He is literally a manifestation of the phenomenon described in this book: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.469826 "The Authoritarian Personality" tl;dr - the roots of the authoritarian personality grow fertile in the desire to be free of 'the filth of others'. Altman seems like he'd go crazy if he didn't keep his machine spectacularly clean ..
He was talking about education. I'm pretty sure about it.
He devalues and invalidates his fellow human beings, from a position of disdain, too much for my liking. Avoiding his activities.
The issue is who is making the decision on where energy resources are spent - on people or machines. And it turns out efficiency or even humanity play a very small role in that decision matrix. Control, on the other hand, is important. Rich and powerful people tend to want to control things, and machines are better at that than people.
This is the conspiratorial mindset. It's not much better than the mindset of people who seek power. It's wrong, because it assumes that everything is about control. For example, if I told you that a certain rich and powerful person was spending resources on sending vaccines to poor countries, you might think that was because they wanted to control things. If I said that someone sent books and teachers to a poor count…
If you told me an individual powerful person did a good thing, then I could believe it. But I'm speaking about the characteristics of groups of people and a very long history of human civilization teaches us that, as a group (individual exceptions exist both in people and in actions), that the rich and powerful do things primarily for the purpose of increasing their own power, wealth, status, and control. No conspiracy is required. Its just people in a position to gain power use that power to get more power. The people who do that the most and are the best at it are disproportionately the ones with the most power. So, as a group, the rich and powerful are much more likely to do things in self serving interest (even at the cost of wider spread harm and suffering) than a random group a people. The proportion of sociopaths in CEOs is many times that of the regular population.
To some extend I think people are putting way to much weight on his exact words, and not why he says them. Altman is a man who is quickly running out of lies, so now he starts slinging random arguments that can't stand up to even the briefest of scrutiny. OpenAI is burning cash and fuel. There are results, and they are, to some extend, impressive, but not impressive enough to justify the cost and Altman are no longer…
People might not want to hear this but AI is already smarter and more useful than most people ever will be. We are not even talking about by the end of the year or decade anymore.
Read and think about what you wrote. How can an ai, completing specific scoped tasks, be in any way comparable to the scale of a human life? Maybe the same thing these execs forgot.
I have a different perspective. You'll probably hate it. AI data centers should be operated according to two limiting factors. 1) No energy from grid. Can't use coal or fossil fuel energy sources. Must have plan to provide excess TO grid. 2) No use of fresh water from municipal or fresh groundwater for cooling. Can use waste water. Must transition to providing excess fresh water to common supply. No loopholes. Massiv…
> 1) No energy from grid. Can't use coal or fossil fuel energy sources. Must have plan to provide excess TO grid. This is easy: the companies will simply build some nuclear power plants near to their data centers. Perhaps even nuclear power plants that are vibe-designed by their AIs. :-)
Faster and cheaper than nuclear power would be building a virtual power plant, adding big-ass banks of batteries charged during times of low demand or excess power capacity, and peak-shaving consumption when the rest of us need power.
I have a different perspective. You'll probably hate it. AI data centers should be operated according to two limiting factors. 1) No energy from grid. Can't use coal or fossil fuel energy sources. Must have plan to provide excess TO grid. 2) No use of fresh water from municipal or fresh groundwater for cooling. Can use waste water. Must transition to providing excess fresh water to common supply. No loopholes. Massiv…
They are already doing that.
They are just firing up natural gas portable generators.
Anthropic treating models like people is cringe and frankly just a PR stunt
I never denied that. I only said "It's really idiotic to posit that only things that eat and drink can suffer.". Don't just pattern-match everything to some vaguely related black/white issues.
In the entire span of human history, the concept of suffering required sentience and the only things with sentience eat and drink.
It probably doesn't matter that subscriptions are profitable, when some estimates put the number of users in the free tier at 96%. I sort of agree with you, not that it's the most subscriptions necessarily that will be the deciding factor, but the there's going to be some companies better positioned to survive when the free money stops. OpenAI has the brand, so that might help, but mostly I think they'll get absorbed…
> when some estimates put the number of users in the free tier at 96%. It's certainly almost everyone today, but that's because enshitificarion has yet to start properly. The risk to OpenAI is that their free tier are captured by the tack on markets (i.e. Gemini with 2TB of cloud storage). But otherwise they will make free more annoying until people just buy the cheap tier and then move up from there. Like chatgpt Go…
They will open up to be undercut by players like Gemini that can provide a less-shitty free tier, and capture their market share.
I seriously doubt, at this moment, that OpenAI can come up with a offering good enough to entice people to pay for them when there will be other free to use services around. Google seems to be well positioned to eat their lunch.
This is the conspiratorial mindset. It's not much better than the mindset of people who seek power. It's wrong, because it assumes that everything is about control. For example, if I told you that a certain rich and powerful person was spending resources on sending vaccines to poor countries, you might think that was because they wanted to control things. If I said that someone sent books and teachers to a poor count…
If you told me an individual powerful person did a good thing, then I could believe it. But I'm speaking about the characteristics of groups of people and a very long history of human civilization teaches us that, as a group (individual exceptions exist both in people and in actions), that the rich and powerful do things primarily for the purpose of increasing their own power, wealth, status, and control. No conspira…
Not to sound incredibly pessimistic, but I spend a lot of time in bars, and I can tell you that most of the people I meet who haven't got two cents to rub together are as capable if not more so of being dishonest, greedy and malicious as anyone with a billion dollars. A random group of people in your opinion contains less sociopaths than a group of people who powered their way or lucked into some money... I guess you're the optimist. I don't think the CEOs are any worse or better than the rest, and I think you kinda nailed it about individuals. We're all individuals. Faced with individual situations, some of us refuse to do harm, some try to do good, some of the time. That's all. That's what I mean by there being no conspiratorial way to frame the world. It's just chaos and a bunch of assholes making bad decisions, occasionally doing something alright.
People might not want to hear this but AI is already smarter and more useful than most people ever will be. We are not even talking about by the end of the year or decade anymore.
Read and think about what you wrote. How can an ai, completing specific scoped tasks, be in any way comparable to the scale of a human life? Maybe the same thing these execs forgot.
I am comparing competency not the "scale of a human life" or whatever that is supposed to mean. AI still lacks taste so it is still hard to replace human originality or creativity but that's almost it when it comes to work that can be done on a computer. It will very clearly surpass everyone in verifiable domains and already has surpassed most people.
We are already at that point where we just don't fully know what to do with what we already have and simply haven't fully internalised it. But all it will take is one economic shakeup to redistribute human intelligence from what we are familiar with.