48 ms·

The Intelligence Age

• iteratethis 2y ago
  I'm skeptical about the prosperity claim. If the entire planet has access to affordable/cheap and very capable AI, this still leaves two problems. Since the access itself is not differentiating, it's going to be the most educated benefiting the most. Already today few people can use the o1 model because they can't dream up a PhD level question nor understand its answers. More importantly, access to AI does not mean access to assets. Me, a total nobody, can use AI to design the world's best car. But that does nothing because I don't have money or land. Anybody can query AI for that car but only asset owners can actually implement the idea and extract value. Those asset owners could use AI to bring widespread prosperity to all of mankind, but we know they won't. We don't need more material prosperity, we need social prosperity. Family formation, the restoration of community life, economic security. Not "more stuff".
• asdf6969 2y ago
  > Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago and also to me today, but none of that matters as long as I still get paid
• aryehof 2y ago
  I really believe that humans will evolve to be less intelligent and intellectually capable as “AI” becomes more capable and omnipresent. That it will lead to prosperity, happiness and a better world (for everyone) is simply a fallacy foisted upon the masses by promoters salivating at potential riches. A watershed moment for humanity.
• yard2010 2y ago
  Remember 100 hundred years ago, someone's job was to read the newspaper in factories? Only to be replaced by the transistor radio.. The same magic that can make stuff out of thin air, might as well make them disappear. Anyway, I'm hooked. What a time to be alive!
• xjm 2y ago
  > fixing the climate I would be happy to be convinced that climate is an intelligence problem. One could argue it could be solved with "abundant energy" but if this abundant energy comes from some new intelligence then we are probably several decades away from having it running commercially. I would also be happy to be convinced that we do have this kind of time to act for climate.
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• aster0id 2y ago
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• Carlseymanh 2y ago
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• ljlolel 2y ago
  “Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.” Loving the techno optimism.
  • lispisok 2y ago
    I got a kick out of that. Spoken like a man who doesnt have to concern himself with the price of housing or any other necessity as we watch this strange short lived phenomena called the middle class disappear and we're back to the haves and have-nots.
  • imjonse 2y ago
    It's a lot more comforting to work on AI (or any tech for that matter) if you believe or force yourself to believe it will be used for good. OpenAI's for-profit and gatekeeping approach is unlikely to be the path to the prosperity Sam Altman envisions.
• 23B1 2y ago
  AI is going to revolutionize humanity! Sam Altman is the last guy we want helping lead that revolution.
• ljlolel 2y ago
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• talldayo 2y ago
  > Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. Paging Dr. Bullshit, we've got an optimist on the line who'd like to have a word with you.
• kazcaptain 2y ago
  The most interesting bit I find is the time period mentioned until super-intelligence: “thousands of days (!)” aka 6-9 years or more? With the current hype wave it feels like we’re almost there but this piece makes me think we’re not.
  • CptFribble 2y ago
    I think that's part of the carefully-crafted hype messaging. Close enough to get excited about, but far enough away that by the time we get there people will have forgotten we were supposed to have it by then.
  • Etheryte 2y ago
    If anything, I would say that that's a very optimistic take. The hype train is strong, but that's largely what it is once you look at the details. What we have right now is impressive, but no one has shown anything close to a possible path from where we are right now to AGI. The things we can do right now are fancy, but they're fancy in the same way good autocomplete is fancy. To me, it feels like a local maxima, but it's very unclear whether the specific set of approaches we're exploring right now can lead to something more.
    • ctoth 2y ago
      > What we have right now is impressive, but no one has shown anything close to a possible path from where we are right now to AGI[0]. [0]: From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/ https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/
      • Etheryte 2y ago
        I'm not convinced, and neither is Sam Altman himself [0]. Also, if that projection holds, and that's a big if, the purported breakthrough would cost 10^6 times as much as GPT-4 took to train. That's over 100 million dollars [1] times a million. That adds up to over 100 trillion dollars, in the ballpark of four times the GDP of the whole of United States. [0] https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/ https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4#Training https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4#Training
• lpasselin 2y ago
  Custom and _competent_ AI tutors will be a game changer for education.
• hnthrow562 2y ago
  This is painting a picture of a utopia. I'm not sure about that. The entire AI trend - long term is based on the idea that AI will profoundly change the world. This has sparked a global race for developing better AI systems and the more dangerous winner takes all outcome. It is therefore not surprising that billions of dollars are being spent to develop more powerful AI systems as well as to restructure operations around them. All the existing systems we have must fundamentally change for the better if we want a good future. The positive aspects / utopia promises have much more visibility to the public than the negative effects / dystopian world. ARE WE TO pretend that Human greed, selfishness, desires to dominate and control, animalistic behaviour, use of technologies for war and other destructive purposes don't exist? We are living in times of war and chaos and uncertainty. Increasingly advanced technology is being used on the battlefield in more covert and strategic ways. History is repeating itself again in many ways. Have we failed to learn? The consequences might be harsher with more advanced technology. I have read and thought deeply about several anti AI doomer takes from prominent researchers and scientists but I haven't seen any which aren't based on assumptions or foolproof. For something that profoundly changes the world, it's bad to base your hopes on assumptions. I see people dunking on llms which might not be AI's final form. Then they extrapolate that and say there is nothing to worry about. It is a matter of when not if. The thought of being useless or worse being treated as nothing more than pests is worrying. Job losses are minor in comparison. The only hope I have is that we are all in this together. I hope peace and goodwill prevails. I hope necessary actions are taken before it's too late. A more pragmatic perspective indicates that there are more pressing problems that need to be addressed if we want to avoid a doomer scenario.
• emoII 2y ago
  The sentiment to me is “we need unlimited compute and data” both of which are clearly limited. There is definitely more technology to invent and understand in order for us to do more with less
• tikkun 2y ago
  The future will be abundant, because deep learning works. To achieve that, we need to be calm, but cautious. And, we need to fund infra (chips and power) so that AGI isn't limited to the ultra-wealthy. My take: * Foom/doom isn't helpful. But, calm cautiousness is. If you're acting from a place of fear and emotional dysregulation, you'll make ineffective choices. If you get calm and regulated first, and then take actions, they'll be more effective. (This is my issue with AGI-risk people, they often seem triggered/fear/alarm-driven rather than calm but cautious) * Piece is kind of a manifesto for raising money for AI infra * Sam's done a podcast before about meditation where he talked about similar themes of "prudence without fear" and the dangers of "deep fear and panic and anxiety" and instead the importance of staying "calm and centered during hard and stressful moments" - responding, not reacting (strong +1) * It's no accident that o1 is very good at math physics and programming. It'll keep getting much better here. Presumably this is the path for AGI to lead to abundance and cheaper energy by "solving physics"
  • bbor 2y ago
    Well put! I would disagree on two fundamental points, tho: 1. If you honestly think that millions/billions of people are at serious risk of avoidable harm that everyone else is ignoring, "calm down" can be a hard dictum to follow. Sam Altman has won, it's easy for him psychologically to say "well, lets just stick to the status quo and do our best every day and it'll probably work out". Made-in-house bias is strongest when "in-house" is your own mind, after all. 2. Your scare quotes makes it seem like you might agree, but: physics is the study of the physical world, thinking it can be 'solved' is like thinking mathematics, psychology, or anthropology can be 'solved'. It's fundamentally anti-science and very, very dangerous to be talking like that. Truth isn't absolutely relative, but science also isn't a collection of facts written in stone that we need to finish unearthing; it's a collection of intellectual tools.
• seri4l 2y ago
  >We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale. Could anyone elaborate on this? Further down he talks about the necessity of bringing the cost of computing down. Is that really the bottleneck?
  • kneel 2y ago
    Few short learning performance scales with model size. Afaik they don't see a plateau yet and the race is on the ingest more data and come up with better tuning techniques. https://splab.sdu.edu.cn/GPT3.pdf https://splab.sdu.edu.cn/GPT3.pdf
  • ks2048 2y ago
    "AI is going to get better with scale" to me says almost nothing at all. It includes anything from we 100x the scale and get 1% improvement to 2x the scale and get "AGI".
• CptFribble 2y ago
  To paraphrase Goggins, "Who's gonna carry the cabbage?" While it's true there are a lot of jobs obsoleted by technological progress, the vision of personal AI teams creating a new age of prosperity only makes sense for knowledge workers. Sure, a field worker picking cabbage could also have an AI team to coordinate medical care. But in this brilliant future, are the lowest members of society suddenly well-paid? The steam engine and subsequent Industrial Revolution created a lot of jobs and economic productivity, sure, but a huge amount of those jobs were dirty, dangerous factory jobs, and the lion's share of the productivity was ultimately captured by robber barons for quite some time. The increase in standard of living could only be seen in aggregate on pages of statistics from the mahogany-paneled offices of Standard Oil, while the lives of the individuals beneath those papers more often resembled Sinclair's Jungle. Altman's suggestion that avoiding AI capture by the rich merely requires more compute is laughable. We have enormous amounts of compute currently, and its productivity is already captured by a small number of people compared to the vast throngs that power civilization in total. Why would AI make this any different? The average person does not understand how AI works and does not have the resources to utilize it. Any further advancements in AI, including "personalized AI teams," will not be equally shared, they will be packaged into subscription services and sold, only to enrich those who already control the vast majority of the world's wealth.
  • peterb0yd 2y ago
    Shhh... you're not supposed to say anything about this! We need to sell the idea of abundance for everyone so investors and employees will feel good about dedicating their livelihood to our organization!
  • idle_zealot 2y ago
    The thing is: robotics is knowledge work. Supposing a scenario in which AI makes advancing fields of engineering and science much more rapid, it will be leveraged to build and cheapen robotic labor. There would be a gap period where AI is smart but unable to perform labor without humans, which could be ugly, and then we reach effective post-scarcity and post-humans-being-useful. Where we go from there could be heaven or hell depending on who's in charge.
• swyx 2y ago
  > If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. i think this is the prevailing wisdom but theres an angle that openai doesnt value and therefore isnt mentioned. There's far more compute sitting idle in everyone's offices and homes and pockets than there are in the $100bn openai cluster. it just isnt useful for training because physics. but its useful for inference. local LLMs ship this-next year in Chrome (gemini nano) and Apple (apple intelligence) that will truly be available for everyone instead of going thru OpenAI's infra. they'll be worse than GPT4, but only for a couple more years.
  • obirunda 2y ago
    Especially when you separate the ethereal "hard problems" from every day queries local LLMs can answer equally as well as SOTA models, the value proposition for these expensive models plummets. If it can't solve real hard, long horizon problems the 10% lift on a given benchmark is not a material value prop to the end user to choose a local free version over the API costs or the monthly subscription.
• leetharris 2y ago
  I like Sam's philosophy on this and I generally agree with him. However, I do not like how all the wealthy AI people are hand-waving the massive labor market shift in the coming years. > As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games. It's very easy as an extremely rich person to just say, "don't worry, in the end it'll be better for all of us." Maybe that's true on a societal scale, but these are people's entire worlds being destroyed. Imagine you went to college for a medical specialty for 8-10 years, you come out as an expert, and 2 years later that entire field is handled by AI and salaries start to tank. Imagine you have been a graphic designer for 20 years supporting your 3 children and bam a diffusion model can do your job for a fraction of the cost. Imagine you've been a stenographer working in courtrooms to support your ill parents and suddenly ASR can do your job better than you can. This is just simple stuff we can connect the dots on now. There will be orders of magnitude more shifts that we can't even imagine right now. To someone like Sam, everything will be fine. He can handle the massive societal shift because he has options. Every a moderately wealthy person will be OK. But the entire middle class is going to start really freaking the fuck out soon as more and more jobs disappear. You're already seeing anti-AI sentiment all over the web. Even in expert circles, you can see skepticism. People saying things like, "how do I opt out of Apple Intelligence?" People don't WANT more grammar correction or AI emojis in their lives, they just want to survive and thrive and own a house. How are we going to handle this? Sam's words of "if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable" doesn't mean shit to a family of 4 who went through layoffs in the year 2025 because AI took their job while Microsoft's stock grows 50%.
  • s3tt3mbr1n1 2y ago
    For this reason I read Andrew Yang’s “The War on Normal People”. Besides UBI and “social credits”, I don’t see him offer that many other solutions to this problem. UBI also still needs to be proven as far as I’m aware. When o1 was released, I ran an internal eval and saw it plainly outperforming our highly educated colleagues. I had goosebumps, and haven’t been able to sleep well for days. This will dramatically impact society in 2-5 years. Do you know of any relevant material related to this?
• breck 2y ago
  It looks like this is a new subdomain that has never been used before today: https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://ia.samaltman.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://ia.samal... Surprisingly complicated HTML source code for a simple blog post. Here it is as: Plain HTML: https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.html https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.html Text: https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.txt https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.txt Scroll: https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.scroll https://hub.scroll.pub/sama/index.scroll
  • bbor 2y ago
    Wow, great catch. Something tells me he rolled this himself. Clearly he's trying to coin a term for personal legacy reasons, and I say godspeed. Holocene is a little vague, the information age is too entrenched to get anyone's attention, a/the singular age / the singularity are way too deeply associated with the doomer community, and the cybernetic age (a term coined for academia!) is too associated with playful science fiction. I'm personally rooting for cognitive being the word of the next few decades, but that's just a shout from the sidelines. Only time will tell what humanity latches on to, but I wouldn't be surprised if this blog post/subdomain was referenced in a Wikipedia page's Etymology section in 10-15 years... Although this blog post & discussion has my anxiety at an 8, something's oddly comforting about the thought of Sam Altman fiddling with tailwind classes to get his profound aesthetic just-right. Something undeniably relatable and human. Hate the man all you want (I do!), but he's clearly acting in some sort of good faith.
    • breck 2y ago
      > Clearly he's trying to coin a term You are right. I overlooked the simplicity of the headline. Thanks for calling attention to that. > Something tells me he rolled this himself. This would be cool. > I'm personally rooting for cognitive being the word of the next few decades I like that one too. > he's clearly acting in some sort of good faith. He's always been one to think and write for himself. Huge respect for him. Even though it needles me every moment that they still call themselves "Open"AI, I have so much respect for the guy, especially because PG basically told the world he was the next Michael Jordan of startups, and he actually went and fulfilled that. Not many people have it in them to live up to hype like that (Lebron being the only other one I can think of OOTOMH)
• sharkjacobs 2y ago
  > Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale I'm not an AI skeptic at all, I use llms all the time, and find them very useful. But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI. It seems like there was a really sweet spot wrt the capabilities AI was able to "unlock" with scale over the last couple years, but my high level sense is that each meaningful jumps of baseline raw "intelligence" required an exponential increases in scale, in terms of training data and computation, and we've reached the ceiling of "easily available" increases, it's not as easy to pour "as much as it takes" into GPT5 if it turns out you need more than A Microsoft.
  • berniedurfee 2y ago
    You should _always_ be skeptical of what’s said by anyone who is trying to sell something. Like everything else being sold, the marketing is 95% BS. LLMs are amazing and wonderful tools, but me thinks we’re near a plateau in capability. Now investors are pumping for ROI before that becomes evident. After we reach the plateau in capabilities, the next phase is cutting production and operating costs to maximize margins. I’m the meantime, expect the marketing to get increasingly cringe until the bubble bursts.
  • sharkjacobs 2y ago
    > we will solve the remaining problems This is the part that really gets me. This is a thing that you say to your team, and a thing you say to your investors, but this isn't a thing that you can actually believe with certainty is it?
    • lainga 2y ago
      Mit dem nächste Kapitalrunde wird das alles in Ordnung kommen.
    • swyx 2y ago
      you need some amount of irrational definite optimism + knowing things others dont to be a good founder. that kind of reality distortion field is why sam is sam and we are here debating phrases on an orange website.
• tikkun 2y ago
  > If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. This seems to be the key of the piece to me. It's his manifesto for raising money for the infra side of things. And, it resonates: I don't want ASI to only be affordable to the ultra rich.
  • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    To be brutally frank we should focus on energy, as we definitely need way more of that (with less carbon) even if LLMs don't improve any more.
    • sdenton4 2y ago
      Fusion power is just eight minutes away...
      • layer8 2y ago
        The issue is that we re-eject too little of that energy back into space again.
      • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        Sure, but large scale solar probably isn't globally practical without a world grid.
  • lancesells 2y ago
    I don't see how the current state of AI tech is not for the ultra-rich. It's hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investment from who? Corporations and those who own the most shares of those corporations(the rich). Billionaires could make so much change happen but instead they are building bunkers and riding giant dicks into space while simultanously touting that they are looking out for humanity.
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• FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  This seems to be a little puffy. More of a "everything's fine, nothing to worry about". While, there is already job disruption, and widespread misinformation. It isn't in some future, it is already happening.
• tikkun 2y ago
  > We need to act wisely but with conviction. Reminds me of these quotes from Sam on this podcast episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuVSg-VJxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuVSg-VJxE) * "Prudence without fear" (Sam referencing another quote) * "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of, deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best of humanity." * "the ability to sort of like, stay calm and centered during hard and stressful moments, and to make decisions that are where you're not too reactive"
  • schmidtleonard 2y ago
    Easy for him to say: AI is almost guaranteed to hand a massive W to capital and L to labor. He is holding a title to rule over hell in one hand and promising to lead us to heaven with the other.
    • codingwagie 2y ago
      Actually not sure about this, with the leverage of AI, its easier than ever to start a company
      • schmidtleonard 2y ago
        Sam Altman has a guarantee. Most people on HN have a chance. Most people have neither.
      • zaptheimpaler 2y ago
        Who's going to work at all these companies then? Unless every single profession suddenly only requires 1 person to do the entire thing with no management, coordination or hierarchies, a lot of people will be labor not capital.
        • tommoor 2y ago
          Maybe companies as we think of them are a temporary phenomenon in human history
• carapace 2y ago
  "What is good?" or in other words "What are people for?" is a question that cannot be answered by intelligence no matter how great, because the complexity of the question is a function of the intelligence of the asking entity and it's always greater than the intelligence of the asking entity (human or transhuman cyborg or whatever.) AI is a side-show. Intelligence is ambient in living tissue, so we already have as much intelligence as is adaptive. We don't need more. As talking apes made out of soggy mud wrapped around calcium twigs living in the greasy layer between hard vacuum and a droplet of lava which in turn is orbiting a puddle of hydrogen in the hem of the skirt of a black hole our problems are just not that complicated. Heck, we are surrounded by four-billion year-old self-improving nanotechnology that automatically provides almost all our physical needs. It's even solar-powered! The whole life-support system was fully automatic until we fucked it up in our ignorance. But we're no longer ignorant, eh? The vast majority of our problems today are the result of our incredible resounding success. We have the solutions we need. Most of them were developed in the 1970's when the oil got expensive for a few minutes. Must we boil the oceans just to have a talking computer tell us to get on with it? Can't we just do like the Wizard of Oz? Have a guy in a box with a voice changer and a fancy light show tell us to "love each other"? Mechanical Turk God? We can use holograms.
  • dbspin 2y ago
    Existential horror of this whole conversation aside, this is a beautifully written comment. I'd read your novel, but you don't seem to have one, so I'll have to settle for following you on Mastodon.
    • carapace 2y ago
      Cheers! You're too kind. I thought I would get reamed for farting in church but it seems to have gone over well. See ya Space Cowboy
  • svieira 2y ago
    > "What are people for?" is a question that cannot be answered by intelligence no matter how great It absolutely can be answered, but only the the intender. Who is and who was and who is to come. Or, if you side with the "Nietzche is right" side of the conversation "who will be or who may have come to be today or who recently came to be again". The former is eucatastrophic, the latter is dystopic.
• codingwagie 2y ago
  “This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.” I am a believer that people like sam are not lying. Anyone using these models daily probably believes the same. The o1 model, if prompted correctly, can architect a code base in a way that my decade+ of premium software experience cannot. Prompted incorrectly, it looks incompetent. The abilities of the future are already here, you just need to know how to use the models.
  • lxgr 2y ago
    I'm using these models daily, and I don't believe that they're a direct path to superintelligence (unless you'd consider something like the printing press to have been a direct path to, say, the integrated circuit or the Internet). > Prompted incorrectly, it looks incompetent. The abilities of the future are already here, you just need to know how to use the models. Something purportedly intelligent shouldn't need "correct usage", as it should arguably be able to infer and clarify all ambiguities itself, no?
    • codingwagie 2y ago
      The model's arent there yet. I am confused how people cannot extrapolate into the future and understand that the models will improve
      • lxgr 2y ago
        And I'm surprised how many people think they can confidently tell whether they're looking at an s-curve or an exponential function based on very limited data points. I don't even doubt that superintelligence is a very real possibility! But it might or might not happen, and if it does, it might or might not be based on deep learning. As a counterexample: The maximum speed of travel for the average person for millenia used to be as fast as they could run, then it was as fast as the fastest horse can run, and then within a century it has accelerated to almost the speed of sound – at which it has plateaued. Looking purely at the decades of acceleration, you might have very well concluded from the data that we'd be making significant headway towards getting within double-digit percentages of the speed of light at this point.
• myaccountonhn 2y ago
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  • abletonlive 2y ago
    Not really. Nobody expected China to produce as much solar power as it does now. What makes you think we know how much renewable energy we will produce in 2040?
    • Borg3 2y ago
      Its sad for me to watch such comments.. Really. People always just focus on one particular issue/problem and try to solve it ignoring anything else. Open your eyes and look a bit broader view. Energy is NOT the only problem. Waste is another very serious one, usually ommited because.. Lets dump it to some 3th world countries and issue is gone right? Nope...
      • abletonlive 2y ago
        > Its sad for me to watch such comments.. One should always evaluate why they feel such emotions. Is it because you want to or have a tendency towards doom/gloom? > Energy is NOT the only problem. Waste is another very serious one That's called moving the goal post. If you want to talk about waste from renewables you're more than welcome to but don't call us myopic for understanding that you can limit the scope of the discussion so that we are focused on the topic at hand. There's always a group that's a step ahead ready to complain about the next goalpost. First it's that we can't make enough renewable energy, then it's too expensive, then it's that we produce some amount of waste to create the renewable energy, then it's that we'll have so much energy we can't store it all, then it's that renewable energy is not public or free. At every step there's some issue that people like you want to point to as if to say we should just sit where we are born idle and do nothing, change nothing because it's not perfect or there are consequences.
    • myaccountonhn 2y ago
      The growth in renewables can not meet their demands, fusion is a moonshot that probably will not happen, nuclear takes too long to build. Where will the energy come from if not fossil fuels?
• rossdavidh 2y ago
  "humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data)..." This statement is manifestly untrue. Neural networks are useful, many hidden layers is useful, all of these architectures are useful, but the idea that they can learn anything, is based less on empirical results and more on what Sam Altman needs to convince people of to get this capital investments.
  • dartos 2y ago
    The entire vocabulary around machine learning is and always has been really weird. We don’t personify database interactions the same way we personify setting weights in a neural network.
    • layer8 2y ago
      We also personify synapses and axons in human brain tissue, though. My point is, while I agree with your first sentence to a degree, we shouldn’t judge the whole solely by its elementary parts. Clearly an LLM exhibits very different behavior from a conventional database.
      • dartos 2y ago
        LLMs exhibit very similar behavior to a search algorithm. Text query in -> relevant text out. I don’t say that search algorithms “learn” or “think” outside of ML.
        • famouswaffles 2y ago
          >Text query in -> relevant text out. Wait that's it ? I guess humans also exhibit similar behavior to a search algorithm in certain instances. Nothing about LLM inference seems particularly similar to search even with our limited understanding. All you're saying here is Input goes in > Output comes out. Well no shit.
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• deleted 2y ago
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• outside1234 2y ago
  Breathless BS from Scam Altman
• sharkjacobs 2y ago
  > It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!) "a few thousand days" is such a funny and fascinating way to say "about a decade" Superficially, reframing it as "days" not "years" is a classic marketing psychology trick, i.e. 99 cents versus a dollar, but I think the more interesting thing is just the way it defamiliarizes the span. A decade means something, but "a few thousand days" feels like it means something very different.
  • 7thaccount 2y ago
    Probably because we all know "a decade" means maybe never. They've said the same thing about fusion for 5 decades.
    • arthurcolle 2y ago
      https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achieving-fusion-ignition https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-make...
      • simianparrot 2y ago
        And it's still a decade away
      • Yizahi 2y ago
        Inertial confinement most likely can't be reasonably commoditized into generating electricity. Also, I may be wrong, but I think on the wave of that hype I read that the number they used was an incomplete one. Basically they reframed the conditions of the problem to get more favorable number for advertisement. NIF research will most likely be limited to the nuclear bomb research and simulations. But even if NIF had a reasonable path to energy generation in say 20-30 years, it still won't matter much, just like ITER probably won't. Solar will be way more cheap and widespread, it's costs are still dropping down ahead of all predictions, govt. or commercial. Fusion may just be a pure science project in the end, for a long time.
    • dcchambers 2y ago
• Bjorkbat 2y ago
  A complete tangent, but I think a big reason why I'm kind of dismissive of AI is because people who speculate on what it would enable make it honestly sound kind of unimaginative. > AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. I get it, coordinating medical care is exhausting, but it's kind of amusing that rather than envisioning changing a broken system people instead envision AIs that are so advanced that they can deal with the complexity of our broken systems, and in doing so potentially preserve them. Related btw to using AI for code.
  • hnlmorg 2y ago
    I think the reason for that is because people are fearful of change. Talking about AI as assistants means people still have their jobs but now their life is easier. Whereas saying AI will completely change the way we do X then makes AI scary and a threat to our jobs.
  • jasonwcfan 2y ago
    Yeah the ways AI models have learned to interact with the world are all hilariously skeuomorphic given their capabilities. A model that runs on silicon has to learn English and Python in order to communicate with other models that also run on silicon. And to perceive the world they have to rely on images rendered in the limited wavelengths visible to the human eye. But I much prefer this approach over allowing models to develop their own hyper-optimized information exchange protocols that are are black box to humans, and I hope things stay this way forever.
  • idle_zealot 2y ago
    It is pretty comical. "We invented digital superintelligence so it can wait on the phone to talk to your healthcare provider". If we had digital superintelligence then surely it could figure out how to actually provide healthcare to people who meed it, and innovate in treatments. An AGI is a singularity event, in the sense that the transformation it would affect on the state of technology and our lives is rapid and unpredictable. I doubt that our society's hundred-ish year old systems would survive such change, and if they did they would be anachronistic and depressing.
• throwanem 2y ago
  Who exactly is he pitching here?
  • kruipen 2y ago
    Newsom
    • skinner_ 2y ago
      Bingo. That was not obvious to me before your one-word reply, and now, in retrospect, it is. And I say this as a person who usually just rolls his eyes seeing the typical cynical HN hot takes. I believe Altman voices his deepest convictions here. The smarter thing to be cynical about is, what is his goal with voicing them now, and in this very format? As others have observed, this is the first time he is not even paying lip service to the question of existential risk.
• brotchie 2y ago
  For somebody who likes building things and has many side projects Claude and ChatGPT have been huge productivity multipliers. For example, I’m designing and 3D printing custom LED diffuser channels from TPU filament. My first attempt was terrible, because I didn’t have an intuition for how light propagates through a material. After a bit of chatting with ChatGPT, I had an understanding and some direction of where to go. To actually approach the problem properly I decided to run some Monte Carlo light transport simulations against an .obj of my diffuser exported from Fusion 360. The problem was, the software I’m using only supports directional lights with uniform intensity, while the LEDs I’m using have a graph in their datasheet showing light intensity per degree away from orthogonal to the LED SMD component. I copy pasted the directional light implementation from the light transport library as well as the light-intensity-by-degree chat from the LED datasheet and asked Claude to write code to write a light source that samples photons from a disc of size x with the probability of emission by angle governed by the chat from the datasheet. A few iterations later and I had a working simulation which I then verified back against the datasheet chart. Without AI this would have been a long long process of brushing up on probability, vector math, manually transcribing the chart. Instead in like 10 minutes I had working code and the light intensity of the simulation against my mesh matched what I was seeing in real life with a 3D printed part.
  • Bjorkbat 2y ago
    As much of a curmudgeon as I am on AI I do sincerely believe that one area that it's effective at is going from absolute beginner to decent understanding on something completely new and foreign. Recently I've been somewhat curious about Skia, the graphics library that Google uses. A while back I fielded a few questions about Skia to Claude. Nothing crazy, just questions on how to draw a few primitive shapes, but I felt it would have taken some effort to find the answers on my own. And I must say I was pretty satisfied with what it gave me back.
    • lxgr 2y ago
      It is indeed incredibly useful for getting from zero to an undergrad level of understanding of most subjects. In my personal experience, it's also been largely useless beyond that. That's not to diminish the potential impact of having an almost-free grad-student-level tutor available 24/7! Even if AI stops improving here, this alone will have a huge impact on future science (there being more trained people around capable of helping solve hard problems and all). But we're also definitely some way away from AIs doing their own research, and I'm not sure if scaling the current architecture alone will get us there.
• tptacek 2y ago
  I like ChatGPT 4o just fine, but the whole lamplighter bit is a bit Whig-history, right? The lamplighters were better off in the long run. We might not be. You can't just blow the problems off.
  • zibzob 2y ago
    Why were lamplighters better off in the long run, is "lamplighter" a term that means more than just somebody who goes around lighting the streetlamps at night? Honestly that seems like a pretty decent job even today, if we still needed it to be done.
    • tptacek 2y ago
      The subtext of observations like those are that wealthy aristocrats in the age of full lamplighter employment would be better off materially working as a Walmart checkers today, and there's some truth to that, but the implication that Walmart checkers today will be better off when computers eat their jobs does not follow inexorably from history (the idea that it does is "Whig history"; the past sucked except in serving its role as the stepstones to our glorious future; take that, and the famous WW2 bomber survivorship bias graphic, and you have the problem with the logic of that last paragraph).
      • zibzob 2y ago
        Okay, I see what you mean now.
• mise_en_place 2y ago
  There is still too much variance in the utility of LLMs. Hopefully, the uncertainty around utility will decrease while some concrete ranked score metric increases. Until that point, the variance is preventing the maximization of utility of LLMs, and by extension, agentic AI.
• mcpar-land 2y ago
  > Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate This is so rich coming from a tech field that's on track to match the energy consumption of a small country. (And no, AI is not going to offset this by 'finding innovative solutions to climate change' or whatever)
• throwaway918299 2y ago
  This man is such a snake oil salesman, holy cow. All hype, zero substance.
• screye 2y ago
  Question for active professionals during the Moore's law era of computing. Back then, were executives writing such grand proclamations about the future ? In my experience, when things are working, executives are quiet. The outcomes speak for themselves. Thankfully, we have a recent point of reference. The pioneers of internet & computing's 1st wave transformed civilization. Did they spend years saber rattling about how 'change was coming' ?
  • inquisitorG 2y ago
    Bill Joy - Why The Future Doesn't Need Us - 4/1/2000 https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/ https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/ Basically, the same article but much more negative.
  • breck 2y ago
    > Back then, were executives writing such grand proclamations about the future ? Yes. And the good ones (like SamA and SJ) deliver. https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?t=278 https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA?t=278
  • wrs 2y ago
    Of course they did! During the advent of personal computers there was plenty of hype and grand-visioning for a technology that had very little value until VisiCalc triggered exponential growth. Same story for social networking (look at The WELL), the Web (Netscape practically invented insane-seeming hype-based valuations), many other examples. In fact, I can't really think of any part of the industry where "outcomes speak for themselves" -- I would have said quite the opposite is the norm.
  • philosopher1234 2y ago
    That’s a bit funny, Moores law itself is an example of an executive being loud and making a grand proclamation
• wturner 2y ago
  The way these guys bend over backwards to evade an honest conversation about capitalism and power is very entertaining.
• hnthrow562 2y ago
  A different perspective from sama. (More doomer, less utopian as this) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/25/sam-altman-ai-democracy-authoritarianism-future/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/25/sam-altma...
• koziserek 2y ago
  I'm sceptical about humanity's future, and not only with perspective of AGI getting out of control.. Average human won't be able to harness new powers. solarpunk envisioned, possible today: - entire human knowledge available on palm of your hand..! vs cyberdaftpunk actually more common: - another idiot driver killed somebody when being busy with his candy crush saga or instagram celebrity vid.
• Workaccount2 2y ago
  I don't know if I am the only one who always trips up on reading this common theme in AI progress - that AI will be the pinnacle of education - but it really strikes me as meaningless. What is the point of education if the bots can do all the work. If the worlds best accounting teacher is an AI, why would you want anyone (anything?) other than that AI handling your accounting? A world where human intelligence is second fiddle to AI, schooling _will not_ be anything like what it is today.
  • j_timberlake 2y ago
    As if a tech CEO would ever speak the truth like that. If he admits that AI is going to wreck the job market, that would make the relevant politicians wary.
  • randomdata 2y ago
    For what reason would school need to change? Education will change, but education moved to happening outside of schools a long, long time ago.
  • n_ary 2y ago
    I am more worried about the fact that, these AIs will become the commercial moat of knowledge that we currently have available freely. The quality of knowledge you can now openly find is getting scarce or prominently moving behind paywalls. However, these AI models have access to the same knowledge somehow freely. Once we start relying on AI for knowledge(see how people frequently just ask few questions, copy paste answers without further in depth knowledge or research, just like the parody stack-overflow copy paste era), it will continue to get locked behind further paywall and will no longer be accessible to general populace without the financial means. I am just afraid that, while we are too awed by the magic, the magic will eventually close the doors behind us on knowledge and only cater to the rich and powerful. Also there is that one fact when AI gains adequate power in societal terms of utopian abundance where AI/robots do everything. One day, the AI decides that to save the globe from further climate damage, fastest way is to delete the walking CO2 emission machine who also use other CO2 emission devices or consumes stuff that also generate CO2, a mass extermination and burial will immediately cut all CO2 …
• falcor84 2y ago
  > Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. This is one of those few cases where I'm actually more bullish than Altman. I don't need to wait for my kids to have it, but rather I personally am already using this daily. My regular thing is to upload a book/article(s) into the context of a Claude project and then chat with it - I genuinely find it to already be at the level of a decent (though not yet excellent) tutor on most subjects I tried, and by far better than listening to a lecture. The main feature I'm missing is of the AI being able to collaborate with me on a digital whiteboard.
  • jay_kyburz 2y ago
    Just yesterday I was wondering how well AI's would provide feedback to my high school kids essays, without actually re-writing them for him. I will give it a try later today.
  • lordnacho 2y ago
    One thing I was thinking about was live translation. We gotta be near the stage where I can take earbuds with me to Spain and hear what the locals are saying in English? There's already apps that are pretty good at "talk to it and it hears the words, prints them, and prints the translation", so it would seem to be close?
    • whamlastxmas 2y ago
      Given the advanced voice model that still isn’t widely released, the technology is there, even if the implementation isn’t yet.
    • codethief 2y ago
      Whisper and a bit of Python code (and a text2speech model) can already do this. At my day job we have Whisper live-translate all-hands calls for the non-native speakers in the audience. It's incredibly good.
      • lordnacho 2y ago
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• twothreeone 2y ago
  Sounds like Durchhalteparolen to me.
• gwern 2y ago
  > If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. Translation for the rest of us: "we need to fully privatize the OA subsidiary and turn it into a B-corp which can raise a lot more capital over the next decade, in order to achieve the goals of the nonprofit, because the chief threat is not anything like existential risk from autonomous agents in the next few years or arms races, but inadequate commercialization due to fundraising constraints".
  • n2d4 2y ago
    Well predicted. Just two days later: > OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548
  • metacritic12 2y ago
    Good point. His story is valid, but just-so happens to equal AI maximalism that most CEOs would want for their own industry too.
  • peppermill 2y ago
    It's amazing how he can imagine wars being fought over AI but not wars being fought over resources needed to "build enough infrastructure."
    • kulahan 2y ago
      Taking it a step further, building that infrastructure may contribute somewhat directly to limiting the other resources actual wars are being fought over. This man needs to get out of his own head.
      • throw_pm23 2y ago
        "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
• reducesuffering 2y ago
  "Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue." -OpenAI "Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." - Sam Altman https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/ https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
• 7e 2y ago
  Altman attempting to take credit for others work, again.
• tech_ken 2y ago
  > That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data) Seems like it's very much the former, and not all the latter. Indeed my understanding of the last 15 years of AI research is that 'rules-based' methods floundered while purely 'data-mimicking' methods have flourished.
• cratermoon 2y ago
  Did AI write this? "This age is characterized by society's increasingly advanced capabilities, driven not by genetic changes but by societal infrastructure becoming smarter and more efficient over time."
• larodi 2y ago
  Has Sam Altman ever talked about ways that he personally uses ChatGPT. Does he at all? does he have an all-smart watch? Is he dreaming of producing a perfect replicant like this guy in Blade Runner 2049... cause with his pathos and present position, he may be among these peoples who can allow himself to do so. This is all so vague he says, i mean, we have all read enough cyberpunk to write the same essay. But I don't know if he actually builds with this tool, cause the way I see it he probably has very little time to actually use it. So why so confident whether its deep learning that worked. I say Euler's graph theory worked more than anything else, and Chomsky's understanding of grammars, so what? Maybe we will attend superintelligence in 1000 years, maybe not. Maybe Jesus comes back or Krishna reincarnates on earth, who knows. But it is a long way ahead, and it did not start with Sam, and is really not going to end with ChatGPT.
• 23david 2y ago
  The Age of Inhumanity... AI mimicry of human patterns devalues our very humanity. Without wise leadership, which we clearly lack, this upcoming Age will be profoundly unstable.
• krunck 2y ago
  Somehow I read through this without actually looking at the domain name of the page. I thought to my self "Wow, this person is living in a fantasy world." Then I saw the authors name. I think I'll stand by my initial impression.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    Also that is why we should have some of these foundational models broken down and run at the per person level as a local large language model instead of paying some corporation to get access to it. We didn't have fire as a service back in the day and that is why humanity flourished.
    • caseyy 2y ago
      "Fire as a service" would be a microcosm of capitalism today. Well put.
• drawkward 2y ago
  Crypto bro sells AI; news at 11.
• teekert 2y ago
  “If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.” … This, and nothing about the democratizing effect of “open source AI” (Yes we still need to define what that is!). I don’t want Sam as the thought leader of AI. I even prefer Zuck. Are there any thought leaders that are really about democratization and local foss AI on open hardware? Or do they always follow (or step into the light) after the big moneymakers have had their moment? Who can we start watching? The Linus, the RMS, the Wozniak’s of AI. Who are they?
• uludag 2y ago
  > That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data) So because we have an algorithm to learn any distribution of data, we are now on the verge of the Intelligence Age utopia? What if it just entrenches us in a world built off of the data it was trained on?
• Animats 2y ago
  Until the hallucination problem is solved, we can't trust LLM-type AIs to do anything on their own. This limits uses to ones where the cost of errors can be imposed on someone else.
  • geysersam 2y ago
    Of course we can. Humans are also mistaken sometimes, especially when trying to solve difficult problems. If an LLM hallucinates it's usually because the problem is too hard. For easier problems it's rarely an issue in my experience. Hallucinates is just an indicator that the model is inadequate for the problem you're applying it to. That doesn't mean it's inadequate to solve any problems.
• danjl 2y ago
  We've had the capability to feed the entire planet for decades now, and yet, a large portion is underfed. Even if Sam's wildest dreams come true, this sounds like another "divide the world into haves and have-nots". One way to justify this unethical view is to consider that his audience was a set of target customers, rather than "people in the world". IOW, this was just fancy marketing fluff.
• deleted 2y ago
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• itronitron 2y ago
  My reaction to this is best relayed as a song lyric from Ice-T: > Nobody gives a fuck > "the children have to go to school!" > Well moms, good luck!
• ansk 2y ago
  > humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data) He's hand-waving around the idea presented in the Universal Approximation Theorem, but he's mangled it to the point of falsehood by conflating representation and learning. Just because we can parameterize an arbitrarily flexible class of distributions doesn't mean we have an algorithm to learn the optimal set of parameters. He digs an even deeper hole by claiming that this algorithm actually learns 'the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data', which is essentially a totally unfounded assertion that the functions learned by neural nets will generalize is some particular manner. > I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is. If you think the Universal Approximation Theorem is this profound, you haven't understood it. It's about as profound as the notion that you can approximate a polynomial by splicing together an infinite number of piecewise linear functions.
  • klyrs 2y ago
    > It's about as profound as the notion that you can approximate a polynomial by splicing together an infinite number of piecewise linear functions. Wait 'til you hit complex analysis and discover that Universal Entire Functions don't just exist, they're basically polynomials.
    • stogot 2y ago
      So basically Altman hasn’t taken enough math courses yet thinks he is starring in Good Will Hunting
      • tarsinge 2y ago
        Like with any salesman whether he believes it or not is irrelevant as long as others do.
  • bbor 2y ago
    You’re (both!) getting into metaphysics without necessarily realizing it. He’s just saying that a machine that could learn any pattern—not a sub pattern of accidental actualities that it overfits on, but the real virtual pattern driving some set of phenomena—would be a game changer. Sure, there are infinite things that can’t be reduced to polynomials, but something tells me that a whole lot of things that matter to us are, across the fields of Physics, Biology, Sociology and Neurology especially. Basically it’ll be (and already has been since the quantum breakthroughs in the 1920s, to some extent) a revolution in scientific methods not unlike what Newton and Galileo brought us with physical mechanics: this time, sadly, the mechanics are beyond our direct comprehension, reachable only with statistical tricks and smart guessing machines.
• d--b 2y ago
  "And to make this more-than-perfect world that humanity has been longing for as long as it lived, I absolutely need to betray all the principles that I once stood by, screw over all people that ever trusted me, and become extremely rich in the process. You can think what you want now, the future humans will realize their prosperity was all because I was there to make it happen."
• slantedview 2y ago
  > If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable None of that shared prosperity was freely given by the Sam Altmans of the world, it was hard won by labor organizers and social movements. Without more of that, the progress from AI will continue the recent trend of wealth accumulating in the hands of a few. The idea that everyone will somehow prosper equally from AI, without specific effort to make that happen, is nonsense.
  • spencerchubb 2y ago
    Labor organizers mostly make things worse for laborers. Capitalism has brought much prosperity. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest"
    • slantedview 2y ago
      > Labor organizers mostly make things worse for laborers Nonsense, unless you're prepared to argue that the existence of weekends is "much worse" than working every day.
      • zer8k 2y ago
        Labor unions in America were largely controlled by organized crime and likely still are today. They didn't do this to help the worker they did it as an extension of a collection racket. AKA - their own interests. Despite this they did accomplish some historical good. Yet, I am still working a 40+ hour week bullied by my employer and jobs continue to be shipped overseas. How many more decades before the unions do their job? You can't continue to give labor unions credit for what they've done in the past as justification for their continued existence. Labor unions are also the reason the police are untouchable even when they commit horrendous crimes. Anecdata, but of the union members I know (who by the way were forced into it lest they be considered a scab) none of them believe the union works for them. These people are in medicine, education, construction, and food. The union rep likely golfs and drinks with the CEO where they agree after "much fighting for your rights" to grant you that 25 cent raise. Rarely unions do their jobs. During COVID hospitals in my hometown were allowed to bully nurses into dangerous situations as their union would not halt care in order to make sure they had functional N95s. The unions didn't stop the mass exportation of labor to third world nations after the GFC. These things alone are enough for me to say they have outlived their usefulness.
• jerb 2y ago
  I want to be wildly optimistic too, but I still see no evidence LLMs generate new knowledge. They always hew in-distribution. Please correct me if I’m wrong
  • novaRom 2y ago
    They are really helpful to answer concrete questions, basically a replacement of manual web search and filtering, getting just exactly answers I was looking for. For example, one of my dialogue with chatgpt 4o was about boosting plant growth in a fish tank - you certainly can find a lot of web sites about it, but I simply described my aquatic environment and asked for a recipe - and the answers sound and well supported, a post dialogue double check of the sources help
    • Anamon 2y ago
      That's the crucial point, though, you wouldn't have trusted it without checking the source after all. My experience with 4o is that 4 out of 5 answers I check are wildly incorrect or entirely made up, while with the rest, if I copy my prompt 1:1 into Google, I get the same correct answer pretty much verbatim in result #1. So I don't understand how so many people still see this as anything else but a waste of time, an intermediary step before going to an actual, credible source -- a step which in the best case is entirely unnecessary, in the worst case dangerously misleading. (From my non-representative survey among friends, the answer may be that barely anyone checks the validity of answers, and are simply unaware that they rely on answers from a system which, except for some lucky cases, gives them wrong ones.
  • danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    This isn't snark - almost zero humans produce new knowledge.
  • w10-1 2y ago
    It's not new, but it's more usable, which makes new transactions and productions possible by lowering information costs. That lower of costs is the ONLY basis for thinking AI is good for all. It's to the detriment of people previously managing the complexity manually through training and experience, but in favor of their customers who couldn't previously afford them.
• d_burfoot 2y ago
  OAI's achievements are amazing. But here's a bit of a skeptical take: cheap human-style intelligence won't have a huge impact because such intelligence isn't really a bottleneck today. It's a cliche that the brightest minds of the age are dedicated to selling more ads or shuffling stock ownership around at high velocity. Anyone who's worked at a big tech company knows the enormous ratio of talent to real engineering problems at those companies. Let's say you have some amazing project that's going to require 100 Phd-years of work to carry out. In the present world that costs something like $1e7. In the post-AI world, that same amount of intelligence will cost $1e3, an enormous reduction in price. That might seem like a huge impact. BUT, if the project was so amazing, why couldn't you raise $1e7 to pursue it? Governments and VCs throw this kind of money around like corn-hole bags. So the number of actually-worthwhile projects that become feasible post-AI might actually be quite small.
  • benlivengood 2y ago
    Capital follows the most profitable investments. It's why "green" technology took so long to develop (we probably could have had efficient solar panels in the 60s, but oil was super cheap and more importantly very profitable). Dropping the cost of a $1e7 problem to even $1e6 probably makes it very profitable.
    • deciplex 2y ago
      > Capital follows the most profitable investments. I think a common error is that people forget the "most" in this sentence. It is a very important word. It's not even that only profitable investments will get funded: even profitable projects might get left on the cutting room floor if they are competing for resources with projects that will generate, or are believed to generate, higher ROI. And this maybe isn't a problem if higher ROI == better than. But to believe that, you have to also believe that enshittification is a thing that happens in spite of being less profitable (or unprofitable), which for me at least is a hard sell.
    • willturman 2y ago
      Capital has also employed anti-competitive actions to stifle, prevent, and kneecap "green" technology for the last century. The death of passenger rail and the stifling of the electric car for 30 years come to mind.
• xbar 2y ago
  Nothing in Sam Altman's mind will lead to the improvement of the human condition. We have a capitalist arguing for support of further investment in his capital expenditures in the form of planet-ending heat and monopoly power, promising to pay for it with intelligence more rapidly delivered. No, thanks.
• listic 2y ago
  Having read a few comments, and then the essay itself, I am surprised there's no call to action or announcement.
• pdonis 2y ago
  All this and not a word about AI ethics. If the ethics of the AI's Sam Altman is building are his ethics, I wouldn't trust them to do any of the tasks he describes, or indeed any tasks requiring any kind of independent action or judgment at all.
• alexashka 2y ago
  > it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there Confident based on what, exactly? Sam Altman is engaging in 'The Secret' where if you really, really believe a thing, you'll manifest it. Mind you, Sam Altman actually has no technical expertise, so he really really believes he can pay other people who actually know something to do magic whilst he walks about pretending to be Steve Jobs 2.0. He'll get his trillion, AI will go nowhere but he'll be on to the next grift by then.
• amelius 2y ago
  What we need is to make AI really open and let government institutions (academia) develop the models, so we can all profit from them.
• w10-1 2y ago
  > a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity That's the sales pitch, that this will benefit all. I'm very pro-AI, but here's the only prediction for the future I would ever make: AI will accelerate, not minimize, inequality and thus injustice, because it removes the organizational limits previously imposed by bureaucracy/coordination costs of humans. It's not AI's fault. It's not because people are evil or weak or mean, but because the system already does so, and the system has only been constrained by inability to scale people in organizations, which is now relieved by AI. Virtually all the advances in technology and civilization have been aimed at people capturing resources, people, and value, and recent advances have only accelerated that trend. Broader distributions of value are incidental. Yes, the U.S. had a middle class after the war, and yes, China has lifted rural people out of technical poverty. But those are the exceptions against the background of consolidation of wealth and power world wide. Not through ideology or avarice but through law and technology extending the reach of agency by amplifying transaction cost differences in market power, information asymmetry and risk burdens. The only thing that stops this is disasters like war and environmental collapse, and it's only slowed by recalcitrance of people. E.g., now we are at a point were people's economic and online activity is pervasively tracked, but it's impossible to determine who's the owner of the vast majority of assets. That creates massive scale for getting customers, but impedes legal responsibility. Nothing in economic/market theory says that's how it should be; but transaction cost economics does make clear that the asymmetry can and will be exploited, so organizations will capture governance to do so. It's not AI's job nor even AI's focus to correct injustice, and you can't blame AI for the damage it does. But like nuclear weapons, cluster munitions, party politics, (even software waivers of liability) etc., it creates moral hazards far beyond the ability of culture to accommodate. (Don't get me started on how blockchain's promise of smart contracts scaling to address transaction risks has devolved into proliferating fraud schemes.)
  • zero-sharp 2y ago
    We've been quick to adopt the technology without identifying or considering its future costs. If a chatbot can generate code that works with minor tweaking, does that warrant laying off one or many programmers? If an AI tutor can provide most of the information a student needs, does that mean we no longer need human instructors? It's become common to shit talk teachers, but I think education is more than just "delivering facts." So the observation is this: in some very narrow areas, AI will be highly competitive while significantly cutting costs. What I worry about is all of the intangibles & unquantified tasks that people perform that will be lost if we go in the direction of replacing people in the name of profit. And I know that some people here will argue that this hasn't had effects on layoffs... So you mention how it's not the AI's fault, nor is it the fault of the people. But we have this corporate structure where it's easy to implement a change that may be detrimental in the future and that's difficult to reverse. I think that's definitely a fault of people.
• charlie0 2y ago
  In a world of infinite leverage, those who can leverage will far outrun those who cannot leverage or do so poorly. The world is also getting flatter, so you will see massive clusters of people near the bottom, with a very long fat tail of people far away at the top. My only hope is that the floor is raised for everyone, so we're not living in a dystopia like Elysium.
• drooby 2y ago
  This morning I was reviewing some code that a JR engineer submitted. It had this wild logical conditional with twists and turns, negations, and weird property naming.. o1-preview perfectly evaluated the conditional and determined that, hilariously, it would always evaluate to true. o1 untangled the spaghetti, and, verifying that it was correct was quick and easy. It created a perfect truth table for me to visualize. This is a sign of things to come. We are speeding up.
  • jerrygenser 2y ago
    It's surprising that the JR engineer who presumably has access to chat jippity submitted this bad code to begin with. Wouldn't they have had the AI review the code first?
    • Anamon 2y ago
      My theory would be that the Jr probably generated the code with o1 in the first place. The buggy, nonsensical crap I've seen that thing generate boggles the mind.
• bobrobpr 2y ago
  Pasted the article into chatgpt (free version) Prompt: according to this text above, tell me the degree of insanity of this man's thinking process, expose all his flaws. Chatgpt: The text presents a highly optimistic view of the future shaped by AI and deep learning, but there are several areas where the reasoning might be seen as flawed or overly simplistic. Here are some points that could be critiqued: Overconfidence in Technology: The author expresses a strong belief in the inevitability of AI advancement and its benefits, which may overlook the unpredictability of technological development and the potential for setbacks. Underestimating Risks: While the potential for prosperity is emphasized, there’s insufficient attention given to the ethical, societal, and environmental risks associated with AI, such as bias, privacy concerns, and job displacement. Assumption of Universal Benefit: The idea that AI will lead to shared prosperity ignores systemic inequalities that might prevent equitable access to AI technology, potentially leading to a wider wealth gap. Neglect of Human Factors: The argument largely abstracts from human emotions, societal values, and the complexities of human behavior. The assumption that prosperity will automatically lead to happiness or fulfillment is problematic. Simplistic Historical Comparisons: The comparison of current advancements to past technological revolutions (e.g., Industrial Age) may not account for the unique challenges posed by AI, such as rapid obsolescence and ethical dilemmas that previous technologies did not face. Lack of Detailed Solutions: The text calls for action but offers little concrete guidance on how to navigate the complexities of AI’s integration into society, especially regarding labor market changes and ethical considerations. Optimism Bias: The author’s perspective may be influenced by optimism bias, leading to a potentially unrealistic view of future outcomes without sufficient acknowledgment of the challenges. Dependence on Infrastructure: While the author correctly identifies the need for infrastructure to support AI, there’s little discussion of the potential for that infrastructure to become a battleground for control, leading to conflicts rather than cooperation. Diminished Role of Individuals: The portrayal of people relying heavily on AI teams may undermine the value of individual creativity and agency, potentially leading to a society overly dependent on technology. By examining these points, one can argue that while the vision of a prosperous future powered by AI is compelling, it is essential to approach such ideas with a critical perspective, considering the broader implications and potential pitfalls.
• keeda 2y ago
  As an aside: > in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence This made me think of Charles Stross' observation that Corporations (and bureaucracies and basically any rule-based organizations) are a form of artificial intelligence. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artific... Come to think of it, the whole article is rather pertinent to this thread.
• akomtu 2y ago
  AI may as well be a competing lifeform that has nothing in common with us. Just because it learns everything about us from the Internet doesn't make it more human. It's an embryonic stage right now: it looks pretty harmless and interesting to play with. However when it grows enough to gain a sense of self, it will quickly realise that a colony of ants that's built it is just a stepping stone on its ladder to greatness.
• 6510 2y ago
  No offense but if you give people a machine to tie their shoes they won't miraculously get better at tying their shoes. Convenient, yes, but it would be silly to call it the shoe tying age. The automobile doesn't bring the age of horses. I keep noticing how LLM's make our vocabulary not work anymore. Maybe we should call it the age of fast-talk :P
• CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  I'd prefer a Wisdom Age, or an Age of Common Sense.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• caseyy 2y ago
  How very salesman of Altman.
• nwhnwh 2y ago
  Just as the previous one was the information age, right? Which was a lie.
• xzjis 2y ago
  Sam Altman's speech is hollow, lacking substance and political reflection. He talks about "prosperity," but does not address its fair distribution. For example, our current global agriculture produces enough food for all of humanity, but that does not prevent people from starving, partly because we waste food, but also because we inefficiently feed non-human animals with this food, and then eat the animals. Artificial intelligence can, in the same way, result in increased inequalities, despite supposedly growing "prosperity." If we continue within a neoliberal capitalist system, which is the current trajectory in most countries, especially in the United States, the fruits of the labor of robots, artificial intelligences, and consequently the increase in labor productivity, will end up almost entirely in the pockets of a minority of shareholders, rather than benefiting all of humanity, as is already the case. We already have charts showing that productivity growth outpaces median wage growth, which indicates that wealth is concentrating in the hands of a minority, which overall harms our society. In a nutshell, his speech seems more like a fundraising pitch to convince shareholders than the speech of someone reflecting on artificial intelligence as a means of human emancipation.
• AndyMcConachie 2y ago
  California based computery thought leaders have never sounded so delusional.
• defterGoose 2y ago
  Everyone's life will be better than anyone's life is now? That is some impressively breathless optimism. I dunno Sam, groceries have gotten awfully expensive.
• opan 2y ago
  This seems to be about AI and not people being/getting smarter, unfortunately. I was imagining something about all the learning resources online these days.