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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#281

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97
GarnetFloride wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they said about electricity when nuclear power plants were proposed. What's your electricity bill like today?

The primary operating cost of traditional power plants is fuel, i.e. coal and natural gas. The fuel cost for nuclear power plants is negligible because the energy content is higher by more than a factor of a million. So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Meanwhile the construction cost should be on pa…

> Unsurprisingly, this scared the crap out of the fossil fuel industry in the US and countries like Russia that are net exporters of fossil fuels, so they've spent decades lobbying to bind nuclear plant construction up in red tape to prevent them being built and funding anti-nuclear propaganda.

This is frankly nonsense, and my hope is that this nonsense is coming from a person too young to remember the real, valid fears from disasters like 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Yes, I fully understand that over the long term coal plants cause many more deaths, and of course climate change is an order of magnitude worse, eventually. The issue is that human fears aren't based so much on "the long term" or "eventualities". When nuclear power plants failed, they had the unfortunate side effect of making hundreds or thousands of square miles uninhabitable for generations. The fact that societies demand heavy regulation for something that can fail so spectacularly isn't some underhanded conspiracy.

Just look at France, the country with probably the most successful wide-scale deployment of nuclear. They are rightfully proud of their nuclear industry there, but they are not a huge country (significantly smaller than Texas), and thus understand the importance of regulation to prevent any disasters. Electricity there is relatively cheap compared to the rest of Western Europe but still considerably higher than the US average.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#282

Post by rcarmo »

This read like a Philip K. Dick, Ubik-style advertisement for a dystopian future, and I’m pretty amazed it is an actual blog post by a corporate leader in 2025. Maybe Sam and Dario should be nominated for Hugos or something…

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#283

Post by imgabe »

rl3 wrote: post #269
imgabe wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Soft power is of obvious immense benefit to citizens of the United States, however you've re…

How about we lower taxes and give money back to the people who earned it? If you want to use your money to save dying children on the other side of the world, you are welcome to do that. If other people have more pressing needs for their money they can do that too.

It seems people are infinitely compassionate when spending someone else’s money.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#284

Post by tsimionescu »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #128
minimaxir wrote: post #14

> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. This isn't correct: people want good software and good art, and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the h…

>and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs. You are getting confused here... LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular…

Do you have any proof whatsoever that non-programmers are using LLMs to write small bespoke apps for them successfully? Programming ecosystems are generally very unfriendly to this type of use case, with plenty of setup required to get something usable out even if you have the code available. Especially if you'd like to run the results on your phone.

Sure, an LLM might be able to guide you through the steps, and even help when you stumble, but you still have to follow a hundred little steps exactly with no intuition whether things will work out at the end. I very much doubt that this is something many people will even think to ask for, and then follow-through with.

Especially since the code quality of LLMs is nowhere near what you make it out to be. You'll still need to bear with them and go through a lot of trial and error to get anything running, especially if you have no knowledge of the terms of art, nor any clue of what might be going wrong if it goes wrong. If you've ever seen consumer bug reports, you might have some idea of the quality of feedback the LLM may be getting back if something is not working perfectly the first time. It's very likely to be closer to "the button you added is not working" than to "when I click the button, the application crashes" or "when I click the button, the application freezes for a few seconds and then pops up an error saying that input validation failed" or "the button is not showing up on the screen" [...]

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#285

Post by tsimionescu »

theptip wrote: post #177
actuallyalys wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, watt-hours are correct. Think of it this way: Power supplies and laptop chargers are rated in watts and that represents how much energy they can pull from the wall at a point in time. If you wanted to know how much energy a task takes on your computer and you know it maxes out your 300 watt desktop [0] for an entire hour, that would take 300 watt-hours. [0] To my knowledge, no desktops are built to max out their…

Watt-hours seem good right now, and rebut the current arguments that LLMs are wasteful. They might soon stop being the right lens, if your agents can go off and (in parallel) expend some arbitrary and borderline-unknowable budget of energy on a single request. At some point you’ll need to measure in terms of $ earned per W-H, or just $out/$in.

(average) Watt-hours would still be the right unit to measure that, if the question is about energy efficiency / environmental impact. You still care how much energy those agents consume to achieve a given task, and the time it takes for tasks is still variable, so you need to multiply by time.

Money is irrelevant to energy efficiency.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#286

Post by rl3 »

imgabe wrote: post #283
rl3 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Soft power is of obvious immense benefit to citizens of the United States, however you've re…

How about we lower taxes and give money back to the people who earned it? If you want to use your money to save dying children on the other side of the world, you are welcome to do that. If other people have more pressing needs for their money they can do that too. It seems people are infinitely compassionate when spending someone else’s money.

I think KFC called that the Double Down, but to each their own.

What of the argument against USAID’s rapid disassembly then? Is such an outcome permissible or even desired on account of sparing these funds sooner, aid continuity be damned?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#287

Post by trashtester »

flessner wrote: post #267

> Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it. Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; It was probably around 7 years ago when I first got interested in machine learning. Back then I followed a crude YouTube tutorial which consisted o…

The "next token prediction" is a distraction. That's not where the interesting part of an AI model happens.

If you think of the tokenization near the end as a serializer, something like turning an object model into json, you get a better understanding. The interesting part of a an OOP program is not in the json, but what happens in memory before the json is created.

Likewise, the interesting parts of a neural net model, whether it's LLM's, AlphaProteo or some diffusion based video model, happen in the steps that operate in their latent space, which is in many ways similar to our subconscious thinking.

In those layers, the AI models detect deeper and deeper patterns of reality. Much deeper than the surface pattern of the text, images, video etc used to train them. Also, many of these patterns generalize when different modalities are combined.

From this latent space, you can "serialize" outputs in several different ways. Text is one, image/video another. For now, the latent spaces are not general enough to do all equally well, instead models are created that specialize on one modality.

I think the step to AGI does not require throwing a lot more compute into the models, but rather to have them straddle multiple modalities better, in particular, these:

- Physical world modelling at the level of Veo3 (possibly with some lessons from self driving or robotics model for elements like object permananence and perception) - Symbolic processing of the best LLM's. - Ability to be goal oriented and iterate towards a goal, similar to the Alpha* family of systems - Optionally: Optimized for the use of a few specific tools, including a humanoid robot.

Once all of these are integrated into the same latent space, I think we basically have what it takes to replace most human thought.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#288

Post by imgabe »

biophysboy wrote: post #245
imgabe wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve been providing foreign aid for, what, like 70-80 years now? Have the dysfunctional governments fixed themselves yet? How long should it take? 100 years? 500 years? Maybe providing aid is just propping up dysfunctional governments by doing their job for them and it would be better in the long run if they were allowed to collapse and be replaced with something that was forced to be functional.

It’s globally useful to eradicate/reduce disease in a region irrespective of whether or not the region’s government becomes stable. Viruses and bacteria mutate and do not care about borders. I have no fantasies that aid will magically make countries stable.

If it is globally useful then the burden should be spread equally among all the countries on the globe. If the US is providing this service, other countries should compensate us for it.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#289

Post by hoseja »

woopsn wrote: post #199
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…

Artificial intelligence is a nourished and well educated population. Plus some Adderall maybe. Those are the key insights which represent the only scientific basis for that term. The crazy thing is that a well crafted language model is great product. A man should be content to say "my company did something akin to compressing the whole internet behind a single API" and take his just rewards. Why sully that reputation…

Such is the nature of the scorpion.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#290

Post by klipt »

flessner wrote: post #267

> Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it. Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; It was probably around 7 years ago when I first got interested in machine learning. Back then I followed a crude YouTube tutorial which consisted o…

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch

You must first invent the universe

If you wish to predict the next token really well

You must first model the universe

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