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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

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391–400 of 447 posts

Re: The Intelligence Age

#391

Post by namaria »

ansk wrote: post #230

> humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data) He's hand-waving around the idea presented in the Universal Approximation Theorem, but he's mangled it to the point of falsehood by conflating representation and learning. Just because we can parameterize an arbitrarily flexible class of distributions doe…

"We're using more energy to do more math and the results are increasingly better"

Reasonable.

"If we keep increasing the amount of energy and math, we should all be floating in bliss any day now"

Selling something.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#392

Post by nickfromseattle »

bloppe wrote: post #372
vundercind wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might find the hype cycle itself entertaining and engaging, but I doubt he’s taking it seriously. I think he’d be worse at his job if he did.

Is Sam Altman generally considered good at his job? OpenAI hasn't really come up with any groundbreaking breakthroughs (transformers came from Google and diffusion came from academia) and they definitely do not make a profit or have any concrete plan to become profitable. He's really good at raising gargantuan amounts of money, but that's not enough to be considered a good founder.

> Is Sam Altman generally considered good at his job?

No credit for popularizing the current generation of AI, kicking off $hundreds of billions in CapEx spends, and for more concrete achievements, leading the fastest company to hit 100m users / $1b ARR?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#393

Post by namaria »

brotchie wrote: post #67

For somebody who likes building things and has many side projects Claude and ChatGPT have been huge productivity multipliers. For example, I’m designing and 3D printing custom LED diffuser channels from TPU filament. My first attempt was terrible, because I didn’t have an intuition for how light propagates through a material. After a bit of chatting with ChatGPT, I had an understanding and some direction of where to…

Congrats on learning way less about the systems and tools you're interacting with?

Re: The Intelligence Age

#394

Post by tarsinge »

stogot wrote: post #363
klyrs wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's about as profound as the notion that you can approximate a polynomial by splicing together an infinite number of piecewise linear functions. Wait 'til you hit complex analysis and discover that Universal Entire Functions don't just exist, they're basically polynomials.

So basically Altman hasn’t taken enough math courses yet thinks he is starring in Good Will Hunting

Like with any salesman whether he believes it or not is irrelevant as long as others do.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#395

Post by tim333 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #233
sharkjacobs wrote: post #58

> It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!) "a few thousand days" is such a funny and fascinating way to say "about a decade" Superficially, reframing it as "days" not "years" is a classic marketing psychology trick, i.e. 99 cents versus a dollar, but I think the more interesting thing is just the way it defamiliarizes the span. A decade means something, but "a few thousand days" f…

"me when i need $6.5B" https://x.com/netcapgirl/status/1838265672096243822

$6.5B isn't cool. You know what's cool - $7tn. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/17/openai...

Re: The Intelligence Age

#396

Post by skinner_ »

kruipen wrote: post #114
throwanem wrote: post #62

Who exactly is he pitching here?

Newsom

Bingo. That was not obvious to me before your one-word reply, and now, in retrospect, it is.

And I say this as a person who usually just rolls his eyes seeing the typical cynical HN hot takes. I believe Altman voices his deepest convictions here. The smarter thing to be cynical about is, what is his goal with voicing them now, and in this very format? As others have observed, this is the first time he is not even paying lip service to the question of existential risk.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#397

Post by tim333 »

w10-1 wrote: post #274

> a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity That's the sales pitch, that this will benefit all. I'm very pro-AI, but here's the only prediction for the future I would ever make: AI will accelerate, not minimize, inequality and thus injustice, because it removes the organizational limits previously imposed by bureaucracy/coordination costs of humans. It's not AI's fault. It's not bec…

I kind of disagree with how it will play out - I'm more optimistic. A couple of points:

>Virtually all the advances in technology and civilization have been aimed at people capturing resources, people, and value...

Not really so - people invent new stuff because it's cool. Maybe eg Geoffrey Hinton and neural networks. Then the business types try to jump in and capture resources - maybe Sam? But that's not really working with current AI - it all gets open sourced shortly after.

Info tech seems to spread rather evenly. Even in Africa a lot of people have smartphones and can access Google and ChatGPT like we can.

In the future people in democracies will be able to vote for universal income, free healthcare, free other stuff and the like. At the moment it doesn't fly to give everyone free stuff because someone has to do the work still - we don't quite have the AI robots yet. But when we do have it'll probably be the way to go.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#398

Post by [deleted] »

nickfromseattle wrote: post #392
bloppe wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Sam Altman generally considered good at his job? OpenAI hasn't really come up with any groundbreaking breakthroughs (transformers came from Google and diffusion came from academia) and they definitely do not make a profit or have any concrete plan to become profitable. He's really good at raising gargantuan amounts of money, but that's not enough to be considered a good founder.

> Is Sam Altman generally considered good at his job? No credit for popularizing the current generation of AI, kicking off $hundreds of billions in CapEx spends, and for more concrete achievements, leading the fastest company to hit 100m users / $1b ARR?

[deleted]

Re: The Intelligence Age

#399

Post by carapace »

dbspin wrote: post #104
carapace wrote: post #28

"What is good?" or in other words "What are people for?" is a question that cannot be answered by intelligence no matter how great, because the complexity of the question is a function of the intelligence of the asking entity and it's always greater than the intelligence of the asking entity (human or transhuman cyborg or whatever.) AI is a side-show. Intelligence is ambient in living tissue, so we already have as mu…

Existential horror of this whole conversation aside, this is a beautifully written comment. I'd read your novel, but you don't seem to have one, so I'll have to settle for following you on Mastodon.

Cheers! You're too kind.

I thought I would get reamed for farting in church but it seems to have gone over well.

See ya Space Cowboy

Re: The Intelligence Age

#400

Post by tim333 »

slantedview wrote: post #235

> If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable None of that shared prosperity was freely given by the Sam Altmans of the world, it was hard won by labor organizers and social movements. Without more of that, the progress from AI will continue the recent trend of wealth accumulating in the hands of a few. The idea that everyone will somehow prosper equally f…

Places like HK and Singapore had free markets and not much unions and became pretty prosperous, during my lifetime having GDP per capita go from something like a third of the UK to nearly twice it in Singapore in spite of us in the UK having the benefit of unions fighting to keep everyone coal mining and the like.
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