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Abundant Intelligence
- wiz21c 1y ago> We are particularly excited to build a lot of this in the US; right now, other countries are building things like chips fabs and new energy production much faster than we are, and we want to help turn that tide. Did Donald call him ?
- tao_oat 1y agothey’re certainly cozy with the administration. this was in the openai RSS feed yesterday: https://openai.com/global-affairs/american-made-innovation/ https://openai.com/global-affairs/american-made-innovation/ interestingly, it doesn’t seem to be linked from the “news” section of their website.
- jennyholzer 1y ago"As AI gets smarter, access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right. Almost everyone will want more AI working on their behalf." I don't buy it at all. This sounds like complete and total bullshit to me.
- bl0rg 1y agoWhy do you feel that way?
- jennyholzer 1y agoyears of consistent disappointment with the user experience, along with years of misleading internet propaganda dramatically overselling the quality and power of the underlying technology. it's a fucking dud.
- seany62 1y agoIt surprises me that people still believe this! I've seen AI deliver incredible value over the past year. I believe the application level is utilizing <.5% (probably less) of the total value that can be derived from current foundation models.
- jennyholzer 1y agoBased on your gung ho attitude I suspect that you are personally invested in "AI products" or otherwise work for a firm that creates "AI products"
- dsr_ 1y agoWhat evidence supports your conclusions? What evidence are you aware of that counters it?
- keiferski 1y agoIt's only a niche weird opinion you'll find on forums like HN. In the real world, it's immensely useful to millions of people. It's possible for a thing to both be incredibly useful and overhyped at the same time.
- dsr_ 1y agoELIZA is that way ->. Try asking "what evidence supports your conclusions?".
- Avshalom 1y agoThe fundamental driver of the economy is people eating and clothing themselves, not writing memos that are never read.
- tlb 1y agoFood is 13% of US consumer spending, and clothing is 2.7%. Both have declined steadily since the industrial revolution.
- nhod 1y agoAre you Jenny Holzer, “you are trapped on the earth so you will explode” conceptual artist?
- blamestross 1y ago> If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible. Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. At least the statement starts with a conditional, even if it is a silly one. If you know your growth curve is ultimately going to be a sigmoid, fitting a model with only data points before the inflection point is underdetermined. > If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will Is a statement that no amount of prior evidence can support.
- jennyholzer 1y agoI think if you're critiquing AI, you should use harsher words. AI boosters are going to spam the replies to your comment in attempts to muddy the waters.
- CuriouslyC 1y agoI'm an AI booster, but he's right, these models are in the sigmoid elbow and we're being hard-headed trying to push frontier models, it's not sustainable. We need to take a step back and work on the engineering of the systems around the frontier models while trying to find a new architecture that scales better. That being said the current models are transformative on their own, once the systems catch up to the models that will be glaringly obvious to everyone.
- jjk166 1y agoAssuming AI stays on the trajectory they think it will doesn't mean they assume it will be infinite exponential growth. If you know for a fact it's sigmoid curve, presumably the path you think it will continue on is the sigmoid curve. The trillion dollar question is does performance plateau before or after AI can do the really exciting stuff, and while I may not agree with it myself the more optimistic position is not an unreasonable belief. Also you can most certainly fit a sigmoid function only from past data points. Any projection will obviously have error, but your error at any given point should be smaller than for an exponential function with the same sampling.
- mathverse 1y agoI think AI compute is one of the biggest grifts of century. A capital that is being redistributed from talented people to this compute when we can clearly see it is not making a huge difference (oai vs deepseek) feels like a grift.
- Guthur 1y agoMy intelligence dropped a few points by reading anything from this charlatan.
- wslh 1y agoIt's intelligent to separate intelligence from power. At the macro level, intelligence is often overvalued.
- computerthings 1y ago[dead]
- emsign 1y agofix'd: Abundant Money
- frabonacci 1y ago> Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. The moat will be how efficiently you convert electricity into useful behavior. Whoever industrializes evaluation and feedback loops wins the next decade.
- HexDecOctBin 1y agoY2K errors in old COBOL code kick-started Indian IT sector, which then lead to immense economic progress and mass scale reduction in poverty. I hope LLMs pepper every thing they touch with many such errors, so that nations of Africa and poorer parts of Latin America (that can't do cheap manufacturing due to a lack of infrastructure and capital) can also begin their upwards economic journey by providing services to fix these mistakes. In order to help reduce global poverty (much of which was caused by colonialism), it is the moral and ethical duty of the Global North to adopt LLMs on a mass scale and use them in every field imaginable, and then give jobs to the global poor to fix the resulting mess. I am only 10% joking.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoThat's funny, but unless LLM bugs break foundational ML codebases beyond human repair (and somehow also delete all existing code, research, and researchers), the models will likely just get better than people at this in a couple years. I mean, the trajectory so far is obvious.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago>(much of which was caused by colonialism) I found the 10%
- paulglx 1y agoAI will become "something we consider a fundamental human right", according to the guy that wants to sell you access to it
- esafak 1y agoSo it's going to be regulated like a utility?
- ActionHank 1y agoYeah, just like privatised utilities that operator solely for the profits of execs and investors with a complete disregard for regulations or best practices only to hide behind govt not regulating enough when things eventually go wrong.
- bilbo0s 1y agoHe'll have no problem with that. You can get your drinking water from a utility, or you can get bottled water. Guess which one he's gonna be selling? And if you think for a second that the "utility" models will be trained on data as pristine as the data that the "bottled" models will be trained on, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. (The "utility" models will not even have any access to all of the "secret sauce" currently being hoarded inside these labs.) Essentially we can all expect to go back to the Lexis-Google type dichotomy. You can go into court on Google searches, nothing's stopping you. But nearly everyone will pay for LexisNexis because they're not idiots and they actually want to compete.
- mietek 1y agoGreat analogy! Look up Dasani some time.
- marbro 1y agoNo, the government is going to provide it to everyone with money that it prints or collects as taxes.
- zoobab 1y ago
- causal 1y agoHe might be right about intelligence becoming the new currency in a world where intelligence becomes fungible. Lots of assumptions about the path to get there, though. And interesting that he's measuring intelligence in energy terms.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zelias 1y ago"The factory must grow"
- r_lee 1y agoAltman fatigue anyone?
- mcpar-land 1y ago> As AI gets smarter, access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right. My product is going to be the fundamental driver of the economy. Even a human right! > Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. How? > We are particularly excited to build a lot of this in the US; right now, other countries are building things like chips fabs and new energy production much faster than we are, and we want to help turn that tide. There's the appeal to the current administration. > Over the next couple of months, we’ll be talking about some of our plans and the partners we are working with to make this a reality. Later this year, we’ll talk about how we are financing it Beyond parody.
- davidw 1y agoMaybe the other countries aren't rounding up engineers working on opening factories and detaining them in inhumane conditions.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thrance 1y agoStop thinking and give them money. But for real, the leap from GPT4 to GPT5 was nowhere near as impressive as from GTP3 to GPT4. They'll have to do a lot more to give any weight to their usual marketing ultra-hype.
- MattDamonSpace 1y agoThe jump from GPT4 through o3 to GPT5 was very impressive
- bronco21016 1y agoAgreed. Their naming conventions in a way really broke the perception of progress. GPT-4 to o3 or GPT-5 is truly impressive. The leap from GPT-4o to GPT-5 is less impressive but GPT-4o is generally recognized as GPT-4. All that being said, it does seem like OpenAI and Anthropic are on a quest for more dollars by promoting fantasy futures where there is not a clear path from A to B, at least to those of us on the outside.
- 0x00cl 1y agoSo... * Nvidia invests 5 billion in Intel * Nvidia and OpenAI announce partnership to deploy 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems (Investment of upto 100 billion) * This indirectly benefits TSMC (which implies they'll be investing more in the US) Looks like the US is cooking something...
- daxfohl 1y ago> provide customized tutoring to every student on earth It could start by figuring out how to keep kids from using AI to write all their essays.
- allemagne 1y ago> Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. If a tenth of this happens, and we don't build a new power plant every ten weeks... then what?
- anovikov 1y agoIt will create demand for electricity. Demand always creates supply. Perpahs that was the missing link to the mass deployment of solar (because there's just no other way similar amounts of energy can be produced).
- sobiolite 1y agoPerhaps, but Hank Green published a pretty convincing argument recently that electricity supply has nowhere the necessary elasticity, and the politicised nature of power generation in the US means that isn't going to change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39YO-0HBKtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39YO-0HBKtA
- 5cott0 1y agousing abundance discourse to market ai slop is the most innovative thing openai has done yet
- conciliatory 1y agoAs a technical user of AI, I think there is certainly value in the capabilities of the current IDE/agentic systems, and as a builder of AI systems professionally I think there is enterprise value as well, although realizing that value in a meaningful way is an ongoing challenge/work in progress. There is also clearly a problem with AI slop, both in codebases and in other professional deliverables. Having said that, what’s more interesting to me is whether we have seen AI produce novel and valuable outputs independently. Altman asserts that 10GW could possibly “cure cancer”, but frankly I’d like to see any discrete examples of AI advancing frontier knowledge areas and moving the needle in small but measurable ways that stand up to peer review. Before we can cure cancer or have world peace through massive consumption of power and spend I’d like to see a meaningful counterpoint to the argument that AI as a derivative technology from all human knowledge is incapable of extending beyond the current limits of human knowledge. Intuitively I think AI should be capable of novel scientific advancement, but I feel like we’re short on examples.
- seydor 1y ago> Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. The growth in energy is because of the increase in the output tokens due to increased demand for them. Models do not get smarter the more they are used. So why does he expect them to solve cancer if they haven't already? And why do we need to solve cancer more than once?
- keiferski 1y agoWhat's the serious counter-argument to the idea that a) AI will become more ubiquitous and inexpensive and b) economic/geopolitical success will be tied in some way to AI ability? Because I do agree with him on that front. The question is whether the AI industry will end up like airplanes: massively useful technology that somehow isn't a great business to be in. If indeed that is the case, framing OpenAI as a nation-bound "human right" is certainly one way to ensure its organizational existence if the market becomes too competitive.
- beeflet 1y agoMaybe AI will become more ubiquitous. But I predict LLMs will be capped by the amount of training data present in the wild.
- bilbo0s 1y agoI'm more worried that publicly available LLMs "will be capped by the amount of training data present in the wild". But private LLMs, available only to the wealthy and powerful, will have additional, more pristine and accurate, data sources made available to them for training. Think about the legal field. The masses tend to use Google, whereas the wealthy and powerful all use LexisNexis. Who do you think has been winning in court?
- kulahan 1y agoI don't think the masses are representing themselves in court... and even then, legal text is borderline obfuscation it's so poorly designed.
- kulahan 1y agoI think it'll be slightly different - without clearly marking AI-generated content, it'll be effectively impossible to find new content that isn't sold to you in pristine packages already, and even that you just sorta have to trust. Of course, you can't train LLMs on LLM-generated content.
- nradov 1y ago
- mayankgoel28 1y agoA company is building technology more powerful than nuclear weaponry, and this comment section is thinking they're "overselling" it. Fun.
- paulglx 1y agoWhat makes you think LLMs are "more powerful than nuclear weaponry" ?
- sadhorse 1y agoNobody will be afraid to use AI.
- emp17344 1y agoThere is no world in which LLMs are more powerful or impactful than nuclear weapons.
- handfuloflight 1y agoA world where LLMs are used to trick or pit people against each to launch nuclear weapons?
- aeve890 1y ago>technology more powerful than nuclear weaponry God-like technology that you can avoid by touching grass? Unless you're talking about a Skynet type rogue ASI, which is probably not gonna happen anytime soon.
- ksec 1y agoGoogle: Do no Evil. Apple: Privacy is a fundamental Human right. That is why we must control everything. And stop our user from sharing any form of data other than to Apple. OpenAI: AI is a fundamental Human right..... There is something about Silicon Valley that is philosophically very odd for the past 15 to 20 years.
- lioeters 1y agoLooks like they're trying to seem more than a profit-seeking corporation but a way of life, culture and value system. Who decides what is good and evil, and what are our human rights. Is it any of their business? Through their actions they're shaping society.
- theaniketmaurya 1y agolet me put some more in nvidia now
- Sivart13 1y ago> Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. Something I've never understood: why do AGI perverts think that a superintelligence is any more likely to "cure cancer" than "create unstoppable super-cancer"
- wongarsu 1y agoI'm not sure he's even talking about AGI (which feels unusual for Altman). He might be talking about GPT5 in agentic workflows. Or whatever their next model will be called
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tensor 1y agoAI will do neither of those things because curing or creating cancer requires physical experiments and trials on real people or animals, as does all science outside of computer science (which is often more math than science). I can see AI being helpful in generating hypothesis, or potential compounds to synthesize, or helping with literature search, but science is a physical process. You don't generally do science just by sitting there and pondering, despite what the movies suggest.
- ozten 1y agoThere are a few fully automated wet labs and many semi-autonomous. They are called "Cloud Labs", and they will only become more plentiful. AI can identify and execute the physical experiments after using simulations to filter and score the candidate hypotheses.
- rooftopzen 1y agoSorry but your concept of AI is marketing driven. It's probabilistic, understanding is past your pay grade.
- 1y ago
- Jun8 1y agoPutting aside the questions of (as some comments here have) whether * AI is a “fucking dud” (you have to be either highly ignorant or trolling to say this) * Altman is a “charlatan” (definitely no but it does look like he has some unsavory personal traits, quite common BTW for people at that level) * the ridiculousness of touting a cancer cure (I guess the post is targeted to the technical hoi polloi, with whom such terminology resonates, but also see protein 3D structure discovery advances) I found the following to be interesting in this post: 1. Altman clearly signaling affinity for the Abundance bandwagon with a clear reference right in the title. Post is shorter but has the flavor of Marc Andreessen's "It's Time to Build" post from 2020: https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/ https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/ 2. He advances the vision of "creat[ing] a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week". This may be called frighteningly ambitious at a minimum: U.S. annual additions have been ~10-20 GW/year for solar builds (https://www.climatecentral.org/report/solar-and-wind-power-2024?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.climatecentral.org/report/solar-and-wind-power-2...)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- physarum_salad 1y agoDorks with forks
- lunias 1y agoSam Altman gives me dark triad vibes.
- vrighter 1y ago"Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. Or with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to provide customized tutoring to every student on earth." what's in between this line and the next: "or it might not. Now give me moar money!!!!!"
- oulipo2 1y agoThose guys are so stupid. AI is just going to get weaponized by companies and governments to enslave more people and accumulate riches for the few
- mainecoder 1y agoWe is everything so negative remember all the people joking about OpenAI when it started well ... this thread will also be remembered and I am posting here for future purposes once AI has revolutionized our lives do not underestimate
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- TaupeRanger 1y ago"What do you mean you won't give us trillions of dollars? Don't you want to cure cancer??" The models are getting more efficient - there's something very weird going on here - like the AI bubble is trying to merge with an energy/datacenter bubble to create a mega bubble.
- siva7 1y agoWell, i see the case that those with great power want factories building ai factories, much like a factorio simulation, to solve cancer. Sure sama, you have to name the most noble goal imaginable everyone agrees on, though we know that's not what drives you. AI to become a fundamental right, that won't work as some kind of subscription service, we also agree on this?
- woopsn 1y agoThe fundamental driver of the economy will be people, as always, because only people define "value". Word generating machine will not "figure out how to cure cancer" but it could help, obviously. AI is extremely valuable tool but it does not work on my behalf, except in same sense a coin sorter does. It's a tool. I still see this thing confuse left and right (no exaggeration), which would be fine - tools aren't perfect - except for all bullshit from VCs. That is where the danger lies, not with the tool but idolatry. I am concerned the system encourages suicide, delusional thinking etc. They need to work that out immediately. Must be held to at least the standard of a lawn mower or couch with regard to safety. Probably should make it safe before hooking it up to 10GW power plant. Does not help perception that author of this blog saying how awesome future will be is also building a hideaway bunker for himself. This is all on you at OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Twitter etc. Whatever happens.
- vivzkestrel 1y agoI have stopped reading all the sam altman posts. Not because I am a hater or anything. Maybe AI is a bubble, maybe it is not but one thing is clear. Your ability to do something is enforced in neural pathways that you exercise on a regular basis. If you let LLMs and AI do your architecture, database, coding, testing and just about all the things you are dreaming, then gradually but surely, your brain will lose these pathways and you won't be able to process and IDEATE code anymore like the way you do currently. This is one reason I don't intend to use AI for anything outside file format conversions and maybe image generations.
- akomtu 1y agoIn fact, Sama talks about this too: https://archive.is/20250109011408/https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge https://archive.is/20250109011408/https://blog.samaltman.com... "We are already in the phase of co-evolution — the AIs affect, effect, and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power and run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build even better chips."
- thoughtpeddler 1y agoI hear you, but I don't understand the logic. If you were wealthy enough to have an executive assistant or a chief of staff who handled most of your email and admin on your behalf, is your instinct to say, "I will still write my own emails because I don't want that skill to atrophy?" No. It's simply not high-value work. I'd assume you rather do something else. You don't see the ultra-wealthy say "Oh no! Not my ability to still do 'architecture, database, coding, testing' on my own!" They just move further and further up the stack. And I think this is a useful frame for everyone else: just move further up the stack. Again, I hear you. As a fellow nerd, I love all of these activities too. Computers can be really fun, endlessly fulfilling, truly. But I have the awareness to say to myself, "Ya, but seems like that may have been a temporary phenomenon ... of getting to control and master these machines, just like I don't really crave to hack away at stone tools anymore, because that's not the time period I was born in."
- vivzkestrel 1y ago
- bdhe 1y agoI think reasonable people will agree that Bitcoin's energy consumption had huge impacts on costs of power with very little to show for, at least for the average user. What are ways in which we can incentivize investments and place societal guardrails so that something similar doesn't happen with AI data centers. Do governments need to invest in nuclear power? Scale up energy generation in other ways through renewables? Insulate or subsidize the average non-corporate electricity consumer through something like rent control?
- SMAAART 1y agoCan someone help me make some sense of the 10 gigawatts of compute? Colossus data has 230K GPUs (150,000 H100 GPUs, 50,000 H200 GPUs and 30,000 GB200 GPUs) [source https://x.ai/colossus https://x.ai/colossus] Energy usage: up to 150 megawatts of electricity per day [source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)] So, when SamA talks about 10 gigawatts of compute does he mean per day or GWH (Gigawatts-hour)?
- rsfern 1y agoI think it’s just scale to the moon rhetoric, like “what if we used 100x more compute?”. Since the units are power and not energy, I’m going with 10 GW continuous load (for training? inference?) but I think it’s not exactly meant literally
- Balgair 1y agoVideo. It's for video. We don't have the compute to do video on demand right now like we do images or text or audio. Combining all the modalities together, smoothly, at speed, and for cheap, is going to take a hell of a lot of thinking sand powered by magic rocks.