3 ms·

For context in WWII, industrial defense production reached 10% of GDP in the US. World GDP is now $100T. If the $5T is spent over 5 years, that's 1% of GDP —

For context in WWII, industrial defense production reached 10% of GDP in the US. World GDP is now $100T. If the $5T is spent over 5 years, that's 1% of GDP — incredibly high, but within the realm of possibility if we become singularly focused on building out AI.

__loam 3y ago
Maybe I'm crazy but GPT just does not seem compelling enough to command these kinds of insane moonshot capital expenditures. We're essentially betting on a breakthrough that might never come here.
- p1esk 3y ago
  We will find out soon enough - GPT5 should be out later this year.
  - __loam 3y ago
    I'm anticipating a disappointing run in with diminishing returns unless the approach changes radically.
- aik 3y ago
  1. We know they have more big breakthroughs already that have not been released. 2. We know the current tech can keep scaling. They have not hit a limit with the current approach yet. Given gpt-4 is already ridiculously useful and we’ve barely scratched the surface, it makes complete sense to me. More capacity + faster gpt responses unlocks massive amounts of more potential/use cases.
  - azinman2 3y ago
    Makes sense to commit 1% of the world’s total money? I don’t think so… No one is even talking about these kind of figures being used for climate change, which is a far more pressing problem.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
      Climate change disaster timelines are longer than AI timelines. Geometric growth doesn't feel like much until you slam into the wall.
      - defrost 3y ago
        > Climate change disaster timelines are longer than AI timelines. Sure ... and we've already let Koch and Co. piss 50 years of lead time up against the wall since the first global recognition of the problem in the 1970s. Now that it's starting to bite and properly ramp up there's far too many that are stretched out lizard like on Titanic deckchairs asking AI Jeeves for another drink.
        ETH_start 3y ago
        The biggest contributor to climate change was widespread protests against nuclear power, which arrested what had been rapid growth in a safe non-CO2-emitting base load power source that could have replaced hydrocarbon generators within two generations. The Green parties in Europe successfully stopped the expansion of every nuclear energy program in the EU. Greenpeace engaged in a number of terrorist attacks to sabotage nuclear energy.
        defrost 3y ago
        Seems unlikely given the expansion in standard of living in developing countries, the use of fossil fuels in ICE's .. and elsewhere outside of power generation in the EU. It's a factor, sure, but "biggest" .. not so much.
        ETH_start 3y ago
        The rate of growth in nuclear power was putting on a trajectory to replace all or nearly all hydrocarbon based base load power sources. And it was political opposition to nuclear power that put a stop to that. No other factor comes close as a contributor to climate change in my estimation. The transition from ICEs to electric battery cars is largely orthogonal to base load power, but even electric battery cars depend on a base load source, so the extent that CO2 emitting energy sources have been replaced by non-emitting ones is highly dependent on the base load sources.
  - __loam 3y ago
    I think you are overestimating its usefulness and underestimating how much the surface has been metaphorically breached. Where's the killer app? The only one I can think of off hand is co-pilot and the reception I've seen is that it's pretty mid. Most of the proposed applications require human checking to get right which is a huge limitation to the adoption of these systems unless you accept a 3-5% error rate which is terrible. I've not met anyone who is interested in something like a book written using this thing and the main use case I've seen basically amounts to denial of service attacks with believable bullshit. Frankly the only people I've seen who are super excited about this stuff are people in the field or the uninformed.
    - aik 3y ago
      Not sure if you’re technical but the only thing I have to say to this is: Tinker with it yourself. Try different experiments. I’ve built a ton of tools at this point with AI, some have not been very useful in the end and others have made me significantly more productive and effective. In terms of error rate: gpt 3.5 had a high hallucination rate that made use cases fairly narrow. It then got faster which opened up some more use cases. Then gpt 4 came out that had a significantly smaller hallucination rate which opened up a gigantic number of additional possibilities. And had a larger context window and output size that made it significantly more useful. Then it got faster with an even larger context size… each of these iterative improvements just continue to add more and more possibility in a gigantic range of cases that have literally never existed before.
somenameforme 3y ago
I suspect you'd find relatively little of the world interested in such. There's no guarantee of anything. Sigmoid curves [1] are a thing that we've seen in just about every single neural network based system. And there seems to be a reasonable argument that that's what we're once again seeing here. But even more importantly, it seems like the ultimate goal could be reasonably expected to drive large scale unemployment, with no clear replacement for such. Necessity is the mother of invention, but in this sort of scenario you're expecting kings of industry and politicians to put aside their greed and self interest for the sake of social good. The odds there are going to be overwhelmingly in favor of dystopia, which we substantially collectively sacrificed to achieve? [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
- maximilianroos 3y ago
  That's a very different discussion! If any discussion of AI build-out collapses to "Will AI lead to dystopia???", then we're not going to make much progress in discussing AI build-out.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  Please, think of the infinite upside \s
johnnyanmac 3y ago
> if we become singularly focused on building out AI. I somehow doubt you can convince even half the liberal voterbase that that would be a good idea. let alone any of the conservative base. But I guess the US did manage to do that with the space race, so maybe the key is another cold war.
- tivert 3y ago
  > I somehow doubt you can convince even half the liberal voterbase that that would be a good idea. let alone any of the conservative base. Don't conservatives like capitalism and religion? Just get some polyamorous nerd to give a TED talk about how they're building God for real to serve the Titans of Industry. That should get the conservative voter base in line, right?
az226 3y ago
Also think how much GDP AGI and ASI can create.
- svaha1728 3y ago
  for the low price of 7 trillion dollars you too can order from Grubhub and have it delivered to your door without the need for a single human! /s
dougb5 3y ago
How did Sam Altman manage to Tom-Sawyer this into a "we" project? He's an individual seeking to raise money for a private sector venture in order to bend the world to his will, which seems to be to create his own version of utopia. I don't think his world-bending has the public buy-in that WWII spending had -- he can't even articulate clearly what that utopia looks like or why he's so, so, so confident that we'll get there with this path.

__loam 3y ago

Maybe I'm crazy but GPT just does not seem compelling enough to command these kinds of insane moonshot capital expenditures. We're essentially betting on a breakthrough that might never come here.

p1esk 3y ago
We will find out soon enough - GPT5 should be out later this year.
- __loam 3y ago
  I'm anticipating a disappointing run in with diminishing returns unless the approach changes radically.
aik 3y ago
1. We know they have more big breakthroughs already that have not been released. 2. We know the current tech can keep scaling. They have not hit a limit with the current approach yet. Given gpt-4 is already ridiculously useful and we’ve barely scratched the surface, it makes complete sense to me. More capacity + faster gpt responses unlocks massive amounts of more potential/use cases.
- azinman2 3y ago
  Makes sense to commit 1% of the world’s total money? I don’t think so… No one is even talking about these kind of figures being used for climate change, which is a far more pressing problem.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
    Climate change disaster timelines are longer than AI timelines. Geometric growth doesn't feel like much until you slam into the wall.
    - defrost 3y ago
      > Climate change disaster timelines are longer than AI timelines. Sure ... and we've already let Koch and Co. piss 50 years of lead time up against the wall since the first global recognition of the problem in the 1970s. Now that it's starting to bite and properly ramp up there's far too many that are stretched out lizard like on Titanic deckchairs asking AI Jeeves for another drink.
      - ETH_start 3y ago
        The biggest contributor to climate change was widespread protests against nuclear power, which arrested what had been rapid growth in a safe non-CO2-emitting base load power source that could have replaced hydrocarbon generators within two generations. The Green parties in Europe successfully stopped the expansion of every nuclear energy program in the EU. Greenpeace engaged in a number of terrorist attacks to sabotage nuclear energy.
        defrost 3y ago
        Seems unlikely given the expansion in standard of living in developing countries, the use of fossil fuels in ICE's .. and elsewhere outside of power generation in the EU. It's a factor, sure, but "biggest" .. not so much.
        ETH_start 3y ago
        The rate of growth in nuclear power was putting on a trajectory to replace all or nearly all hydrocarbon based base load power sources. And it was political opposition to nuclear power that put a stop to that. No other factor comes close as a contributor to climate change in my estimation. The transition from ICEs to electric battery cars is largely orthogonal to base load power, but even electric battery cars depend on a base load source, so the extent that CO2 emitting energy sources have been replaced by non-emitting ones is highly dependent on the base load sources.
- __loam 3y ago
  I think you are overestimating its usefulness and underestimating how much the surface has been metaphorically breached. Where's the killer app? The only one I can think of off hand is co-pilot and the reception I've seen is that it's pretty mid. Most of the proposed applications require human checking to get right which is a huge limitation to the adoption of these systems unless you accept a 3-5% error rate which is terrible. I've not met anyone who is interested in something like a book written using this thing and the main use case I've seen basically amounts to denial of service attacks with believable bullshit. Frankly the only people I've seen who are super excited about this stuff are people in the field or the uninformed.
  - aik 3y ago
    Not sure if you’re technical but the only thing I have to say to this is: Tinker with it yourself. Try different experiments. I’ve built a ton of tools at this point with AI, some have not been very useful in the end and others have made me significantly more productive and effective. In terms of error rate: gpt 3.5 had a high hallucination rate that made use cases fairly narrow. It then got faster which opened up some more use cases. Then gpt 4 came out that had a significantly smaller hallucination rate which opened up a gigantic number of additional possibilities. And had a larger context window and output size that made it significantly more useful. Then it got faster with an even larger context size… each of these iterative improvements just continue to add more and more possibility in a gigantic range of cases that have literally never existed before.

somenameforme 3y ago

I suspect you'd find relatively little of the world interested in such. There's no guarantee of anything. Sigmoid curves [1] are a thing that we've seen in just about every single neural network based system. And there seems to be a reasonable argument that that's what we're once again seeing here. But even more importantly, it seems like the ultimate goal could be reasonably expected to drive large scale unemployment, with no clear replacement for such. Necessity is the mother of invention, but in this sort of scenario you're expecting kings of industry and politicians to put aside their greed and self interest for the sake of social good. The odds there are going to be overwhelmingly in favor of dystopia, which we substantially collectively sacrificed to achieve? [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function

maximilianroos 3y ago
That's a very different discussion! If any discussion of AI build-out collapses to "Will AI lead to dystopia???", then we're not going to make much progress in discussing AI build-out.
bamboozled 3y ago
Please, think of the infinite upside \s

johnnyanmac 3y ago

> if we become singularly focused on building out AI. I somehow doubt you can convince even half the liberal voterbase that that would be a good idea. let alone any of the conservative base. But I guess the US did manage to do that with the space race, so maybe the key is another cold war.

tivert 3y ago
> I somehow doubt you can convince even half the liberal voterbase that that would be a good idea. let alone any of the conservative base. Don't conservatives like capitalism and religion? Just get some polyamorous nerd to give a TED talk about how they're building God for real to serve the Titans of Industry. That should get the conservative voter base in line, right?

az226 3y ago

Also think how much GDP AGI and ASI can create.

svaha1728 3y ago
for the low price of 7 trillion dollars you too can order from Grubhub and have it delivered to your door without the need for a single human! /s

dougb5 3y ago

How did Sam Altman manage to Tom-Sawyer this into a "we" project? He's an individual seeking to raise money for a private sector venture in order to bend the world to his will, which seems to be to create his own version of utopia. I don't think his world-bending has the public buy-in that WWII spending had -- he can't even articulate clearly what that utopia looks like or why he's so, so, so confident that we'll get there with this path.