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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#321

Post by imgabe »

duchef wrote: post #312
imgabe wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying the US is simultaneously non-functional but also responsible for providing free healthcare to every other country? If we're non-functional, where is all the foreign aid providing free stuff for us? C'mon other countries, give us free stuff. It will be great for your soft power, and prevent us from doing terrorist attacks on you.

Why do you keeping making posts implying the US provides the bulk of international aid when that is demonstrably not the case (on a % of GDP basis or total dollar amount)?

If it’s not a significant amount then why is it such a catastrophe if it stops?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#323

Post by fyrn_ »

throw310822 wrote: post #275
paradox242 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a condensed version of Altman's greatest hits when it comes to his pitch for the promise of AI as he (allegedly) conceives it, and in that sense it is nothing new. What is conspicuous is that there is a not-so-subtle reframing. No longer is AGI just around the corner, instead one gets the sense that OpenAI they have already looked around that corner and seen nothing there. No, this is one of what I expect wil…

Cool things down a bit? That's what you call "we're already in the accelerating part of the singularity, past the event horizon, the future progress curve looks vertical, the past one looks flat"? :D

For Sam Altman, honestly yes. The man has said some truly wild things for the VC

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#324

Post by imgabe »

rl3 wrote: post #314
imgabe wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're right. Hopefully those impoverished kids (many of whom are dead now) take some personal responsibility for themselves in the afterlife. To think we'd even entertain pulling their food and medicine on their schedule and not our schedule. The children? No, but their parents and the other adults running their country. That is who is responsible for providing for them. Americans have their own children they need…

> Americans have their own children they need to take care of and do not need their money seized and sent overseas to take care of other people's children. You talk as if it's a zero-sum game, as if the two choices are mutually exclusive. > And yes, maybe it is a "rug pull" but it was always going to be. No reason it had to be.

It is zero sum. How is it not? This is not an investment. It is not going to create future tax revenue for the US. It is just keeping people barely alive in crippling poverty for a little bit longer than they would otherwise.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#325

Post by udev4096 »

rcarmo wrote: post #282

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…

[flagged]

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#326

Post by LtWorf »

psalaun wrote: post #251
godelski wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in ML and honestly I agree. We live in a fairly post scarce world. We could already live in a much less post scarce world. AI, as most technology, make these things easier, but they are power. It's all about what you do with power. You can build power plants or bombs. AI could (let's be hypothetical) free humans from all necessary labor. Robots making all the food, mining all the materials, and do the whole pi…

> It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here I'd like someone, amongst the tech bros for instance but it could be any influential politician in power, to set a target on when do we stop making life more miserable than it could for billions of people, by asking them to aim for no more than structural unemployment, 40+ hours weeks, steady economic growth in the name of progress. Becaus…

tech bros by definition want people to be miserable

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#328

Post by justlikereddit »

It's like the tenth time openAI invents AGI?

Like a storefront advertising "live your wildest dreams" in pink neon. A slightly obese Mediterranean man with questionable taste tries to get you into his fine establishment. And if you do enter the first thing that meets you is an interior with a little bit too many stains and a smell of cum.

That's the vibe I get whenever Sam goes on his bi-quarterly AGI hype spree.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#329

Post by Sammi »

helloplanets wrote: post #319
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…

What's your take on Anthropic's 'Tracing the thoughts of a large language model'? [0] > To write the second line, the model had to satisfy two constraints at the same time: the need to rhyme (with "grab it"), and the need to make sense (why did he grab the carrot?). Our guess was that Claude was writing word-by-word without much forethought until the end of the line, where it would make sure to pick a word that rhyme…

What is called "planning" or "thinking" here doesn't seem conceptually much different to me than going from naive breath first search based Dijkstra shortest path search, to adding a heuristics that makes it search in a particular direction first and calling it A*. In both cases you're adding another layer to an existing algorithm in order to make it more effective. Doesn't make either AGI.

I'm really no expert in neural nets or LLMs, so my thinking here is not an expert opinion, but as a CS major reading that blog from Anthropic, I just cannot see how they provided any evidence for "thinking". To me it's pretty aggressive marketing to call this "thinking".

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#330

Post by MagnumOpus »

squidbeak wrote: post #320
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nuclear plants have other long tails costs, decommissioning and waste containment.

So do coal plants. Interestingly approximately nobody seems to be worried about the thousands of coal ash ponds leaching radioactive material, toxic heavy metals and teratogenic compounds into ground water on a regular basis - while storing spent fuel element in a salt mine thousands of miles away engenders outrage…
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