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It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

• kopirgan 2y ago
  I generally don't take anyone other than Leon at his word. \s
• DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
  > Last week, CEO Sam Altman published an online manifesto titled “The Intelligence Age.” In it, he declares that the AI revolution is on the verge of unleashing boundless prosperity and radically improving human life. /s
• bediger4000 2y ago
  This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles. I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.
  • MailleQuiMaille 2y ago
    >Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. Is it even possible ? Like, don't you know the political inclination of any website/journal you read ? I feel like this search of "The Objective Truth" is just a chimera. I'd rather articles combine pros and cons of everything they discuss tbh
    • Moto7451 2y ago
      There’s a difference between having natural human biases you try to avoid when reporting by using the usual context sentence (where, when, to whom something was stated), quote, appositive denoting speaker, quote format and writing “this guy is full of crap” or “you really need to believe this person” while cherry picking statements. You can easily find examples of each. Both NYT and Slate are considered left leaning and at the same time have been the professional stomping grounds of right leaning writers that started their own media companies that are not left leaning. Everyone has a bias and they don’t have to work somewhere with that same bias, especially if you just stick to the paper’s style guide. On the same substance the two media outlets present the same topic very differently. Sometimes I appreciate the Slate format for the author’s candor and view being injected (like being pointed on Malcom Gladwell). Sometimes I just want to know the facts as clearly stated as possible (I don’t care if the author doesn’t believe in climate change, tell me what happened when North Carolina flooded).
    • smogcutter 2y ago
      Yes, you’ve rediscovered the curriculum of a journalism 101 class.
      • Aeolun 2y ago
        So are you saying there are a lot of journalists that never studied, or did they just never pay attention in class? Because articles that actually do that are few and far between.
  • Dalewyn 2y ago
    A journalist's job is to journal something, exactly like how NTFS keeps a journal of what happens. A journalist doing anything other than journaling is not a journalist. So people getting quoted verbatim is perfectly fine. If the quoted turns out to be a liar, that's just part of the journal.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • llamaimperative 2y ago
      You’re describing a PR representative. Simply the decision of what to cover is inherently selective and driven by an individual’s and a culture’s priorities.
    • i80and 2y ago
      That sounds more like stenography than anything else
    • bee_rider 2y ago
      I don’t think that’s right. First off, we don’t generally define jobs based on the closest computer analogy (we would be unhappy if the loggers returned with a list of things that happened in the woods, rather than a bunch of wood). The journalist’s job is to describe what actually is happening, and to provide enough context for readers to understand it. Some bias will inevitably creep in, because they can’t possibly describe every event that has ever happened to their subject. But for example if they are interviewing somebody who usually lies, it would be more accurate to at least include a small note about that.
      • Dalewyn 2y ago
        >The journalist’s job is to describe what actually is happening, and to provide enough context for readers to understand it. The former is a journalist's job, the latter is the reader's concern and not the journalist. One of the reasons I consider journalism a cancer upon humanity is because journalists can't just write down "it is 35 degrees celsius today at 2pm", but rather "you won't believe how hot it is". Just journal down what the hell happens literally and plainly, we as readers can and should figure out the rest. NTFS doesn't interject opinions and clickbait into its journal, and neither should proper journalists.
  • Apreche 2y ago
    It’s possible to insert a few sentences factually accounting for a person’s character without inserting a subjective judgement of character. For example you could say: Joey JoeJoe, billionaire CEO, who notably said horrible things, was convicted of some crimes, and ate three babies, was quoted as saying “machine learning is just so awesome”. There, you didn’t inject a judgement. You accurately quoted the subject. You gave the reader enough contextual information about the person so they know how much to trust or not-trust the quote.
    • secondcoming 2y ago
      "Nelson Mandela, convicted of some crimes, calls for World Peace"
    • cogman10 2y ago
      This does often happen (depending on the leaning of the newspaper, it's omitted if the figure is someone supported and emphasized otherwise). A major problem, though, is headlines don't and can't carry this context. And those are the things most people read. The best you'll get is "Joey JoeJoe says machine learning is just so awesome" or at best "Joey JoeJoe comments on ML. The 3rd word will blow you away!".
    • afavour 2y ago
      Extreme examples are easy. But you can pick and choose which facts to present to the reader to affect the judgement they’re making. It would be trivially easy to paint Bill Gates as either a legendary humanitarian or a ruthless capitalist egotist to someone that’s never heard of him.
    • VonGallifrey 2y ago
      > who notably said horrible things How do you objectively decide which statements are horrible and which aren't? The other stuff you listed are facts, but this one would be subjective. That isn't just providing contextual information, but adding personal bias into the reporting.
  • PKop 2y ago
    Or more likely, the journalists don't know any better and believe the AI hype sold to them and promote it of their own accord.
• goles 2y ago
  https://archive.is/lDcx5 https://archive.is/lDcx5
• cyanydeez 2y ago
  Better headline : It's too late to stop taking Sam Altman at his word See same with Elon Musk. Money turns genius to smooth brained egomaniacal idiots. See same with Steve Jobs
  • api 2y ago
    Money removes social feedback. You end up surrounded with bobble heads telling you how genius you are… because they want your money. This is terrible for human psychology. It’s almost like a kind of solitary confinement — solitary in the sense that you are utterly deprived of meaningful rich human contact.
    • yownie 2y ago
      it's this more than anything else I wish the general public would understand, those same bobble heads that surround celebrities and eventually warp all sense of costs of common everyday items. We often only see the end result of this when so-and-so celebrity declares bankruptcy and the masses cheer. In reality they've been vampire sucked dry by close family / friends / salesmen for years and didn't know it.
    • aomix 2y ago
      I think about this comparison sometimes https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888?lang=en https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888?lan... "Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day" Solitary confinement is a great comparison. But also not existing in the same reality is 99.99% of the population must really warp you too.
    • throwaway42668 2y ago
      Sam Altman is not a hapless victim at the mercy of the isolating effects of his financial success. He was an opportunistic, amoral sociopath before he was rich, and the system he reaps advantage from strongly selects for hucksters of that particular ilk more than anything else. He's just another Kalanick, Neumann, Holmes or Bankman-Fried.
• deepsquirrelnet 2y ago
  > At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future I think the job of a CEO is not to tell you the truth, and the truth is probably more often than not, the opposite. What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? What is OpenAI worth then?
  • Aeolun 2y ago
    If you need someone to tell you the truth you don’t need a CEO. What you need a CEO for is to sell you (and your investors) a vision.
    • llamaimperative 2y ago
      This is silly. Delusion kills more companies than facing reality with honesty does.
    • hn72774 2y ago
      Without the truth, a vision is a hallucination. It saddens me how easily someone with money and influence can elevate themselves to a quasi religious figure. In reality, this vision you speak of is more like the blind leading the blind.
      • squarefoot 2y ago
        > It saddens me how easily someone with money and influence can elevate themselves to a quasi religious figure. If so many people wouldn't fall for claims without any proof, religions themselves would not exist.
      • ergonaught 2y ago
        All knowledge is incomplete and partial, which is another way of saying "wrong", therefore all "vision" is hallucination. This discussion would not be happening without hallucinators with a crowd sharing their delusion. Humanity generally doesn't find the actual truth sufficiently engaging to accomplish much beyond the needs of immediate survival.
• thelastgallon 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. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot." - Sam Altman, https://ia.samaltman.com/ https://ia.samaltman.com/ Reality: AI needs unheard amounts of energy. This will make climate significantly worse.
  • golergka 2y ago
    So far it seems that AIs appetite for energy might finally pushing western countries back to nuclear, which would make climate significantly better.
    • collingreen 2y ago
      Nuclear and everything we were using before is probably not better than just everything we were using before. Hopefully we can continue to reduce high emission or otherwise damaging power production even while power requirements grow.
      • golergka 2y ago
        Power means making things and providing services that people want, that make their lives better. Which is a good thing. We need more power, not less.
        • g-b-r 2y ago
          I guess that global warming is a good thing, then
        • layer8 2y ago
          Almost all power consumed ends up as thermal energy in the environment.
          • 2y ago
• twelve40 2y ago
  well the good news is all that stuff comes with an expiration date, after which we will know if this is our new destiny or yet another cloud of smoke. This is a good reminder: > Prominent AI figures were among the thousands of people who signed an open letter in March 2023 to urge a six-month pause in the development of large language models (LLMs) so that humanity would have time to address the social consequences of the impending revolution In 2024, ChatGPT is a weird toy, my barber demands paper cash only (no bitcoin or credit cards or any of that phone nonsense, this is Silicon Valley), I have to stand in line at USPS and DMV with mindless paper-shuffling human robots, marveling at humiliating stupidity of manual jobs, robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always. Let's check again in a "coupe of thousand days" i guess!
  • namaria 2y ago
    I've said this before, at the root of all these technological promises lies a perpetual motion machine. They're all selling the reversal of thermodynamics. Any system complex enough to be useful has to be embedded in an ever more complex system. The age of mobile phone internet rests on the shoulders of an immense and enormously complex supply chain. LLMs are capturing low entropy from data online and distilling it for you while producing a shitton of entropy on the backend. All the water and energy dissipated at data centers, all the supply chains involved in building GPUs at the rate we are building. There will be no magical moment when it's gonna yield more low entropy than what we put in on the other side as training data, electricity and clean water. When companies sell ideas like 'AGI' or 'self driving cars' they are essentially promising you can do away with the complexity surrounding a complex solution. They are promising they can deliver low entropy on a tap without paying for it in increased entropy elsewhere. It's physically impossible. You want human intelligence to do work, you need to deal with all the complexities of psychology, economics and politics. You want complex machines to do autonomous work, you need an army of people behind it. What AGI promises is, you can replace the army of people with another more complex machine. It's a big bald faced lie. You can't do away with the complexity. Someone will have to handle it.
    • ben_w 2y ago
      > It's physically impossible Your brain is proof to the contrary. AGI means different things to everyone, but a human brain definitely counts as "general intelligence", that implemented in silicon is enough to get basically all the things promised by AGI: if that's done at the 20 watts per brain that biology manages, then all of humanity can be simulated within the power envelope of the USA electrical grid… three times over.
• thwg 2y ago
  TSMC has stopped way earlier.
• austinkhale 2y ago
  There are legit criticisms of Sam Altman that can be levied but none of them are in this article. This is just reductive nonsense. The arguments are essentially: 1. The technology has plateaued, not in reality, but in the perception of the average layperson over the last two years. 2. Sam _only_ has a record as a deal maker, not a physicist. 3. AI can sometimes do bad things & utilizes a lot of energy. I normally really enjoy the Atlantic since their writers at least try to include context & nuance. This piece does neither.
  • BearOso 2y ago
    I think LLM technology, not necessarily all of CNN, has plateaued. We've used up all the human discourse, so there's nothing to train it on. It's like fossil fuels. They took billions of years to create and centuries to consume. We can't just create more. Another problem is that the data sets are becoming contaminated, creating a reinforcement cycle that makes LLMs trained on more recent data worse. My thoughts are that it won't get any better with this method of just brute-forcing data into a model like everyone's been doing. There needs to be some significant scientific innovations. But all anybody is doing is throwing money at copying the major players and applying some distinguishing flavor.
    • senko 2y ago
      Actually, the sources we had (everything scraped from the internet) turns out to be pretty bad. Imagine not going to school and instead learning everything from random blog posts or reddit comments. You could do it if you read a lot, but it's clearly suboptimal. That's why OpenAI, and probably every other serious AI company, is investing huge amounts in generating (proprietary) datasets.
      • chuckledog 2y ago
        GitHub, especially filtered by starred repos, is a pretty high quality dataset.
    • theptip 2y ago
      What data are you using to back up this belief? Progress on benchmarks continues to improve (see GPT-o1). The claim that there is nothing left to train on is objectively false. The big guys are building synthetic training sets, moving to multimodal, and are not worried about running out of data. o1 shows that you can also throw more inference compute at problems to improve performance, so it gives another dimension to scale models on.
• wicndhjfdn 2y ago
  Our economy runs on market makers AI, Blockchain, whether they are what they seem in the long run is beside the point. They're sole purpose is to generate economic activity. Nobody really cares if they pan out.
• fnordpiglet 2y ago
  While I agree anyone taking sam Altman at his word is and always was a fool, this opinion piece by a journalism major at a journalism school giving his jaded view of technology is the tired trope that is obsessed with the fact reality in the present is always reality in the present. The fact I drive a car that’s largely - if not entirely - autonomous in highly complex situations, is fueled by electricity alone, using a super computer to play music from an almost complete back catalog of everything released at my voices command, on my way to my final cancer treatment for a cancer that ten years ago was almost always fatal, while above me constellations of satellites cooperate via lasers to provide global high speed wireless internet being deployed by dozens upon dozens of private rocket launches as we prepare the final stretch towards interplanetary spaceships, over which computers can converse in true natural language with clear human voices with natural intonation…. Well. Sorry, I don’t have to listen to Sam Altman to see we live in a magical era of science fiction. The most laughable part of the article is where they point at the fact that in the past TWO YEARS we haven’t gone from “OMG we’ve achieved near perfect NLP” to “Deep thought tell us the answer to life the universe and everything” as some sort of huge failure is patently absurd. If you took Altman at his word on that one, you probably also scanned your eye ball for fake money. The truth though is that the rate of change in the products his company is making is still breath taking - the text to speech tech in the latest advanced voice release (recognizing it’s not actually text to speech but something profoundly cooler, but that’s lost on journalism majors teaching journalism majors like the author) puts to shame the last 30 years of TTS. This alone would have been enough to have a fairly significant enterprise selling IVR and other software. When did we go from enthralled by the rate of progress to bored that it’s not fast enough? That what we dream and what we achieve aren’t always 1:1 but that’s still amazing? I get that when we put down the devices and switch off the noise we are still bags of mostly water, our back hurts, we aren’t as popular as we wish we were, our hair is receding, maybe we need invisiline but flossing that tooth every day is easier and cheaper, and all the other shit that makes life much less glamorous than they sold us in the dot com boom, or nanotech, etc, as they call out in the article. But the dot com boom did succeed. When I started at early Netscape no one used the internet. We spun the stories of the future this article bemoans to our advantage. And it was messier than the stories in the end. But now -everyone- uses the internet for everything. Nanotechnology permeates industry, science, tech, and our every day life. But the thing about amazing tech that sounds so dazzling when it’s new is -it blends into the background- if it truly is that amazingly useful. That’s not a problem with the vision of the future. It’s the fact that the present will never stop being the present and will never feel like some illusory gauzy vision you thought it might be. But you still use dot coms (this journalism major assessment of tech was published on a dot com and we are responding on a dot com) and still live in a world powered by nanotechnology, and AI promised in TWO YEARS is still mind boggling to anyone who is thinking clearly about what the goal posts for NLP and AI were five years ago.
• hnadhdthrow123 2y ago
  Will Human ego, greed, selfishness lead to our destruction? (AI or not) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35364833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35364833
  • m2024 2y ago
    Hopefully, with as little collateral damage to the remaining life on this planet.
• flenserboy 2y ago
  that ship sailed a long time ago
• melenaboija 2y ago
  It is weird that one of the most valued markets (openai, microsoft investments, nvidia gpus, ...) is based on a stack that is available to anyone that can pay for the resources to train the models and that in my opinion still has to deliver to the expectations that have been created around it. Not saying it is a bubble but something seems imbalanced here.
  • throwaway42668 2y ago
    It's okay to say it. It's a bubble. It was just the next in line to be inflated after crypto.
    • superluserdo 2y ago
      I wouldn't write it off as a bubble, since that usually implies little to no underlying worth. Even if no future technical progress is made, it has still taken a permanent and growing chunk of the use case for conventional web search, which is an $X00bn business.
      • thegeomaster 2y ago
        A bubble doesn't necessarily imply no underlying worth. The dot-com bubble hit legendary proportions, and the same underlying technology (the Internet) now underpins the whole civilization. There is clearly something there, but a bubble has inflated the expectations beyond reason, and the deflation will not be kind on any player still left playing (in the sense of AI winter), not even the actually-valuable companies that found profitable niches.
    • KaiserPro 2y ago
      I mean OpenAI is a bubble, if it pops, its big enough to take the rest of tech with it.
      • throwaway42668 2y ago
        Alternatively, it might make capital available to other things. It's at least theoretically possible that all the liquidity and leverage in the top of the market could tire itself of chasing the next tulip mania. For instance, $6 Billion could have gone into climate tech instead of ElizaX. My problem with these dumb hype cycles is all the other stuff that gets starved in their wake.
• photochemsyn 2y ago
  Of course no corporate executive can be taken at their word, unless that word is connected to a legally binding contract, and even then, the executive may try to break the terms of the contract, and may have political leverage over the court system which would bias the result of any effort to bring them to account. This is not unusual - politicians cannot be taken at their word, government bureaucrats cannot be taken at their word, and corporate media propagandists cannot be taken at their word. The fact that the vast majority of human beings will fabricate, dissemble, lie, scheme, manipulate etc. if they see a real personal advantage from doing so is the entire reason the whole field of legally binding contract law was developed.
• simpaticoder 2y ago
  A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason. The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free. How would the car industry change if someone made a 3D printer that could make any part, including custom parts, with just electricity and air? It is a sea change to manufacturers and distributors, but there would still be a need for mechanics and engineers to specify the correct parts, in the correct order, and use the parts to good purpose. It is easy to imagine that the inventor of such a technology would probably start talking about printing entire cars - and if you don't think about it, it makes sense. But if you think about it, there are problems. Making the component of a solution is quite different than composing a solution. LLMs exist in the same conditions. Being able to generate code/text/images is of no use to someone who doesn't know what to do with it. I also think this limitation is a practical, tacit solution to the alignment problem.
  • vbezhenar 2y ago
    There are plenty of plastic parts in cars and you can print them with 3D printer. I don't think that anything really changed because of that.
    • edgyquant 2y ago
      Because those are irrelevant to the point being made in the GP
      • paulyy_y 2y ago
        GP? What happened to the good old "OP"?
        • rendall 2y ago
          OP is original poster (or post), to which we are not referring.
        • taiduoxiaoqi 2y ago
• est 2y ago
  sama is best match with today's LLM because of the "scaling law" like Zuckerberg described. Everyone is burning cash to race to the end, but the billion dollar question is, what is the end for transformer based LLM? Is there an end at all?
  • vbezhenar 2y ago
    The end is super-human reasoning along with super-human intuition, based on humanity knowledge.
    • plaidfuji 2y ago
      Sure, and the end of biotech is perfect control of the human body from pre-birth until death, but innovation has many bottlenecks. I would be very surprised if the bottlenecks to LLM performance are compute and model architecture. My guess is it’s the data.
    • Mistletoe 2y ago
      Are you sure you can get to that with transformers? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SkcM4hwgH3AP6iqjs/can-you-get-agi-from-a-transformer https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SkcM4hwgH3AP6iqjs/can-you-ge...
    • meroes 2y ago
      And some Mongols, Romans, etc probably said continually expanding their boarders would give them comparable contemporary heights.
• lolinder 2y ago
  To recap OpenAI's decisions over the past year: * They burned up the hype for GPT-5 on 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can't quickly replicate. * They dissolved the safety team. * They switched to for profit and are poised to give Altman equity. * All while hyping AGI more than ever. All of this suggests to me that Altman is in short-term exit preparation mode, not planning for AGI or even GPT-5. If he had another next generation model on the way he wouldn't have let the media call his "discount GPT-4" and "tree of thought" models GPT-5. If he sincerely thought AGI was on the horizon he wouldn't be eyeing the exit, and he likely wouldn't have gotten rid of the superalignment team. His actions are best explained as those of a startup CEO who sees the hype cycle he's been riding coming to an end and is looking to exit before we hit the trough of disillusionment. None of this is to say that AI hasn't already changed a lot about the world we live in and won't continue to change things more. We will eventually hit the slope of enlightenment, but my bet is that Altman will have exited by then.
  • Analemma_ 2y ago
    Yeah, everything from OpenAI in the last year suggests they have nothing left up their sleeve, they know the competition is going to catch up very soon, and they're trying to cash out as fast as possible before the market notices. (In the Gell-Mann amnesia sense, make sure you take careful note of who was going "OAI has AGI internally!!!" and other such nonsense so you can not pay them any mind in the future)
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • lrg10aa 2y ago
    It does look like an exit. Employees were given the chance to cash in some of their shares at $86 billion valuation. Altman is getting shares. New "investors" are Microsoft and Nvidia. Nvidia will get the money back as revenue and fuel the hype for other customers. Microsoft will probably pay in Azure credits. If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably means bankruptcy. But at that stage all parties have already got what they wanted.
• vasilipupkin 2y ago
  Don't listen to David Karpfs of the world. Did he predict chat gpt? if you asked him in 2018, he would have said AI will never write a story now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed.
  • throwgfgfd25 2y ago
    > now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed. You really cannot.
    • ComplexSystems 2y ago
      You can even take an enormous sample of articles that he has written and fine tune a model on it, so that it really sounds like him.
      • throwgfgfd25 2y ago
        And it still won't produce the type of articles he produces. Because at the very least he is capable of writing new articles from something the LLM doesn't have: his brain. Seriously. This is just the parrot thing again. The fact that AI proponents confuse the form of words with authorial intent is mindbending to me. Wouldn't have confused Magritte, I think.
        • javed6542 2y ago
          It would cost around $5 and about 5 hours of work to prove you wrong...
          • throwgfgfd25 2y ago
            You clearly, clearly do not understand what I am saying. But sure, waste your time and money making a parrot that, unlike the author it mimics, is incapable of introspection, reflection, intellectual evolution or simply changing its mind. Words are words. Writers are writers. Writers are not words. ETA: consider what would actually be necessary to prove me wrong. And when you hear back from David Karpf about his willingness to take part in that experiment, write a blog post about it and any results, post it to HN. I am sure people here will happily suggest topics for the articles. I, for example, would love to hear what your hypothetical ChatKarpf has to say about influences from his childhood that David Karpf has never written about, or things he believed at age five that aren't true and how that affects his writing now. Do you see what I mean? These aren't even particularly forced examples: writers draw on private stuff, internal thoughts, internal contradictions, all the time, consciously and unconsciously.
• nomilk 2y ago
  tl;dr author complains that Sam's predictions of the future of AI are inflated (but doesn't offer any of his own), and complains that AI tools that surprised us last year look mundane now. The article is written to appeal to people who want to feel clever casually slagging off and dismissing tech. > it appears to have plateaued. GPT-4 now looks less like the precursor to a superintelligence and more like … well, any other chatbot. What a pathetic observation. Does the author not recall how bad chatbots were pre-LLMs? What LLMs can do blows my mind daily. There might be some insufferable hype atm, but gees, the math and engineering behind LLMs is incredible, and it's not done yet - they're still improving from more compute alone, not even factoring in architecture discoveries and innovations!
  • raincole 2y ago
    > it appears to have plateaued. GPT-4 now looks less like the precursor to a superintelligence and more like … well, any other chatbot. This is such a ridiculous sentence. GPT-4 now looks like any other chatbot because the technology advanced so the other chatbots are smarter now as well. Somehow the author is trying to twist this as a bad thing.
    • asadotzler 2y ago
      If everyone can catch up so easily, OAI has no moat and SamA is further full of shit asserting that they do.
• latexr 2y ago
  Distorting the old Chinese proverb, “The best time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word was the first time he opened his mouth. The second best time is now”. We’ve known he’s a scammer for a long time. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
  • stonethrowaway 2y ago
    I would love to read a solid exposé of Worldcoin, but I don’t think I will get that from Buzzfeed or from The Atlantic. Both seemed to be agenda driven and hot headed. I’d like a more impartial breakdown ala AP-style news reporting.
    • throwintothesea 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • robertlagrant 2y ago
        > although you won't find, like... fascism in there (sorry if you're disappointed) I don't understand how HN can hit such highs sometimes, but also host nonsense like this.
        • iphoneisbetter 2y ago
          [dead]
      • CPLX 2y ago
        The Atlantic is run by Jeffrey Goldberg and owned by Laurene Powell Jobs. Of course these people have agendas, it’s not exactly a secret.
        • 2y ago
• klabb3 2y ago
  > Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics. Yes. We've been through this again and again. Technology does not follow potential. It follows incentive. (Also, “all of physics”? Wtf is he smoking?) > It’s much more pleasant fantasizing about a benevolent future AI, one that fixes the problems wrought by climate change, than dwelling upon the phenomenal energy and water consumption of actually existing AI today. I mean, everything good in life uses energy, that’s not AIs fault per se. However, we should absolutely evaluate tech anchored in the present, not the future. Especially with something we understand so poorly like emergent properties of AI. Even when there’s an expectation of rapid changes, the present is a much better proxy than yet-another sociopath with a god-complex whose job is to be a hype-man. Everyone’s predictions are garbage. At least the present is real.
• rubyfan 2y ago
  I sort of wish there was a filter for my life that would ignore everything AI (stories about AI, people talking about AI and of course content generated by AI). The world has become a less trustworthy place for a lot of reasons and AI is only making it worse, not better.
  • rand0mx1 2y ago
    https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
    • rubyfan 2y ago
      Thanks! Now I just need to filter my LinkedIn feed and the corporate AI leaders at work.
  • keiferski 2y ago
    Sounds like a good startup idea. Just be sure to use AI for this filter so you can get funded.
  • wslh 2y ago
    Do you use LLMs?
• KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
  Nobody is taking Sam Altman at his word lol, these ideas about intelligence have been believed for a long time in the tech world and the guy is just the best at monetizing them. People are pursuing this path because of a general conviction in these ideas of themselves, I guess to people like Atlantic writers Sam Altman is the first time they've encountered them but it really has nothing to do with Sam Altman.
  • Capricorn2481 2y ago
    > Nobody is taking Sam Altman at his word lol ITT: People taking Sam at his word.
  • danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    100% this. He isn't even saying anything novel (I mean that in a good way). On top of that, the advance in models for language and physical simulation based models (for protein prediction and weather forecasting as examples) has been so rapid and unexpected that even folks who were previously very skeptical of "AI" are believers - it ain't because Sam Altman is up there talking a lot. I went from AI skeptic to zealot in about 18 months, and I'm in good company.
  • KaiserPro 2y ago
    Someone is buying enough of his bullshit to invest a few billion into openAI. The problem is, when it pops, which it will, it'll fuck the economy.
  • lesuorac 2y ago
    People are taking Altman at his word. He was literally invited to congress to speak about AI safety. Sure, perhaps people that have a longer memory of the tech world don't trust him. That's actually not a lot of people. A lot of people just aren't following tech (like my in-laws).
• nottorp 2y ago
  The time to stop taking him seriously was when he started his "fear AI, give me the monopoly" campaign.
• richrichie 2y ago
  He seems like any other tech “evangelical” to me.
• jacknews 2y ago
  Does anyone take him at face value anyway? The other issue is that AI's 'boundless prosperity' is a little like those proposals to bring an asteroid made of gold back to earth. 20m tons, worth $XX trillion at current prices, etc. The point is, the gold price would plummet, at the same time as the asteroid, or well before, and the promised gains would not materialize. If AI could do everything, we would no longer be able (due to no-one having a job), let alone willing, to pay current prices for the work it would do, and so again, the promised financial gains would not materialize. Of course in both cases, there could be actual societal benefits - abundant gold, and abundant AI, but they don't translate directly to 'prosperity' IMHO.
• rsynnott 2y ago
  I mean, in general, if you’re taking CEOs at their word, and particularly CEOs of tech companies at their word, you’re gonna have a bad time. Tech companies, and their CEOs, predict all manner of grandiose nonsense all the time. Very little of it comes to pass, but through the miracle of cognitive biases some people do end up filtering out the stuff that doesn’t happen and declaring them visionary.
• bambax 2y ago
  > Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics. He predicts that we may have an all-powerful superintelligence “in a few thousand days.” It seems fair to say Altman has completed his Musk transformation. Some might argue it's inevitable. And indeed Bill Gates' books in the 90s made a lot of wild promises. But nothing that egregious.
  • yndoendo 2y ago
    Both of them remind me of Elizabeth Holmes. She ran Theranos through a promise of lies long enough they turned into fraud. So far Musk has been pushing the lies out continually to try and prevent any possible exposure to fraud. Like "Getting to Mars will save humanity" or the latest "We will never reach Mars unless Trump is president again". Then again, self driving cars are just around the corner, as stated in 2014 with a fraudulently staged video of their technology, that they just need to work the bugs out. Altman is making wild clams too with how Machine Learning will slow and reverse climate change while proving that the technology needs vast more resources, specially in power consumption, just to be market viable for business and personal usage. All three play off people's emotions to repress critical thinking. They are no different than the lying preachers, I can heal you with a touch of my hand, that use religion to gain power and wealth. The three above are just replacing religion with technology.
    • whamlastxmas 2y ago
      This is some really out there thinking, and I think you need to do some basic fact checking bc some of this just isn’t true
    • n2d4 2y ago
      The difference between those is that Musk and Altman make wrong predictions about the future; Holmes with Theranos made wrong statements about the present. One of them is illegal, the other isn't.
• m3kw9 2y ago
  The Atlantic is really going out of their way to hate on Altman. That publication has always been a bit of a whack job of an outfit
  • throwgfgfd25 2y ago
    > That publication has always been a bit of a whack job of an outfit This is a bizarre take about a 167-year-old, continuously published magazine.
    • FireBeyond 2y ago
      There's quite a number of posts here that seem determined to attack the integrity of The Atlantic... hm. Everything from "their writers are scared that they'll lose their jobs" to complaints about twenty year old articles not panning out correctly.
  • throwintothesea 2y ago
    The techbro whining about as staid a publication as the Atlantic is truly hilarious. They published some of the first pieces in support of abolition, and now you're upset that they're swinging at the richest grifter in Silicon Valley. Get a grip.
    • m3kw9 2y ago
      He brought us AI that is about to change almost everything, be grateful for the magic intelligence in the sky
    • throwgfgfd25 2y ago
      It also famously published As We May Think.
• thruway516 2y ago
  "Altman is no physicist. He is a serial entrepreneur, and quite clearly a talented one" Not sure the record supports that if you remove OpenAi which is a work-in-progress and supposedly not going too great at the moment. A talented 'tech whisperer' maybe?
  • wslh 2y ago
    Sam Altman is only 39 years old. Like it or not, it would be a fallacy to assume he's shown everything he's capable of. He likely has much more to contribute in his lifetime.
    • Barrin92 2y ago
      I feel I read that sentence a lot when Sam Bankman Fried was still the darling of the tech intelligentsia, but the closer you are to the huckster and moneyman corner of the spectrum rather than the actual research side the less true that statement is.
      • wslh 2y ago
        SBF was convicted for fraud, crossing legal and ethical lines that Sam Altman has not. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
        • martin82 2y ago
          Sam Altman is an even bigger fraud and he will cause significantly greater harm to the world.
• mppm 2y ago
  Around the time of the board coup and Sam's 7-trillion media tour, there were multiple, at the time somewhat credible, rumors of major breakthroughs at Open AI -- GPT5, Q*, and possibly another unnamed project with wow-factor. However, almost a year has passed, and OpenAI has only made incremental improvements public. So my question is: What does the AI rumor mill say about that? Was all that just hype-building, or is OpenAI holding back some major trump card for when they become a for-profit entity?
  • ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    All hype. Remember when the whole "oh we are so scared to release this model" happen back in the day and it was worse than GPT3? All of these doing the rounds of foreign governments and acting like artificial general intelligence is just around the corner is what got him this fundraising round today. It's all just games.
  • javed6542 2y ago
    probably just waiting for the election to be over before releasing the next gen models
  • minimaxir 2y ago
    Q* turned out to be GPT-o1, which was objectively overhyped.
• whoiscroberts 2y ago
  Any person that thinks “automating human thought” is good for humanity is evil.
• m3kw9 2y ago
  You all just sit back and not pick at every word he says, just sit calmly and let him cook. And he’s been cooking
• bhouston 2y ago
  Sam Allan has to be a promoter and true believer. It is his job to do that and he does have new tech that didn’t exist before and it is game changing. The issue is more that the company is hemorrhaging talent, and doesn’t have a competitive moat. But luckily this doesn’t affect most of us, rather it will only possibly harm his investors if it doesn’t work out. If he continues to have access to resources and can hire well and the core tech can progress to new heights, he will likely be okay.
• AndrewKemendo 2y ago
  OpenAI cant be working on AGI because they have no arc for production robotics controllers AGI cannot exist in a box that you can control. We figured that out 20 years ago. Could they start that? Sure theoretically. However they would have to massively pivot and nobody at OAI are robotics experts
• mrangle 2y ago
  I can't imagine taking The Atlantic seriously on anything. My word. You aren't actually supposed to read the endless ragebait. Contrary to the Atlantic's almost always intentionally misleading framing, the "dot com boom" did in fact go on to print trillions later and it is still printing them. After what was an ultimately marginal if account clearing dip for many. I say that as someone who would be deemed to be an Ai pessimist, by many. But its wildly early to declare anything to be "what it is" and only that, in terms of ultimate benefit. Just like it was and is wild to declare the dot com boom to be over.
  • arrobbiato 2y ago
    > I can't imagine taking The Atlantic seriously on anything. Agreed - I stopped taking The Atlantic seriously after their 2009 cover story, "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?"[1] To ignore CDOs, the Glass-Steagal repeal, the co-option of the ratings agencies and the dissolution of lending standards, and instead blame the Great Recession on a few obnoxious megapastors is to completely discard the magazine's credibility. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/did-christianity-cause-the-crash/307764/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/did-chr...
    • FireBeyond 2y ago
      Really, you can't see a connection between people promoting ever supernatural rewards for being money and prosperity-driven and stoking that fire right alongside rampant capitalism and reckless decisions on how to protect our financial and economic wellbeing? Especially when even some very very bright people still believe in imaginary creatures in the sky and use that to shape and guide their decision process? Maybe not "cause", but "contribute notably to".
      • arrobbiato 2y ago
        You might argue that faith, in its various manifestations, is the root of all economic distortions and malaises. That being said, no, I don’t think that a subset of evangelical Christianity caused or meaningfully contributed to the 2009 crash, since there are abundant facts and analyses to the contrary. To believe otherwise would be, ironically, an act of faith.
• throwintothesea 2y ago
  The Gang Learns That Normal People Don't Take Sam Altman Seriously
• tightbookkeeper 2y ago
  Journalists smell blood in the water. When times were looking better they gave him uncritical praise.
• theptip 2y ago
  The better reason to stop taking Altman at his word is on the subject of OpenAI building AGI “for the benefit of humanity”. Now that he’s restructuring the company to be a normal for-profit corp, with a handsome equity award for him, we should assume the normal monopoly-grabbing that we see from the other tech giants. If the dividend is simply going to the shareholder (and Altman personally) we should be much more skeptical about baking these APIs into the fabric of our society. The article is asinine; of course a tech CEO is going to paint a picture of the BHAG, the outcome that we get if we hit a home run. That is their job, and the structure of a growth company, to swing for giant wins. Pay attention to what happens if they hit. A miss is boring; some VCs lose some money and nothing much changes.
• xyst 2y ago
  Sam Altman is the modern version of a snake oil salesman
• nabla9 2y ago
  The field is extremely research oriented. You can't stay on top with good engineering and incremental development and refining. Google just paid over $2.4 billion to get Noam Shazeer back in the company to work with Gemini AI. Google has the deepest pool of AI researchers. Microsoft and Facebook are not far behind. OpenAI is losing researchers, they have maybe 1-2 years until they become Microsoft subsidiary.
  • xbar 2y ago
    You make it sound like AI researchers are in short supply.
    • danielmarkbruce 2y ago
      For almost all jobs X, "really competent X" are in exceedingly short supply.
      • xbar 2y ago
        That is certainly true. But the market began searching in earnest for "really competent X" in this field only about 2 years ago. Before that, it was a decidedly opt-in affair..
        • danielmarkbruce 2y ago
          Are you saying the average AI researcher isn't good? I'm not arguing with you, I just can't parse what you are saying here.
          • xbar 2y ago
            I'm saying that both the volume and upper bound are increasing, not becoming constrained.
    • nabla9 2y ago
      Good AI researchers and research teams are. The whole LLM era was started with the 2017 "Attention is all you need" paper by Google Brain/Research and nobody has done anything same magnitude since. Noam Shazeer was one of the authors.
• wg0 2y ago
  At the expense of irking many, I'd like to add Musk to the list if someone didn't already. From robotics, neurology, transport to everything in between - not a word should be taken as is.
• cowmix 2y ago
  I keep thinking about Sam Altman’s March ’23 interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast—this was after GPT-4’s release and before he was ousted as CEO. Two things he said really stuck with me: First, he mentioned wishing he was more into AI. While I appreciate the honesty, it was pretty off-putting. Here’s the CEO of a company building arguably the most consequential technology of our time, and he’s expressing apathy? That bugs me. Sure, having a dispassionate leader might have its advantages, but overall, his lack of enthusiasm left a bad taste in my mouth. Why IS he the CEO then? Second, he talked about going on a “world tour” to meet ChatGPT users and get their feedback. He actually mentioned meeting them in pubs, etc. That just sounded like complete BS. It felt like politician-level insincerity—I highly doubt he’s spoken with any end-users in a meaningful way. And one more thing: Altman being a well-known ‘prepper’ doesn’t sit well with me. No offense to preppers, but it gives me the impression he’s not entirely invested in civilization’s long-term prospects. Fine for a private citizen, but not exactly reassuring for the guy leading an organization that could accelerate its collapse.
  • Schiendelman 2y ago
    Hi there! I've done a huge amount of political organizing in my life, for common good - influencing governments to build tens of billions of dollars worth of electric rail infrastructure. I'm also a big prepper. It's important to understand that stigmatizing prepping is very dangerous - specifically to those who reject it. Whether it's a gas main break, a forest fire, an earthquake, or a sci-fi story, encouraging people to become resilient to disaster is incredibly beneficial for society as a whole, and very necessary for individuals. The vast, vast majority of people who do it are benefiting their entire community by doing so. Even, as much as I'm sure I'd dislike him if I met him, Sam Altman. Him being a prepper is good for us, at least indirectly, and possibly directly. Just look at the stories in NC right now - people who were ready to clear their own roads, people taking in others because they have months of food. Be careful not to ascribe values to behaviors like you're doing.
    • whamlastxmas 2y ago
      I had a prepper phase too and I’m as leftist and pro human as they come. It’s just fun to organize and plan and has nothing to do with alex jones selling me on the frogs turning gay. And if there’s ever a natural disaster (like I just lost water for a week due to a hurricane) it’s nice to have things like 55 gallons of fresh water on standby.
• dmitrygr 2y ago
  Someone took that grifter at his word ever? Haha! Wait you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder. Hahahaha
  • GolfPopper 2y ago
    Apparently a whole lot of people think the guy who's running a <checks notes> for-proft eyeball-scanning cryptocurrency, "for the benefit of humanity" is very serious when he says his non-profit (but also for-profit) AI company is also "for the benefit of humanity".
• throwaway918299 2y ago
  I’m just expecting a Microsoft acquisition and Altman exits and moves on to his next grift.
• twodave 2y ago
  The amount of comparisons I see between some theoretical AGI and something more akin to a science fiction like Jane from the Ender saga or the talking head from That Hideous Strength is I guess not surprising. But in both of those cases the only way to make the plot work was to make the AI literally an other-worldly being. I am personally not sold on AGI being possible. We might be able to make some poor imitation of it, and maybe an LLM is the closest we get, but to me it smacks of “man attempts to create life in order to spite his creator.” I think the result of those kinds of efforts will end more like That Hideous Strength (in disaster).
• mark_l_watson 2y ago
  I appreciate everything that OpenAI has done, the science of modeling and the expertise in productization. But, but, but… their drama, or Altman’s drama is now too much for me, personally. With a lot of reluctance I just stopped doing the $20/month subscription. The advanced voice mode is lots of fun to demo to people, and o1 models are cool, but I am fine just using multiple models for chat on Abacus.AI and Meta, an excellent service, and paid for APIs from Google, Mistral, Groq, and OpenAI (and of course local models). I hope I don’t sound petty, but I just wanted to reduce their paid subscriber numbers by -1.
• whamlastxmas 2y ago
  It’s really sad to see all the personal attacks and cynicism that has no basis in reality. OpenAI has an amazing product and was first to market with something game changing for billions of people. Calling him a fraud and scammer is super ridiculous
  • meroes 2y ago
    Game changing for billions? Please give an example. I’m fine to be proven wrong but I don’t know what you could mean.
    • whamlastxmas 2y ago
      It will teach you anything in any language step by step and answer every single question directly without having to google stuff and find only semi adjacent question and answers. It has completely replaced the need to google things in many instances. I think this is pretty game changing and it’s available to billions of people.
  • xbar 2y ago
    I do not know about any of that or your feelings of sadness. I have skepticism of his predictions, and disregard for his exaggerations. I have a ChatGPT subscription and build features on OpenAI technology.
• krick 2y ago
  Since it's paywalled, I assume we are discussing the title (as usual). It implies that there was the time when [we] took him at his word. Uh, ok, maybe. But what does it matter? "We" aren't the people at VCs who fund it, I suppose? So, what does it matter if "we" take him at his word? Hell, even if it suddenly went public, it still wouldn't mean much if we trust the guy or not, because we could buy shares for the same reason we buy crypto or TSLA shares. As a matter of fact, I suspect the author of the article actually belongs to gullible minority who ever took Altman at his word, and now is telling everyone what they already knew. But so what? What are we even discussing? Nobody calls to remove their OpenAI (or, in fact, Anthropic, or whatever) account, as long as we find it useful for something, I suppose. It just makes no difference at all if that writer or his readers take Altman at his word, their opinions have no real effect on the situation, it seems. They are merely observers.
• slenk 2y ago
  Same needs to happen to Elon Musk
• yumraj 2y ago
  Open AI’s AGI is like Tesla’s completely automated self driving. So close, yet so far. And, both help the respective CEOs in hyping the respective companies.
• rpgbr 2y ago
  I’ll never understand how so many smart people haven’t realize that the biggest “hallucination” produced by AI was this Sam Altman.
  • paradox460 2y ago
    He's been grifting long before the current AI hype He went from a failed startup to president of yc to ultra wealthy investor in the span of about a decade. That's sus
• breck 2y ago
  In 2017 Daniel Gross, a YC partner at the time, recruited me to join the YC software team. Sam Altman was president of YC at this time. During my interview with Jared Friedman, their CTO, I asked him what Sam was trying to create, the greatest investment firm of all time surpassing Berkshire Hathway, or the greatest tech company surpassing Google? Without hesitation, Jared said Google. Sam wanted to surpass Google. (He did it with his other company, OpenAI, and not YC, but he did it nonetheless) This morning I tried Googling something and the results sucked compared to what ChatGPT gave me. Google still creates a ton of value (YouTube, Gmail, etc), but he has surpassed Google in terms of cutting edge tech.
• hdivider 2y ago
  In my view we should also stop taking the Great Technoking at his word and move away from lionizing this old well-moneyed elite in general. Real technological progress in the 21st century is more capital-intensive than before. It also usually requires more diverse talent. Yet the breakthroughs we can make in this half-century can be far greater than any before: commercial-grade fusion power (where Lawrence Livermore National Lab currently leads, thanks to AI[1]), quantum computing, spintronics, twistronics, low-cost room-temperature superconductors, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, nanotechnology. Thus, it's much more about the many, not the one. Multi-stakeholder. Multi-person. Often led by one technology leader, sure, but this one person must uplift and be accountable to the many. Otherwise we get the OpenAI story, and end-justifies-the-means type of groupthink wrt. those who worship the technoking. [1]: https://www.llnl.gov/article/49911/high-performance-computing-ai-cognitive-simulation-helped-llnl-conquer-fusion-ignition https://www.llnl.gov/article/49911/high-performance-computin...
  • danga 2y ago
    [dead]
• luxuryballs 2y ago
  I wonder how many governments and A-listers are investing heavily in the rapid development of commodity AI video that is indistinguishable from real video. Does it seem paranoid? They would at least be more believable if they blast claims that a certain video must be fake, especially with how absurd and shocking it is.
• wnevets 2y ago
  He just needs a paltry trillion dollars to make this AI thing happen. Stop being so short sighted.
• ortusdux 2y ago
  Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41744167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41744167
• 7e 2y ago
  I mean, there is a reason the board tried their best to exorcise Sam Altman him from the company. OpenAI could be the next Loopt.
• swiftcoder 2y ago
  I feel like the time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word was probably when he was shilling for an eyeball-scanning cryptocurrency... But apparently as a society we like handing multi-billion dollar investments to folks with a proven track record of (not actually shipping) complete bullshit.
• ein0p 2y ago
  Anyone who takes startup CEOs at their word has never worked in a startup. The plasticity of their ethics is legendary when there’s a prospect of increasing the revenues.
• EchoReflection 2y ago
  according to the book "The Sociopath Next Door", approximately 1 in 25 Americans is a "sociopath" who "does not feel shame, guilt, or remorse, and can do anything at all without what "normal" people think of as an internal voice labeling things as "right" or "wrong". It makes sense to me that sociopaths would be over-represented among C-level executives and "high performers" in every field. https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-sociopath-next-door-9780767915823 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-sociopat...
• angarg12 2y ago
  > Remember, these technologies already have a track record. The world can and should evaluate them, and the people building them, based on their results and their effects, not solely on their supposed potential. But that's not how the market works.
• razodactyl 2y ago
  I think we should consider companies that create or own their own hardware, the ability to generate cheap electricity and the ability of neural networks to continuously learn. I still "feel the AGI". I think Ben Goertzel'a recent talk on ML Street Talk was quite grounded / too much hype clouds judgement. In all honesty, once the hype dies down, even if AGI/ASI is a thing - we're still going to be heads down back to work as usual so why not enjoy the ride? Covid was a great eye-opener, we dream big but in reality people jump over each other for... toilet paper... gotta love that Gaussian curve of IQ right?
• euphetar 2y ago
  While I do not have much sympathy for Altman, the article is very low quality and contains zero analysis Yeah, maybe on the surface chatbots turned out to be chatbots. But you have to be a poor journalist to stop your investigation of the issue at that and conclude AI is no big deal. Nuance, anyone?
• _davide_ 2y ago
  Did I ever? :')
• _hyn3 2y ago
  > The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires. (The Atlantic recently entered a corporate partnership with OpenAI.) Hilarious.
• neuroelectron 2y ago
  I'm surprised nobody noticed the elephant in the room, the fact that ChatGPT has a very hard woke slant. That said, -o1 has gotten a lot better but it's not as uncensored and unbiased as GPT-3 was when it was first released. For a while GPT-4 was very clearly biased for the left and U.S. Democrats particularly. Now keep in mind that this is going to be the default option for a lot of forums and social media for automated moderation. Reddit is already using it a lot and now a lot of the front page is clearly feedback farming for OpenAI. What I'm getting at is we're moving towards a future where only a certain type of dialog will be allowed on most social media and Sam Altman and his sponsors get to decide what that looks like.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  "At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman's entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don't get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present." Old tactic. The project that would eventually became Microsoft Corp. was founded on it. Gates told Ed Roberts the inventor of the first personal computer that he had a programming for it. He had no such programming langugage. Gates proceeded to espouse "vapourware" for the decades. Arguably Microsoft and its disciples are still doing so today. Will the tactic ever stop working. Who knows. Focus on the future that no one can predict, not the present that anyone can describe.
• magaretbrennan 2y ago
  [flagged]
• tim333 2y ago
  >Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become Is kind of a boring way of looking at things. I mean we have fairly good chatbots and image generators now but it's where the future is going that's the interesting bit. Lumping AI in with dot coms and crypto seems a bit silly. It's a different category of thing. (By the way Sam being shifty or not techy or not seems kind of incidental to it all.)
• kthejoker2 2y ago
  Can't stop something you never started. It's funny we coach people not to ascribe human characteristics to LLMS.. But we seem equally capable of denying the very human characteristics in our would be overlords. Which warlord will we canonize next?
• msephton 2y ago
  Sam blinks furiously when he's not telling the truth.
• make3 2y ago
  I sympathize, but I feel like people are over-selling the "end of AI". The progress that we've seen in the past two years has been completely insane compared to literally any other field. LLMs complete absolutely insane reasoning tasks, including math proofs at the level of a "mediocre grad student" (which is super impressive). For better or worse, image generation & now video generation is indistinguishable from the real thing, a lot of the times. I think that crazy business types and media really overhyped the fuck out of AI so fucking high, that even with such strong progress, it's still not enough.
• opheliagreyw1 2y ago
  [dead]