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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#221

Post by imgabe »

nielsbot wrote: post #214
imgabe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USAID is not the sole source of administering AIDS and malaria treatments. No doubt many more people were successfully treated because those treatments exist. I don't think I understand your point. We shouldn't develop new treatments because one country won't supply them to the entire world for free? Why is it the US's responsibility to treat every disease everywhere in the world? Do these countries not have their ow…

People keep saying we're the richest country in the history of the world. I think we have a responsibility to practice good old fashioned Christian compassion (with a side of soft power if that's more your thing.)

I thought we weren't a Christian country?

Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. If citizens want to do that, have the government collect fewer tax dollars and citizens can give them to charity as they see fit.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#222

Post by imgabe »

warwren wrote: post #219
imgabe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USAID is not the sole source of administering AIDS and malaria treatments. No doubt many more people were successfully treated because those treatments exist. I don't think I understand your point. We shouldn't develop new treatments because one country won't supply them to the entire world for free? Why is it the US's responsibility to treat every disease everywhere in the world? Do these countries not have their ow…

The point is that a treatment existing does not mean it will be adequately administered. The biggest pool of treatable cases worldwide does not occur where the people with the most ability to pay are.

And a treatment not existing means it will not be administered at all, adequately or not. You need to make the treatment exist first, then you can figure out how to administer it as widely as possible. You can't administer a treatment that doesn't exist.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#223

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

lantry wrote: post #200
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those incentives are themselves the output of a variety of heuristics that we rely on only due to a lack of viable alternatives. I expect that eventually AI will make some alternatives viable because the bottleneck is so often an information processing one. Three examples: - Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be b…

> AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies. The thing that you, altman, and every other AI booster fail to explain is how AI will do this. Every argument is littered with "if"s and "could"s, and it's just taken for granted that AI will be smart enough to find a solution that solves all our problems. It's also taken for granted that we'll actually implement the solution! If AI sai…

I've got a few designs in mind for an alternative to scarcity based economics. I don't presume to have it right, but its worth a shot and its a bit more concrete than blind trust in one technology or another. I thought it would take my whole life to just lay the foundation, but with some AI help, maybe not.

The trouble with you naysayers is you always take as immutable things that we can change.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#224

Post by imgabe »

biophysboy wrote: post #220
imgabe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USAID is not the sole source of administering AIDS and malaria treatments. No doubt many more people were successfully treated because those treatments exist. I don't think I understand your point. We shouldn't develop new treatments because one country won't supply them to the entire world for free? Why is it the US's responsibility to treat every disease everywhere in the world? Do these countries not have their ow…

All of these questions are easy to answer: 1) The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. 2) We don’t. USA’s foreign aid per capita is not that high (especially now). To mobilize private money for aid, you need a long-term, trusted infrastructure. 3) Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.

> The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence.

And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs.

> Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.

Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#225

Post by yablak »

imgabe wrote: post #221
nielsbot wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep saying we're the richest country in the history of the world. I think we have a responsibility to practice good old fashioned Christian compassion (with a side of soft power if that's more your thing.)

I thought we weren't a Christian country? Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. If citizens want to do that, have the government col…

USAID is not just charity. It is a projection of soft power that keeps many countries and world citizens looking up to the USA. It reduces likelihood of terrorist attacks on US citizens.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#226

Post by hdjdbdirbrbtv »

thegeomaster wrote: post #173
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #150

Do you think we will get AI models capable of learning in real time, using a small number of examples similar to humans, in the next few years? This seems like a key barrier to AGI. More broadly, I wonder how many key insights he thinks are actually missing for AGI or ASI. This article suggests that we've already cleared the major hurdles, but I think there are still some major keys missing. Overall his predictions s…

I hate to enter this discussion, but learning based on a small number of examples is called few-shot learning, and is something that GPT-3 could already do. It was considered a major breakthrough at the time. The fact that we call gradient descent "learning" doesn't mean that what happens with a well-placed prompt is not "learning" in the colloquial sense. Try it: you can teach today's frontier reasoner models to do…

Are you talking about teaching in the context window or fine tuning?

If it is the context window, then you are limited to the size of said window and everything is lost on the next run.

Learning is memory, what you are describing is an llm being the main character in the movie Momento, I.e. no longterm memories past what was trained in the last training run.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#227

Post by [deleted] »

imgabe wrote: post #224
biophysboy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these questions are easy to answer: 1) The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. 2) We don’t. USA’s foreign aid per capita is not that high (especially now). To mobilize private money for aid, you need a long-term, trusted infrastructure. 3) Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.

> The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs. > Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments. Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.

[deleted]

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#228

Post by haswell »

Analemma_ wrote: post #79
1penny42cents wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What problem?

I think you answered this with the rest of your comment.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#229

Post by [deleted] »

unstablediffusi wrote: post #193
greenie_beans wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

watch the cost of electricity go up because the demand created by data centers. i'm building an off grid solar system right now and it ain't cheap! thinking about a future where consumers are competing with data centers for electricity makes me think it might feel cheap in the future, though.

bro, how much did your electricity cost go up because of millions of people playing games on their 500w+ gpus? by a billion of people watching youtube? by hundreds of millions of women and children scrolling instagram and tiktok 8 hours a day?

[deleted]

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#230

Post by insin »

Briannaj wrote: post #204
ryandv wrote: post #87

> We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Not sure if wishful thinking trying to LARP-manifest this future into being, or just more unfalsifiable thinking where we can always be said to be past the event horizon and near to the singularity, given sufficiently underwhelming…

I could not take the article seriously after reading that.

I get the feeling the first paragraph was intended to make people who immediately went "this is is absolute horseshit" stop reading, in the same way an obvious spam email does
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