Sam Altman: This is what I learned from DALL-E 2

I think there’s an important set of lessons for us about what the next decade will be for AI. The first is where it comes from: it’s a team of three people pushing an idea into, say, a random corner of the OpenAI building.

This unique idea about diffusion models, just a small breakthrough in algorithms, has taken us from something that’s not very good to something that can have a huge impact on the world.

Another interesting thing is that it was the first AI that everyone used, and there are several reasons for that. But one is that he creates, like, complete end products. If you use Copilot, our code generation AI, it must have a lot of help from you. But with DALL-E 2, you tell it what you want and it’s like talking to a fellow designer. And I think this is the first time we’ve seen that with an AI.

3/ What DALL-E means for society

When we realized that DALL-E 2 was going to be a big thing, we wanted it to be an example of how we’re going to deploy new technology – to let the world know that images could be faked and say, ‘Hey, you know, pretty soon you’re going to have to be wary of images on the internet.

We also wanted to talk to the people who will be most affected first, and get them to use it. It’s not the current framework, but the world that I would like us to arrive in, as a field, is one where if you help train an AI by providing data, you should somehow own some of this model.