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> 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

• 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.
    • Aeolun 2y ago
      > In reality, this vision you speak of is more like the blind leading the blind. If you want to call it suckering suckers into parting with their money that works too. It’s not all that different from crypto. Progress depends on irrational people though. Even if 50 companies fail for every one that succeeds, that’s progress.
• naveen99 2y ago
  The future is not binary, it’s a probability.
• ThinkBeat 2y ago
  If a CEO lies all the time, and investors make investments because of it, will that not turn out to become a problem for the CEO?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • angulardragon03 2y ago
    This is the Tesla Autopilot playbook, which seems to continue to work decently for that particular CEO
    • ben_w 2y ago
      The difference between Tesla and Nikola is that some false claims matter more than others: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-electric-trucks-guilty-fraud https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-ele... Given Altman seems to be extremely vague about exact timelines and mainly gives vibes, he's probably doing fine. Especially as half the stuff he says is, essentially, to lower expectations rather than to raise them.
    • tux3 2y ago
      I'm not sure about the decency of it. I remember all the articles praising the facade of a super-genius. It's a stark contrast to today. People write about his trouble or his latest outburst like they would a neighborh's troubled kid. There's very little decency in watching people sink like that. What's left after reality reassesserts itself, after the distortion field is gone? Mostly slow decline. Never to reach that high again.
  • butterfly42069 2y ago
    It seems that continuously promising something is X weeks/months/years away is seen as optimism and belief, not blatant disregard for facts. I'm sure the defence is always, "but if we just had a bit more money, we would've got it done"
    • 2y ago
• meiraleal 2y ago
  > What if gpt5 is vaporware OpenAI decides what they call gpt5. They are waiting for a breakthrough that would make people "wow!". That's not even very difficult and there are multiple paths. One is a much smarter gpt4 which is what most people expect but another one is a real good voice-to-voice or video-to-video feature that works seamlessly the same way chatgpt was the first chatbot that made people interested.
  • deepsquirrelnet 2y ago
    It’s more than that. Because of what they’ve said publicly and already demonstrated in the 3->4 succession, they can’t release something incremental as gpt5. Otherwise people might get the impression that we’re already at a point of diminishing returns on transformer architectures. With half a dozen other companies on their heels and suspiciously nobody significantly ahead anymore, it’s substantially harder to justify their recent valuation.
• antirez 2y ago
  Not possible since Claude is effectively GPT5 level in most tasks (EDIT: coding is not one of them). OpenAI lost the lead months ago. Altman talking about AGI (may take decades or years, nobody knows) is just the usual crazy Musk-style CEO thing that is totally safe to ignore. What is interesting is the incredible steady progresses of LLMs so far.
  • diggan 2y ago
    > Claude is effectively GPT5 level Which model? Sonnet 3.5? I subscribed to Claude for while to test Sonnet/Opus, but never got them to work as well as GPT-4o or o1-preview. Mostly tried it out for coding help (Rust and Python mainly). Definitely didn't see any "leap" compared to what OpenAI/ChatGPT offers today.
    • antirez 2y ago
      Both, depending on the use case. Unfortunately Claude is better in almost every regard than ChatGPT but fo coding so far. So you would not notice improvements if you test it only for code. Where it shines is understanding complex things and ideas in long text, and the context window is AFAIK 2x than ChatGPT.
      • diggan 2y ago
        Tried it for other things too, but then they just seem the same (to me). Maybe I'll give it another try, if it has improved since last time (2-3 months maybe?). Thanks!
• raincole 2y ago
  > What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? Sam Altman himself doesn't know whether it's the case. Nobody knows. It's the natural of R&D. If you can tell whether an architecture works or not with 100% confidence it's not cutting edge.
  • barrell 2y ago
    Sam Altman has explicitly said the next model will be an even bigger jump than between 3 and 4. I think that was before 4o? I know 4o-mini and o1 for sure have come out since he said that
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • MOARDONGZPLZ 2y ago
      > Sam Altman has explicitly said the next model will be an even bigger jump than between 3 and 4. You say unironically on an article stating that Sam Altman cannot be taken at his word in a string of comments about him hyping up the next thing so he can exit strongly on the backs of the next greater fool. But seriously, I’m sure GPT-5 will be the greatest leap in history (OpenAI equity holder here).
  • patcon 2y ago
    > Nobody knows. I suspect it's a little different. AI models are still made of math and geometric structures. Like mathematicians, researchers are developing intuitions about where the future opportunities and constraints might be. It's just highly abstract, and until someone writes the beautiful Nautilus Mag article that helps a normie see the landscape they're navigating, we outsiders see it as total magic and unknowable. But Altman has direct access to the folks intuiting through it (likely not validated intuitions, but still insight) That's not to say I believe him. Motivations are very tangled and meta here
  • deepsquirrelnet 2y ago
    We got to ~gpt4 by scaling model parameters, and then several more companies did too. That’s dead. OpenAI knows that much. There will be more, but they aren’t going to report that we’re doing incremental advances until there’s a significant breakthrough. They need to stay afloat and say what it takes to try and bridge the gap.
• mrbungie 2y ago
  A typical CEO's job is to guard and enforce a narrative. Great ones also work at adding to the narrative. But it is always about the narrative.
  • mola 2y ago
    I thought it was about directing the execution of the company business. Defining strategy and being a driving force behind it. But you are right, we live in a post truth influencer driven world. It's all about the narrative.
• latexr 2y ago
  What a shitty world we constructed for ourselves, where the highest positions of power with the highest monetary rewards depend on being the biggest liar. And it’s casually mentioned and even defended as if that’s in any way acceptable. https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
• vbezhenar 2y ago
  I'm paying my subscription and I'd probably pay 5x more if they would charge it to keep access to the current service. ChatGPT 4o is incredibly useful for me today, regardless of whether GPT5 will be good or not. I'm not sure how does that reflect OpenAI cost, but those company costs are just bubbles of air anyway.
  • coffeefirst 2y ago
    Would you be willing to share how you're using it? I keep hearing from people who find these enormous benefits from LLMs. I've been liking them as a search engine (especially finding things buried in bad documentation), but can't seem to find the life-changing part.
    • vbezhenar 2y ago
      1. Search engine replacement. I'm using it for many queries I asked Google before. I still use Google, but less often. 2. To break procrastination loops. For example I often can't name a particular variable, because I can see few alternatives and I don't like all of them. Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT and often proceed with his opinion. 3. Navigating less known technologies. For example my Python knowledge is limited and I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it. ChatGPT is just perfect for that kind of tasks, because I know what I want to get, I just miss some syntax nuances and I can quickly check the result. Another example is jq, it's very useful tool, but its syntax is arcane and I can't remember it even after years of occasional tinkering with it. ChatGPT builds jq programs like a super-human, I just show example JSON and what I want to get. 4. Not ChatGPT, but I think Copilot is based on GPT4, and I use Copilot very often as a smart autocomplete. I didn't really adopt it as a code writing tool, I'm very strict at code I produce, but it still helps a lot with repetitive fragments. Things I had to spend 10-20 minutes before, construction regexps or using editor macroses, I can now do with Copilot in 10-20 seconds. For languages like Golang where I must write `if err != nil` after every line, it also helps not to become crazy. May be I didn't formulate my thoughts properly. It's not anything irreplaceable and I didn't become 10x programmer. But those tools are very nice and absolutely worth every penny I paid for it. It's like Intellij Idea. I can write Java in notepad.exe, but I'm happy to pay $100/year to Jetbrains and write Java in Idea.
• almatabata 2y ago
  Funnily I came across an interview from around 5 years ago where he straight up admitted that he had no clue how to generate a return on investment back then (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcJlKg2Rc0&t=1920s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcJlKg2Rc0&t=1920s) "We have no current plans to make revenue." "We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue." "We have made a soft promise to investors that once we've built a general intelligence system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you." The fact he has no clue how to generate revenue with an AGI without asking it, shows his lack of imagination.
  • flappyeagle 2y ago
    Or his honesty?
    • slater 2y ago
      Or maybe both
  • slashdave 2y ago
    Well, I mean the actual answer is raise more money from investors. But it is better to leave things up to the imagination of the listener.
  • qnleigh 2y ago
    > The fact he has no clue how to generate revenue with an AGI without asking it... I wouldn't take this statement at face value any more than anything else a CEO says. For example, maybe he still had to appease the board, and talking about making profit would be counterproductive. Maybe he gave this answer because it signals that he's in it for the long game and investors should be too.
• slashdave 2y ago
  Actually, CEOs, and other board members, are supposed to be held to certain standards. Specifically, honesty and integrity. Some charters explicitly include working for the public good. Let's not forget that and not get desensitized to certain behaviors.
  • switch007 2y ago
    That ship has long, long sailed