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The most interesting bit I find is the time period mentioned until super-intelligence: “thousands of days (!)” aka 6-9 years or more? With the current hype wave it feels like we’re almost there but this piece makes me think we’re not.
> Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale I'm not an AI skeptic at all, I use llms all the time, and find them very useful. But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI. It seems like there was a really sweet spot wrt the capabilities AI…
This is the part that really gets me. This is a thing that you say to your team, and a thing you say to your investors, but this isn't a thing that you can actually believe with certainty is it?
This seems to be the key of the piece to me. It's his manifesto for raising money for the infra side of things. And, it resonates: I don't want ASI to only be affordable to the ultra rich.
More of a "everything's fine, nothing to worry about".
While, there is already job disruption, and widespread misinformation.
It isn't in some future, it is already happening.
Reminds me of these quotes from Sam on this podcast episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuVSg-VJxE)
* "Prudence without fear" (Sam referencing another quote)
* "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of, deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best of humanity."
* "the ability to sort of like, stay calm and centered during hard and stressful moments, and to make decisions that are where you're not too reactive"
>We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale. Could anyone elaborate on this? Further down he talks about the necessity of bringing the cost of computing down. Is that really the bottleneck?
The most interesting bit I find is the time period mentioned until super-intelligence: “thousands of days (!)” aka 6-9 years or more? With the current hype wave it feels like we’re almost there but this piece makes me think we’re not.
AI is a side-show.
Intelligence is ambient in living tissue, so we already have as much intelligence as is adaptive. We don't need more. As talking apes made out of soggy mud wrapped around calcium twigs living in the greasy layer between hard vacuum and a droplet of lava which in turn is orbiting a puddle of hydrogen in the hem of the skirt of a black hole our problems are just not that complicated.
Heck, we are surrounded by four-billion year-old self-improving nanotechnology that automatically provides almost all our physical needs. It's even solar-powered! The whole life-support system was fully automatic until we fucked it up in our ignorance. But we're no longer ignorant, eh?
The vast majority of our problems today are the result of our incredible resounding success. We have the solutions we need. Most of them were developed in the 1970's when the oil got expensive for a few minutes.
Must we boil the oceans just to have a talking computer tell us to get on with it? Can't we just do like the Wizard of Oz? Have a guy in a box with a voice changer and a fancy light show tell us to "love each other"? Mechanical Turk God? We can use holograms.
> Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale I'm not an AI skeptic at all, I use llms all the time, and find them very useful. But stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI. It seems like there was a really sweet spot wrt the capabilities AI…
> we will solve the remaining problems This is the part that really gets me. This is a thing that you say to your team, and a thing you say to your investors, but this isn't a thing that you can actually believe with certainty is it?
> If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. i think this is the prevailing wisdom but theres an angle that openai doesnt value and therefor…