专栏作者人工智能将把我们带往天堂还是地狱The Fight for the Soul of A.I.DAVID BROOKS2023年11月24日 JUMBO TSUI/TRUNK ARCHIVEOne of the nice things about OpenAI is that it was built on distrust. It began as a nonprofit research lab because its founders didn’t think artificial intelligence should be pioneered by commercial firms, which are driven overwhelmingly by the profit motive. OpenAI的优点之一是，它建立在不信任的基础上。它最初是一个非营利性的研究实验室，因为它的创始人认为，人工智能不应该由主要受利润驱动的商业公司来开创。 As it evolved, OpenAI turned into what you might call a fruitful contradiction: a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit board with a corporate culture somewhere in between. 随着发展，OpenAI变成了一个可称为卓有成效的矛盾体的东西：一家由非营利董事会监管的营利性公司，企业文化介于两者之间。 Many of the people at the company seem simultaneously motivated by the scientist’s desire to discover, the capitalist’s desire to ship product and the do-gooder’s desire to do this all safely. 公司里的许多人似乎同时受到三种激励：科学家的探索欲望、资本家交付产品的欲望和行善者安全行事的欲望。 The events of the past week — Sam Altman’s firing, all the drama, his rehiring — revolve around one central question: Is this fruitful contradiction sustainable? 过去一周发生的事件——萨姆·奥尔特曼被解雇，经历各种跌宕起伏，被重新聘用——都围绕着一个核心问题：这种卓有成效的矛盾体能否持续下去？ Can one organization, or one person, maintain the brain of a scientist, the drive of a capitalist and the cautious heart of a regulatory agency? Or, as Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic, will the money always win out? 一个组织或一个人能否同时保持科学家的头脑、资本家的动力和监管机构的谨慎？或者，正如查理·沃泽尔在《大西洋月刊》(The Atlantic)上所写的那样，金钱总会胜出？ It’s important to remember that A.I. is quite different from other parts of the tech world. It is (or at least was) more academic. A.I. is a field that had a research lineage stretching back centuries. Even today, many of the giants of the field are primarily researchers, not entrepreneurs — people like Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of computing) together in 2018 and now disagree about where A.I. is taking us. 重要的是要记住，人工智能与科技界的其他领域有很大不同。它（或者至少曾经是）更加学术化。人工智能这个领域的研究历史可以追溯到几个世纪前。即使在今天，该领域的许多巨头也主要是研究人员，而不是企业家——比如扬·勒昆和杰弗里·辛顿这样的人，他们在2018年一起获得了图灵奖（计算机领域的诺贝尔奖），但现在，对于人工智能将把我们带往何方，他们意见不一。 It’s only in the last several years that academic researchers have been leaving the university aeries and flocking to industry. Researchers at places like Alphabet, the parent company of Google; Microsoft; OpenAI; and Meta, which owns Facebook, still communicate with one another by publishing research papers, the way professors do. 直到最近几年，学术界的研究人员才陆续离开大学，涌向工业界。谷歌母公司Alphabet；微软；OpenAI；还有拥有Facebook的Meta这些公司的研究人员仍然通过发表研究论文的方式相互交流，就像教授们那样。 But the field also has the intensity and the audacity of the hottest of all startup sectors. While talking with A.I. researchers over the past year or so, I have often felt I was on one of those airport moving walkways going three miles per hour and they were on walkways going 4,000 miles per hour. The researchers kept telling me that this phase of A.I.’s history is so exhilarating precisely because nobody can predict what will happen next. “The point of being an A.I. researcher is you should understand what’s going on. We’re constantly being surprised,” the Stanford Ph.D. candidate Rishi Bommasani told me. 但这个领域的激昂与进取，与别的热门创业领域并无不同。在过去一年左右的时间里，当我与人工智能研究人员交谈时，我经常觉得自己站在每小时五公里的机场移动人行道上，而他们站在每小时6000公里的跑道上。研究人员不断告诉我，人工智能历史的这一阶段之所以如此令人振奋，正是因为没有人能预测接下来会发生什么。“作为人工智能研究人员，重点是你应该了解正在发生的事情，我们不断地感到惊讶。”斯坦福大学博士候选人里希·博马萨尼告诉我。 The people in A.I. seem to be experiencing radically different brain states all at once. I’ve found it incredibly hard to write about A.I. because it is literally unknowable whether this technology is leading us to heaven or hell, and so my attitude about it shifts with my mood. 从事人工智能的人似乎同时经历着完全不同的大脑状态。我发现，要写关于人工智能的文章非常困难，因为我们根本不知道这项技术会把我们带到天堂还是地狱，所以我对它的态度会随着我的情绪而改变。 The podcaster and M.I.T. scientist Lex Fridman, who has emerged as the father confessor of the tech world, expressed the rapid-fire range of emotions I encountered again and again: “You sit back, both proud, like a parent, but almost like proud and scared that this thing will be much smarter than me. Like both pride and sadness, almost like a melancholy feeling, but ultimately joy.” 播客主播、麻省理工学院科学家莱克斯·弗里德曼以科技界的忏悔之父形象出现，他表达了我曾多次遇到的那种急剧变化的情绪：“你坐下来，像父母一样自豪，但几乎是又骄傲又害怕，担心这个东西会比我聪明得多。既像骄傲又像悲伤，几乎像一种忧郁的感觉，但最终还是喜悦。” When I visited the OpenAI headquarters in May, I found the culture quite impressive. Many of the people I interviewed had arrived when OpenAI was a nonprofit research lab, before the ChatGPT hullabaloo — when most of us had never heard of the company. “My parents didn’t really know what OpenAI did,” Joanne Jang, a product manager, told me, “and they were like, ‘You’re leaving Google?’” Mark Chen, a researcher who was involved in creating the visual tool DALL-E 2, had a similar experience. “Before ChatGPT, my mom would call me like every week and she’d be like, ‘Hey, you know you can stop like bumming around and go work at Google or something.’” These people are not primarily driven by the money. 当我在5月份参观OpenAI总部时，我发现那里的文化令人印象深刻。我采访的许多人都是在OpenAI还是一个非营利研究实验室的时候来到这里的，在ChatGPT的喧嚣之前——当时我们大多数人都没有听说过这家公司。“我父母并不真正了解OpenAI是做什么的，”产品经理乔安妮·姜（音）告诉我，“他们说，‘你要离开谷歌？’”参与创造了可视化工具DALL-E 2的研究人员马克·陈（音）也有类似的经历。“在ChatGPT出现之前，我妈几乎每周都会给我打电话，她会说，‘嘿，你知道，你别再四处游荡了，该去谷歌之类的公司上班了。’”这些人的主要动机并非金钱。 Even after GPT made headlines, being at OpenAI was like being in the eye of a hurricane. “It just feels a lot calmer than the rest of the world,” Jang told me. “From like the early days, it did feel more like a research lab, because mainly we were only hiring for researchers,” Elena Chatziathanasiadou, a recruiter, told me. “And then, as we grew, it started becoming apparent to everyone that progress would come from both engineering and research.” 即使在GPT成为头条新闻之后，置身OpenAI就像身处飓风眼一样。“这里感觉比世界上其他地方要平静得多，”乔安妮·姜告诉我。“从早期开始，它确实感觉更像是一个研究实验室，因为我们主要只招聘研究人员，”招聘人员埃琳娜·查齐亚塔纳西亚杜告诉我。后来，随着我们的发展，每个人都开始意识到，工程和研究会带来进步。” I didn’t meet any tech bros there, or even people who had the kind of “we are changing the world” bravado I would probably have if I were pioneering this technology. Diane Yoon, whose job title is vice president of people, told me, “The word I would use for this work force is earnest … earnestness.” 我在那里没有遇到任何“技术男”的氛围，甚至没有人有那种“我们正在改变世界”的不可一世——就是当我是一项技术的先驱时可能会有这种架势。任人力副总裁的戴安·尹（音）告诉我：“我想用热忱这个词来形容这个团队……热忱的感觉。” Usually when I visit a tech company, as a journalist, I get to meet very few executives, and those I do interview are remorselessly on message. OpenAI just put out a sign-up sheet and had people come to talk to me. 通常，当我作为一名记者访问一家科技公司时，我能见到的高管很少，而我能采访到的那些人个个守口如瓶。而OpenAI只是拿出一张登记表，然后就让人来跟我交谈了。 I confess I have a history of going into these tech workplaces with a degree of defensive humanistic snobbery: These people may know code, I tell myself, but they probably don’t know the literary and philosophical things that really matter. 我承认，过去我走进这些科技公司的时候，会摆出一种防御性的人本主义架子：我告诉自己，这些人可能懂代码，但他们可能不懂真正重要的文学和哲学。 I was humbled at OpenAI. Yoon grew up as a dancer and acting Shakespeare. Nick Ryder was a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, with an interest in something called finite differential convolutions before he became a researcher at OpenAI. Several people mentioned a colleague on the research side who studied physics as an undergrad, went to Juilliard for two years to study piano and then got a graduate degree in neuroscience. Others told me their original academic interests had been in philosophy of mind or philosophy of language or symbolic systems. Tyna Eloundou, a member of the company’s technical staff, studied economic theory and worked at the Federal Reserve before coming to OpenAI. 在OpenAI，我没什么优越感。戴安·尹从小跳舞，出演过莎士比亚戏剧。尼克·莱德是加州大学伯克利分校的一名数学家，在成为OpenAI的研究员之前，他对一种叫做有限微分卷积的东西很感兴趣。几个人提到了一个研究方面的同事，他本科学习物理学，在茱莉亚音乐学院学习了两年钢琴，然后获得了神经科学的研究生学位。还有人告诉我，他们最初的学术兴趣是心灵哲学、语言哲学或符号系统。公司技术人员蒂娜·埃卢恩多在加入OpenAI之前学习过经济理论，并在美联储工作过。 As impressive as they all were, I remember telling myself: This isn’t going to last. I thought there was too much money floating around. These people may be earnest researchers, but whether they know it or not, they are still in a race to put out products, generate revenue and be first. 尽管他们都给人留下深刻的印象，但我记得我当时告诉自己：这不会持续太久。我觉得到处都是金钱的氛围。这些人可能是认真的研究人员，但不管他们是否意识到这一点，他们仍在为推出产品、创造收入和成为第一而竞争。 It was also clear that the folks were torn over safety. On the one hand, safety was on everybody’s mind. For example, I asked Marc Chen about his emotions the day DALL-E 2 was released. “A lot of it was just this feeling of apprehension. Like, did we get the safety.” On the other hand, everybody I spoke to was dedicated to OpenAI’s core mission — to create a technology capable of artificial general intelligence, capable of matching or surpassing human intelligence across a broad range of tasks. 很明显，人们在安全问题上存在分歧。一方面，安全是每个人都关心的问题。例如，我问马克·陈在DALL-E 2发布那天的心情。“很多时候都是这种忧虑的感觉。比如，我们是否能保证安全？”他说。另一方面，与我交谈的每个人都致力于OpenAI的核心使命——创造一种能够实现人工智能的技术，能够在广泛的任务中匹配或超越人类智能。 A.I. is a field that has brilliant people painting wildly diverging but also persuasive portraits of where this is going. The venture capital investor Marc Andreessen emphasizes that it is going to change the world vastly for the better. The cognitive scientist Gary Marcus depicts an equally persuasive scenario about how all this could go wrong. 人工智能领域的卓越人物描绘出截然不同但又有说服力的前景。风险投资家马克·安德森强调，它将极大地改变世界，让世界变得更美好。认知科学家加里·马库斯描绘的场景同样有说服力，他说了这一切可能会出怎样的问题。 Nobody really knows who is right, but the researchers just keep plowing ahead. Their behavior reminds me of something Alan Turing wrote in 1950: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” 没有人真正知道谁是对的，但研究人员只是继续努力。他们的行为让我想起了艾伦·图灵在1950年写的一句话：“我们只能看到前方很短的距离，但我们可以看到有很多事情需要做。” I had hoped that OpenAI could navigate the tensions, though even then there were worries. As Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, told me: “The big thing is, is really just maintaining the culture and the mission orientation as we grow. The thing that actually keeps me up, if you’re asking honestly, is how do you maintain that focus at scale.” 我曾希望OpenAI能够找到解决这种对立的办法，然而即便在当时，就已经存在着担忧。正如OpenAI首席运营官布拉德·莱特卡普告诉我的那样：“最重要的是，在我们成长的过程中保持公司文化和使命导向。真要说的话，真正让我感到不安的是，如何在规模化的过程中保持这种专注。” Those words were prescient. Organizational culture is not easily built but is easy to destroy. The literal safety of the world is wrapped up in the question: Will a newly unleashed Altman preserve the fruitful contradiction, or will he succumb to the pressures of go-go-go? 这些话很有先见之明。组织文化不容易建立，却很容易被摧毁。这个问题关系到世界的安危：刚刚被解放出来的奥尔特曼能否保持这种卓有成效的矛盾体，抑或他会屈服于拼命向前的压力？ David Brooks自2003年以来一直是时报的专栏作家。他最近出版的一本书是“How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen”。欢迎在Twitter上关注他：@nytdavidbrooks。 翻译：晋其角 点击查看本文英文版。 相关报道人工智能现已属于资本主义2023年11月23日 OpenAI事件再逆转：奥尔特曼复职2023年11月22日 OpenAI“宫斗”事件中的赢家和输家2023年11月21日 政府究竟该如何监管人工智能2023年11月8日 最受欢迎中国出现儿童肺炎感染潮，WHO要求提供更多信息 WHO称中国已提供儿童肺炎数据，未检测到新病原体 驾摩托艇逃往韩国的中国异见人士在韩被判缓刑 瑞士人真的不爱买房爱租房？ 人工智能现已属于资本主义 关于以色列与哈马斯的临时停火协议，你应该知道的 人工智能将把我们带往天堂还是地狱 旧金山之行让外界窥见习近平更为真实的一面 为何中国和波音仍需要彼此 币安CEO赵长鹏对洗钱指控认罪，公司被罚43亿美元 国际 中国 商业与经济 镜头 科技 科学 健康 教育 文化 风尚 旅游 房地产 观点与评论 免费下载 纽约时报中文网 iOS 和 Android App 点击下载iOS App点击下载Android App © 2023 The New York Times Company.