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An Open Letter to Sam Altman

garymarcus.substack.com

11–20 of 33 posts

Re: An Open Letter to Sam Altman

#11
Sam Altman:

A man who can't seem to help out his own sister, is now going to save the world with a 7 trillion dollar LLM fund.

Thats 10 years of the us military budget.

Thats the GDP of Japan and India Combined.

Sam Altman is to tech what late 80's telivanglishts were to religion.

Re: An Open Letter to Sam Altman

#13
Why do we allow someone non technical, manipulative and a glorified salesman to run a deeply technological initiative like AI! The stupid media has made him the God of AI. He has no background in AI , no success stories to beat his chest other than being Paul’s protege.

Re: An Open Letter to Sam Altman

#14

I’m going out on a whim here but surely putting $7t towards solving something like food poverty in the undeveloped world, or subsidising renewable energy for the average person, would be of a much greater benefit to humanity than further lining the already bursting pockets of entitled individuals. Call me old fashioned but having living, healthy humans is more valuable to humanity than an, albeit impressive, text gen…

For 7 trillion dollars we could probably build high speed train from NY to London, Or Sydney to LA. Or convert every coal plant in the world into some version of green energy. It's a crazy large amount of money.

You're not old fashioned. You're sensible.

Re: An Open Letter to Sam Altman

#15
post #10

I fully agree with the sentiment, but I am bit... confused? with the section that raises possible concerns about the negatives of LLMs. In particular the "women" mention, without any ellaboration. Am I missing something? It feels pretty lazy. Like an enumeration of things we are supposed to care about, rather than an effort to build a solid argumentation against Sam Altman's fundraising effort. And I have other issue…

Yes that whole section is extremely off:

> How do we know that $7 trillion invested into LLMs and their infrastructure would not simply exacerbate those costs, grinding down content creators, women, and the environment, undermining democracy, destroying jobs, etc?

“Destroying jobs” is pretty much a _good_ thing. I think we’re all pretty happy we don’t need dedicated people anymore for a lot of tedious tasks that we take for granted these days (washing clothes etc)

Re: An Open Letter to Sam Altman

#16

I’m going out on a whim here but surely putting $7t towards solving something like food poverty in the undeveloped world, or subsidising renewable energy for the average person, would be of a much greater benefit to humanity than further lining the already bursting pockets of entitled individuals. Call me old fashioned but having living, healthy humans is more valuable to humanity than an, albeit impressive, text gen…

Remember when Elon tweeted out that he would spend his potential $6bn tax write-off to save world hunger if only someone would give him a plan, then the UN sent him a plan that would save 42 million people from food poverty, then instead of doing that he donated it to his own foundation instead?

https://truthout.org/articles/musk-pledged-6b-to-solve-world...

Re: An Open Letter to Sam Altman

#17

Sam Altman: A man who can't seem to help out his own sister, is now going to save the world with a 7 trillion dollar LLM fund. Thats 10 years of the us military budget. Thats the GDP of Japan and India Combined. Sam Altman is to tech what late 80's telivanglishts were to religion.

I'm seeing this kind of sentiment a lot on hnews, which is weird because it's owned by YC. This is not how investors or businesses work. Government's job is not Sam's job, his job is OpenAI.

Re: An Open Letter to Sam Altman

#18

I’m going out on a whim here but surely putting $7t towards solving something like food poverty in the undeveloped world, or subsidising renewable energy for the average person, would be of a much greater benefit to humanity than further lining the already bursting pockets of entitled individuals. Call me old fashioned but having living, healthy humans is more valuable to humanity than an, albeit impressive, text gen…

Putting $7T towards mitigating climate change might be the best thing he could do

Re: An Open Letter to Sam Altman

#19

I’m going out on a whim here but surely putting $7t towards solving something like food poverty in the undeveloped world, or subsidising renewable energy for the average person, would be of a much greater benefit to humanity than further lining the already bursting pockets of entitled individuals. Call me old fashioned but having living, healthy humans is more valuable to humanity than an, albeit impressive, text gen…

Remember when Elon tweeted out that he would spend his potential $6bn tax write-off to save world hunger if only someone would give him a plan, then the UN sent him a plan that would save 42 million people from food poverty, then instead of doing that he donated it to his own foundation instead? https://truthout.org/articles/musk-pledged-6b-to-solve-world...

Does it mean that he has no trust in the UN?

It does not matter much here, but most probably he's not the only one.

Re: An Open Letter to Sam Altman

#20

This whole discussion is kind of silly. 7T is 8% of global gdp. If your thing needs 7T of investment to happen, then it’s not going to happen.

> 7T is 8% of global gdp

Formally, that's not the correct analogy, but very creepy, as it sounds pretty similar (however not equivalent) to asking for 8% of the world population to be his project slaves.

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