Greg Brockman of OpenAI

 He grew up in Thompson ND, which is 8 miles south of Grand Forks. He attended HS in Grand Forks and took UND classes while in HS. Later went to Harvard, transferred to MIT, then dropped out to start a series of unsuccessful start-ups, until a few years ago, when he co-founded OpenAI.

His responses to the questions were quite thoughtful (at first) and I was impressed with how genuinely intelligent he is (not a tech bro at all). HOWEVER, in the last few minutes I ended up being really disgusted, for several reasons:

ChatGPT is NOT creative, as he claims. It bases its output on the creative work of humans, much of it scraped from the internet without permission. Claiming that GenAI is creating original content, something that has "not been seen before" (by creating a response from predicting the next most likely word) is LAUGHABLE (and kind of offensive).

He also suggests the AI might have an internal or interior experience, which I also think is absurd and sort of wishful thinking on the part of humans. We don't really know exactly what makes us human, but I would contend, whatever it is, AI doesn't have it (at least not yet).

I seriously question whether neural networks are successfully modeling biological thinking, as he is claiming. Human thinking is NOT just information processing! This debate has gone on for decades and I think it continues, it is not settled yet. It is clear to me that humans process information through a filter of experience, memory, and especially emotion, something AI does not and cannot do.

Thought he claims the goal of the company is to harness the value of AI for the benefit of all humanity, ChatGPT4 is fee-based - I guess it's just a happy coincidence that the adoption of LLM technology happens to pour money into his pocket.*

His final comment was that the best way we can prepare for the future is to become "experts" in this technology. This was after claiming that AI is the magic wand that will create the (imminent) utopian future (within 10 years he thinks).

No mention of intellectual property theft, and no mention of the alignment issue (though he hinted at it). 

Pollyanna horseshit, imho.

ADDENDUM

I spoke with someone who was at the session and they think some of the stuff I'm objecting to is cognitive dissonance - that Greg has to believe his company is a force for good because he's a good person and he is inextricably wedded to it.

*ADDL ADDENDUM

Sam Altman was fired as CEO in November and Greg Brockman quit in solidarity - both are committed to the open part of the name (OpenAI) and clearly the board wants to monetize it all. Sam was eventually rehired, but it was a huge drama.