Before ChatGPT
51 quotes from 1934 to 2021, the long run-up: Turing, the first chatbots, deep learning, the warnings nobody read. Newest first.
- 2021
First of the three H's: helpful, harmless, honest.
AI is neither artificial nor intelligent
Kate Crawford's opening argument in Atlas of AI: it runs on minerals, energy and human labour.
Coined in the 2021 paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" for language models that recombine text without understanding.
Theory that most online activity is now bots talking to bots.
- 2020
Empirical relations between compute, data, parameters and model quality.
- 2019
Capture the light cone of all future value in the universe
Altman on what AGI could do for OpenAI, StrictlyVC, May 2019, "and that's for sure not okay for one group of investors to have".
Rich Sutton, 2019: general methods that leverage computation beat human-designed cleverness.
How the press summarised OpenAI's decision not to publish GPT-2 in February 2019, "due to our concerns about malicious applications".
- 2018
Ensure AGI benefits all of humanity
OpenAI's stated mission.
More profound than electricity or fire
Sundar Pichai, 2018.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says AI is more profound than electricity or fire
- 2017
Most fears about AI are fears about capitalism
Ted Chiang, 2017, paraphrased in many later interviews: fears about technology are fears about how capitalism will use it.
Sutskever to Musk and Altman, 20 Sep 2017: "The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship."
Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw
Elon Musk's nine-minute reply to Sutskever and Brockman's "Honest Thoughts" email, 20 Sep 2017. He left OpenAI's board in February 2018.
Whoever leads in AI will rule the world
Vladimir Putin to students, 1 Sep 2017: whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.
Putin says the nation that leads in AI 'will be the ruler of the world'
Title of the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer.
View that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority.
- 2016
People should stop training radiologists now
Geoffrey Hinton at the Creative Destruction Lab's Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference in Toronto, 2016, predicting that deep learning would outperform radiologists within five years.
Guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks
Sam Altman describing his personal emergency preparations in Tad Friend's New Yorker profile, October 2016.
Small children playing with a bomb
Nick Bostrom, 2016.
Nick Bostrom: 'We are like small children playing with a bomb'
AlphaGo's 37th move in game two against Lee Sedol, 10 March 2016. Commentators took it for a mistake. It won the game.
- 2015
AI will probably lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there'll be great companies
Sam Altman, 2015, before founding OpenAI.
Peter Singer's 2015 book title.
Worrying about killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars
Andrew Ng, 2015.
Andrew Ng: worrying about killer AI is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars
- 2014
Stephen Hawking to the BBC, 2014: full AI "could spell the end of the human race."
Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind
Elon Musk at MIT, 2014: "With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon."
Elon Musk: artificial intelligence is our biggest existential threat
- 2011
Career-advice organisation named after the hours in a working life.
EA idea: take a high-paying job and donate most of it.
Movement to do the most good with evidence and reason; closely tied to AI safety funding.
- 2009
Facebook's internal motto until 2014.
- 2008
LessWrong maxim: when the numbers are large, trust the arithmetic over the gut.
- 2007
Select all squares with traffic lights
reCAPTCHA prompt; humans labelling training data to prove they are human.
- 2005
Kurzweil's year for the singularity.
Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book title. He set the date at 2045.
- 2003
10^58 future people are watching
Bostrom's 2003 estimate of potential future lives, turned into a slogan.
Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development
Bostrom's thought experiment: an AI told to make paperclips converts everything into paperclips.
- 2000
Google's motto, dropped from the code of conduct preface in 2018.
- 1981
Coined at Apple in 1981 for Steve Jobs. People who know Sam Altman use it for him.
- 1971
Audi's slogan since 1971. The only non-English line in this collection.
- 1969
Coca-Cola, 1969.
- 1968
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that
HAL 9000, 1968.
- 1965
I. J. Good's 1965 scenario of machines improving machines.
The last invention that man need ever make
I. J. Good, 1965: an ultraintelligent machine could design better machines, so it would be the last invention humans need make.
- 1951
We should have to expect the machines to take control
Turing in a 1951 lecture, anticipating machines that outstrip human powers.
- 1950
The first sentence of Turing's 1950 paper. He replaced the question with the imitation game.
- 1934
His salary depends on his not understanding it
Upton Sinclair, 1934. Daniel Kokotajlo quotes it in 2026 for why OpenAI staff stopped worrying.