12 ms·

$20 is the very first price tier introduced at the very outset of what could be one of the most powerful companies of our generation. Google.com adding a single

$20 is the very first price tier introduced at the very outset of what could be one of the most powerful companies of our generation. Google.com adding a single yellow box with an advertisement seemed reasonable, too. Anyone else having serious concerns about the direction this is going? At my wife's company they have already largely replaced an hourly data classification job with ChatGPT. This announcement is the first in an inevitable series of moves to monetize a technology that directly replaces human knowledge work. I'm not saying that those jobs need to be artificially protected or that painful changes should be avoided (basically all tech workers automate human work to some extent) but I'm really concerned about the wealth gap and the extent to which we are pouring gas on that fire. Income inequality looks just like it did before the Great Depression, and now we're handing the power to replace human work over to those who can afford to pay for it.

vasco 4y ago
> and now we're handing the power to replace human work over to those who can afford to pay for it. All technological advances through the ages have been doing this in one way or another. For some things people paid with their health or effort and for others people pay with money when that was available. I disagree with the "now". This is no different from a car. You seemed to say that in the middle of your comment but then reverted back.
- kokanee 4y ago
  Fair; I think my poorly-articulated concern is that there seems to be a healthy pace of technological change at which our productivity increases but people have time to adapt and modernize their income streams. If technology replaces human work too quickly, people don't have time to adapt, and the middle class disappears. I don't even see a solution at this point, but keeping the technology free would at least not make the problem worse.
realce 4y ago
> and now we're handing the power to replace human work over to those who can afford to pay for it. That's been capitalist industrialization for the last 200 years. We have been warned thousands upon thousands of times already what's going to happen - that's what's going to happen. The only thing to do is to make this layer of tech accessible to every person on Earth to every degree of depth possible. The terror is in the imbalance of power and access, and the best-case we can get is if we totally erase that imbalance so we can once again compete as "equals"
lostmsu 4y ago
You realize that near human-level AI for $20/month is a bargain in a country where typical mobile phone plan is $25+, and is basically universally affordable?
- kokanee 4y ago
  The implication of my point was that I expect this to be the first in an endless series of new prices, tiers, and SKUs, each one offering the most power to those who can pay the most.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  >typical mobile phone plan is $25+ Jeepers! €5.99 - 70Gb data, unlimited calls and sms. You guys are being gouged to the max...especially with that '+' sign, at the end.
  - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
    Yeah, telecom companies in the US and Canada have us by the balls. It's at least $60 with taxes....we just get fucked compared to what Euros pay.
    - anonyfox 4y ago
      Yep, 30€/mo for phone/SMS flatrate + unlimited LTE here. Germany.
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  Universally affordable? Here's two data points for you, minimum wage in Zambia is 13 USD per month, in India it's 65 USD per month.
  - qualudeheart 4y ago
    Maybe people in rich countries can learn to subsist on that much. Combined with the feudalism model that I have elsewhere in this thread promulgrated, this will define the living conditions of the 99 percent as we approach the singularity.
electrondood 4y ago
The future is bifurcated into those who invested in AI companies in the 2020s, and those on UBI.
- r00fus 4y ago
  I strongly doubt the UBI part as it goes against the "religion" of Wall Street and most politicians.
  - qualudeheart 4y ago
    It’s much easier to stomacj than communism. I believe that UBI will be part of the forthcoming neofeudal system. Rich people will operate private welfare systems that distribute money and housing to poor people. This will be a philanthropically funded version of the current welfare system, but with different tradeoffs made than public welfare systems. Parents pay their children an allowance. The child must obey the orders of the parents or the allowance can be taken away. Most children exist in a such relationship with their parents and everyone involved is satisfied. Under neofeudalism, the poor will be as children to the rich. The rich will operate intentional communities populated by their poor people. From the perspective of a rich person it’s like playing The Sims but with real people. Here is how life under this system will be. You live according to the rules set by the overlord. The rules will be downstream from the personal values of their overlords. Most housing in these communities will be like current housing provided to welfare recipients. It will probably be a spectrum of Tent to Homeless Shelter to Studio Apartment to Small Multi Room Apartment to Small House. Here’s a question to ponder. How much of a welfare state can the average oligarch provide to how many people under the economic conditions of the post-AGI era?
  - evo_9 4y ago
    Ok then what? I keep saying what I said to my dad 10 years+ back - once we automate ALL jobs out of existence be that 10 years or 100 years from now, how does society / monetary systems change? What comes next? UBI at best is a stopgap.
    - qorrect 4y ago
citilife 4y ago
I'm less concerned about how many jobs are going to be replaced and more about how they'll be replaced. The AI is not decerning and right in the announcement, OpenAI states it's intention on "correcting assumptions": > challenge incorrect assumptions I imagine some of these assumptions will be bias towards particularly ideologies / things people desire. - https://twitter.com/Basedeyeballs/status/1613269931617050625 https://twitter.com/Basedeyeballs/status/1613269931617050625 - https://medium.com/ninjas-take/chat-gpts-bias-is-very-very-evident-9a83ff98b7f https://medium.com/ninjas-take/chat-gpts-bias-is-very-very-e... I can go on, but imagine you're relying on this system to grade papers... Now any independent thought or argument is squashed and corrections in a bias manner are added. ChatGPT only knows what it's trained on, it doesn't have real-world examples or live-time examples incorporated.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  if challenging your assumptions is something that your worldview can't tolerate I think that means that you need to tinker with your worldview a bit, not that people should stop challenging your assumptions.
- luma 4y ago
  I feel like the non-stop handwringing about ChatGPT centers around people's expectations for machines vs people. We expect machines to have consitent, predictable output. We expect humans to inconsistent and messy. Now we have a machine that is inconsistent and messy (and helpful!) and nobody seems to know what to think. Maybe we stop applying machine notions to this sort of machine? Stop expecting certain, consistant output. Understand that it's sometimes messy. We have these expectations already when working with humans. Humans have biases, if you ask a human a loaded question you can expect a loaded response. If you train a LMM on a dataset that contains those human biases, why should you expect the result to be anything other than similarly biased?
  - jmagoon 4y ago
    That's exactly what the post you're replying to is saying. It's saying that ChatGPT _would_ respond a certain way but has a bunch of schoolmarm filters written by upper middle class liberals that encode a specific value structure highly representative of those people's education and backgrounds, and that using it as a tool for information generation and synthesis will lead to a type of intellectual bottlenecking that is highly coupled with the type of people who work at OpenAI. For all the talk of it replacing Google, sometimes I want a Korean joke (I'm Korean, damn it!) and not to be scolded by the digital personification of a thirty year old HR worker who took a couple of sociology classes (but not history, apparently) and happens to take up the cause of being offended for all people at all times throughout all of history. The take on ethics being a vague "non-offensiveness" while avoiding all of the real, major questions about ethics (like replacing human workers) with these kind of banal answers about "how we need to think seriously about it as a society" tells pretty much everything there is to know about what the ethical process at OpenAI looks like which is basically "let's not be in the news for having a racist chatbot".
qorrect 4y ago
I'm extremely worried. This tech is going to replace a lot of jobs in the next 10-20, including ours ( software ). And if not replace, it's going to cut the available positions drastically. We already have a great divide between those with money and those without and this is a nuclear bomb about to go off. Without any sort of UBI or social safety nets, this is going to be a true disaster.
- moab 4y ago
  > including software highly unlikely. You should be concerned if you are just plumbing between different software stacks, but even that is likely hard to fully automate.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    You underestimate how powerful it already is. Have you tried Copilot or coding with ChatGPT? If this is the very first iteration it won't be long before many developers are fully replaced.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      Aren't they just as likely to go sideways and build exactly the wrong thing? If all else fails a lot of a software dev's day to day will be a Chat wrangler where we still need the skills to determine why it's going wrong, which is a big part of the dev skill stack. Maybe it'll make us more productive, but in my experience, the software building doesn't stop until budget runs out. They'll still need devs.
      - anonyfox 4y ago
        They will go the wrong directions, too, but in 2 seconds instead of 2 week sprints. And the feedback loop to keep them on track can be automated, too … making current devs the next generation of PMs (prompt managers)
    - rm_-rf_slash 4y ago
RGamma 4y ago
Looking at world history it is clear that humanity stumbles from catastrophe to catastrophe and always cleans up after the fact. Until now this has always been possible but one day it won't be. So... Great Filter?
sterlind 4y ago
It's going to hit so unevenly. My partner works with children at a homeless shelter, I'm an algorithm designer. I'm certain my job will be obsolete before my partner's is. It's going to automate away nearly all pure desk jobs. Starting with data entry, like you've seen, but it'll come for junior SDEs and data scientists too. Customer service, then social media/PR, then marketing, as it culls the white collar. Graphic design is already struggling. But janitors will still keep their jobs because robotics is stuck at Roomba stage. It's going to be fascinating. I can't think of a time in the past where white-collar jobs have been made obsolete like this.
- elashri 4y ago
  If it replaces juniors, then it hopefully can replace seniors because you wouldn't find any of them after some time.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    The Junior SE will become the Junior PE. In reality, you still need to plan the architecture, know the concepts, understand the domain, shape the data, and most importantly review and test the generated code.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  This is a still from a movie set in 1959 (Billy Wilder's excellent /The Apartment/): https://onceuponascreen.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/apt.jpg https://onceuponascreen.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/apt.jpg Those people are all doing white collar jobs nobody does today: adding up columns of numbers with desktop adding machines, retyping manuscript memos, responding to customer and vendor mail, summarizing other hand-generated reports into newer more digestable reports (which are in turn the input for yet more manual clerical steps), maintaining paper indexes into warehouse-sized file stores, etc. Each of these people (well, it's a movie, but the real people they represent) had a career, performance reviews, Christmas bonuses, all of it. Now the whole work output of this entire high-rise office building floor (and probably more floors on either side of it) can be replaced with one copy of Excel. I'm confident we'll come up with all kinds of new data-pushing jobs to hand out, assuming we can contrive to continue living in conditions of energy abundance (like we already were in 1959).
christkv 4y ago
I imagine that in a couple of years it will be possible to buy a model and run your own on your own hardware. The space requirements are not out of the world and the cost seems bearable for companies.
- kaibee 4y ago
  > I imagine that in a couple of years it will be possible to buy a model and run your own on your own hardware. The space requirements are not out of the world and the cost seems bearable for companies. Sure, you'll be able to run GPT-3 at home, at a time when ProMaxGPT-5++ is out.
- mmkos 4y ago
  In the same way you can run Google (the search engine) on your own machine. That is, not at all. It's those companies' biggest assets we're talking about.
  - Xeophon 4y ago
    However, you can run Stable Diffusion on your hardware, same as Whisper etc.
mistermann 4y ago
> I'm not saying that those jobs need to be artificially protected or that painful changes should be avoided (basically all tech workers automate human work to some extent) but I'm really concerned about the wealth gap and the extent to which we are pouring gas on that fire. Income inequality looks just like it did before the Great Depression, and now we're handing the power to replace human work over to those who can afford to pay for it. An additional (possible/plausible) wrinkle: all major social media platforms are ~~compromised~~ in a state whereby the common man is not able to have unconstrained discussions about the range of counter-strategies available to them. I just got a one week ban on Reddit for suggesting that violence is within the range of options in a thread discussing the massive increase in homelessness, including among people who have full time job. Nothing specific, nothing against anyone in particular, nothing that technically violates the stated terms regarding violence, and certainly less than the numerous, heavily upvoted comments that explicitly and unequivocally call for violence against specific people that I read on a regular basis. If a revolution is ever to be mounted, I think it might have to be done with paper and walkie talkies. Meanwhile, those on the corporate-government merger side not only can communicate and coordinate freely, they also have access to the communications of their enemies. Oh, what a time to be alive.
OrangeMusic 4y ago
> what could be one of the most powerful companies of our generation. I have the impression that AI tech such as GPT tends to become ubiquitous and that the current advantage that OoenAI has won't last when this become accessible and basically free to everybody.
alfor 4y ago
I agree with you. It’s going to get wild. It will improve very rapidly, from openAI and other. The competition will be incredible this year. I think we are headed for a complete replacement of human work very soon. Those who can use AI will become manager of an army of programers, writers, etc. We will be able to do much more, quicker too. Then we will have more robots to do physical things: self-driving, farming, cooking, cleaning, etc. Limiting factor will be silicon chip production and robotic production.
- hollerith 4y ago
  I worry that the eventual result of AI research will be human extinction intentionally caused by an AI. The human creators of the AI will probably not have intended to extinct the humans: they will probably only have been overconfident in their ability to prevent it from doing undesirable things. The AI's motive for killing the humans will probably be its perceiving (correctly) that the humans are a "danger" to the successful completion of whatever task the AI has been set to perform. In other words, the AI will perceive (correctly) that it can achieve a higher task score if the humans were out of the way. My conclusion from my reading the literature on how to control an AI once it becomes very smart is that the science of how to exert this control is in its infancy and won't be ready for decades, but of course unless AI research is paused worldwide for a few decades, the human race doesn't have decades. By "exert control" I basically mean designing the AI so that it cares about what happens to the humans or about what the humans might want or prefer.
  - alfor 4y ago
    I try to be hopeful about it, but I agree that we don’t know what we are doing and AI will rapidly be way smarter/faster than us. It’s already used to win the war against Russia: Palantir AI spot targets from satellite image for artillerie, they get way better hit ration. AI is already enslaving the whole population to Youtube/Tictok/fb/etc. Hopefully we get better use of it (Copilot is very good, ChatGPT too)
- optymizer 4y ago
  Right. The dream is to automate the boring stuff so we can have more leisure time and pursue creative endeavors, but it's our AIs that are currently playing games, coding and drawing art, while we are still working 9-5, 5 days a week in the corporate hamster wheel. The way this is going, we'll automate all the fun stuff and continue to do our laundry and cooking manually for the foreseeable future.
tatrajim 4y ago
It's a bit sad to realize I am part of the last generation of students who had to put together an essay from books found via a card catalog, take notes, then type up several drafts painfully on a typewriter. Not to mention learning math pre-calculators. But if the electricity ever goes out . . .
anileated 4y ago
> we're handing the power to replace human work over to those who can afford to pay Consider that this power works by consuming copyright-protected work done by unwitting contributors without any opt-in, creating derivative works from it and charging the users without acknowledging the authors. In addition to being illegal, it plain discourages open information sharing—since anything you publish, regardless of license, is consumed and monetized by OpenAI in an automatic fashion. I.e., if people have no reason to read what you write or buy your books when they can just ask an LLM for the same information (which LLM had obtained from your writing), there is no motivation for you to publish. When do we start considering this illegal? Not LLMs, of course, but for-profit operated LLMs created by mass scraping of copyright-protected data. > Google.com adding a single yellow box with an advertisement seemed reasonable, too. Google acts fairly though: it directs the searcher to you. Imagine if at any point Google stopped doing that and just started to show you regurgitated computed contents in response to your search, without ever telling you who authored the info. Everyone would be up in arms on day 2 if they did it; why do we forgive OpenAI and Microsoft when they do essentially that?

vasco 4y ago

> and now we're handing the power to replace human work over to those who can afford to pay for it. All technological advances through the ages have been doing this in one way or another. For some things people paid with their health or effort and for others people pay with money when that was available. I disagree with the "now". This is no different from a car. You seemed to say that in the middle of your comment but then reverted back.

kokanee 4y ago
Fair; I think my poorly-articulated concern is that there seems to be a healthy pace of technological change at which our productivity increases but people have time to adapt and modernize their income streams. If technology replaces human work too quickly, people don't have time to adapt, and the middle class disappears. I don't even see a solution at this point, but keeping the technology free would at least not make the problem worse.

realce 4y ago

> and now we're handing the power to replace human work over to those who can afford to pay for it. That's been capitalist industrialization for the last 200 years. We have been warned thousands upon thousands of times already what's going to happen - that's what's going to happen. The only thing to do is to make this layer of tech accessible to every person on Earth to every degree of depth possible. The terror is in the imbalance of power and access, and the best-case we can get is if we totally erase that imbalance so we can once again compete as "equals"

lostmsu 4y ago

You realize that near human-level AI for $20/month is a bargain in a country where typical mobile phone plan is $25+, and is basically universally affordable?

kokanee 4y ago
The implication of my point was that I expect this to be the first in an endless series of new prices, tiers, and SKUs, each one offering the most power to those who can pay the most.
InCityDreams 4y ago
>typical mobile phone plan is $25+ Jeepers! €5.99 - 70Gb data, unlimited calls and sms. You guys are being gouged to the max...especially with that '+' sign, at the end.
- TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  Yeah, telecom companies in the US and Canada have us by the balls. It's at least $60 with taxes....we just get fucked compared to what Euros pay.
  - anonyfox 4y ago
    Yep, 30€/mo for phone/SMS flatrate + unlimited LTE here. Germany.
nextaccountic 4y ago
Universally affordable? Here's two data points for you, minimum wage in Zambia is 13 USD per month, in India it's 65 USD per month.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  Maybe people in rich countries can learn to subsist on that much. Combined with the feudalism model that I have elsewhere in this thread promulgrated, this will define the living conditions of the 99 percent as we approach the singularity.

electrondood 4y ago

The future is bifurcated into those who invested in AI companies in the 2020s, and those on UBI.

r00fus 4y ago
I strongly doubt the UBI part as it goes against the "religion" of Wall Street and most politicians.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  It’s much easier to stomacj than communism. I believe that UBI will be part of the forthcoming neofeudal system. Rich people will operate private welfare systems that distribute money and housing to poor people. This will be a philanthropically funded version of the current welfare system, but with different tradeoffs made than public welfare systems. Parents pay their children an allowance. The child must obey the orders of the parents or the allowance can be taken away. Most children exist in a such relationship with their parents and everyone involved is satisfied. Under neofeudalism, the poor will be as children to the rich. The rich will operate intentional communities populated by their poor people. From the perspective of a rich person it’s like playing The Sims but with real people. Here is how life under this system will be. You live according to the rules set by the overlord. The rules will be downstream from the personal values of their overlords. Most housing in these communities will be like current housing provided to welfare recipients. It will probably be a spectrum of Tent to Homeless Shelter to Studio Apartment to Small Multi Room Apartment to Small House. Here’s a question to ponder. How much of a welfare state can the average oligarch provide to how many people under the economic conditions of the post-AGI era?
- evo_9 4y ago
  Ok then what? I keep saying what I said to my dad 10 years+ back - once we automate ALL jobs out of existence be that 10 years or 100 years from now, how does society / monetary systems change? What comes next? UBI at best is a stopgap.
  - qorrect 4y ago

citilife 4y ago

I'm less concerned about how many jobs are going to be replaced and more about how they'll be replaced. The AI is not decerning and right in the announcement, OpenAI states it's intention on "correcting assumptions": > challenge incorrect assumptions I imagine some of these assumptions will be bias towards particularly ideologies / things people desire. - https://twitter.com/Basedeyeballs/status/1613269931617050625 https://twitter.com/Basedeyeballs/status/1613269931617050625 - https://medium.com/ninjas-take/chat-gpts-bias-is-very-very-evident-9a83ff98b7f https://medium.com/ninjas-take/chat-gpts-bias-is-very-very-e... I can go on, but imagine you're relying on this system to grade papers... Now any independent thought or argument is squashed and corrections in a bias manner are added. ChatGPT only knows what it's trained on, it doesn't have real-world examples or live-time examples incorporated.

idiotsecant 4y ago
if challenging your assumptions is something that your worldview can't tolerate I think that means that you need to tinker with your worldview a bit, not that people should stop challenging your assumptions.
luma 4y ago
I feel like the non-stop handwringing about ChatGPT centers around people's expectations for machines vs people. We expect machines to have consitent, predictable output. We expect humans to inconsistent and messy. Now we have a machine that is inconsistent and messy (and helpful!) and nobody seems to know what to think. Maybe we stop applying machine notions to this sort of machine? Stop expecting certain, consistant output. Understand that it's sometimes messy. We have these expectations already when working with humans. Humans have biases, if you ask a human a loaded question you can expect a loaded response. If you train a LMM on a dataset that contains those human biases, why should you expect the result to be anything other than similarly biased?
- jmagoon 4y ago
  That's exactly what the post you're replying to is saying. It's saying that ChatGPT _would_ respond a certain way but has a bunch of schoolmarm filters written by upper middle class liberals that encode a specific value structure highly representative of those people's education and backgrounds, and that using it as a tool for information generation and synthesis will lead to a type of intellectual bottlenecking that is highly coupled with the type of people who work at OpenAI. For all the talk of it replacing Google, sometimes I want a Korean joke (I'm Korean, damn it!) and not to be scolded by the digital personification of a thirty year old HR worker who took a couple of sociology classes (but not history, apparently) and happens to take up the cause of being offended for all people at all times throughout all of history. The take on ethics being a vague "non-offensiveness" while avoiding all of the real, major questions about ethics (like replacing human workers) with these kind of banal answers about "how we need to think seriously about it as a society" tells pretty much everything there is to know about what the ethical process at OpenAI looks like which is basically "let's not be in the news for having a racist chatbot".

qorrect 4y ago

I'm extremely worried. This tech is going to replace a lot of jobs in the next 10-20, including ours ( software ). And if not replace, it's going to cut the available positions drastically. We already have a great divide between those with money and those without and this is a nuclear bomb about to go off. Without any sort of UBI or social safety nets, this is going to be a true disaster.

moab 4y ago
> including software highly unlikely. You should be concerned if you are just plumbing between different software stacks, but even that is likely hard to fully automate.
- Kiro 4y ago
  You underestimate how powerful it already is. Have you tried Copilot or coding with ChatGPT? If this is the very first iteration it won't be long before many developers are fully replaced.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Aren't they just as likely to go sideways and build exactly the wrong thing? If all else fails a lot of a software dev's day to day will be a Chat wrangler where we still need the skills to determine why it's going wrong, which is a big part of the dev skill stack. Maybe it'll make us more productive, but in my experience, the software building doesn't stop until budget runs out. They'll still need devs.
    - anonyfox 4y ago
      They will go the wrong directions, too, but in 2 seconds instead of 2 week sprints. And the feedback loop to keep them on track can be automated, too … making current devs the next generation of PMs (prompt managers)
  - rm_-rf_slash 4y ago

RGamma 4y ago

Looking at world history it is clear that humanity stumbles from catastrophe to catastrophe and always cleans up after the fact. Until now this has always been possible but one day it won't be. So... Great Filter?

sterlind 4y ago

It's going to hit so unevenly. My partner works with children at a homeless shelter, I'm an algorithm designer. I'm certain my job will be obsolete before my partner's is. It's going to automate away nearly all pure desk jobs. Starting with data entry, like you've seen, but it'll come for junior SDEs and data scientists too. Customer service, then social media/PR, then marketing, as it culls the white collar. Graphic design is already struggling. But janitors will still keep their jobs because robotics is stuck at Roomba stage. It's going to be fascinating. I can't think of a time in the past where white-collar jobs have been made obsolete like this.

elashri 4y ago
If it replaces juniors, then it hopefully can replace seniors because you wouldn't find any of them after some time.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  The Junior SE will become the Junior PE. In reality, you still need to plan the architecture, know the concepts, understand the domain, shape the data, and most importantly review and test the generated code.
ElevenLathe 4y ago
This is a still from a movie set in 1959 (Billy Wilder's excellent /The Apartment/): https://onceuponascreen.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/apt.jpg https://onceuponascreen.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/apt.jpg Those people are all doing white collar jobs nobody does today: adding up columns of numbers with desktop adding machines, retyping manuscript memos, responding to customer and vendor mail, summarizing other hand-generated reports into newer more digestable reports (which are in turn the input for yet more manual clerical steps), maintaining paper indexes into warehouse-sized file stores, etc. Each of these people (well, it's a movie, but the real people they represent) had a career, performance reviews, Christmas bonuses, all of it. Now the whole work output of this entire high-rise office building floor (and probably more floors on either side of it) can be replaced with one copy of Excel. I'm confident we'll come up with all kinds of new data-pushing jobs to hand out, assuming we can contrive to continue living in conditions of energy abundance (like we already were in 1959).

christkv 4y ago

I imagine that in a couple of years it will be possible to buy a model and run your own on your own hardware. The space requirements are not out of the world and the cost seems bearable for companies.

kaibee 4y ago
> I imagine that in a couple of years it will be possible to buy a model and run your own on your own hardware. The space requirements are not out of the world and the cost seems bearable for companies. Sure, you'll be able to run GPT-3 at home, at a time when ProMaxGPT-5++ is out.
mmkos 4y ago
In the same way you can run Google (the search engine) on your own machine. That is, not at all. It's those companies' biggest assets we're talking about.
- Xeophon 4y ago
  However, you can run Stable Diffusion on your hardware, same as Whisper etc.

mistermann 4y ago

> I'm not saying that those jobs need to be artificially protected or that painful changes should be avoided (basically all tech workers automate human work to some extent) but I'm really concerned about the wealth gap and the extent to which we are pouring gas on that fire. Income inequality looks just like it did before the Great Depression, and now we're handing the power to replace human work over to those who can afford to pay for it. An additional (possible/plausible) wrinkle: all major social media platforms are ~~compromised~~ in a state whereby the common man is not able to have unconstrained discussions about the range of counter-strategies available to them. I just got a one week ban on Reddit for suggesting that violence is within the range of options in a thread discussing the massive increase in homelessness, including among people who have full time job. Nothing specific, nothing against anyone in particular, nothing that technically violates the stated terms regarding violence, and certainly less than the numerous, heavily upvoted comments that explicitly and unequivocally call for violence against specific people that I read on a regular basis. If a revolution is ever to be mounted, I think it might have to be done with paper and walkie talkies. Meanwhile, those on the corporate-government merger side not only can communicate and coordinate freely, they also have access to the communications of their enemies. Oh, what a time to be alive.

OrangeMusic 4y ago

> what could be one of the most powerful companies of our generation. I have the impression that AI tech such as GPT tends to become ubiquitous and that the current advantage that OoenAI has won't last when this become accessible and basically free to everybody.

alfor 4y ago

I agree with you. It’s going to get wild. It will improve very rapidly, from openAI and other. The competition will be incredible this year. I think we are headed for a complete replacement of human work very soon. Those who can use AI will become manager of an army of programers, writers, etc. We will be able to do much more, quicker too. Then we will have more robots to do physical things: self-driving, farming, cooking, cleaning, etc. Limiting factor will be silicon chip production and robotic production.

hollerith 4y ago
I worry that the eventual result of AI research will be human extinction intentionally caused by an AI. The human creators of the AI will probably not have intended to extinct the humans: they will probably only have been overconfident in their ability to prevent it from doing undesirable things. The AI's motive for killing the humans will probably be its perceiving (correctly) that the humans are a "danger" to the successful completion of whatever task the AI has been set to perform. In other words, the AI will perceive (correctly) that it can achieve a higher task score if the humans were out of the way. My conclusion from my reading the literature on how to control an AI once it becomes very smart is that the science of how to exert this control is in its infancy and won't be ready for decades, but of course unless AI research is paused worldwide for a few decades, the human race doesn't have decades. By "exert control" I basically mean designing the AI so that it cares about what happens to the humans or about what the humans might want or prefer.
- alfor 4y ago
  I try to be hopeful about it, but I agree that we don’t know what we are doing and AI will rapidly be way smarter/faster than us. It’s already used to win the war against Russia: Palantir AI spot targets from satellite image for artillerie, they get way better hit ration. AI is already enslaving the whole population to Youtube/Tictok/fb/etc. Hopefully we get better use of it (Copilot is very good, ChatGPT too)
optymizer 4y ago
Right. The dream is to automate the boring stuff so we can have more leisure time and pursue creative endeavors, but it's our AIs that are currently playing games, coding and drawing art, while we are still working 9-5, 5 days a week in the corporate hamster wheel. The way this is going, we'll automate all the fun stuff and continue to do our laundry and cooking manually for the foreseeable future.

tatrajim 4y ago

It's a bit sad to realize I am part of the last generation of students who had to put together an essay from books found via a card catalog, take notes, then type up several drafts painfully on a typewriter. Not to mention learning math pre-calculators. But if the electricity ever goes out . . .

anileated 4y ago

> we're handing the power to replace human work over to those who can afford to pay Consider that this power works by consuming copyright-protected work done by unwitting contributors without any opt-in, creating derivative works from it and charging the users without acknowledging the authors. In addition to being illegal, it plain discourages open information sharing—since anything you publish, regardless of license, is consumed and monetized by OpenAI in an automatic fashion. I.e., if people have no reason to read what you write or buy your books when they can just ask an LLM for the same information (which LLM had obtained from your writing), there is no motivation for you to publish. When do we start considering this illegal? Not LLMs, of course, but for-profit operated LLMs created by mass scraping of copyright-protected data. > Google.com adding a single yellow box with an advertisement seemed reasonable, too. Google acts fairly though: it directs the searcher to you. Imagine if at any point Google stopped doing that and just started to show you regurgitated computed contents in response to your search, without ever telling you who authored the info. Everyone would be up in arms on day 2 if they did it; why do we forgive OpenAI and Microsoft when they do essentially that?