Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that will Change the World
- 2025-08-20 (modified: 2025-08-26)
- 저자: Parmy Olson
Prologue
지금까지 경험하지 못했던 속도:
In the fifteen years that I’ve written about the technology industry, I’ve never seen a field move as quickly as Artificial intelligence has in just the last two years.
누구는 유토피아를 얘기하고 누구는 멸망을 얘기하지만, 이런 극단적 예측은 당면한 현실의 문제를 가릴 뿐이다:
Many AI builders say this technology promises a path to utopia. Others say it could bring about the collapse of our civilization. In reality, the science fiction scenarios have distracted us from the more insidious ways AI is threatening to harm society by perpetuating racism, threatening entire creative industries, and more.
소수 기술 업계의 막강한 영향력:
Behind this invisible force are companies that have grabbed control of AI’s development and raced to make it more powerful. Driven by an insatiable hunger to grow, they’ve cut corners and misled the public about their products, putting themselves on course to become highly questionable stewards of AI.
No other organizations in history have amassed so much power or touched so many people as today’s tech giants. Google conducts web searches for 90 percent of Earth’s internet users, and Microsoft software is used by 70 percent of humans with a computer. … AI future has been written by just two men: Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. … Altman was the reason the world got ChatGPT. Hassabis was the reason we got it so quickly.
독과점이 야기하는 문제:
The concentration of power in AI would lead to reduced competition and herald new intrusions into private life and new forms of racial and gender prejudice. Already today, if you ask a popular AI tool to generate images of women, it’ll make them sexy and scantily clad; ask it for photorealistic CEOs, and it’ll generate images of white men; ask for a criminal, and it will often generate images of Black men.
에디슨 vs. 웨스팅하우스 사례와의 유사성:
The pair’s journey was not all that different from one two centruies ago, when two entrepreneurs named Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse went to war. … In the end, Westinghouse’s more efficient electrical standard became the most popular in the world. But he didn’t win the so-called War of the Currents. General Electric did.
As corporate interests pushed Altman and Hassabis to unleash bigger and more powerful models, it was the tech titans who came out as the winners, only this time the race was to replicate our own intelligence.
책의 구성:
The second half of this book lays out those rissks, but first I’ll explain how we got here, and how the visions of two innovators who tried to build AI for good were eventually ground down by the forces of monopoly.
Act 1. The Dream
Chapter 1. High School Hero
온라인 공간의 힘에 대한 깨달음.
AOL chat rooms were so significant to the LGBTQ community that by 1999, when Altman was founteen, about a third of its rooms were focused on gay topics. When he was sixteen, he came out to his parents. His mother was shocked.
리더십:
He stepped up to as many leadership roles as he could manage.
권력과 지원 네트워크에 대한 깨달음.
Altman left school with a hard lesson. If you had ambitious ideas, there would always be some haters. The solution was to align yourself with those who had power and authority and to surround yourself with a support network.
포커를 즐기며 블러핑과 심리조작 기술을 갈고 닦음.
He’d play hours of poker at a popular casino in San Jose, honing his skills of psychological maneuvering and influence. Poker is all about watching others and sometimes misdirecting them about the strength of your hand, and Altman became so good at bluffing and reading his opponents’ subtle cues that he used his winnings to fund most of his living expenses as a college student.
스탠포드 AI 랩에서 Sebastian Thrun과 만남. AI의 존재론적 위험에 대한 고민을 시작.
He became a researcher at Standord’s AI lab. … The AI lab had just been reopneed and its leader was Sebastian Thrun. … Thurn noticed that the serious kid from St. Louis was interested in the possibility of unintended consequences in AI. …
Altman mused on this idea for some time. As a science fiction fan, he wondered if this was why humans had never had contact with alien life. Perhaps beings on other planets had tried creating AI, too, and then been wiped out by their own creation. If that was aviodable, someone would have built safer AI before others created the dangerous kind.
Loopt, Y Combinator, 폴 그레이엄.
Altman and Sivo decided to join the three-month program, called Y Combinator, and create a start-up. … Most investors in Silicon Valley dismissed Y Combinator as a silly summer camp for hackers. … Graham and others believed founders had this authority for good reason. When the smartest and most talented people had a long-term vision, they needed the freedom to carry it out. …
Silicon Valley was the land of crazy thinkers. You didn’t start a business here. You started an empire.
위험을 과장하는 전략.
While many entrepreneurs would have been in denial about their app’s misuse, Altman seemed intent on openly confronting the problem. … What looked like career suicide was a shrewd PR move that he would turn to again and again in the future as a kind of calculated reverse psychology. By becoming overly concerned with the worst-case scenario of his creation, Altman could disarm his critics or journalists like Jessica Lessin. There was nothing left to throw at him because, well, he’d done it to himself.
사업 실패.
In 2012, Altman sold it to a gift-card company for about $43 million, barely covering what was owed to investors and his employees.
구세주 컴플렉스.
If you throw a smartphone at a group of people sitting inside the exclusive Battery Club in San Francisco, it’ll hit at least three trying to save the world. … The young St. Louis native needed to delve back into the world of building start-ups and plug himself so deeply into those Silicon Valley networks that he would become synonymous with the companies who proclaimed they were changing the world. He would transform himself into an even more profound version of his old mentors, and then dig back into what he’d been stewing on at the Stanford AI lab. That would lead him to chase an even grander objectie: saving humanity from a looming existential threat and then bringing them an abundance of wealth unlike anything they had seen.