I considered this, but

a) there is a big difference between a recording that can be quote-mined by a million journalists and some relatively sparse notes that offer all the plausible deniability he could want (and then some).

b) it was clear that this information was going to be discussed in the ML community and much of that discussion would be in writing, so he could have made a request to refrain from sharing if that was important to him.

c) he went out of his way to make this information available to the AC10 community. I think it would be weird if somehow now we are supposed to not write about it.

I do remember hearing that if systems became capable of self-improvement (sooner than expected?), that could be a big update

The way I heard that bit was he said he expected it to go smoothly; then someone asked him what it would take to change his mind and would be a 'fire alarm', and he said self-improvement with some sudden jumps in abilities is where he'd start to seriously worry about a hard takeoff.

I don't remember hearing that last bit as a generic warning sign, but I might well have missed it. I do remember hearing that if systems became capable of self-improvement (sooner than expected?), that could be a big update towards believing that fast take-off is more likely (as mentioned in your next point).

He mentioned the self-improvement part twice, so you probably missed the first instance. 

I remember both these claims as being significantly more uncertain/hedged.

Yes, all the (far) future claims were more hedged than I express here. 

I remembered this as being a forecast for ~transformative AI, and as explicitly not being "AI that can do anything that humans can do", which could be quite a bit longer. (Your description of AGI is sort-of in-between those, so it's hard to tell whether it's inconsistent with my memory.)

I think the difference between "transformative AI" and "AI that can do most economically useful tasks" is not that big? But because of his expectation of very gradual improvement (+ I guess different abilities profile compared to humans) the "when will AGI happen"-question didn't fit very well in his framework. I think he said something like "taking the question as intended" and he did mention a definition along the lines of "AI that can do x tasks y well", so I think his definition of AGI was a bit all over the place.

I was a bit confused about this answer in the Q&A, but I would not have summarized it like this. I remember claims that some degree of merging with AI is likely to happen conditional on a good outcome, and maybe a claim that CBI was the most likely path towards merging.

Yes, I think that's more precise. I guess I shortened it a bit too much. 

For what it's worth, I took notes on the event and did not share them publicly because it was pretty clear to me doing so would have been a defection, even though it was implicit. Obviously, just because it was clear to me doesn't mean it was clear to everyone but I thought it still made sense to share this as a data point in favor of "very well known person doing a not recorded meetup" implying "don't post and promote your notes publicly."

I am also disappointed to see that this post is so highly upvoted and positively commented upon despite:

1. Presumably others were aware of the fact that the meetup was not supposed to be recorded and LW is supposedly characteristically aware of coordination problems/defection/impact on incentives. At least to me, it seems likely that in expectation this post spreading widely would make Sam and people like him less likely to speak at future events and less trustworthy of the community that hosted the event. This seems not worth the benefit of having the notes posted given that people who were interested could have attended the event or asked someone about it privately.
2. As Sean McCarthy [LW(p) · GW(p)] and others pointed out, there were some at best misleading portrayals of what Altman said during his Q&A.

I was the one who first shared the notes on reddit. Unfortunately, I did not know that recording the speech was against the wishes of Sam Altman, but I should have checked why there was no recording (at the time I simply thought that no one bothered to do it). I'm sorry, fwiw I deleted the post.

No way to remove it from the internet at this point, but the obvious thing to do for LW goodwill is to remove the post and replace it with an apology, I'm not sure why that hasn't happened yet.

Parameters will get outdated in the same way we don't measure CPU performance using gigahertz anymore.

This was in the context of when he was asked about the number of parameters of GPT-4. He said that the big changes are not in the number of parameters but in the structure of the model. And he made a pretty excited and/or confident impression on me when he said it. I wouldn't be surprised if the nxt GPT-N is much better without many more parameters.

Nowhere did I write "Sam Altman claims ... !"

Instead I wrote: "These notes are not verbatim [...]While note-taking I also tended to miss parts of further answers, so this is far from complete and might also not be 100% accurate. Corrections welcome."

Talk about badly misrepresenting ...

I fail to see how "A question was asked about how far out he thought we were from being able to pass the Turing Test. Sam thought that this was technically feasible in the near term but would take a lot of effort that was better spent elsewhere, so they were quite unlikely to work on it." is misrepresented by "GPT-5 might be able to pass the Turing test. But probably not worth the effort."

Sam Altman literally said that passing the Turing test might be feasible with GPT-5, but not worth the effort. Where is the "directionallly false information"? To me your longer version is pretty much exactly what I express here. 

My notes are 30+ bullet point style sentences that catch the gist of what Sam Altman said in answers that were often several minutes long. But this example is the "misrepresentation" you want to give as example? Seriously?

If some things are flat out wrong, say which and offer a more precise version. 

I didn't take notes, and I don't want to try to correct the record from memory and plausibly make things worse.

Maybe some attendees could make a private Google Doc that tries to be a little more precise about the original claims/context/vibe, then share it after enough attendees have glanced over it to make you confident in the summary?

I don't expect this would be a huge night-and-day difference from the OP, but it may matter a fair bit for a few of the points. And part of what bothers me right now is that I don't know which parts to be more skeptical of.

I mean even if Lanrian's corrections are based on perfect recall, none of them would make any of my notes "pretty false". He hedged more here, that warning was more specific, the AGI definition was more like "transformative AGI" - these things don't even go beyond the imprecision in Sam Altman's answers. 

The only point were I think I should have been more precise is about the different "loss function". That was my interpretation in the moment, but it now seems to me much more uncertain whether that was actually what he meant. 

I don't care about the frontpage, but if this post is seen by some as "false gossip and rumors about someone's views" I'd rather take it down. 

I don't think that whether a post should be on the frontpage should be much influenced by what's being said in its comments by a third party.

I don't think I think we should be worried that something's going to do harm by spreading less-than-perfectly-accurate recollections when it says up front "These notes are not verbatim [...] While note-taking I also tended to miss parts of further answers, so this is far from complete and might also not be 100% accurate. Corrections welcome.". Lanrian's alternate versions don't seem so different to me as to make what p.b. wrote amount to "false gossip and rumors".

Everything in the OP matches my memory / my notes, within the level of noise I would expect from my memory / my notes.

I also don't think I could easily have checked whether others at the meetup had the same recollection. I had to leave pretty much when Sam Altman did and I didn't know anybody attending. 

Fact of the matter is that gwern, NNOTM, Amateur and James Miller of the commenters so far seem to have attended the meetup and at least didn't express any disagreements with my recollections, while Lanrian's (well-intended and well-taken) corrections are about differences in focus or degree in a small number of statements.

Which of my notes would you classify as "pretty false"? 

My claims mostly relate to what Sam Altman said, in response to my question, in discussion room 1 after Altman's official talk had ended.  Why are you so confident that I have said false things about what he stated?  Gwern was, I believe, just referring to what  Altman said in his official talk.  You should have a very high standard of proof before you accuse someone of saying "pretty false things".

I think people irrationally reject evidence that aliens are UFOs.  Pilots have reported that they feared disclosing what they had seen UFOs do because no one would believe them.  Ironically, If my version of what Altman said is true, we have a case here where I'm being falsely accused of spreading false information for accurately reporting that a hyper-high status person thinks UFOs are likely aliens.  Something about  UFOs causes normally rational people to jump to the conclusion that anyone offering evidence for the alien hypothesis is either lying, deluded, or a fool.

I got this a bit different: That it's lagging not because of lagging hardware but because robotics is hard.

When I say "robot hardware" I don't mean compute hardware. He mentioned for example how human dexterity is far ahead of robots. The "robotics is hard" bit is partly in "easier to iterate with bits".

As a general point, these notes should not be used to infer anything about what Sam Altman thought was important enough to talk a lot about, or what his general tone/attitude was. This is because

• The notes are filtered through what the note-takers thought was important. There's a lot of stuff that's missing.
• What Sam spoke about was mostly a function of what he was asked about (it was a Q&A after all). If you were there live you could maybe get some idea of how he was inclined to interpret questions, what he said in response to more open questions, etc. But here, the information about what questions were asked is entirely missing.
• General attitude/tone is almost completely destroyed by the compression of answers into notes.

For example, IIRC, the thing about GPT being empathic was in response to some question like "How can we make AI empathic?" (i.e., it was not his own idea to bring up empathy). The answer was obviously much longer than the summary by notes (so less dismissive). And directionally, it is certainly the case already that GPT-3 will act more empathic if you tell it to do so.

Did he really speak that little about AI Alignment/Safety? Does anyone have additional recollections on this topic?

He did make some general claims that it was one of his top few concerns, that he felt like OpenAI had been making some promising alignment work over the last year, that it was still an important goal for OpenAI's safety work to catch up with its capabilities work, that it was good for more people to go into safety work, etc. Not very many specifics as far as I can remember.

Oh, yeah. I'll change that. Thanks.

Yeah, but he said "at current revenue", which is kind of unsurprising? 

Codex/Copilot is all of 6 weeks old and GPT-3 based apps that see real usage yet are where? 

Mod note: I just toggled the post into a "major update" mode, which makes it easier to see version history and read the diffs. (This is currently an admin-only feature). I'm not sure whether it's worth the readability-cost of including all the struck-out parts, but meanwhile at least now there's an easy way to see the changes (click on the clock icon by the date of the post)

I changed very litte so far actually. Mostly because the "pretty false things" and the "flat out wrong" things don't seem to be forthcoming.

I think the "merging"-statement is also the only change were I didn't make it very clear in the text that it had been changed, but I will add that.

I am very ok with "you said X. I remember Y. My version is correct because Z." That's not what I get here, except by Lanrian. Instead I get allegations and then ... no follow-up.  

I think it has mostly been pretty civil. I have nothing against the OP and don't think he is malicious. Just think the situation is unfortunate. I was not blameless.  We should have explicitly mentioned in the emails to not publish notes.  And I should have asked OP flat out to remove it in my initial reply,  rather than my initial slightly timid attempt. 

Most of our meetups are recorded and posted publicly and obviously we are fine with summarization and notes, but about 1/10 guests prefer them to not be recorded.

Just to be clear, at no point did Sam Altman endorse "UFOs are aliens".

Is that to be interpreted as "finding out whether UFOs are aliens is important" or "the fact that UFOs are aliens is important"?

Timestamp / excerpt? As described, I think you need to be missing a lot of facts (or be reasoning very badly) in order to reach a conclusion like that.

p.b., I propose that you change the title to "Rough Notes: Sam Altman Q&A on GPT + AGI". I think this will help people not be confused about how much the notes are claiming to be accurate – it seems the notes are 'roughly' accurate but with some mistakes. As Sam's a prominent person I think you can expect small mistakes to flow out far and it's good to avoid that.