"Understand" is up for debate, but it's clearly learning something. The fact that it's possible to learn general structure as well as we can from unlabeled data does seem like a significant development.
I think people should be impressed, but also recognize the distance from here to AGI. It clearly has some capabilities that are quite surprising, and is also clearly missing something fundamental relative to human understanding.
It is difficult to define AGI, and it is difficult to say what the remaining puzzle piece are, and so it's difficult to predict when it will happen. But I think the responsible thing is to treat near-term AGI as a real possibility, and prepare for it (this is the OpenAI charter we wrote two years ago: https://openai.com/charter/).
I do think what is clear is that we are, in the coming years, going to have very powerful tools that are not AGI but that still change a lot of new things. And that's great--we've been waiting long enough for a new tech platform.
The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks.
Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :(
It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible.
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.
We fund startups all around the world! In the rare cases where a founder is unable to get a US visa for the duration of our program, we are open to doing something remote. We offer a lot of help figuring out the US visa system, which is in my opinion extremely sub-optimal. I believe talent is equally distributed in the world, and the US should want as many talented founders to come create businesses here as possible.
China is an especially interesting market to us given the quality of companies and entrepreneurs we see there.
I am happy to help, and honestly if I had more time right now I'd take this on directly--right now is an unusually busy time for me. I agree with you it's critical to Silicon Valley.