4 ms·

It's fine, Sam's bulletproof plan is to build AGI (how hard could it be) and then ask the AGI how they can make a return on their investments. https://www.thre

It's fine, Sam's bulletproof plan is to build AGI (how hard could it be) and then ask the AGI how they can make a return on their investments. https://www.threads.net/@nixcraft/post/C5vj0naNlEq https://www.threads.net/@nixcraft/post/C5vj0naNlEq If they haven't built AGI yet that just means you should give them more billions so they can build the AGI. You wouldn't want your earlier investments to go to waste, right?

baq 2y ago
Honestly, it isn't a bad plan at all. Assuming money even makes sense in a world with AGI, that is.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  In the Star Trek/Culture/Commonwealth equally distributed, benevolent AI, sure. In the I’ve-got-mine reality, I assume only the select few can speak with the AI and use it to control the serfs.
  - baq 2y ago
    I mean, it isn't a bad plan for VCs. Never said it's a good plan for us peasants. My opinion of sama is 'selling utopia, implementing dystopia' and that's assuming he's playing clean, which he obviously isn't. As for a post-money world, if AGI can do every economically viable thing better than any human, the rational economic agent will at the very least let go all humans from all jobs.
  - philipkglass 2y ago
    There's no future where OpenAI makes everyone else a "serf" though. In 1948 certain Americans imagined that the US could rule the Earth because it got the atomic bomb first, and they naively imagined that other countries would take a generation to catch up. In reality the USSR had its own atomic bomb by 1949. That's what the competition with OpenAI looks like to me. There are at least three other American companies with near-peer models plus strong open-weights models coming from multiple countries. No single institution or country is going to end up with a ruling-the-Earth lead in AI.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      I am not thinking some better LLM, but a genuine AI capable of original thought. Vastly superior capabilities to a human. A super intelligence which could silently sabotage competitor systems preventing the key breakthrough to make their own AI. One which could manipulate markets, hack every system, design Terminator robots, etc Fanciful, yes, but that is the AI fantasy.
    - austhrow743 2y ago
      America not using its nuclear advantage to secure its nuclear advantage doesn’t mean it couldn’t have.
    - est31 2y ago
      In many ways the USA does rule the earth now. The Grand Area is big. With AI, I think there is extremely strong power laws that benefit the top performing models. The best model can attract the most users, which then attracts the most capital, most data, and best researchers to make an even better model. So while there is no hard moat, one only needs to hold the pole position until the competition runs out of money. Also, even if no single AI company will rule the earth, if AI turns out to be useful, the AI companies might get a chunk of the profits from the additional usefulness. If the usefulness is sufficiently large, the chunk doesn't have to be large percentually to be large in absolute terms.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
The funny thing about that statement is that if it actually does become true, all of those VCs (and Altman himself), whose job is ostensibly to find the optimal uses for capital, would immediately become obsolete. Heck, the whole idea that capitalism could just continue along in its current form if true AGI existed is pretty laughable.
- benterix 2y ago
  There are so many things wrong in this statement (starting with "immediately"). Let's assume they built a system they claim is AGI. Let's assume its energy consumption is smaller than that of a small country. Let's assume that we can verify it's AGI. Let's assume its intelligence is higher than average human. That's many "ifs" and I omitted quite a few. Now, the question is: would you trust it? As a human, a manager, a president? With the current generation, I treat is as a dumb but quick typist, it can create code much faster than I can, but the responsibility to verify it all is entirely on me. We would need decades of proof such an AGI is reliable in order to actually start trusting it - and even then, I'm not sure how safe it would be.
  - xvector 2y ago
    If anyone in the thread has used o1 or the real-time voice tools, it's pretty clear AGI is here already, so we are really talking about ASI. You have no option but to trust an ASI as it is all-powerful by definition. If you don't trust ASI, your only option is to prevent it from existing to begin with. Edit: please note that AGI ≠ "human intelligence," just a general intelligence (that may exceed humans in some areas and fall behind in others.)
    - flunhat 2y ago
      > please note that AGI ≠ "human intelligence," just a general intelligence (that may exceed humans in some areas and fall behind in others.) By this definition a calculator would be an AGI. (Behold -- a man!)
      - 2y ago
giarc 2y ago
How old is that though? They seem to be making revenue pretty well now, so I suspect this might be quite old?
- lxgr 2y ago
  Revenue isn't profit. They're burning money at an impressive rate: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt-investors-funding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt... I wouldn't even be surprised if they were losing money on paying ChatGPT users on inference compute alone, and that isn't even factoring in the development of new models. There was an interesting article here (can't find the link unfortunately) that was arguing that model training costs should be accounted for as operating costs, not investments, since last year's model is essentially a total write-off, and to stay competitive, an AI company needs to continue training newer frontier models essentially continuously.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Training costs scale to infinite users making them a perfect moat even if they need to keep updating it. Success would be 10-100x current users at which point training costs at the current scale just don’t matter. Really their biggest risk is total compute costs falling too quickly or poor management.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      The potential user base seems quite finite to me, even under most optimistic assumptions.
      - Retric 2y ago
        Not everyone is going to pay 20$/month, but an optimistic trajectory is they largely replace search engines while acting as a back end for a huge number of companies. I don’t think it’s very likely, but think of it like an auction. In a room with 100 people 99 of them should think the winner overpaid. In general most people should feel a given startup was overvalued and only looking back will some of these deals look like a good investment.
queuebert 2y ago
AGI's answer will be easy: hyperinflation. Kills many birds with one stone.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  The answer would need to be "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" for these valuations to make sense.
  - HPMOR 2y ago
    Even before reading your username I could've kissed you <3 Asimov
    - cryptonector 2y ago
      The Last Question is a wonderful short story. One of my favorites.
cryptonector 2y ago
Reminds me of Stanislav Lem's The Phools.

baq 2y ago

Honestly, it isn't a bad plan at all. Assuming money even makes sense in a world with AGI, that is.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
In the Star Trek/Culture/Commonwealth equally distributed, benevolent AI, sure. In the I’ve-got-mine reality, I assume only the select few can speak with the AI and use it to control the serfs.
- baq 2y ago
  I mean, it isn't a bad plan for VCs. Never said it's a good plan for us peasants. My opinion of sama is 'selling utopia, implementing dystopia' and that's assuming he's playing clean, which he obviously isn't. As for a post-money world, if AGI can do every economically viable thing better than any human, the rational economic agent will at the very least let go all humans from all jobs.
- philipkglass 2y ago
  There's no future where OpenAI makes everyone else a "serf" though. In 1948 certain Americans imagined that the US could rule the Earth because it got the atomic bomb first, and they naively imagined that other countries would take a generation to catch up. In reality the USSR had its own atomic bomb by 1949. That's what the competition with OpenAI looks like to me. There are at least three other American companies with near-peer models plus strong open-weights models coming from multiple countries. No single institution or country is going to end up with a ruling-the-Earth lead in AI.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    I am not thinking some better LLM, but a genuine AI capable of original thought. Vastly superior capabilities to a human. A super intelligence which could silently sabotage competitor systems preventing the key breakthrough to make their own AI. One which could manipulate markets, hack every system, design Terminator robots, etc Fanciful, yes, but that is the AI fantasy.
  - austhrow743 2y ago
    America not using its nuclear advantage to secure its nuclear advantage doesn’t mean it couldn’t have.
  - est31 2y ago
    In many ways the USA does rule the earth now. The Grand Area is big. With AI, I think there is extremely strong power laws that benefit the top performing models. The best model can attract the most users, which then attracts the most capital, most data, and best researchers to make an even better model. So while there is no hard moat, one only needs to hold the pole position until the competition runs out of money. Also, even if no single AI company will rule the earth, if AI turns out to be useful, the AI companies might get a chunk of the profits from the additional usefulness. If the usefulness is sufficiently large, the chunk doesn't have to be large percentually to be large in absolute terms.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

The funny thing about that statement is that if it actually does become true, all of those VCs (and Altman himself), whose job is ostensibly to find the optimal uses for capital, would immediately become obsolete. Heck, the whole idea that capitalism could just continue along in its current form if true AGI existed is pretty laughable.

benterix 2y ago
There are so many things wrong in this statement (starting with "immediately"). Let's assume they built a system they claim is AGI. Let's assume its energy consumption is smaller than that of a small country. Let's assume that we can verify it's AGI. Let's assume its intelligence is higher than average human. That's many "ifs" and I omitted quite a few. Now, the question is: would you trust it? As a human, a manager, a president? With the current generation, I treat is as a dumb but quick typist, it can create code much faster than I can, but the responsibility to verify it all is entirely on me. We would need decades of proof such an AGI is reliable in order to actually start trusting it - and even then, I'm not sure how safe it would be.
- xvector 2y ago
  If anyone in the thread has used o1 or the real-time voice tools, it's pretty clear AGI is here already, so we are really talking about ASI. You have no option but to trust an ASI as it is all-powerful by definition. If you don't trust ASI, your only option is to prevent it from existing to begin with. Edit: please note that AGI ≠ "human intelligence," just a general intelligence (that may exceed humans in some areas and fall behind in others.)
  - flunhat 2y ago
    > please note that AGI ≠ "human intelligence," just a general intelligence (that may exceed humans in some areas and fall behind in others.) By this definition a calculator would be an AGI. (Behold -- a man!)
    - 2y ago

giarc 2y ago

How old is that though? They seem to be making revenue pretty well now, so I suspect this might be quite old?

lxgr 2y ago
Revenue isn't profit. They're burning money at an impressive rate: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt-investors-funding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt... I wouldn't even be surprised if they were losing money on paying ChatGPT users on inference compute alone, and that isn't even factoring in the development of new models. There was an interesting article here (can't find the link unfortunately) that was arguing that model training costs should be accounted for as operating costs, not investments, since last year's model is essentially a total write-off, and to stay competitive, an AI company needs to continue training newer frontier models essentially continuously.
- Retric 2y ago
  Training costs scale to infinite users making them a perfect moat even if they need to keep updating it. Success would be 10-100x current users at which point training costs at the current scale just don’t matter. Really their biggest risk is total compute costs falling too quickly or poor management.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    The potential user base seems quite finite to me, even under most optimistic assumptions.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Not everyone is going to pay 20$/month, but an optimistic trajectory is they largely replace search engines while acting as a back end for a huge number of companies. I don’t think it’s very likely, but think of it like an auction. In a room with 100 people 99 of them should think the winner overpaid. In general most people should feel a given startup was overvalued and only looking back will some of these deals look like a good investment.

queuebert 2y ago

AGI's answer will be easy: hyperinflation. Kills many birds with one stone.

Mistletoe 2y ago
The answer would need to be "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" for these valuations to make sense.
- HPMOR 2y ago
  Even before reading your username I could've kissed you <3 Asimov
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    The Last Question is a wonderful short story. One of my favorites.

cryptonector 2y ago

Reminds me of Stanislav Lem's The Phools.