Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 1001 posts

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#241

Post by bigyabai »

stavros wrote: post #237
einrealist wrote: post #198

I don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning', all while subsidising the real costs to capture the market. So much SciFi BS and extrapolation about a technology that is useful if adopted with care. This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of…

> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning' If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ".

That's moonshot logic that reinforces the parent's point. You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#242

Post by Noumenon72 »

ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #194
morleytj wrote: post #166

Wow, this is an incredibly detailed piece. Really in depth reporting and the kind of detailed investigation we need more of on important topics like this. > "Employees now call this moment “the Blip,” after an incident in the Marvel films in which characters disappear from existence and then return, unchanged, to a world profoundly altered by their absence." This is a very small detail, but an instinctive grimace cro…

They're mass media cynically produced to extract maximum profit from lowest common denominator audiences, so the idea that people working in such influential positions find them appealing enough to reference suggests they are members of that lowest common denominator audience. The people shaping the future have no taste.

When things reach a certain level of popularity they constitute "mental real estate". Your audience has heard of Groundhog Day, so there is an opening for a movie with that title to make money -- your film will start out already having name recognition and some understanding of what the movie is about.

Thus it is a writer's job not to make references they find appealing to reveal their good taste, but to know what references their audience will find appealing and use them to help communicate concepts. If this bothers you it's because they're insulting you by saying you might be part of the audience that watches Marvel, and you had hoped reading the New Yorker would signal that you aren't.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#243

Post by shruggedatlas »

einrealist wrote: post #198

I don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning', all while subsidising the real costs to capture the market. So much SciFi BS and extrapolation about a technology that is useful if adopted with care. This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of…

Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#244

Post by Teever »

ronanfarrow wrote: post #59
kmfrk wrote: post #48

Gobsmacking details about Altmans' time as Y Combinator president, in case anyone's wondering. Fantastic reporting.

As is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page.

You mention many proxies of Musk who post negative content about Altman.

In your investigation were you able to determine if Altman has similar proxies?

How common would you say that this is? Do these kinds of people generally have teams of people who sling mud for them?

Can you speculate on how that manifests on a site like Hackernews?

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#245

Post by chromacity »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #164

> Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted “money and power.” Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, “Happy to not become rich on this, so long as no one else is.” In another, he asks, “So what do I really want?” Among his answers is “Financially what will take me to $1B.” I can't im…

Eh. It doesn't start or stop with people like Altman, Zuckerberg, or Nadella. I think it's a symptom of a broader problem in tech. Half the people on this site made a decision to work at companies that do shady things, and they did that to maximize personal wealth.

The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so we stick to enabling lesser evils to retire with mere millions in the bank.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#246

Post by xorgun »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #164

> Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted “money and power.” Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, “Happy to not become rich on this, so long as no one else is.” In another, he asks, “So what do I really want?” Among his answers is “Financially what will take me to $1B.” I can't im…

[dead]

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#247

Post by eutropia »

ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #194
morleytj wrote: post #166

Wow, this is an incredibly detailed piece. Really in depth reporting and the kind of detailed investigation we need more of on important topics like this. > "Employees now call this moment “the Blip,” after an incident in the Marvel films in which characters disappear from existence and then return, unchanged, to a world profoundly altered by their absence." This is a very small detail, but an instinctive grimace cro…

They're mass media cynically produced to extract maximum profit from lowest common denominator audiences, so the idea that people working in such influential positions find them appealing enough to reference suggests they are members of that lowest common denominator audience. The people shaping the future have no taste.

There's a time and a place for everything, and rejecting popular media as "lowest common denominator" is the most uninspired form of cultural elitism.

Is it cynical to want your to make a profit? Or for it to make enough profit to subsidize other projects?

Is it cynical to make something accessible so more people who watch it are able to enjoy it?

I agree that it's embarrassing and feels crass when movies both try to be broadly appealing and simultaneously fail to be entertaining or well executed ... but many of the marvel movies clearly surpass that bar.

No one wants to make a bad movie that does poorly with critics and paying customers - but it does happen because making a movie is expensive and complicated and requires a lot of skilled people working together towards the same goal.

Regarding taste: do you think a michelin star chef swears off cheap food like hotdogs or fish and chips? Doubtful - because those foods have their place and the chef is able to enjoy them for what they are rather than use them as an excuse to display a superiority complex.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#248

Post by krackers »

ambicapter wrote: post #148

I didn't have the mental energy to read the whole thing but man the final paragraph is some really good writing. Way to tie it all in together.

The entire thing is a joy to read, you should really set aside some time to cleanse your palette in this age of LLM prose. I mean just look at this juxtaposition

>Altman continued touting OpenAI’s commitment to safety, especially when potential recruits were within earshot. In late 2022, four computer scientists published a paper motivated in part by concerns about “deceptive alignment,” in which sufficiently advanced models might pretend to behave well during testing and then, once deployed, pursue their own goals.

(plus it finally resolves the mystery of "what Ilya saw" that day)

Also since it wasn't stated clearly

>“the breach” in India. Altman, during many hours of briefing with the board, had neglected to mention that Microsoft had released an early version of ChatGPT in India

That was Sydney if I understand correctly.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#249

Post by Noumenon72 »

bigyabai wrote: post #241
stavros wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning' If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ".

That's moonshot logic that reinforces the parent's point. You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment.

"The cure for cancer" as a phrase doesn't include those solutions. If the headline was "Pope discovers the cure for cancer" and those were his solutions you would say "No he didn't." OP was referring to AI discovering the cure for cancer that cancer research is working towards.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#250

Post by wyldfire »

ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

Dang, can you substantiate that this is actually Mr. Farrow like he claims?

Or Mr Farrow can you post some evidence somewhere we can see?

Post reply on HN