反思

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ChatGPT 的两岁生日才过去一个多月，我们现在已经进入了能够进行复杂推理的下一代模型范式。新年让人陷入反思的情绪，我想分享一些个人想法，关于迄今为止的进展，以及我一路走来学到的一些东西。

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.

随着我们越来越接近 AGI，现在似乎是审视公司进展的重要时刻。我们仍有太多需要理解的东西，仍有太多未知，而且一切都还处于早期阶段。但比起开始时，我们现在知道的要多得多。

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.

我们大约九年前创办了 OpenAI，因为我们相信 AGI 是可能的，并且它可能成为人类历史上最具影响力的技术。我们想弄清楚如何构建它并使其广泛受益；我们很兴奋，试图在历史上留下我们的印记。我们的雄心壮志极高，我们也同样坚信这项工作可能会以同样非凡的方式造福社会。

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.

当时，很少有人关心，即使关心，也主要是因为他们认为我们不可能成功。

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

2022 年，OpenAI 还是一个安静的研究实验室，致力于一个临时称为“Chat With GPT-3.5”的项目。（我们做研究比起名字要擅长得多。）我们一直在观察人们使用 API 的 playground 功能，知道开发者们非常喜欢与模型对话。我们认为围绕这种体验构建一个演示，可以向人们展示未来的重要方向，并帮助我们让模型变得更好、更安全。

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.

我们最终仁慈地将其命名为 ChatGPT，并于 2022 年 11 月 30 日发布。

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

我们一直抽象地知道，在某个时刻，我们会达到一个临界点，AI 革命将会启动。但我们不知道那个时刻会是什么。令我们惊讶的是，结果就是这一刻。

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.

ChatGPT 的发布引发了我们从未见过的增长曲线——在我们的公司、我们的行业以及整个世界中。我们终于看到了我们一直希望从 AI 中获得的巨大好处，并且我们可以看到更多即将到来。

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.

这并不容易。道路并不平坦，正确的选择也并不显而易见。

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

在过去的两年里，我们不得不围绕这项新技术，几乎从零开始建立整个公司。除了亲身实践，没有其他方法可以培训人们，而当技术类别完全是新的时，没有人能确切告诉你应该如何做。

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.

以如此高的速度、如此少的培训来建立一家公司是一个混乱的过程。通常是前进两步，后退一步（有时是前进一步，后退两步）。错误会在过程中得到纠正，但在进行原创工作时，真的没有手册或路标。在未知水域高速前进是一次不可思议的经历，但对所有参与者来说也是巨大的压力。冲突和误解比比皆是。

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.

这些年是我迄今为止人生中最有回报、最有趣、最好、最有趣、最 exhausting、最有压力、尤其是过去两年最不愉快的岁月。压倒性的感觉是感激；我知道有一天我会退休，在农场里看着植物生长，有点无聊，然后回想起来，我能做从小梦想的工作是多么酷。我试着在每个周五下午一点前有七件糟糕的事情发生时记住这一点。

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.

大约一年前的一个周五，那天主要出问题的事情是我在视频通话中突然被解雇，然后我们挂断电话后，董事会立即发布了一篇关于此事的博客文章。我当时在拉斯维加斯的一家酒店房间里。感觉就像一场噩梦，程度几乎无法解释。

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.

在毫无预警的情况下被公开解雇，引发了几个非常疯狂的小时，以及相当疯狂的几天。“战争迷雾”是最奇怪的部分。我们没有人能够对发生的事情或原因得到满意的答案。

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.

整个事件，在我看来，是善意的人（包括我自己）在治理上的重大失败。回想起来，我当然希望自己当时能做得不同，并且我愿意相信，现在的我比一年前是一个更好、更深思熟虑的领导者。

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.

我也学到了拥有多元观点和广泛经验的董事会对于管理复杂挑战的重要性。良好的治理需要大量的信任和信誉。我感激这么多人共同努力，为 OpenAI 建立了一个更强大的治理体系，使我们能够追求确保 AGI 造福全人类的使命。

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.

我最大的收获是我有多么感恩，以及有多少人值得我感谢：感谢每一位在 OpenAI 工作并选择花费时间和精力追求这个梦想的人，感谢帮助我们度过危机时刻的朋友们，感谢支持我们并信任我们以实现他们成功的合作伙伴和客户，以及感谢在我生命中向我展示他们关心的人们。[1]

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]

我们都以更加团结和积极的方式回到了工作中，我为我们自那以后的专注感到非常自豪。我们完成了一些很容易成为我们有史以来最好的研究。我们的周活跃用户从大约 1 亿增长到超过 3 亿。最重要的是，我们继续向世界推出人们似乎真正喜爱并能解决实际问题的技术。

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.

九年前，我们真的不知道我们最终会变成什么样子；即使现在，我们也只是大概知道。AI 的发展经历了许多曲折，我们预计未来还会有更多。

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.

有些曲折是令人愉快的；有些则是艰难的。看到源源不断的研究奇迹发生很有趣，许多怀疑者变成了真正的信徒。我们也看到一些同事离开并成为竞争对手。团队在扩张时往往会更替，而 OpenAI 的扩张速度非常快。我认为其中一些是不可避免的——初创公司在每个新的主要规模级别上通常会有大量人员更替，而在 OpenAI，数字每几个月就会增长一个数量级。过去两年就像一家正常公司的十年。当任何公司如此快速地成长和演变时，利益自然会分化。当任何重要行业的领先公司时，很多人会出于各种原因攻击它，尤其是当他们试图与之竞争时。

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.

我们的愿景不会改变；我们的策略将继续演变。例如，开始时我们不知道我们必须建立一个产品公司；我们以为我们只是做伟大的研究。我们也不知道我们需要如此疯狂的资金。现在有一些我们几年前不理解的新东西需要我们去构建，未来还会有我们现在几乎无法想象的新东西。

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.

我们为迄今为止在研究和部署方面的记录感到自豪，并致力于继续推进我们在安全和利益分享方面的思考。我们仍然相信，使 AI 系统安全的最佳方式是迭代地、逐步地将其发布到世界中，让社会有时间适应并与技术共同进化，从经验中学习，并继续使技术更安全。我们相信在安全和对齐研究方面成为世界领先者，并用来自实际应用的反馈指导这些研究的重要性。

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.

我们现在确信，我们知道如何构建我们传统上理解的 AGI。我们相信，在 2025 年，我们可能会看到第一批 AI 智能体“加入劳动力大军”，并实质性地改变公司的产出。我们仍然相信，迭代地将好工具交到人们手中会带来伟大的、广泛分布的结果。

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.

我们开始将目标转向更远的地方，转向真正意义上的超级智能。我们热爱我们当前的产品，但我们是为了辉煌的未来而来。有了超级智能，我们可以做任何其他事情。超级智能工具可以极大地加速科学发现和创新，远远超出我们自身的能力，进而极大地增加富足和繁荣。

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.

这现在听起来像科幻小说，甚至谈论它都有些疯狂。没关系——我们以前经历过这种情况，我们愿意再次经历。我们相当确信，在接下来的几年里，每个人都会看到我们所看到的，并且以极大的谨慎行事，同时最大化广泛利益和赋权，是如此重要。鉴于我们工作的可能性，OpenAI 不能是一家普通的公司。

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.

能够在这项工作中发挥作用是多么幸运和谦卑。

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

（感谢 Josh Tyrangiel 以某种方式促成了这篇文章。我希望我们有更多的时间。）

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

在那几天里，有很多人做了令人难以置信的大量工作来帮助 OpenAI 和我个人，但有两个人脱颖而出。

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.

Ron Conway 和 Brian Chesky 远远超出了职责范围，我甚至不知道如何描述。我当然多年来听说过 Ron 的能力和坚韧，过去几年我也花了很多时间与 Brian 相处，得到了大量的帮助和建议。

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.

但没有什么比与人们一起身处战壕更能看到他们真正能做什么了。我相当确信，如果没有他们的帮助，OpenAI 会分崩离析；他们日夜不停地工作，直到事情解决。

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.

尽管他们工作得难以置信地努力，但他们始终保持冷静，并始终提供清晰的战略思考和出色的建议。他们阻止我犯下几个错误，并且自己一个错误都没有犯。他们利用自己庞大的网络处理一切需要的事情，并能够应对许多复杂的情况。而且我确信他们还做了很多我不知道的事情。

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.

然而，我最记得的是他们的关心、同情和支持。

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

我以为我知道支持创始人和公司是什么样子，在某种程度上确实如此。但我以前从未见过，甚至从未听说过，像这些人所做的那样的事情，现在我更充分地理解了为什么他们拥有传奇般的地位。他们与众不同，都完全配得上他们真正独特的声誉，但他们在移山填海和帮助他人的非凡能力上相似，以及在需要时坚定不移的承诺。科技行业因为有他们两人而变得更好。

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.

还有其他人像他们一样；这是我们行业的一个非常特别的事情，并且比人们意识到的更多地使一切运转良好。我期待着将这份善意传递下去。

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.

更个人化地说，特别感谢 Ollie 在那个周末以及一直以来给予的支持；他在各个方面都令人难以置信，没有人能要求更好的伴侣。

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.

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