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Sam Altman 'A Little Bit Scared' of ChatGPT, Will Eliminate 'Many' Jobs
- decremental 4y ago"What would you say is your biggest flaw?" "Honestly, I'm too hard-working."
- Jensson 4y agoStartup founder 'A Little Bit Scared' his product will revolutionize the world, argues people must buy it now to ensure their jobs are safe! Sorry, but this is the last person to listen to about these things.
- handwarmers 4y agoThere is an art to knowing when your cynicism is justified, and when you should take a pause... Yeah a lot of people claimed their SPA would change the world, but this one is pretty interesting, so no need to go all "get off my lawn" on it With just a few minutes of experimentation, it becomes really trivial to see how ChatGPT can accelerate some types of jobs sufficiently to justify reduction of staff. It will likely create other jobs too, which is also mentioned in the article.
- Jensson 4y agoBut Sam Altman saying those things doesn't mean anything. Telling the world that their AI is too powerful and needs to be closed to be safe is a marketing trick, this "I'm scared about how good our product is!" is also just a marketing trick. He cried wolf about GPT-2, cried wolf about GPT-3, and now about GPT-4. Maybe it is great and the wolf is here now, but people stop listen to this sort of person quick.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI would note that it seems he said “AI” consistently but the journalist wrote “Chatgpt” in the headline. I would have agreed with you two years ago. But knowing what we’ve done with AI before this (grand master level chess, cars that can self drive, etc) building an ensemble from those and what these LLM are able to do, I think if you don’t see 10 years from now being on its head from today, I think you might have lost the capacity to dream. I don’t think LLM alone are sufficient. But pointing to what they produced in beta and saying “time is static the universe is done AI is a crock” seems myopic.
- polygamous_bat 4y agoPerhaps large language models will change the world, but it will be the open variant that people can run on their own machines, not some corporate API.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThat’s why I built a GPU data center in the bomb shelter under my house. I’m convinced it’ll start a fad.
- dogma1138 4y agoIn what world would that ever be possible? Some of these models require compute power equal to that of some nation states, regardless it the technology will be open or not and it won’t be - the resources needed would make it impossible for all but the largest of the corporate entities to run.
- kthejoker2 4y agoLol "nation states"? You can definitely prune these models and fine tune them to fit on your smartphone today. The compute required is more like high 6/low 7 figure levels of compute, a rounding error for every Fortune 1000 company. In fact, if we're so convinced this particular LLM is so great, we should just be chopping it up into fit for purpose agents.
- owenmarshall 4y agoOne of the consistent refrains that I see on these threads is that AI is going to replace someone else’s job. It’s almost never going to replace our jobs, because when we test it against ours we can quickly see gaps and flaws, or worse, its overconfident yet incorrect answers. But when we apply a surface level understanding of someone else’s job to a surface level investigation of AI’s ability to do that job, we keep coming back to the same answer: it’s here! It’s ready! Meanwhile, if you go ask those other people, they’ll show you a ton of very good reasons why AI isn’t ready to replace their jobs, things I never knew they had to do or understand. And I bet a few of them will tell me that they heard it can write code.
- edanm 4y agoI don't know what you're talking about, it's a fairly common refrain here that AI will replace development jobs. There are some upvoted articles on musings about whether it's worth getting into the field right now.
- owenmarshall 4y agoA perfect illustration of my point. In the Carmack thread[0] someone with a surface level of what it means to work in software because they’re just entering the industry worries that ChatGPT will eliminate their entire career. Then a thread of experts goes into the many things they do today that ChatGPT can’t, and why those fears are overblown. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35216894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35216894
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI’m 100% certain AI will replace my job. My daughter dreams of training dogs to do karate for a living, she I think will be employed for life.
- flappyeagle 4y agoSam has always been pretty open about this. Everyone is so quick to argue that no machine could possible do their job. It’s cope. I’m close enough to top management to see how these decisions get made and I have seen 3 instances in the last month of a potential job opening not getting opened because “we could do most of that with chatGPT/mid journey today, and probably do all of it once gpt5 comes out” The jobs: illustrator, copywriter, operations analyst. All junior roles, all potential career starters that are not going to happen.
- Jensson 4y agoEvery startup founder argues that their product will revolutionize the world. Nocode startup founders says all the time that soon programmers will be gone etc. One of those will be right, but you shouldn't listen to founders opinions about these, as they will be biased to believe in their own success.
- krab 4y agoWouldn't they have a faster start, using new tools than the previous generation?
- danpalmer 4y agoAny time things like this have happened in the past, a huge number of jobs have been created, and the impact on existing jobs has been less than expected. Illustrators – midjourney isn't going to replace great illustrators, it's going to allow more companies to have more illustrations, replace some use of stock illustrations, and aid productivity for illustrators in helping them churn out ideas that can be turned into more specific/tailored illustrations. Copywriters – GPT/etc aren't going to replace copy editors, they're going to allow many more people who wouldn't otherwise hire a copy editor to have better copy, and to aid productivity for copywriters, allowing them to move into more of a supervising role. Operations analyst – I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but if it's business intelligence, there's nothing anywhere near ready yet. These tools don't provide insight, they provide on-demand content that a human can curate for real insight. In general, these tools will act as productivity aids for the people already in these professions, allowing the jobs to evolve over time. That's not just at the top end but also at the junior end. More people will be able to make use of generated content for free, but they'll all find that it takes time to do so effectively, and find that eventually roles need to be hired for. If you're currently deciding not to hire these roles because they can be done with GPT/etc already, then I think you're either not quite serious about hiring for these roles, don't understand what goes into them, or have needs that are only marginally above those fulfilled by stock photos/illustrations etc.
- afpx 4y agoThere's an infinite amount of work to do.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoWhen all our needs are met, and all the machinery to meet those needs tend to themselves, what work remains?
- jstanley 4y agoIf all your needs are met, what is there to be upset about? If you're upset about something, obviously all your needs aren't being met yet.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoWho said anything about anyone being upset? I asked for clarification about a statement about work being infinite.
- ben_w 4y agoIain M Banks wrote a series if books in a universe where super-advanced friendly sentient AI could do all the things. That Culture was a complete utopia from the author's perspective — all their serious drama had to come from their interactions with various outsiders. Yet there are people here in the real world who find it horrifying. Those fictional AI would out-class humans by about the degree to which a human would outclass a blade of grass; even if you tone that down a bit and we're just pets rather than plants in comparison, I can see how people may feel that this detracts from their sense of self-worth.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoEliminating jobs should be the point of progress. When we get worried that we're going to ruin lives and economy by eliminating jobs with technology what we're really saying is that our system is too fucked to deal with progress. Of course, we already knew that. See: bullshit jobs, artificial scarcity, etc. But we'll keep on regardless, no matter how many poors have to suffer.
- jackstraw14 4y ago> But we'll keep on regardless, no matter how many poors have to suffer. this you or ChatGPT?
- romankolpak 4y ago"too fucked" sounds a bit too extreme, but I agree. it's an interesting problem that we need to learn how to solve - what do you do with people whose jobs have been automated? capitalists won't do shit, so governments need to step in and make sure the portion of the profit from automation progress gets invested into the professional transition assistance programs to those who need it.
- seydor 4y agoMaybe, but it won't be chatGPT First they were 'scared' that GPT2 would destroy the world Now they will take you out of jobs. The rest of you can become GPT engineers, but we won't tell you how to make models NotopenAI is as much in the business of FUD as they are into AI
- aka878 4y agoDefinitely, but it may not be chatGPT
- walkhour 4y agoWhether it will be true or not, good propaganda attempt, Sam.
- kingstoned 4y agoGood article to read: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/will-ais-take-all-our-jobs-and-end-human-history-or-not-well-its-complicated/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/will-ais-take-al...
- codethief 4y agoCould you summarize what exactly makes this blog post worth reading compared to all the other articles about ChatGPT out there? Wolfram has a tendency to follow the principle "I would have written less, had I had more time" but he didn't, so he didn't.
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- danpalmer 4y agoChatGPT is a content generator. It needs to be directed, and the content doesn't inherently do anything, it needs to be actioned, and the content is inherently hit and miss and needs to be filtered. It's like using stock photos. I, as a non-photographer, can get access to a ton of content that's of varying quality but all passing some quality bar. The content has none of my context so I need to search/filter/curate. While I, as a non-expert, can do this, at some quality bar that's not going to be good enough and an "art director" or photography expert will be able to do a better job at using stock photos because they understand how to create cohesive selections that fit a brand or brief. This opens the market dramatically for non-experts, and gives the experts a huge productivity boost by automating leg-work and letting them focus on where they can add value with expertise, taste, context, and so on.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoImproving productivity invariably means less jobs needed to produce the same amount of output. If we can expand the output being consumed, then great, but how many sitcom plots do we really need?
- danpalmer 4y agoConsider an illustrator. The standard working model may be to receive a brief, present 5 sketches to the client, they pick 1, and you turn it into a final draft, touch-up, then done. Midjourney might automate those sketches, either for the client or the illustrator, but it's unlikely to automate the final draft as that will contain significant amounts of context that these models are not able to hold, and it's unlikely to automate the touch-up process as this requires the same context plus great care in the adjustments being done, again something these models struggle with. If this happens, now an illustrator can produce more illustrations in the same amount of time, prices come down, demand goes up. Sure that's a simplified view, but are we saturated on these services? I doubt it in most cases.
- dogma1138 4y agoThat’s because you are looking at the tools right now. These tools would definitely eliminate some links in the chain and would reduce the need for some others. How many companies still employ people today to do data entry?
- tanepiper 4y agoIf that's what he thinks based on the current level of technology, it shows you how much he thinks of the level of skill of the workers.
- sebzim4500 4y agoPresumably he thinks that the technology will improve. Also even if it was only better than the stupidest 20% of workers, that's still a massive amount of unemployment.
- colinmorelli 4y agoPlacing any judgment aside about an individual person’s skill level, there are tens of thousands of tier 1 customer support jobs that likely can already be entirely automated with ChatGPT. This is not a statement about those individual people’s skill levels, but simply a reality of the constraints applied to them by their organization (largely following prewritten scripts)
- heavyset_go 4y agoThis is just the next generation of AI hype, and a lot of people are going to latch on to it in the same way that hordes of people latched on to Bitcoin.
- presentation 4y agoThis is the first time I’ve felt that AI hasn’t sucked and has many obvious uses that Bitcoin never had. I’m usually a bit of a Luddite, but this time I’m actually using it actively daily. I’m inclined to think otherwise.
- jstx1 4y agoThis isn't an argument though, all you're saying is that a different thing was pointless hype at a different time.
- mewpmewp2 4y agoHow much have you used ChatGPT yourself? I'm already seeing my productivity be 5x.
- Ozzie_osman 4y agoExcept that, for bitcoin, even years after it was developed, it was hard to find any useful applications. For genAI, we're barely into its development and there are already tons of applications.
- fallingfrog 4y agoWe should turn it off while we still can. It will most likely eliminate almost all programming jobs, most creative professions, etc. I mean, people keep saying, “oh, but it can’t do X yet.” But it will, and it won’t take long. How long do you think the world will last once anything you could do or achieve can be done better by a machine instantly? What is your purpose then? Why go to school? Why try at all? The great mass of people will descend into hopeless depression once they realize that there is literally no point to learn anything. Nothing that makes you special. Your talents, whatever they are, will become meaningless. No point in learning to play the piano, or draw, or code.
- ben_w 4y ago> Your talents, whatever they are, will become meaningless. No point in learning to play the piano, or draw, or code. That is assuming this is purely about economics. It may well not be; for example, if art is humanity’s version of peacock tails, then the effort is the point, and if so, then even an uploaded brain of some famous and well-regarded artist will be dismissed as “not capable of real art”[0]. Hobbies for social experience can certainly still be a thing, as evidenced by the fact that art clubs and music clubs survived the invention of recorded music and photography respectively. Even code has forms of this: challenge devs to write games in 1k, or on old hardware, or code golf. [0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-copyright/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...
- ozim 4y agoI don't like this analysis because it equates purpose with having "a job". Bunch of artist or creative people don't do it "because of the job", they do it for fun and reason that they like drawing, writing, programming etc. There is a lot of artist and writers who live in poverty all their lives. They could stick to their manual labor that provides food and get drunk, watch TV series in their free time but many people still go above and beyond that anyway. There are of course many people who already have "why go to school, why even bother" attitude and somehow they are still alive waking up in the morning and going to work or whatever else they are busy with.
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- discreteevent 4y ago"in terms of impact on our lives and improving our lives and upside, this will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed," There is a possibility that what he said here will turn out to be true. But compared to writing or electric power etc? Surely we will have to wait some time before we can say that. I don't think he is a fundamentally dishonest person so it's unsettling to see him say this with such confidence because it shows that he has lost some grounding in reality.
- jprete 4y agoThe first thing I noticed was actually the picture caption: "Sam Altman believes it is 'critical' to regulate AI technology.". Not that I think he's wrong, but he's going through the market-dominance playbook pretty fast if he already wants to regulate his competitors out of existence.
- lukewrites 4y agoSo this is his hope-ChatGPT “raises efficiency” (my scare quotes; not a direct quotation) such that the ownership class doesn’t have to pay a bunch of salaries and can make more profit. But don’t worry, this will just unleash innovation and create more jobs! Unionize now, friends. The owners and the workers don’t have aligned values. I don’t think this will happen on any sort of scale yet. It seems much more likely that big tech uses it to make social media more sticky, autogenerating content (of all sorts) tailored just for you.
- thordenmark 4y agoIt is the same old story of incremental progress in increasing a worker's productivity. Like how much more work a farmer can do with a tractor than with an oxen and plow.
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- fatneckbeard 4y agoas someone said on here the other day, this is a bit over blown. chatgpt only knows about the 'open source' world, it only understands one generic human as an audience, and it is absolutely atrocious with details. it doesn't know how to deal with a bunch of obscure proprietary niche-domain one-off systems, lots of different human personalities and their communication styles, and it's attention to detail is pretty atrocious. so it would be absolutely terrible as an employee in most workplaces.
- alienicecream 4y agoThe jobs will change, from creating solutions, to verifying solutions and troubleshooting problems, and finding ways to ask it that will generate more appropriate solutions. It's Google++ but now you can't even trust the top post from stack overflow.
- throwawaysalome 4y agoBullies: this is what happens when you don't do you job.