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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#521
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri and so on . I never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-dri…

> ... and that "singularities" are a sign something is wrong with the model. Einstein thought that way too because his model predicted singularities in space-time fabric. Turns out he was wrong. Nowadays we call them blackholes and have images of them too.

The image is not of the singularity itself but the accretion disc.

This is not to discount that amazing accomplishment but to point out that, in addition to misrepresenting what the singularity is in a black hole, you also misrepresented what the image of a black hole is.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-driving cars were the ones I was talking to myself, and everyone else was dismissive of them. Voice assistants were mainly mocked from day 1, with the Alex advert being re-dubbed as…

I mean nobody needs to bother with anecdotes here. chatgpt.com hit 3.7B visits in October and was #8 in worldwide internet traffic. Open AI say they have 300M weekly active users and 1B messages per day . The idea that it's some fad with no utility or that the general public knows little about it is at this point laughable. It's the software product with by far the fastest adoption any software product has ever seen.…

Yes, because it is free.

How many paid users? Is a paid user generating profit right now? Google had to inject advertising in its search results to start earning real money. What will OpenAI do? That's the PMF.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public. Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others . 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri a…

Self-driving won't take over by just being available in the new cars people are buying anyway. It'll take over when people find it cheaper to ride robotaxis than to own a vehicle at all. That's potentially a much quicker transition, requiring significantly fewer new vehicles.

Nobody is going to sit and wait for a robo uber in the suburbs for ten minutes to go to the grocery store ten miles down the road. This is the main problem, America has suburbanised itself to hell and no amount of robo taxis will create the world you are suggesting. And elsewhere in the world there’s no need because most places have adequate public transit which solves the problem way more efficiently than robo taxis ever will.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#524
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

> no obvious large-scale product-market fit I mean, I know pessimistically "ackshually"-ing yourself into the wrong side of history is kind of Hackernews's thing (eg. that famous dropbox comment). But if you don't think OpenAI found product-market-fit with ChatGPT, then I don't think you understand what product-market-fit is...

That’s because it sparked a virtuous feedback loop at a time when it just so happens people’s credulity levels are off the charts. The creators of AI tools have a benefit in hyping it, as do software vendors as do hardware companies as do hyper scalers as does meta as does musk as do systems integrators like Accenture and on and on.

I think OP is saying despite all that there is little evidence that end users are actually paying significant sums of money to use it. To this point it’s a great marketing tool for companies that are all eager to be viewed as innovative and you have lots of very wealthy smart people with clout like Bezos and Zuckerberg talking it up. Like any good bubble you have to have at the core a real asset.

So of course there are people who use it daily as many anecdotes here in the comments point out. It’s a genuinely interesting and useful technology. That doesn’t mean though that it’s going to result in AGI or become profitable while liquidity conditions are still easy. I promise you Mark Zuckerberg would be singing a very different tune regarding chip investment if he were having to compete with bonds yielding 6-7%+.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Elon is driven by money per se. I think he just wants to see expensive cool shit happen in his lifetime.

I wish he'd choose to do expensive cool shit that helped people or cured diseases and stuff.

There are a lot of people doing that expensive cool shit. Not everyone’s expensive cool shit needs to be the same.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#526
post #458
post #34

Ignoring all the drama, this part is interesting: "On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."

Elon Musk is nothing if not famous for astronomically over-promising and under-delivering.

He is overly optimistic about timelines, but he usually delivers. Or did I imagine his company catching a fucking rocket out of the air with chopsticks? Guess that was under delivering

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#527
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

Millenarianism or millenarism (from Latin millenarius 'containing a thousand' and -ism) is the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which "all things will be changed".. - From Wiki

Correct me if this the wrong meaning in the context. I will admit this is the first time I see this word. When I first read it I thought it was something to do with "millennials" also known as Gen Y.

>Robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020,

And we still dont have Lv4 / Lv 5 autonomous vehicles. Not close and likely still not in 2030. And with all the regulation hurdle in place it means even if we achieve it by 2030 in lab it wont be widespread until 2035 or later.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#528
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this trend of using IQ as a primary measuring stick is flawed. I agree, but it's difficult to fully describe the impact of a tech where $5 gets you the ability to do arithmetic faster than literally every human combined even if we were all working at the speed of the current world record holder , yet simultaneously it took a billion dollar research team 14 years to figure out how to get a robot to reliably…

It's difficult to fully describe, so let's just give up and use a deeply flawed benchmark? Why not try to develop benchmarks that actually work and tell us something useful instead? The key issue is that there is no result an AI can achieve on a standard IQ test which guarantees that same AI can do any task at a superhuman level, apart from taking IQ tests. Can an LLM that scores 250 replace a human driver? Who knows…

More importantly, basically all of the IQ tests are in the training sets, so it's hard to know how the models would perform on similar tests not in the training set.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#529
post #527
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

Millenarianism or millenarism (from Latin millenarius 'containing a thousand' and -ism) is the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which "all things will be changed". . - From Wiki Correct me if this the wrong meaning in the context. I will admit this is the first time I see this word. When I first read it I thought it was something to…

++1

me too

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#530
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk I’m going to guess that GP does not consider random protestors to be in Sam Altman’s ‘sphere’ > The product market fit is fantastic. This is true insomuch that you define “product market fit” as “somebody mentioning it in an Indian restaurant in Berlin” > every definition of "very smart" Every definition you say? https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lclo77…

> Every definition you say? When I was growing up, "very smart" people had a law degree or a medical degree or understood quantum physics and/or relativity (but all three would be silly), or spoke perhaps three or four languages (but thirty would be a joke). They might perhaps also be above average at games of skill like chess, or perhaps could improvise poetry in some specific style (but every style would be a bit o…

> I may not trust ChatGPT's medical diagnosis or legal analysis, but it does pass those exams;

It's really, really, really important to note that this could easily just be memorisation (and indeed, the GSM Symbolic paper from Apple suggests that it most likely is).

We don't have a good way of assessing the ability of models literally trained on all free text in existence, but comparing their performance based on text they've seen in training is definitely not it.

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