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The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype
- icpmacdo 2y agoIf you know about the author of this post Gary Marcus you can just as easily ascribe accusations of fear, The Denial of Uncertainties, Hype and self-promotion/grifting
- motbus3 2y agoThe manoeuvre to become a for-profit organisation after years without paying taxes tells something deeper about OpenAI true way of operating. Accepting to do deals with people who have no shame for pulling such trick is to accept they will do it again in a much bigger scale.
- __loam 2y agoShould be illegal.
- wslh 2y agoNothing different than other smart business structurations, the focus in Sam, whatever he deserves, seems to be on purpose to not talk about the forest. Sam is an easy target, it does not require too much research.
- yoyohello13 2y agoYeah, it’s unfortunate that suck ruthless pricks have control over such a powerful and important technology.
- refulgentis 2y agoFor what it's worth, try to take it easy on each other in this thread: I cannot think of a worse messenger than Gary Marcus for this, he's directly equivalent to Sam, but on the downside. AI-as-meme has been around long enough now that its being force-interpreted into two camps, "its all a scam, at best it only knows how to reproduce exact training data" and "it's glory shall have us working 0 hours by 2030". This article won't shed light on reality, the in-between. ex. lets walk through the opening: 1) "How do you convince the world your ideas and business might ultimately be worth $7 trillion dollars" -- he's referring to an unsourced rumor, that never made any sense, that Mr. Altman approached Saudis for $7 trillion to build GPUs. Even the nonsensical gossip rag rumor explicitly has nothing to do with OpenAI, part of the "intrigue" was the perfidy of Sam doing it separate from OpenAI. 2) "Sam Altman is on a tour to raise money and raise valuations...at some of top universities in the world", figuratively, maybe, but not actually - they just raised a round in December and this isn't a company that needs to do PR at universities to catch investor attention. 3) "A few days ago at Stanford, Sam promised that AGI will be worth it, no matter how much it costs" -- actual quote: "I don't care if we burn $50 billion a year, we're building AGI and it's going to be worth it" -- that's not a "promise" nor "no matter how much it costs" -- yes, $50B is functionally 'no matter how much', so I'd give Gary charity of interpretation on that too - except as long as we're doing that, why are we over-reading Sam?
- invig 2y agoGPT-4 is absolutely incredible and even if we never get beyond it the world is a much better place with it than without it. It makes total sense to bet on the team that made this being the best placed people in the world to advance it.
- FlamingMoe 2y agoSo the ends justify the means?
- mupuff1234 2y agoHow exactly is the world so much better with GPT 4? I'm not saying it's not cool tech or that the current level of LLMs don't have some impact, but "the world is so much better" is quite a stretch (unless you are a Nvidia shareholder) Not to mention the adverse affect of job loss in industries such as customer service almost exclusively hurting people from poorer countries and lower socio economic levels.
- rabbits77 2y agoYeah, I mean I work inside a Fortune 10 company and after countless man hours across multiple teams we have exactly zero LLM applications in production and the pipeline heading to production is empty. I guess it’s good at generating plausible blog spam and helping children with homework. I’ve used it to bootstrap my own writing. It’s not entirely useless but hardly world changing. I think the biggest commercial use right now is Klarna uses it for basic lvl 1 support? I don’t know the details but it sounds like a good result from RAG over a fairly constrained corpus. So, again, nice but completely unaligned with the massive valuations in that space right now.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fromMars 2y agoFrom what I can tell, all the GPT team did was scale up ideas already there invented elsewhere in previous large language models. I am not sure that is a reason to bet on them making any breakthroughs needed for AGI.
- aredox 2y agoThe current AI wave is a perfect application of Conway's law: the bullshit industry has generated the perfect bullshit machines, pretending to show intelligence when they only parrot what they've heard elsewhere - badly but convincingly.
- dboreham 2y agoYes. But I predict we will eventually realize that's what humans do too.
- graycat 2y ago> that's what humans do too. Maybe so, but is it ALL humans do???? If not, then what about, how to do, the rest???
- apantel 2y agoI mean, that’s too reductive. LLM’s can do all kinds of things, not just generate bullshit.
- aredox 2y agoLLM can _pretend_ to do all kinds of things, and fall flat on their face as soon as they can't fake it.
- XorNot 2y agoI mean that's just describing a solid half of Hacker News comments on any given subject.
- gafferongames 2y agoMore than half
- Jensson 2y agoIf not for the other half HN would be a very different place.
- obiefernandez 2y agoThis post is not going to age well. In fact, when GPT-5 comes out soon it's going to look positively dumb. Also GPT-4 is still leaps and bounds more capable than the competition. Anyone pushing large-language models to their limits today can easily attest to that. Claude 3 Opus comes close, but is significantly more expensive and much harder to do function calling with.
- adamhartenz 2y agoI wish I had a percentage of your childish optimism
- dev1ycan 2y agoHe can go ahead and create openai, the second he creates it however, it should be taken away from him and become public domain or we need to have a change in system, a true AGI should be able to automate every single industry if so then, I think everyone knows what system is the only one left to implement once humans are no longer required to work and every single factory/company produces much higher output
- dmead 2y agoMy comment history about Sam Altman being a snake is aging well.
- xyzzy4747 2y agoApproximately 8 billion people have accomplished less in their lives than Sam Altman... maybe criticize them instead? And so what if he's selling a vision of the future? That's a large part of entrepreneurship.
- talldayo 2y agoAccomplishing more != Benefiting Humanity
- xyzzy4747 2y agoGPT 3.5 and GPT 4 have benefited quite a lot of software engineers at a minimum. I don't see why GPT 5 would be any different.
- thefaux 2y agoI think it also has hurt a lot of software engineers in a number of different ways. AI assisted programming tools are an experiment and the jury is still very much out.
- talldayo 2y agoMy point stands; nobody can mistake this for charity, Sam Altman is selling a product. He is just as conniving as any other businessman when it comes time to act in his own personal interests, which makes him no better than a business as a steward for populist change. I hope OpenAI collapses, so that the market is forced to pick a more responsible leader.
- gafferongames 2y ago[flagged]
- kernel1 2y ago[dead]
- opt1c 2y agoHard to take Gary seriously calling out "outlandish claims" with "no substance" when he does the same thing in the opposite direction. Garbage article for clicks to pay for his lifestyle, now that he's grifted his way into being an "AI Expert" paid to pontificate with no skin in the game.
- wslh 2y agoIs this something different to any startup?
- light_triad 2y agoSam has always been very skilled at dealing with the media: making grand pronouncements, apocalyptic statements, save the word predictions, rag to riches hero stories. Which is fine. It's hard to get anyone to pay attention to anything, and he's got a nice playbook (and product) to get people to pay attention. The more interesting question, I think: is OpenAI actually a good business? Can they generate the resources they need to meet their goals and keep control, without selling to big tech companies that will derail their plans? Do they have enough of a moat and can they benefit from network effect to make their products more valuable over time, without getting copied? They realised they need a lot more capital then they initially thought. Time will tell if Microsoft is able to take over - see what recently happened with Inflection AI: After raising $1.3B, Inflection is eaten alive by its biggest investor, Microsoft https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/19/after-raising-1-3b-inflection-got-eaten-alive-by-its-biggest-investor-microsoft/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/19/after-raising-1-3b-inflect...
- mindwok 2y agoJeez, I'm a Sam Altman skeptic but this is just another level. How about instead of attacking this guy and literally deconstructing a single-sentence tweet to make him out as an evil bogeyman, we make some constructive arguments for these so-called 'more reliable' ways of building AI and why the current approach is 'deeply flawed'?
- mindcrime 2y ago> we make some constructive arguments for these so-called 'more reliable' ways of building AI and why the current approach is 'deeply flawed'? FWIW, Gary Marcus wrote an entire book[1] that, from what I can tell, purports to do that. I have not read the book (yet) so I can't personally attest to how well it meets that goal, but at least be aware that it exists. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Rebooting-AI-Building-Artificial-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B07MYLGQLB https://www.amazon.com/Rebooting-AI-Building-Artificial-Inte...
- artninja1988 2y agoTldr. is that he's vaguely arguing for neuro symbolic ai without proposing anything specific that's implementable let alone building it himself. It's just snarky pointing out flaws and kvetching at people who actually build stuff with him.
- ronsor 2y agoAs someone else who is not an Altman fan and generally skeptical of people pushing weird AGI scenarios: I do not think Gary Marcus has anything interesting to say about current AI, and by that, I mean anything that's not a cheap gotcha, restatement of an obvious fact, or something entirely disingenuous.
- godelski 2y agoIn a similar boat, and I find Marcus weird. Initially I thought he had some valid complaints but the more and more I heard the more he was pushing it into unreasonable territory (maybe he started more rational and went off the deep end ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) This is a problem I have with a lot of people in the AI safety or criticism space. There's a lot to criticize LLMs and AI for. There are a lot of real and concerning things that can cause real world harm, with systems we have __now__. But attacking him or any of the AI doomer/X-risk stuff just muddies the waters and makes those real conversations near impossible to have. Just primes people the wrong way. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I'm not surprised by people that think these two groups are on the same side. Just seems like a lot of attention seeking and we can fight the hype without creating a different kind of hype...
- singhrac 2y agoI haven't taken anything Gary says seriously since like 2017. I'd recommend others do the same, you'll save yourself a lot of time.
- DanielBMarkham 2y agoLong time HN-er I'm flagging this. It's not because I give a hoot about sama but because this kind of crap is posted only to lead to endless discussion. Get to work. Focus. Whatever the hell Sam is can wait for another day.
- jay_kyburz 2y agoI'll also flag, and I've never flagged anything before. Sam A's job is to sell Open AI. It's not not interesting that he talks about why is so great!
- DanielBMarkham 2y agoIn my opinion, might be worthy of a meta rule: If the only result of a post is to discuss the value or general opinion of a particular public person, it is, by definition, not a post we would like in our conversation.
- wg0 2y agoSelling snake oil? Of generative AI? Where most companies have failed to turn profitable just because these models are not as useful and reliable especially in "high value use cases" such as "read this 100 page insurance policy and tell me if my situation X is covered or not and in both cases under what clauses" kind of cases?
- a_wild_dandan 2y ago3rded. There's nothing substantive in this article. The author expresses a seething hatred for OpenAI's CEO by repeatedly lampooning ("where's the evidence!?") brief quotes, without context, of Altman's opinions/predictions. I hope that the author escapes whatever rut made him so overwhelmingly bitter and resentful. I've been there, and it truly stinks. :/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- __loam 2y ago
- jackblemming 2y agoDoes anyone know what Sam’s great super power is besides acquiring power? He may as well be another less successful flavor of Elon Musk.
- jamesrom 2y ago>(again without presenting evidence that historically extremely difficult problems are close to being solved) This tells you everything you need to know about the author. Anyone that has solved difficult problems knows that evidence of being close to a solution is not a thing. In fact, by the time you're close, proving you're close is _harder_ than finishing the solution.
- wg0 2y agoWhy AI and belief in AI leaders has turned into a religion? A devoted cult? Because both sides don't have conclusive arguments?
- nojvek 2y agoGary Marcus has become attention seeking lately. I unfollowed him. Most of his posts were attacks on other people instead of genuine contributions on how we can make AI actually better and safer. Easy to criticize, much harder to offer effective solutions.
- kernel1 2y ago[dead]
- w1nst0nsm1th 2y agoSam is a kind of man who has a pair of 2 in hand and he's boasting he will make all-in if someone raise above his 20$ after 4-7-9 appears in flop.