Notes from Sam Altman Event

We had Sam Altman over this week in the Qatar National Library in Education City to talk about OpenAI. The talk was somewhat generic and the questions that were asked were about AI's impact on Education, Governance, and the Economy. Extensive reads are available online on those topics so I'll summarize the key insights I got from the event:

1. How to find/generate startup ideas that will go big: He suggested that you keep in the loop of new findings in the fields you are interested in and spend a lot of time with smart people (my post about friends).

2. Future of jobs: AI will have an enormous impact in the economy. Most workers right now do repetitive assigned tasks instead of jobs, and that will be eliminated with the help of AI soon. It's a good time to be an AI/ML engineer and he advised to learn large scale distributed systems.

3. Off-topic: Something interesting I noticed was the lack of guards in the event. The event was attended by Sheikha Moza, mother of the current emir of Qatar, and I did not see anyone doing checks on people. Sam Altman left from the regular entrance with everyone.

@noordievdev