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Y Combinator Podcast #4: Sam Altman Interviews Elon Musk (2016)
- gkoberger 3y ago[2016]
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoFrom 2016, so not as bad as I'd initially guessed, but still mostly a mutual pat-on-the-back fest, with very little actual substance.
- elil17 3y agoAnother reminder that Elon Musk routinely lies about timelines. If Mars colonization had followed the timeline laid out here, we'd be three years from having lots of people on Mars. On a side note, I loved Altman's interview style - he focused on the interviewee instead of soapboxing, which is unfortunately very rare in interviewers.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoA future projection is not a fact, so it's not a lie when it's wrong.
- FrankoDelMar 3y agoI will develop self driving basketball shoes by tomorrow, I pinky promise.
- grecy 3y agoIf you had a ton of incredibly smart people working on the project, a ton of secured funding and a track record of actually delivering things that are incredibly complicated and ground breaking, then some people would choose to believe you, and they might even invest in you. Of course, there will always be people that don't, and that's perfectly fine too.
- JohnFen 3y agoIf I make a prediction without actually believing that my prediction is likely to happen, then I've lied.
- autonomousErwin 3y agoHow do you know if the person didn't believe the prediction is likely to happen? (benefit of the doubt?)
- JohnFen 3y agoDepends on the situation, I think. Did the person otherwise behave assuming their prediction is true? Have they told anyone else that they don't really believe it? Etc. I wasn't claiming that that Musk (or anyone in particular) was lying in my my comment. I was just pointing out that you can, in fact, lie through making speculative statements.
- autonomousErwin 3y agoAh fair enough, in the context of the thread I made that incorrect assumption that was what you were inferring.
- FireBeyond 3y ago"This year you will be able to drive coast to coast with no interventions". "Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities. Tesla will not say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by end of calendar year."
- signatoremo 3y agoFrom Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity In 1965 I. J. Good predicted an ultraintelligent machine by 2000, Vinge (1993) predicted greater-than-human intelligence between 2005 and 2030, Yudkowsky (1996) predicted a singularity by 2021, and Kurzweil (2005) predicted human-level artificial intelligence by 2030. Moravec (1988) predicted human-level artificial intelligence in supercomputers by 2010 by extrapolating past trend using a chart, while Moravec (1998/1999) predicted human-level artificial intelligence by 2040, and intelligence far beyond human by 2050. In a 2017 interview, Kurzweil predicted human-level intelligence by 2029 and billion fold intelligence and singularity by 2045 Who do you think lied among them?
- elil17 3y agoI do not hold people who make unjustifiably confident predictions in high regard. Yud and Kurzweil are the ones from your quote who I am more familiar with and they are constantly wrong and constantly overconfident. They've spent decades making wrong predictions, and they keep doing it without updating their methods. To me, that's not making mistakes, that's lying.
- signatoremo 3y agoLying means they knew their prediction was wrong, but they did it anyway. Are you suggesting Yud and Kurzwell knew they were wrong? What about “updating model”? If only AI can be correctly predicted by models. Don’t you see the contradiction?
- abenga 3y agoDid any of them sell you kits implementing their predictions for thousands of dollars?
- signatoremo 3y agoWe are talking about Mars colonization prediction. Read first before comment? This is the OP: Another reminder that Elon Musk routinely lies about timelines. If Mars colonization had followed the timeline laid out here, we'd be three years from having lots of people on Mars.
- autonomousErwin 3y agoI mean the guy said "the rockets will land themselves in 5 years". He might be off a couple of years but he delivered. Same with electric cars. Stands to reason he'll deliver on the Mars promise (though I think someone will beat him to the self-driving punch).
- elil17 3y agoYou can cherry-pick the promises that have come true. But for every one of those there's a cyber truck, a "self driving mode," etc.
- grecy 3y ago> But for every one of those there's a cyber truck, a "self driving mode," etc. Cybertruck is entering mass production soon. Yes, it's late, but it's coming. Same for self driving. It is clearly getting better all the time, and it's coming. Again, he is often late delivering on very difficult and ambitious things. Have a look how the competition are doing with re-usable rockets, mass producing electric vehicles, self driving, etc. None of these things are easy, and they take time.
- autonomousErwin 3y agoThat's true I'm cherry-picking but you kind of have to when people are making impossible claims. Most of them won't come true (at least, yet) but as long as some of them come true I think that's a net positive.
- elil17 3y agoThat's still lying, even if you think it is net positive.
- autonomousErwin 3y agoTrue. 1. You don't have to believe him. 2. We still get some impossible results in the end which leads to a more interesting future.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0xDEF 3y agoTIL Sam Altman became the CEO of OpenAI because he is good at verbally patting billionaires on the back.
- sleepybrett 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gkoberger 3y agoNo, Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI because he built it. He's incredibly smart and driven, the only wealthy person I've worked with who I think is, at his core, a good person who cares. I don't know the backstory, but they've gone their separate ways since this podcast. Musk left OpenAI after a failed takeover attempt: > Musk told fellow cofounder Sam Altman in early 2018 that he thought OpenAI, which has since created ChatGPT, was lagging behind Google, people familiar with the matter told Semafor. Musk offered to take charge of OpenAI to lead it himself, but when Altman and other co-founders said no, Musk stepped down from the board and backed out of a huge donation, per Semafor. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-tried-lead-openai-left-after-founders-objected-2023-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-tried-l...
- bookmark1231 3y agoHave you considered that maybe his skill is making other people, like you, believe he is a good person who cares? He is, after all, most known for his ability to influence others (particularly billionaires) into doing what he wants. And the whole doomsday prepper thing is pretty weird.
- gkoberger 3y agoMaybe! But I wasn’t rich or important when I worked with Sam, and he had no reason to charm me. He barely knew me, and everything I saw about him was genuine and kind — not to me, but how he interacted with the world. I’ve known many “important” or “rich” people over the years, and there’s always something in their eye that betrays what they want you to think of them. Sam is likely the only person of that sort I’d ever speak fondly of — he’s a genuinely good person who cares about humans more than the abstract concept of humanity.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]