Observations About Sam Altman's Observations

I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this latest post from Sam Altman. I read it yesterday right before the Super Bowl and found it a bit all over the place, so I decided to come back to it today and I'm still not quite sure what to make of it, so I figured I'd jot down some thoughts – observations, on Altman's observations.

First and foremost, Altman, like so many of us, needs to figure out one place to post and stick to that. This one was a personal blog post, it seems, but it also sort of reads like an official OpenAI blog post, outlining some key talking points as they've done quite often recently. At the very least, it's interesting that this post didn't get the marquee treatment of 'The Intelligence Age', a post Altman wrote back in September. That one actually looked like an official OpenAI blog post, but actually it was just hosted on a special URL on Altman's site.

That post was actually fairly similar to this one in ways, though, notably, it didn't mention "AGI" once, instead referencing "superintelligence" – the step beyond AGI, or the reframing of some parts of AGI, depending on your read and the day. Anyway, perhaps others using their own personal blogs to weigh in on such matters inspired him. Or perhaps it was simply Altman jotting down his own notes to help himself solidify some thoughts on these topics. I'm a fan of that! And while at first, I thought the timing may be to get ahead of their first television commercial – why else publish a blog post right before the Super Bowl? But that ad, which was well-crafted in that it stood out by striking a very different visual tone than all other ads,¹ is almost the opposite of this post.