Sam Altman 剛剛突然發了一篇反思博客，博客中Sam說這些年是他一生中迄今為止最有收獲、最有趣、最好、最有趣、最疲憊、最緊張，尤其是過去兩年——最不愉快的幾年，OpenAI已經知道如何實現傳統定義的AGI,現在OpenAI轉向更遠大的目標：超級智能。

以下是中英文全文分享給大家

Sam Altman

山姆·奧特曼

Reflections

反思

The second birthday of ChatGPT was only a little over a month ago, and now we have transitioned into the next paradigm of models that can do complex reasoning. New years get people in a reflective mood, and I wanted to share some personal thoughts about how it has gone so far, and some of the things I’ve learned along the way.

ChatGPT 的第二個生日才過去一個多月，現在我們已經過渡到了下一個模型范式，它可以進行復雜的推理。新年讓人們陷入沉思，我想分享一些個人想法，關于迄今為止的進展，以及一路走來我學到的一些東西。

As we get closer to AGI, it feels like an important time to look at the progress of our company. There is still so much to understand, still so much we don’t know, and it’s still so early. But we know a lot more than we did when we started.

隨著我們越來越接近 AGI，我覺得現在是時候回顧一下我們公司的進展了。還有很多東西需要理解，還有很多東西我們不知道，現在還為時尚早。但是我們比剛開始的時候知道的要多得多。

We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed that AGI was possible, and that it could be the most impactful technology in human history. We wanted to figure out how to build it and make it broadly beneficial; we were excited to try to make our mark on history. Our ambitions were extraordinarily high and so was our belief that the work might benefit society in an equally extraordinary way.

我們近九年前創立 OpenAI，因為我們相信 AGI 是可能的，并且它可能是人類歷史上最具影響力的技術。我們想弄清楚如何構建它并使其廣泛受益；我們很高興能嘗試在歷史上留下自己的印記。我們的雄心壯志異常高遠，我們也同樣堅信這項工作可能會以同樣非凡的方式造福社會。

At the time, very few people cared, and if they did, it was mostly because they thought we had no chance of success.

當時，很少有人關心，如果有的話，那主要是因為他們認為我們沒有成功的機會。

In 2022, OpenAI was a quiet research lab working on something temporarily called “Chat With GPT-3.5”. (We are much better at research than we are at naming things.) We had been watching people use the playground feature of our API and knew that developers were really enjoying talking to the model. We thought building a demo around that experience would show people something important about the future and help us make our models better and safer.

2022 年，OpenAI 還是一個安靜的研究所，致力于開發一個臨時名為“與 GPT-3.5 聊天”的項目。（我們在研究方面比在命名方面要強得多。）我們一直在觀察人們使用我們 API 的 playground 功能，并且知道開發人員真的很喜歡與模型交談。我們認為圍繞這種體驗構建一個演示將向人們展示關于未來的一些重要信息，并幫助我們使我們的模型更好、更安全。

We ended up mercifully calling it ChatGPT instead, and launched it on November 30th of 2022.

我們最終還是將其命名為 ChatGPT，并于 2022 年 11 月 30 日發布。

We always knew, abstractly, that at some point we would hit a tipping point and the AI revolution would get kicked off. But we didn’t know what the moment would be. To our surprise, it turned out to be this.

我們一直抽象地知道，在某個時刻，我們會達到一個臨界點，人工智能革命將開始。但我們不知道那個時刻會是什么。令我們驚訝的是，結果就是這個。

The launch of ChatGPT kicked off a growth curve like nothing we have ever seen—in our company, our industry, and the world broadly. We are finally seeing some of the massive upside we have always hoped for from AI, and we can see how much more will come soon.

ChatGPT 的發布啟動了一條我們從未見過的增長曲線——在我們的公司、我們的行業以及整個世界。我們終于看到了我們一直希望從人工智能中獲得的一些巨大的好處，并且我們可以看到很快會有更多的好處。

It hasn’t been easy. The road hasn’t been smooth and the right choices haven’t been obvious.

這并不容易。道路并不平坦，正確的選擇也并不明顯。

In the last two years, we had to build an entire company, almost from scratch, around this new technology. There is no way to train people for this except by doing it, and when the technology category is completely new, there is no one at all who can tell you exactly how it should be done.

在過去兩年中，我們不得不圍繞這項新技術從頭開始建立一整個公司。除了親身實踐，沒有辦法培訓人們做這件事，而且當技術類別是全新的時，根本沒有人能確切地告訴你應該如何做。

Building up a company at such high velocity with so little training is a messy process. It’s often two steps forward, one step back (and sometimes, one step forward and two steps back). Mistakes get corrected as you go along, but there aren’t really any handbooks or guideposts when you’re doing original work. Moving at speed in uncharted waters is an incredible experience, but it is also immensely stressful for all the players. Conflicts and misunderstanding abound.

以如此高的速度建立一家公司，卻缺乏培訓，這是一個混亂的過程。通常是前進兩步，后退一步（有時是前進一步，后退兩步）。錯誤會隨著你的前進得到糾正，但是當你做原創工作時，真的沒有任何手冊或指南。在未知的水域中快速前進是一種難以置信的體驗，但對所有參與者來說也壓力巨大。沖突和誤解比比皆是。

These years have been the most rewarding, fun, best, interesting, exhausting, stressful, and—particularly for the last two—unpleasant years of my life so far. The overwhelming feeling is gratitude; I know that someday I’ll be retired at our ranch watching the plants grow, a little bored, and will think back at how cool it was that I got to do the work I dreamed of since I was a little kid. I try to remember that on any given Friday, when seven things go badly wrong by 1 pm.

這些年是我一生中迄今為止最有收獲、最有趣、最好、最有趣、最疲憊、最緊張，尤其是過去兩年——最不愉快的幾年。壓倒一切的感覺是感激；我知道有一天我會在我們的牧場退休，看著植物生長，有點無聊，并且會回想起我能夠做我從小就夢想的工作是多么酷。我試著記住這一點，在任何一個星期五，當下午 1 點之前有七件事出了大問題的時候。

A little over a year ago, on one particular Friday, the main thing that had gone wrong that day was that I got fired by surprise on a video call, and then right after we hung up the board published a blog post about it. I was in a hotel room in Las Vegas. It felt, to a degree that is almost impossible to explain, like a dream gone wrong.

一年多前，在一個特別的星期五，那天發生的主要問題是，我在一次視頻通話中意外被解雇了，然后就在我們掛斷電話后，董事會發布了一篇關于此事的博客文章。我當時在拉斯維加斯的一家酒店房間里。這感覺就像一場噩夢，其程度幾乎無法解釋。

Getting fired in public with no warning kicked off a really crazy few hours, and a pretty crazy few days. The “fog of war” was the strangest part. None of us were able to get satisfactory answers about what had happened, or why.

在沒有任何警告的情況下被公開解雇，引發了非常瘋狂的幾個小時，以及相當瘋狂的幾天。“戰爭迷霧”是最奇怪的部分。我們沒有人能夠得到關于發生了什么或為什么發生的滿意答案。

The whole event was, in my opinion, a big failure of governance by well-meaning people, myself included. Looking back, I certainly wish I had done things differently, and I’d like to believe I’m a better, more thoughtful leader today than I was a year ago.

在我看來，整個事件是包括我在內的善意人士在治理方面的重大失敗。回想起來，我當然希望我當時做了不同的事情，而且我愿意相信今天的我比一年前是一個更好、更深思熟慮的領導者。

I also learned the importance of a board with diverse viewpoints and broad experience in managing a complex set of challenges. Good governance requires a lot of trust and credibility. I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.

我還了解到，擁有一個具有不同觀點和廣泛經驗的董事會在管理一系列復雜挑戰方面的重要性。良好的治理需要大量的信任和信譽。我很感謝這么多人一起努力，為 OpenAI 建立了一個更強大的治理體系，使我們能夠追求我們的使命，確保 AGI 造福全人類。

My biggest takeaway is how much I have to be thankful for and how many people I owe gratitude towards: to everyone who works at OpenAI and has chosen to spend their time and effort going after this dream, to friends who helped us get through the crisis moments, to our partners and customers who supported us and entrusted us to enable their success, and to the people in my life who showed me how much they cared. [1]

我最大的收獲是我有多么感激，以及我有多少人要感謝：感謝在 OpenAI 工作的每一個人，他們選擇花費時間和精力去追逐這個夢想；感謝幫助我們度過危機時刻的朋友們；感謝支持我們并委托我們幫助他們取得成功的合作伙伴和客戶；感謝我生命中那些向我表達了他們有多么關心我的人。[1]

We all got back to the work in a more cohesive and positive way and I’m very proud of our focus since then. We have done what is easily some of our best research ever. We grew from about 100 million weekly active users to more than 300 million. Most of all, we have continued to put technology out into the world that people genuinely seem to love and that solves real problems.

我們都以一種更具凝聚力和積極的方式回到了工作中，我為我們從那時起的專注感到非常自豪。我們完成了一些有史以來最好的研究。我們的周活躍用戶從大約 1 億增長到 3 億多。最重要的是，我們繼續向世界推出人們真正喜愛并解決實際問題的技術。

Nine years ago, we really had no idea what we were eventually going to become; even now, we only sort of know. AI development has taken many twists and turns and we expect more in the future.

九年前，我們真的不知道我們最終會變成什么樣子；即使是現在，我們也只是大概知道。人工智能的發展經歷了許多曲折，我們預計未來還會有更多曲折。

Some of the twists have been joyful; some have been hard. It’s been fun watching a steady stream of research miracles occur, and a lot of naysayers have become true believers. We’ve also seen some colleagues split off and become competitors. Teams tend to turn over as they scale, and OpenAI scales really fast. I think some of this is unavoidable—startups usually see a lot of turnover at each new major level of scale, and at OpenAI numbers go up by orders of magnitude every few months. The last two years have been like a decade at a normal company. When any company grows and evolves so fast, interests naturally diverge. And when any company in an important industry is in the lead, lots of people attack it for all sorts of reasons, especially when they are trying to compete with it.

一些曲折是令人愉快的；有些則很艱難。看到一連串的研究奇跡發生，以及許多反對者變成了真正的信徒，這很有趣。我們也看到一些同事分裂并成為競爭對手。團隊往往會隨著規模的擴大而發生人員更替，而 OpenAI 的規模增長非常快。我認為其中一些是不可避免的——初創公司通常會在每個新的主要規模級別上看到大量的人員流動，而在 OpenAI，數字每隔幾個月就會增加幾個數量級。過去兩年就像在一家普通公司工作了十年。當任何一家公司發展和演變得如此之快時，利益自然會出現分歧。當任何一家重要行業的公司處于領先地位時，很多人會出于各種原因攻擊它，尤其是當他們試圖與之競爭時。

Our vision won’t change; our tactics will continue to evolve. For example, when we started we had no idea we would have to build a product company; we thought we were just going to do great research. We also had no idea we would need such a crazy amount of capital. There are new things we have to go build now that we didn’t understand a few years ago, and there will be new things in the future we can barely imagine now.

我們的愿景不會改變；我們的策略將繼續發展。例如，當我們開始時，我們不知道我們必須建立一家產品公司；我們以為我們只是要做偉大的研究。我們也不知道我們需要如此瘋狂的資本。現在我們必須去構建一些幾年前我們不理解的新事物，未來還會有一些我們現在幾乎無法想象的新事物。

We are proud of our track-record on research and deployment so far, and are committed to continuing to advance our thinking on safety and benefits sharing. We continue to believe that the best way to make an AI system safe is by iteratively and gradually releasing it into the world, giving society time to adapt and co-evolve with the technology, learning from experience, and continuing to make the technology safer. We believe in the importance of being world leaders on safety and alignment research, and in guiding that research with feedback from real world applications.

到目前為止，我們對我們在研究和部署方面的記錄感到自豪，并致力于繼續推進我們在安全和利益共享方面的思考。我們仍然相信，使人工智能系統安全的最佳方法是迭代和逐步地將其發布到世界上，讓社會有時間適應并與技術共同發展，從經驗中學習，并繼續使技術更安全。我們相信在安全和對齊研究方面成為世界領導者的重要性，并用現實世界應用的反饋來指導這項研究。

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

我們現在確信我們知道如何構建我們傳統上理解的 AGI。我們相信，到 2025 年，我們可能會看到第一批人工智能代理“加入勞動力大軍”，并實質性地改變公司的產出。我們仍然相信，迭代地將偉大的工具交到人們手中會帶來偉大的、廣泛分布的結果。

We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

我們開始將目標轉向更遠的地方，轉向真正意義上的超級智能。我們熱愛我們目前的產品，但我們是為了光輝的未來而來。有了超級智能，我們可以做任何其他事情。超級智能工具可以極大地加速科學發現和創新，遠遠超出我們自己能夠做到的程度，從而極大地增加富足和繁榮。

This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright—we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again. We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care, while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment, is so important. Given the possibilities of our work, OpenAI cannot be a normal company.

這聽起來像是科幻小說，甚至談論它都有點瘋狂。沒關系——我們以前就經歷過，我們也可以再次經歷。我們非常有信心，在接下來的幾年里，每個人都會看到我們所看到的，并且在仍然最大化廣泛利益和賦權的同時，謹慎行事的必要性是如此重要。鑒于我們工作的可能性，OpenAI 不可能成為一家普通公司。

How lucky and humbling it is to be able to play a role in this work.

能夠在這項工作中發揮作用是多么幸運和謙卑。

(Thanks to Josh Tyrangiel for sort of prompting this. I wish we had had a lot more time.)

（感謝 Josh Tyrangiel 的某種程度上的提示。我希望我們有更多的時間。）

[1]

There were a lot of people who did incredible and gigantic amounts of work to help OpenAI, and me personally, during those few days, but two people stood out from all others.

在那幾天里，有很多人做了令人難以置信的巨大工作來幫助 OpenAI 和我個人，但有兩個人比其他人更突出。

Ron Conway and Brian Chesky went so far above and beyond the call of duty that I’m not even sure how to describe it. I’ve of course heard stories about Ron’s ability and tenaciousness for years and I’ve spent a lot of time with Brian over the past couple of years getting a huge amount of help and advice.

Ron Conway 和 Brian Chesky 所做的遠遠超出了職責范圍，我甚至不知道該如何描述。當然，多年來我一直聽說 Ron 的能力和堅韌不拔，并且在過去幾年里，我花了很多時間與 Brian 在一起，獲得了大量的幫助和建議。

But there’s nothing quite like being in the foxhole with people to see what they can really do. I am reasonably confident OpenAI would have fallen apart without their help; they worked around the clock for days until things were done.

但是，沒有什么能比得上和人們一起在戰壕里更能看出他們真正的能力了。我有理由相信，如果沒有他們的幫助，OpenAI 就會崩潰；他們夜以繼日地工作了幾天，直到事情完成。

Although they worked unbelievably hard, they stayed calm and had clear strategic thought and great advice throughout. They stopped me from making several mistakes and made none themselves. They used their vast networks for everything needed and were able to navigate many complex situations. And I’m sure they did a lot of things I don’t know about.

盡管他們工作得令人難以置信地努力，但他們始終保持冷靜，并始終擁有清晰的戰略思維和出色的建議。他們阻止我犯了幾個錯誤，而他們自己沒有犯任何錯誤。他們利用他們龐大的網絡做了一切需要的事情，并且能夠處理許多復雜的情況。我相信他們做了很多我不知道的事情。

What I will remember most, though, is their care, compassion, and support.

不過，我最記得的是他們的關心、同情和支持。

I thought I knew what it looked like to support a founder and a company, and in some small sense I did. But I have never before seen, or even heard of, anything like what these guys did, and now I get more fully why they have the legendary status they do. They are different and both fully deserve their genuinely unique reputations, but they are similar in their remarkable ability to move mountains and help, and in their unwavering commitment in times of need. The tech industry is far better off for having both of them in it.

我以為我知道支持創始人和公司是什么樣子，從某種意義上說，我確實知道。但我以前從未見過，甚至從未聽說過像這些人所做的那樣的事情，現在我更充分地理解了為什么他們擁有傳奇的地位。他們是不同的，并且都完全配得上他們真正獨特的聲譽，但他們在移山和幫助方面的非凡能力以及他們在需要時的堅定承諾方面是相似的。科技行業因為有他們兩個而變得更好。

There are others like them; it is an amazingly special thing about our industry and does much more to make it all work than people realize. I look forward to paying it forward.

還有其他人像他們一樣；這是我們行業的一個非常特別的事情，它比人們意識到的更能使這一切運轉起來。我期待著將這份情誼傳遞下去。

On a more personal note, thanks especially to Ollie for his support that weekend and always; he is incredible in every way and no one could ask for a better partner.

更私人的一點是，特別感謝 Ollie 在那個周末和一直以來的支持；他在各個方面都令人難以置信，沒有人能要求一個更好的伴侶了。