https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Guz73e6fw
This is probably going to be one of the more impactful interviews among those from Lex Fridman.
Sam seems to be a thoughtful person, and at least he doesn't seem to be preoccupied by ideas or thoughts about power. I'm a bit alarmed by his optimism about the world's ability to deal with this stuff though, but I guess it's part of his job to be so. There's also a tad bit of aloofness as to real, pressing human issues that seems so pervasive in tech circles. Just a tad bit, but still.
Not of much significance but I note how he says he doesn't want to live in a communist country, but that he supports universal basic income. Not entirely a contradiction if you're against central planning, but that coming from a person who's on the way to develop AGI, well. Slightly more alarmingly he says he thinks "competition" from multiple AGI would be better than one AGI doing central planning... sure, as long as that "competition" doesn't come in the form of nuclear war like the one we almost had when some country tried to compete against a communist country.
Any form of competition actually takes a toll on people, whether in the form of lives, economic hardship, mental stress, whatever. Economic competition in the form of capitalist, market driven society was an ingenious solution to many of the world's problems in a certain time and context, but the worship of the fundamental idea of "competition" itself is probably unwarranted IMHO.
It's also rather curious that while Sam Altman seems to be for competition in the AGI space, he still thinks UBI is a good idea (note that it eliminates competition at the "lowest" level of economic society). Maybe actually that's the way to move forward to eliminate competition in the areas that don't matter (similar to how well-understood businesses are converted into regulated monopolies instead of allowing cutthroat competition to wreck things up).
