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 的第二個生日就在一個多月前，而現在我們已邁入模型的新典範，這些模型具備複雜的推理能力。新年總讓人們陷入反思的情緒，我想分享一些我個人對於迄今發展的看法，以及一路走來的一些心得。
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通用人工智慧 (AGI)，現在正是審視公司進展的重要時刻。仍有許多有待理解之處，許多未知的領域，而這一切尚處於早期階段。但比起當初，我們已掌握更多。
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.
我們在近九年前創立 OpenAI，因為我們相信 AGI 是可行的，而且它可能成為人類歷史上最具影響力的科技。我們希望能找出構建 AGI 的方法，並使其廣泛造福人群；我們渴望在歷史上留下印記。我們的抱負極其遠大，我們也同樣深信這項工作能以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，很少有人關注，即使有人關注，也大多是因為他們認為我們不可能成功。
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 還是一個默默無聞的研究實驗室，致力於一個暫時稱為「與 GPT-3.5 聊天」的項目。（我們在研究方面比在命名方面擅長得多。）我們觀察到人們使用我們 API 的 Playground 功能，並且知道開發者非常喜歡與模型互動。我們認為，圍繞這種體驗構建一個演示版本，可以向人們展示關於未來的一些重要信息，並幫助我們讓模型變得更好、更安全。
We ended up mercifully calling it ChatGPT instead, and launched it on November 30th of 2022.
我們最終決定將其命名為 ChatGPT，並於 2022 年 11 月 30 日推出。
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.
從理論上來說，我們一直都知道，在某個時刻，我們會迎來一個轉捩點，AI 革命將會由此展開。但我們不知道這個時刻會是什麼時候。出乎意料的是，原來就是這個時刻。
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 的推出引發了前所未有的成長曲線——在我們公司、我們所屬的行業以及整個世界範圍內都是如此。我們終於看到了我們一直以來期望從 AI 獲得的巨大優勢，而且我們可以看到，未來將會有更多優勢顯現。
It hasn’t been easy. The road hasn’t been smooth and the right choices haven’t been obvious.
這並不容易。這條路並非一帆風順，正確的選擇也並非顯而易見。
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.
在過去的兩年裡，我們幾乎從零開始，圍繞這項新技術建立了一整間公司。除了親身實踐，沒有其他方法可以培訓人員，尤其當技術領域是全新的，根本沒有人能確切地告訴你應該怎麼做。
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、如此少的培訓來建立公司，是一個混亂的過程。這往往是進兩步、退一步（有時甚至是進一步、退兩步）。過程中錯誤會不斷被修正，但在進行原創性工作時，並沒有真正的指導手冊或路標可循。在未知的領域快速前進是一種難以置信的體驗，但對所有參與者來說，壓力也極大。衝突和誤解比比皆是。
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.
這幾年是我人生中最有成就感、最有趣、最美好、最精彩、最疲憊、壓力最大，尤其過去兩年，也是最不愉快的幾年。但最主要的感受還是感恩；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，然後回想起我從小就夢想的工作是多麼酷。每當星期五下午一點前就發生七件不好的事時，我都會試著這樣提醒自己。
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，那天最糟糕的事情是我在視訊通話中被意外解僱，然後就在我們掛斷電話後，董事會就發表了一篇關於此事的部落格文章。當時我在拉斯維加斯的一家飯店房間裡。那種感覺，難以言喻，就像一場噩夢。
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.
在毫無預警的情況下被公開解僱，引發了幾個小時的瘋狂，以及幾天相當瘋狂的時光。「戰爭迷霧」是最奇怪的部分。我們誰都無法得到令人滿意的答案，究竟發生了什麼事，以及為什麼。
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，整件事是一群善意人士（包括我自己在內）在治理上的一大失敗。回顧過去，我當然希望我當時能以不同的方式處理事情，我也相信今天的我是一個比一年前更好、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.
我也學到了擁有一個觀點多元、在應對複雜挑戰方面經驗豐富的董事會的重要性。良好的治理需要大量的信任和信譽。我很感激這麼多人共同努力，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，確保通用人工智慧造福全人類。
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]
我最大的收穫是，我有太多需要感恩的人事物：感謝所有在 OpenAI 工作、選擇投入時間和精力追尋這個夢想的人，感謝在危機時刻幫助我們的朋友，感謝支持我們並信任我們、讓我們成就他們成功的合作夥伴和客戶，以及感謝生命中那些向我展現他們關懷的人。 [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.
我們都以更凝聚、更積極的方式回到了工作崗位，我為我們自那時以來的專注感到非常自豪。我們完成了一些堪稱我們有史以來最好的研究。我們的每週活躍用戶從約 1 億增長到超過 3 億。最重要的是，我們持續將人們真正喜愛且能解決實際問題的技術推向世界。
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麼樣子；即使是現在，我們也只是一知半解。人工智慧的發展經歷了許多曲折，我們預計未來還會有更多。
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.
這一路走來，有喜悅的轉折，也有艱辛的挑戰。看著研究奇蹟源源不斷地湧現，令人振奮，許多原本抱持懷疑態度的人也轉而堅信。同時，我們也目睹一些同事離開，成為我們的競爭對手。團隊規模擴張時，人事變動在所難免，而 OpenAI 的發展速度更是驚人。我認為這其中一些變化是不可避免的——新創公司在每個重要的規模提升階段通常都會經歷大量的人員流動，而 OpenAI 的各項數字每隔幾個月就會以數量級的速度增長。過去兩年如同一般公司的十年。任何公司在如此快速地成長和發展過程中，其成員的興趣自然會產生分歧。而當任何一個重要產業中的領先公司，都會因為各種原因受到許多攻擊，尤其是在競爭對手試圖與之抗衡之時。
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.
我們的願景不會改變；我們的策略將持續演進。例如，最初我們並未預料到需要建立一家產品公司；我們當時的想法只是單純地做好研究。我們也沒想到會需要如此龐大的資金。現在，我們需要著手構建一些幾年前我們還不理解的事物，而未來也將出現一些我們現在難以想像的新事物。
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.
迄今為止，我們為自己在研究和部署方面的成就感到自豪，並致力於持續推進我們在安全性和利益共享方面的思考。我們仍然相信，確保 AI 系統安全的最佳方法是迭代式地、逐步地將其釋放到世界上，讓社會有時間適應和與技術共同演進，從經驗中學習，並持續提升技術的安全性。我們相信在安全性和對齊研究方面成為世界領先者的重要性，並相信以實際應用中的回饋來引導這項研究的重要性。
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理解中的人工通用智慧（AGI）。我們相信，在 2025 年，我們可能會看到第一批 AI 代理「加入勞動力大軍」，並顯著改變企業的產出。我們仍然相信，將優秀的工具迭代地交到人們手中，將會帶來廣泛而美好的成果。
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高層次，即真正意義上的超級智慧。我們熱愛目前的產品，但我們的存在是為了那輝煌的未來。有了超級智慧，我們可以做到任何事情。超級智慧的工具可以極大地加速科學發現和創新，遠遠超出我們自身的能力，進而大幅提升豐裕和繁榮。
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，甚至談論它都有些瘋狂。沒關係——我們以前也經歷過這種情況，我們可以再次面對。我們非常有信心，在接下來的幾年裡，每個人都會看到我們所看到的，並且明白在最大限度地提升廣泛利益和賦能的同時，謹慎行動是多麼重要。鑑於我們工作的可能性，OpenAI 不能只是一家普通的公司。
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，是多麼幸運和令人謙卑的一件事。
(Thanks to Josh Tyrangiel for sort of prompting this. I wish we had had a lot more time.)
（感謝 Josh Tyrangiel 的某種程度上促成了這件事。我希望我們能有更多時間。）
[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.
在那幾天裡，有許多人為 OpenAI 和我個人付出了難以置信的巨大努力，但其中有兩個人尤其突出。
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 的付出遠遠超乎尋常，我甚至不知道該如何形容。多年來，我當然聽過關於 Ron 的能力和韌性的故事，過去幾年我也和 Brian 共事了很長時間，從他那裡得到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.
但沒有什麼比得上與人共患難，才能真正了解他們的能耐。我相當確信，如果沒有他們的幫助，OpenAI 可能已經分崩離析；他們夜以繼日地工作了好幾天，直到事情解決。
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.
儘管他們工作非常辛苦，但他們始終保持冷靜，並在整個過程中展現出清晰的戰略思維和卓越的見解。他們阻止我犯了幾個錯誤，而他們自己則沒有犯任何錯誤。他們運用廣闊的人脈網絡來處理所有需要的事情，並能巧妙地應對許多複雜的局面。而且我相信他們還做了很多我不知道的事情。
What I will remember most, though, is their care, compassion, and support.
然而，我最難忘的是他們的關懷、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.
我以為我知道如何支持一位創辦人和一家公司，某種程度上我的確知道。但我從未見過，甚至聽說過像他們這樣的人所做的事情，現在我更充分地理解了為什麼他們擁有如此傳奇般的地位。他們各不相同，都當之無愧地享有獨特的聲譽，但他們在非凡的扭轉乾坤、助人為樂的能力，以及在危難時刻堅定不移的承諾方面卻是相似的。科技行業因為有他們兩位而更加美好。
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.
還有其他像他們一樣的人；這是我們這個行業一個非常特別的地方，它對行業的運作貢獻良多，遠超人們的想像。我期待著將這份精神傳承下去。
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.
就個人而言，我特別要感謝 Ollie 在那個週末以及一直以來的支持；他在各方面都非常出色，沒有人能找到比他更好的夥伴了。