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The chief hype officer is back at it again. Altman is defending exponential progress when everything points to incremental progress with signs of diminishing re

by fsndz 2y ago

The chief hype officer is back at it again. Altman is defending exponential progress when everything points to incremental progress with signs of diminishing returns. Altman thinks benefits will naturally trickle down when everything points to corporation replacing employees with AI to boost their profit margins. I now understand why some people say Sama might be wrong: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong

bwfan123 2y ago
"assume the sale" is the marketing tactic. ie, in every pitch, project that agi (whatever that means) is here, and is a persistent threat. unfortunately, ai is not search or social. there are no network-effects here. so, get-big-fast is not going to work. and slowly the masses start waking up and asking what the hell is this good for except as a fancy auto-complete.
- EA-3167 2y ago
  Unfortunately there is essentially a loose federation of quasi-religious "cults" that have emerged around the topic of AI. For an otherwise mostly secular group of people, the lure of reinventing Abrahamic religion in their own image was inescapable. I feel like most sensible people took the off ramp by the time Roko's Basilisk popped up, but as we saw with the Zizians that's not always the case. So there's this thread of taking two assumptions at face value I see a lot here and elsewhere: 1. What we call "AI" now is actually some kind of AI, and the rest is just scaling up. 2. It's inevitable that AGI would conform to sci-fi tropes. Meanwhile we've been watching BILLIONS spent on data centers, power for data centers, water for data centers... all of that going in one end, and LLM's coming out the other. As long as the future AI overlord requires enough power and water to run a city, and the best it can manage amounts to a fun show, I'll keep my alarmism in check. But Altman, man he really know his audience, and he's going to sell sell sell, to an audience that's been primed on fiction and religion to believe in him like some kind of blank-faced prophet.
csomar 2y ago
> Altman thinks benefits will naturally trickle down when everything points to corporation replacing employees with AI to boost their profit margins. That's not what he is saying. He is saying that this investment in AI will yield incredible returns and power. The investor will dominate the next decade(s) and thus you should invest. Of course, he has to say it in a careful way not to alarm politically correct people. But, in essence, he is trying to create investor FOMO to drive his next round.
- fsndz 2y ago
  yeah that's mostly hype to get the next funding round
joshtbradley 2y ago
He explicitly stated progress is logarithmic. > 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it.
raghavtoshniwal 2y ago
The article you linked is from Sept '24 and points to the ARC-AGI test as "evidence" that we're not getting close. We're in Feb '25. ARC-AGI (at least the version they're referencing) already has been solved by AI at above average human level. >everything points to incremental progress with signs of diminishing returns. Seems like everything in just Dec '24/ Jan '25 points the other way. These models are already helping PhDs in novel research, they're already getting super human at coding (yes yes, they're not perfect and I'm sure someone on HN has this weird coding job that AI can't replace yet and they're very excited to shit over AI), but they've already replaced a lot of real software dev jobs. Also aren't you contradicting yourself? > everything points to incremental progress with signs of diminishing returns > corporation replacing employees with AI If we have incremental progress, how are corporations going to replace employees with AI?
- maleldil 2y ago
  > getting super human at coding They're getting super-human at _competitive coding_, which is essentially identifying and writing algorithms. They _are not_ good at general coding, as demonstrated by their subpar scores at benchmarks like SWE-bench, and even those aren't particularly representative of what a real coding job is.
  - raghavtoshniwal 2y ago
    >subpar scores at benchmarks like SWE-bench The last few models have remarkably improved on SWE-bench too. o3 scores 73%, this number was in the low teens 16 months ago. Willing to wager that SWE benchmark gets saturated before the end of 2025. > aren't particularly representative of what a real coding job I don't know about that, large swath of "real world" coding is writing plumbing and UIs for CRUD apps, they're getting really good at that as well. Anecdotally, engineers I know have gotten insanely productive with tools like Cursor.
- fsndz 2y ago
  to get the score they had on ARC AGI, they had to fine-tune o3 on ARC AGI. That is hardly a sign of general intelligence or emergent capability. PhD novel research ? What is the novel research discovered by an LLM ever since the emergence of ChatGPT ? None. Despite all the knowledge these models accumulate in their weights they haven't been able to connect the dots and discover a lot of things humans haven't discovered, autonomously. Replace which software engineering job ? They are useful, sure; good at benchmarks, yes; but not a drop in replacement of any software engineer.

by fsndz 2y ago

bwfan123 2y ago

"assume the sale" is the marketing tactic. ie, in every pitch, project that agi (whatever that means) is here, and is a persistent threat. unfortunately, ai is not search or social. there are no network-effects here. so, get-big-fast is not going to work. and slowly the masses start waking up and asking what the hell is this good for except as a fancy auto-complete.

EA-3167 2y ago
Unfortunately there is essentially a loose federation of quasi-religious "cults" that have emerged around the topic of AI. For an otherwise mostly secular group of people, the lure of reinventing Abrahamic religion in their own image was inescapable. I feel like most sensible people took the off ramp by the time Roko's Basilisk popped up, but as we saw with the Zizians that's not always the case. So there's this thread of taking two assumptions at face value I see a lot here and elsewhere: 1. What we call "AI" now is actually some kind of AI, and the rest is just scaling up. 2. It's inevitable that AGI would conform to sci-fi tropes. Meanwhile we've been watching BILLIONS spent on data centers, power for data centers, water for data centers... all of that going in one end, and LLM's coming out the other. As long as the future AI overlord requires enough power and water to run a city, and the best it can manage amounts to a fun show, I'll keep my alarmism in check. But Altman, man he really know his audience, and he's going to sell sell sell, to an audience that's been primed on fiction and religion to believe in him like some kind of blank-faced prophet.

csomar 2y ago

> Altman thinks benefits will naturally trickle down when everything points to corporation replacing employees with AI to boost their profit margins. That's not what he is saying. He is saying that this investment in AI will yield incredible returns and power. The investor will dominate the next decade(s) and thus you should invest. Of course, he has to say it in a careful way not to alarm politically correct people. But, in essence, he is trying to create investor FOMO to drive his next round.

fsndz 2y ago
yeah that's mostly hype to get the next funding round

joshtbradley 2y ago

He explicitly stated progress is logarithmic. > 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it.

raghavtoshniwal 2y ago

The article you linked is from Sept '24 and points to the ARC-AGI test as "evidence" that we're not getting close. We're in Feb '25. ARC-AGI (at least the version they're referencing) already has been solved by AI at above average human level. >everything points to incremental progress with signs of diminishing returns. Seems like everything in just Dec '24/ Jan '25 points the other way. These models are already helping PhDs in novel research, they're already getting super human at coding (yes yes, they're not perfect and I'm sure someone on HN has this weird coding job that AI can't replace yet and they're very excited to shit over AI), but they've already replaced a lot of real software dev jobs. Also aren't you contradicting yourself? > everything points to incremental progress with signs of diminishing returns > corporation replacing employees with AI If we have incremental progress, how are corporations going to replace employees with AI?

maleldil 2y ago
> getting super human at coding They're getting super-human at _competitive coding_, which is essentially identifying and writing algorithms. They _are not_ good at general coding, as demonstrated by their subpar scores at benchmarks like SWE-bench, and even those aren't particularly representative of what a real coding job is.
- raghavtoshniwal 2y ago
  >subpar scores at benchmarks like SWE-bench The last few models have remarkably improved on SWE-bench too. o3 scores 73%, this number was in the low teens 16 months ago. Willing to wager that SWE benchmark gets saturated before the end of 2025. > aren't particularly representative of what a real coding job I don't know about that, large swath of "real world" coding is writing plumbing and UIs for CRUD apps, they're getting really good at that as well. Anecdotally, engineers I know have gotten insanely productive with tools like Cursor.
fsndz 2y ago
to get the score they had on ARC AGI, they had to fine-tune o3 on ARC AGI. That is hardly a sign of general intelligence or emergent capability. PhD novel research ? What is the novel research discovered by an LLM ever since the emergence of ChatGPT ? None. Despite all the knowledge these models accumulate in their weights they haven't been able to connect the dots and discover a lot of things humans haven't discovered, autonomously. Replace which software engineering job ? They are useful, sure; good at benchmarks, yes; but not a drop in replacement of any software engineer.