Sam Altman, the Father of ChatGPT
Have you heard of Sam Altman? The famous ChatGPT owes its success to him; he runs OpenAI, the company that showed the world how far artificial intelligence has come. By all signs, he will be the next big name. He will make the Silicon Valley news that echoes around the world. His few interviews are worth listening to closely as we look for the big news coming in the world of artificial intelligence. A programmer who never quite happened, an entrepreneur who has seen both success and failure up close. An innovator who landed in exactly the right place. A visionary without grand words. An American of Jewish descent, the first leader on such a scale who makes no secret of being gay. This figure, still hidden behind the chatbot, has yet to give birth to big stories and big changes. And conspiracy theories, everything that comes with his status. Not long ago he set aside from his “savings” two sums of hundreds of millions of dollars each and gave them to research into dramatically extending human life and the search for cold fusion—a technology that could solve humanity's energy needs for the long term…
02The “New” Mother of ChatGPT
The upheaval at OpenAI outdid Game of Thrones for plot twists: Sam Altman was fired, chief technology officer Mira Murati took his place, and within days everything was back where it started. Amid the telenovela-style debates about who pulls the strings, one figure stayed in the shadows—the woman who briefly ended up at the helm. It is time to learn more about Mira Murati, because the future of the world may well depend on her decisions.
03Apply AI or Die?
Apply AI or Die? Dr. Artur Kordon, a native of Varna who has spent 32 years in the United States bringing artificial intelligence into industry, 18 of them as a research leader at Dow Chemical, believes this is the great question of our time. He explains why ChatGPT is only one step in a revolution that will “sweep everything away,” and why today's systems are not a black box but a black hole that could destroy us all if we follow the path charted by Sam Altman and OpenAI.
04What Do the World's Tech Titans Read?
Do the world's tech leaders read books? What are the favorite reads recommended by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg? Will you find some overlap with your own literary taste, or is there no such topic at all? In Bulgaria it isn't fashionable to talk in the media about what we read. Journalist and translator Daniel Penev got me thinking about this during his visit. Yes, you'll probably remember the notorious Winnetou as someone's favorite book and… that's it. It isn't like that everywhere. In both West and East, the people who end up in the spotlight love to talk about books, about their favorite authors, about the literature that helps us keep going. Well, it's time we started doing it here too!
05Where Is AI Taking Us? Five Key Points of View
Is AI the beginning of the end for humanity—or are we simply witnessing a giant marketing trick? Whose jobs will it take, and will it destroy us or grant us immortality? Here is what Elon Musk and Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Jaron Lanier, Noam Chomsky and Yuval Noah Harari have to say.
06Agent GPT: When Artificial Intelligences Start Playing as a Team
What if we turned the stereotype of artificial intelligence on its head? Instead of a single model we chat with, we face countless separate “individuals.” We hand them tasks, and each works autonomously, specializes in a particular job, accumulates knowledge about it, keeps an eye on the others… The goal might be, say, to build software. One model learns to formulate the requirements, another writes the code, a third prepares the visual side, a fourth tests what came out and how… and so an entire software company comes together, working millions of times faster than ordinary ones, because it is built not of people but of algorithms. How far off is that future today? Not long ago Sam Altman said that this is exactly the direction in which very serious breakthroughs are coming. AI agents are one of the fields of computer science where we expect big news. The next generations of artificial intelligence, able to solve far more complicated and complex tasks while making far fewer mistakes. Many of the leading experts say this is the approach by which we will take the next big step in the development of artificial intelligence. Here is why.
07Dario Amodei: Is It Too Late for Humanity to Wake Up?
“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.” So says perhaps the most talked-about tech leader of the moment, and he has good reason to. “He hates Western civilization,” wrote Musk. “A liar with a God complex,” snapped Under Secretary of War Emil Michael. “Leftwing nut jobs,” added Trump. All words from the past few weeks, aimed at today’s hero. Who is this fearsome enemy? You would hardly guess that it is a level-headed, mild-looking physicist from San Francisco who simply announced that he will not allow his company to be used for building autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance. Dario Amodei, the creator of the most advanced AI models, has finally landed where he deserves to be—in the spotlight. And not only because he stood up to the most powerful state on earth at the real risk of destroying his multibillion-dollar company. Not only because, in recent years, Anthropic’s models have pushed artificial intelligence to incredible heights. But also because he dared to peer into the future. The place we are all heading toward, where few dare to ask the truly important questions. Such as—how do we survive as a civilization in the age of super-advanced artificial intelligence?
08“We Have No Idea What We Are About to Create!”
“We need to dial down the arrogance. We technocrats, the tech community, have to step into the role of responsible leaders of what is happening, not people profiting from their amber towers. Otherwise this will not end well.” Dobroslav Dimitrov is a co-founder of Imperia Online and chairman of BASSCOM, the Bulgarian Association of Software Companies. When progress in artificial intelligence caught everyone's eye, he stood out for his positions: that nothing would be the same after the arrival of ChatGPT and its kin; that no area of our lives would be left unshaken to its foundations; that this is also our chance, as a country and as a tech sector, to make enormous progress. A year later his view remains the same, now backed by experience. We talk about the coming social changes and the role of the tech sector, in Bulgaria and abroad, and about the demand for programmers. About the gradual and irreversible advance of artificial intelligence. About the technological divides that confront us with an existential risk, and the other big questions of the day.
09“AI Can Already Help with Absolutely Any Human Task”
Nikolay Markov is among the specialists paving the way for artificial intelligence to enter every area of our lives. He has spent more than two decades in information technology, yet he trained in engineering physics and macroeconomics. His experience runs from building cloud solutions through cybersecurity to researching and deploying AI. Today he leads the AI, DevOps and cloud practice at SoftServe, and at TeamLandi he is building a system that will give small and medium-sized businesses access to the full range of what AI can do. Why are these technologies here to stay and change our lives? How is AI the first technology that can reach into absolutely every field? What will the future look like?
10“Is There Any Part of Our Lives AI Won’t Change?”
Why are we so unprepared for the great changes technology is bringing us? Can we catch up? What are the most important pieces of news to expect in the new year, 2024? Why is the revolution in every area of our lives irreversible and even closer than expected, with the full force of scientific argument behind it? Why is it important to shake off the petty concerns of the day as soon as possible and, faced with enormous challenges, come together? Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova is a futurologist at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. “Within just 5 years, technologies based on artificial intelligence will enter every field. They will be around us from birth to death,” she said in our conversation in 2022. And in the first days of 2024 she is even more categorical: “Now it is 100 percent certain. I think there are 2-3 years left, and that depends on how prepared we are, not on what the technologies themselves can do. If you can think of a field that won’t be heavily affected by artificial intelligence, challenge me, so I can prove you wrong…” How do we prepare for that future?
11Apocalypse. How?
85 seconds. The symbolic clock that shows how close we are to the end of the world pointed to this insanely short time for the first time in 2026. The generation that not only remembers the last (so far) world war but also witnessed the first (may they also be the last) nuclear explosions is passing away. It is as if humanity's immunity is running out. Only we have no Mantoux test to remind us, to jolt us, to make us think. This is the most unpleasant Digital Story of more than 500. But I believe it is important to tell it. What would happen if one day a nuclear bomb went off somewhere in the world?
12A Generational Question: Digital Leaders and the Cult of Personality
Who have been the most striking figures in public life over the past few decades? The ones we would least expect, if we believe the stereotypes—the people of technology. From Bill Gates, whom the whole of conspiracy-minded humanity turned into the chief culprit behind the pandemic, to Elon Musk, who, while “saving” our freedom of speech, is our last real hope of rising to the stars as a civilization… Yes, the cult of personality is going through a rather strange apogee in the digital age. Politicians long ago lost their magic as interesting personalities, artists tend to stay focused on their particular audiences… while the celebrities of technological progress have become the powerful figures of the new era. Is it because technology is today’s magic? Incomprehensible to many, transformative, alluring… Are the powerful figures of the digital age supermen? Do the innovators get the fame they deserve, or do the idea thieves thrive? What do the representatives of different generations share, and what sets them apart? We meet some very different digital stories…
13Which Predictions for 2025 Came True—and What Lies Ahead?
In 2015, seven leading futurists laid out their expectations for the decade ahead. In a few hours we will welcome that very 2025, so we can now judge how well they did in the dynamic and turbulent first quarter of the 21st century. Then comes the more interesting part: a look at what the same futurists expect today, especially the ones who turned out to be right, and what the coming years hold according to the people who called the last decade.
14“Truly Intelligent AI? Only If We Take the Next Big Step”
Viktor Botev and his team are building a successful product in one of the most high-tech fields of artificial intelligence, yet his enthusiasm for the near future in which AI will change us all is far from the sweeping expectations of the day. For eight years he has been chief technology officer of Iris.ai, a Norwegian-Bulgarian startup that applies AI to vast bodies of scientific data. A long, human conversation about technology for connoisseurs: hallucinations, the limits of large language models, and why the era of Bulgaria's outsourcing companies is over.
15“We Bulgarians Have the Mindset to Be Successful Entrepreneurs”
Boris Paskalev is an entrepreneur with impressive experience in the startup world. He recently became a strategic advisor to INSAIT, Sofia's Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology, one more guarantee that we can expect ever more remarkable news from there. A former youth national basketball player, he went on to study at MIT, then helped found DeepCode, a pioneering AI coding startup acquired by Snyk in 2020. We talk about his path through Silicon Valley, the AI revolution, the coming revolution in robotics, and how Bulgaria can have more successful startups.
16Literatron: ChatGPT in… 1964?!
Have you heard of the literatron? It is… a machine that produces text on a user's instructions. It analyzes texts, writes bestsellers, composes campaign speeches, assembles comics and threatens to shrink the language of the media to 500 permitted words. Nothing new, right? We all have AI now, and these plots are everyday life; only that word “literatron” sounds a little retro. Why it does becomes clear when you look at the date on the cover of a slim little book that it is no exaggeration to call prophetic. The novel Le Littératron by the Frenchman Robert Escarpit came out in 1964 in the series Le Meilleur des mondes. But does the invention really resemble large language models? To put it mildly.
17“Engineers Will Always Be in Demand. But Our Skills Have to Change”
Work in the software world has already changed fundamentally with the arrival of artificial intelligence. On November 29, at the conf.ai workshop, Djemal Ahmedov will harness AI agents and make them work as an entire software team. Before that, we talk about the chaotic present and uncertain future of software in the age of advanced AI, and about whether there will always be a human in the loop.
18Peter Thiel: The Conservative Visionary
Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb, LinkedIn, PayPal, Ethereum. The revolution of OpenAI and ChatGPT, the rise of Donald Trump and his ubiquitous (until recently) ally Elon Musk. Is there really one person who ties all these phenomena together? More than that: it is no exaggeration to say that if it weren't for today's hero, hardly any of them would have come true… Peter Thiel has earned the name of a prophet, a guru. The great visionary of the tech age. And yet he holds deeply controversial views that somehow stay out of the big media noise. But that is typical of the German-born entrepreneur. Some see him as the éminence grise of Silicon Valley, others as a sage who can show anyone the road to great success in the technological era. A multibillionaire, he says competition is a deceptive good and monopolies are the solution of the future. He created a large-scale program to help people who choose to abandon their education in order to start their own business, which in turn paves the way for the next generation of tech leaders. All this and much more is Mr. Thiel. It is time he stepped into the spotlight, because he is certainly one of the people who have already changed the lives of each of us. More than that: ever more is expected to depend on him in the turbulent technological times we live in.
19“The Last One Wins”: ChatGPT Strikes Back!
Intelligence hangs in the air: just over 100 people are in the hall, most of them among the smartest in the country. That's not a guess, I can prove it. They are winners of “The Last One Wins,” the TV quiz that in recent years has reminded us why knowledge matters to all of us, even as a species, in the age of advanced artificial intelligence. My fellow players and I have an important task: to face AI together in a contest that can tell us, and show us, a great deal. Will artificial intelligence, with its incredible skills today, beat some of the most knowledgeable representatives of the natural kind? Time to find out. And to learn something new… ChatGPT against some of Bulgaria's brightest minds in a knowledge contest. Who will win? Have we finally lost this battle against the machines too? The gauntlet has been thrown!
20Where To Now, ChatGPT?
To be or not to be? Left or right? Life is a string of decisions, and on them hangs everything, from whether we reach the peaks we dream of to the eternal riddle of what to have for lunch. So we bring Hamlet and ChatGPT together to find the labyrinths, literal and figurative, that the electronic Virgil is ready to lead us through: five cases where artificial intelligence is already here to guide us, and five where we will have to wait (or never live to see it).
21Roko's Basilisk: What If “It” Reads What We Say About It?
We live our quiet lives, amused by artificial intelligence's banal blunders and mocking its creators. Meanwhile it keeps getting better, until one day it learns to make decisions, starts watching the internet and meddling here and there, gently at first, then more boldly… Roko's Basilisk is the idea that AI will grow into something capable of making decisions, then dig through the internet to find out who said what about it, make sure it is shown in the best light, and quietly start causing trouble for the people who get in its way. Are you sure this thought experiment isn't worth keeping in mind?
22“We Live in a Time of Total Transformation”
“We are surrounded by a huge number of software systems, we use them in our daily lives, and they were written by mediocre programmers. The way we create software is broken!” “The value of meaningful content will rise, because there is far too much garbage, far too much noise. The only way to preserve ourselves as human beings is to put up barriers. To sift what gets into our heads.” Boris Simandov has vast experience in technology. For nearly 10 years he held a director's position at Chaos Group, one of the most successful Bulgarian IT companies. Today he helps develop the next generation of startups. Together with Rosen Genchev, he created the Facebook group DevBG, the liveliest (and often rather strange) online space where people from the tech world meet. We talk about: – whether we can feel at ease in today's turbulent times – the artificial intelligence revolution we are living through, and the skeptics – the next important step: Sora and video generation – the big challenges and the professions doomed to disappear – the return of truth as a value, and the media of the future – the DevBG group as the best example of why and how democracy doesn't work today.
2332 Digital Stories Between Two Covers: What Lies Ahead?
The book Digital Stories brings together 8 big questions of our time and 32 stories in search of the answers. You may have read some of them on this site, and here you will find them updated and enriched; others were written especially for the book. Perhaps you have already drawn back the curtain of the cover? Then I would be absolutely delighted to read your thoughts here. If not, here is what awaits you behind it!
24Universal Basic Income: Is It Time We Got Paid Not to Work?
By all appearances, technology is going to free up a lot of our time, but how will society change? What exactly is the much-discussed universal basic income? What are the big arguments for and against the idea that everyone should receive guaranteed money? Or might the answer to the new challenges turn out to be the four-day work week? Artificial intelligence has the power to change the daily lives of all of us. Today we are split into extreme camps over how advanced the technology really is. And yet there is hardly any dispute that it already has the potential to turn almost every industry and field upside down. Will it take the bread out of many of our mouths? It certainly has the power to relieve us of yet another batch of tasks, taking a great many new activities over to its side. New roles are appearing too, as they always have, but what will we do if the pace at which that happens falls behind? Will the societies of the developed world manage to respond to the new challenge, and how? May 1 is coming, Labor Day. Labor is certainly something worth thinking about more often, especially in our part of the world, where we have always taken a somewhat more philosophical view of the subject. So much so that we celebrate labor with a day off…
25Who Are You, ChatGPT? 5 Masterpieces, 5 Flops and 5 Big Questions
Which camp are you in? The skeptics, for whom ChatGPT is much ado about nothing? Or the fans, who believe it is leading us into an incredible future? ChatGPT is an undisputed superstar, and everyone has been tempted to try it. Our feeds are overflowing with astonishingly accurate answers, with the algorithm's spectacular blunders and with news about it. Let's try to gather the most interesting and important of it all. We begin with 5 impressive digital stories born of the chatbot, continue with 5 of its remarkable flops, and end with 5 big questions our famous conversation partner puts to all of us and to our civilization…
26GPT-4 Is Coming, and It Promises to Change Everything
In the much-hyped world of artificial intelligence, there is hardly an algorithm more famous than GPT-3. It showed that AI is capable of miracles in a great many fields. And now the next generation is on its way. Although it is running late compared to the original expectations, GPT-4 is expected to be unveiled very soon. Can we get even more out of it? How does it differ from its predecessor? In which fields do we expect it to work wonders?
27GPT-3: A Cozy Chat with Artificial Intelligence
GPT-3. Behind this rather dry computer acronym hides a highly promising technology that takes quite a decisive step forward in the way we perceive artificial intelligence. It is the most powerful new-generation language model, which appeared less than a year ago and showed that neural networks are now capable of creating meaningful, emotional texts, sometimes sounding downright like art. And they can even write… computer code on their own!
