领导危机初现： inesperado 的“移除”
在OpenAI的历史上，可能只有一个时刻让我感到自己不想再继续下去了。回溯到得知 Sam Altman 被解职的那一刻，我身在家中。随后收到一条信息：“我们能视频通话吗？” 我随即接入了视频会议，发现董事会成员（不包括 Sam）悉数在列。他们告诉我，董事会已决定移除 Sam，同时我也被移出了董事会，但会继续留在公司。那一刻，我脑海中闪过的念头是：“这事不对劲。” 挂断电话后，我立刻与妻子交谈，告诉她：“我得辞职了。” 她回答：“我同意。”
Original English
It was maybe the only moment in Open
AI's history where I felt like I didn't
want to do it anymore. Take me back to
the moment you found out that Sam had
been fired. Where were you? I was at
home. And what happened? I got a text
saying can we hop on a video call? So I
hopped on the video call.
I noticed that
it was the board minus Sam who were on
there. I was told that the board has
decided
that
Sam would be removed, also that I had
been removed from the board but would be
staying with the company. What went
through your mind?
It just wasn't right. Right after I hung
up the call
talked to my wife and I said, "Got to
quit." And she said,
"I agree." And you quit that day. Yes.
忠诚的回响：凝聚新公司的愿景
我当天就辞职了。辞职后，我开始收到各种各样的信息，人们告诉我：“我不知道你和 Sam 接下来要做什么，但我跟着你们。我想和你们一起开创点什么。” 这份支持出乎我的意料，是一种真实的、发自内心的惊喜。我几位亲密的合作者，包括 Yakub Shimon 和 Alexander，也在那天选择离开。我们五个人，加上 Sam，聚在一起，开始勾勒一个新公司的蓝图。我记得第一天时的感受，觉得或许有 10% 的机会，我们真的能把公司重新夺回来。
接下来的第二天，我们在 Sam 家召开了一个会议。公司里许多人都赶了过来，我们向大家展示了正在勾勒的愿景。那是一次非常特别的经历，我们脑海中形成了一个关于如何运营这个项目的全新清晰图景。整个周末，我们都投入了大量时间，与董事会和公司进行谈判，试图弄清楚是否有可能共同回归。
Original English
That day when I quit started to get all
these messages, people saying, "I don't
know what you and Sam are doing next,
but I'm with you. I want to go start
something with you." Like just that was
that was a real honest surprise. There
were a few
of my close collaborators who quit that
day as well. That's Yakub Shimon,
Alexander
and the five of us, so
those people plus Sam, we all got
together and we started to chart out
what a new company could look like. I
remember feeling that first day like
okay, there's a 10% chance that we
actually get the company back, 10%. The
next day
we set up a meeting at Sam's house. A
bunch of people from the company came by
and we showed the vision that we'd been
sketching out. So it was this really one
day in, you know, with this this fresh
picture of how we'd run the project and
we spent
a bunch of time over that weekend also
negotiating with the board and the
company and trying to figure out is
there a path back together that makes
sense.
动荡与混乱：一次“叛变”的连锁反应
那个周日晚上，董事会决定由 Mira 担任临时 CEO，并引入了一位新的人选。然而，公司内部发生了“叛变”。我们当时身在办公室，以为与董事会达成协议、重归于好的道路近在咫尺。但董事会做出了那个改变，随后，几乎所有人都在涌出办公楼，现场陷入了一片真正的混乱。我通过视频通话安抚那些对加入新公司感兴趣的人，告诉他们一切都会好起来，我们有计划。我们原本只是为预期中少数愿意跟随的人准备了一个“救生筏”，但突然间，没有人想与这个“实体”扯上关系。人们希望为他们认为正确的事情发声。
随后，一份请愿书开始在公司内部流传。签名的人太多了，以至于 Google Docs 都崩溃了。因此，需要指定一些人作为联络人，由他们负责收集签名，以避免过多的编辑者同时操作。
Original English
That Sunday night
the board replaced
Mira as interim CEO with
a new person and the company just
rebelled.
Like we'd actually been at the office,
we thought we were close to a deal and
To come back.
To come back. Yeah, we thought we had a
path and then
the board made that change and then
suddenly it was
everyone streaming out of the building
and it was just like real chaos. I was
on video calls with many of the people
who had been interested in coming to
this new this new company saying it's
going to be okay, we have a plan and we
expanded, you know, we've been building
this little life raft, right, for the
small set of people we expected to want
to come and suddenly it was like no one
wanted to be associated with this
entity, right? People wanted to
you know, stand up for what they viewed
as right. Then this petition starts to
circulate. So many people were trying to
sign the petition at once, it actually
crashed Google Docs. And so they you had
to have certain people who were
designated as the person you go to to
actually put your name on the document
so you don't you don't have too many
editors at once.
救赎的曙光：Ilya 的签名与重聚的希望
大概凌晨五点我才到家，睡了大约 45 分钟后醒来。查看 Twitter 时，我看到 Ilya 发布了消息，表示他已经签署了请愿书，并希望公司能够重归于好。那一刻，我感到了巨大的宽慰和感激，仿佛一切都还能挽回，我们能够重回正轨。你和 Ilya 是共同创造这一切的。在他离开之后，你们是如何重建这种关系的？
寻找回那种关系确实很艰难。那无疑是一段非常亲密的关系，你甚至曾是我民事婚礼的主婚人。我们一起经历过极其艰难的时刻。就像任何一段关系一样，我们总会有起伏。之后，我们花了很多时间深入交谈，努力去理解和清晰地表达那些积累在我们之间、或从未说出口的事情。我认为我们走过了那个过程，到达了一个非常好的状态，并且就发生的一切达成了真正的了结。
最终，大家都回来了。我必须说，这并非板上钉钉，因为整个周末，竞争对手都在伺机而动，简直像一场“逐食盛宴”。人们都在积极争取，纷纷收到邀请。但令人难以置信的是，我们竟然没有在那一周内失去任何一个人。没有人接受竞争对手的提议。我认为这简直太不可思议了。这确实是一个“钻石时刻”。
Original English
You know, I probably
got home around like 5:00 a.m. or
something, went to sleep and I woke up
like 45 minutes later and I checked
Twitter and I saw that Ilya had posted
and had signed the petition and it said
that he wanted the company to come back
together and that was this real moment
of relief. I felt so much gratitude that
it just felt like okay, like we can put
this back together, we can get back to a
good track. You and Ilya had built this
together. What was it like trying to
find your way back to that relationship
after? Look, it was tough. It was
definitely that was definitely a very
close relationship. You'd been the
officiant at my civil ceremony.
Right, we'd been through extremely tough
times together and like any
relationship, you always have your ups
and downs and we spent a lot of time
afterwards really talking things through
and really trying to understand and just
articulate some of the things that we
had let build up or had left unsaid
between us and I think that we got to
through that process, I think we had
gotten to a really good place and I felt
like we got to closure on on everything
that had happened. And so eventually
everybody comes back. I'll tell you it
was not guaranteed because
throughout that weekend all the
competitors were circling. Just imagine
this like feeding frenzy. People were
shaping up to do, people were getting
offers
and we actually did not lose a single
person through that weekend. No one
accepted a competing offer. I think
that's incredible. Yeah, it was a very
that was a diamond moment.
内省与坚韧：在不确定中找寻动力
经历了这一切之后，你选择休息了一段时间。你内心的状态是怎样的？那是一段极其紧张的经历，回归也是如此。老实说，这是我在 OpenAI 经历过的最艰难的时刻之一，就是 Ilya 离开的时候。那可能是在 OpenAI 历史上，我感到自己不想再继续下去的唯一时刻。我想我需要一些时间来重新找回我为什么要做这件事，为什么它如此重要，以及为什么它值得承受痛苦。
如果让我打开一个 Google 文档，用一页纸写下你从 Sam 被赶下台、你辞职、激发了所有这些忠诚，到休息一段时间然后回归的过程中，学到了关于自己的什么？我想我学到的是，要坚持去做那些值得的事情。如果你有一个重要的使命，那么即使经历起伏，也要继续前进。总会有那么一些时刻，感觉一切都完了，或者一切又回来了，但你绝不能让这些时刻将你引离航道。我认为，在这些时刻，你必须成长出强大的个人韧性，因为如果你是领导者，人们会看着你，需要你展现稳定、支持和方向。我想，我在成长过程中学到很多的是，要能够既理解我们所做事情的细节，以及一个选择会带来什么影响，同时又要果断。
我承认，有过一些时刻，我认为我处理 OpenAI 的方式更多的是一种不确定感，感觉我不知道正确的答案是什么，不知道如何构建这项技术，或者如何回答那些棘手的伦理问题。但 OpenAI 有很多非常聪明的人，他们有非常坚定的意见。因此，我必须努力去理解所有这些意见，并找出如何将它们结合起来。有时这样做是正确的，有时你会意识到这些意见是相互矛盾的，不可能同时成立。有时，你只能做出选择，而这意味着会有人感到不满，会有人辞职，会有人感到被冷落。我认为，我一直在努力的是建立更强的自我认知，以及在有明确信念时，能够坚定地采取行动。这并不总是最容易的，你确实需要愿意承担巨大的个人痛苦。
正如 Ilya 所说：“如果你在痛苦，说明你还在创造价值。” 我认为这句话有深刻的真理。
Original English
After all of this happened, you took
some time off. What was going on
internally with you? That was an intense
experience to go through, an intense
experience to come back to and
honestly just
one of the hardest moments for me at
Open AI was
when Ilya left. It was maybe the only
moment in Open AI's history where I felt
like I didn't want to do it anymore.
I think I needed some time to
kind of find my way
back to remembering like why I was doing
this and why it was so important and why
it was worth the pain.
If I were to say like open a Google
document, write out sort of what you
learned about yourself on one page from
this whole
starting to Sam getting ousted to
quitting to inspiring all this loyalty
to the time off and then coming back,
what would you write? I think I've just
learned to just keep going for something
that's worth it. Right, if you have a
mission that matters, then the fact of
you keep going through the ups and the
downs. There going to be moments where
it's
it's all over
moments where it's where so back and you
just can't let those moments pull you
off course. And I think that the degree
of personal resilience that you have to
grow during these times because if
you're leading, people look to you for
that steadiness, for that support, for
the direction that the whole thing will
go. And I think that a lot of what I've
tried to
grow
with is to really
be able to both understand the details,
right, of what we're doing, what the
implication will be of a choice
but also be decisive. I think that that
there have been moments where I think
I've been
very much approaching Open AI through a
lens of uncertainty of feeling like I
don't know what the right answer is. I
don't know what the right way to build
this technology is or how do you answer
these very thorny questions.
But there's lots of people here who are
very smart, who have very strong
opinions and so really try to understand
all those opinions and figure out how to
put them together. And sometimes that's
the right thing and sometimes that you
realize that the opinions are mutually
contradictory, they can't all be true at
once. And sometimes you do just have to
pick and you know that means that
there's going to be someone who's going
to be upset, someone who's going to
quit, someone who's going to feel
slighted and I think that a lot of what
I've tried to do is have a stronger
sense of self and a stronger sense of
when there is conviction
that we need to act on it. Not always
the easiest, right, that you really do
have to be willing to take on great
personal pain. Like in the words of
Ilya, Ilya always says that you have to
suffer.
Right, if you're not suffering, like
you're not building value.
And I think there's deep truth to it.
Double click on that. This picture of
suffering was something that that we
thought about throughout the course of
Open AI where it's like we had so much
uncertainty from the beginning. Is this
thing going to work? And there's many
reasons why it might not work, why it
should not work, why you could even say
it cannot work, right, whether it's how
do you get the people, how do you pursue
the technology like how do you get
enough capital, how do you keep people
motivated, like how do you make the
right decisions, like each of these
things is extremely hard, extremely
uncertain and it's easy to just sweep
the problems under the rug and just
blindly say go. And I think that is the
negative side of like Silicon Valley
culture, right, certainly Silicon Valley
perception. But I don't think that works
in AI and I don't think that works for
Open AI. I don't think that's how we've
operated ever. I think the way that we
have always operated is to say encounter
the hard truth understand
science the reality as it is and that is
I think something that has contributed
to the successes we have had of thinking
about the problems differently, of not
being
happy with even in the early days, we're
thinking about okay, if we just write
some papers
and publish them it'll be great, we'll
get citations, we'll get you know, we'll
be the coolest people at these
conferences, but will we achieve the
mission?
Like how is it that you do that activity
and then AGI goes better for the world?
They're not connected, right, it's not
enough. Maybe it's a foundation, maybe
it's a step, but it is not sufficient.
And so then you start really thinking
about these bigger picture questions of
well, what it would what would it take
to build an AGI? And not pleasant,
right, because you realize there's no
path. You realize you need dollars.
You don't have any mechanism that's
going to allow you to raise dollars and
you can try hard. We did try hard, we
tried extremely hard, but you know,
maybe you're raising 100 million
dollars, you could do 500 million
dollars, great. But a billion?
Pretty hard. And you look at what Open
AI has been able to accomplish with the
resources we have been able to raise to
further that mission, there truly would
be no other way to do it besides having
leaned into the suffering and trying to
understand the truth of what it is we're
trying to accomplish.
[music]
AGI 使命与真相：直面挑战，方能前行
“遭受痛苦”——这个关于痛苦的画面，是我们 OpenAI 在整个过程中反复思考的。从一开始，我们就面临着巨大的不确定性：这个事物（AGI）能否成功？有很多原因可能导致它失败，或者它根本就不应该成功，甚至可以说是“不可能”成功。例如，我们如何吸引人才？如何推进技术？如何获得足够的资金？如何保持团队的积极性？如何做出正确的决策？所有这些都是极其困难、极其不确定的。
很容易就将问题掩盖起来，然后盲目地前进。我认为这是硅谷文化（或者说硅谷的某种认知）的负面一面。但我不认为这适用于 AI 领域，也不适用于 OpenAI。我一直认为，我们公司的运作方式是：直面硬道理，理解现实的科学和真相，并以此为依据。我认为，这正是我们取得成功的原因之一——我们以不同的方式思考问题。即使在早期，我们也没有安于现状，仅仅是写几篇论文、发表一下，然后沾沾自喜地认为自己是会议上最酷的人，但我们是否能实现使命？如何让 AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) 最终造福世界？这两者之间并非必然联系。这也许是一个基础，一个步骤，但绝非充分条件。
因此，我们开始认真思考这些更宏大的问题：构建一个 AGI 需要什么？这并非一个愉快的思考过程，因为你会意识到，几乎没有可行的路径。你会意识到你需要大量的资金，而我们当时没有任何机制能够筹集到这些资金。你可以努力尝试，我们确实付出了极大的努力，但也许你能筹集到一亿、五亿美元，但要达到十亿美元的规模，那就非常困难了。
现在，看看 OpenAI 凭借我们筹集到的资源实现了什么，以推进我们的使命，这确实别无他法，只能通过“拥抱痛苦”，并努力去理解我们所要完成之事的真相。
Original English
Double click on that. This picture of
suffering was something that that we
thought about throughout the course of
Open AI where it's like we had so much
uncertainty from the beginning. Is this
thing going to work? And there's many
reasons why it might not work, why it
should not work, why you could even say
it cannot work, right, whether it's how
do you get the people, how do you pursue
the technology like how do you get
enough capital, how do you keep people
motivated, like how do you make the
right decisions, like each of these
things is extremely hard, extremely
uncertain and it's easy to just sweep
the problems under the rug and just
blindly say go. And I think that is the
negative side of like Silicon Valley
culture, right, certainly Silicon Valley
perception. But I don't think that works
in AI and I don't think that works for
Open AI. I don't think that's how we've
operated ever. I think the way that we
have always operated is to say encounter
the hard truth understand
science the reality as it is and that is
I think something that has contributed
to the successes we have had of thinking
about the problems differently, of not
being
happy with even in the early days, we're
thinking about okay, if we just write
some papers
and publish them it'll be great, we'll
get citations, we'll get you know, we'll
be the coolest people at these
conferences, but will we achieve the
mission?
Like how is it that you do that activity
and then AGI goes better for the world?
They're not connected, right, it's not
enough. Maybe it's a foundation, maybe
it's a step, but it is not sufficient.
And so then you start really thinking
about these bigger picture questions of
well, what it would what would it take
to build an AGI? And not pleasant,
right, because you realize there's no
path. You realize you need dollars.
You don't have any mechanism that's
going to allow you to raise dollars and
you can try hard. We did try hard, we
tried extremely hard, but you know,
maybe you're raising 100 million
dollars, you could do 500 million
dollars, great. But a billion?
Pretty hard. And you look at what Open
AI has been able to accomplish with the
resources we have been able to raise to
further that mission, there truly would
be no other way to do it besides having
leaned into the suffering and trying to
understand the truth of what it is we're
trying to accomplish.
[music]
📌 文中提及的人物和组织
人物: Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever
公司/组织: OpenAI