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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#71

Post by jlhawn »

xg15 wrote: post #23

> The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year. How about affordable housing?

If I were a centibillionaire and I really thought Georgism was a good idea, I would make it my life's work to prove it out by using my vast net-worth to buy land in existing urban areas and actually implement it at a large scale. But instead the closest thing we have is the California Forever thing in East Solano County.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#73

Post by mindwok »

xg15 wrote: post #23

> The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year. How about affordable housing?

Affordable housing is already easily possible from a technical perspective, it's a social problem. I have some hope that AI will help with this, by at the very least providing faster ways to make decisions, but that's about it.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#76

Post by insin »

xg15 wrote: post #23

> The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year. How about affordable housing?

Affordable yachts for me, something something for thee

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#77

Post by jiggawatts »

simmanian wrote: post #18
afavour wrote: post #13

> It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year I heard similar things in my college dorm, amid all the hazy smoke. It’s very difficult to take this stuff seriously. It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars wound up by 1000x. Because we got from 1 to 100 of course we’ll get from…

I find it hard to believe too, but at the same time, Demis Hassabis has also said that AI will help us "colonize the galaxy" in as little as five years [1]. Maybe Sam Altman was emboldened by Hassabis' statement. I would not be opposed to living in a future where I can personally live in space. It would be quite fun. [1] (paywalled) https://fortune.com/2025/06/06/google-deepmind-ceo-demis-has...

Colonize the… what now? In how long!?

What is that man smoking and can I have some?

Five years wouldn’t be enough time to “colonise” Antarctica, let alone another planet (just one!), and certainly not anything at a larger scale, even if we were visited by aliens tomorrow and they gifted us five hundred spaceships to give us a boost.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#78

Post by thcipriani »

k2xl wrote: post #3

> The least-likely part of the work is behind us; the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far. > 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights Interesting the level of confidence compared to recent comments by Sundar [1]. Satya [2] also is a bit more reserved in his optimism. [1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps…

Gotta put the optimism in context vs. previous Sam Altman writing.

Here he says:

> Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp.

Six months ago[0] he said:

> We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.

This time:

> we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways

My summary: ChatGPT is already pretty great and we can make it cheaper and that will help humanity because...etc

Which moves the goal posts quite a bit vs: we'll have AGI pretty soon.

Could be he didn't reiterate we'd have AGI soon because he thought that was obvious/off-topic. Or it could be that he's feeling less bullish, too.

[0]: https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections>

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#79

Post by Analemma_ »

1penny42cents wrote: post #59
muglug wrote: post #46

I’ve heard a joke that under Steve Jobs, the number of big initiatives at Apple was limited to the number of execs Steve could shout at in a given day. I see a similar thing at work — the number of projects a developer can get through isn’t bounded by the lines of code they can churn out in a day. Instead it’s bounded by their appetite for getting shouted at when something goes wrong. Until you can shout at an LLM, I…

everyone talks about the alignment problem, not nearly enough about the accountability problem

What problem? The whole point of shareholder capitalism is to diffuse accountability across so many people that it ceases to exist: the employee points to management, management points to executives, executives point to the board, the board points to the shareholders, the shareholders are index funds managed by robots so "nobody" is to blame. The final phase of the administrative state works much the same way.

Viewed through that lens, LLMs and their total lack of accountability are a perfect match for the modern-day business; that's probably part of why so many executives are hell-bent on putting them everywhere as quickly as possible.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#80

Post by munificent »

1penny42cents wrote: post #59
muglug wrote: post #46

I’ve heard a joke that under Steve Jobs, the number of big initiatives at Apple was limited to the number of execs Steve could shout at in a given day. I see a similar thing at work — the number of projects a developer can get through isn’t bounded by the lines of code they can churn out in a day. Instead it’s bounded by their appetite for getting shouted at when something goes wrong. Until you can shout at an LLM, I…

everyone talks about the alignment problem, not nearly enough about the accountability problem

If I've learned anything from watching politics the past decade, it's that many important people in power consider lack of accountability a solution, not a problem.
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