I am really curious how the employees and researchers (who will actually have to make all the miraculous things being promised to investors) feel about all the strong AI rhetoric. Do you have to be a true believer to work there, or are they willing to hire talented agnostics?
Sam Altman’s leap of faith
111–120 of 166 posts
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#112I like OpenAI and hope they succeed. But it's a bit ironic that the president of YC has become the CEO of a company that ignores YC's most hallowed slogan: "Make Something People Want". As far as I know, nobody's been clamoring for super-powerful language models or human-level DOTA bots.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#113Allow me to present Altman's wager: - If OpenAI does not achieve AGI, and you invested in it, you lose some finite money (or not, depending on the value of their other R&D) - If OpenAI does not achieve AGI, and you did not invest in it, you saved some finite money, which you could invest elsewhere for finite returns - If OpenAI achieves AGI and you invested in it, you get infinite returns, because AGI will capture al…
Has the same issue as Pascal's. Competing AGI projects (gods) exist and their believers might be the ones reaping the infinite rewards, not to mention the distinct possibility the AGI (god) doesn't actually see rewarding believers as its highest priority, and might choose to share its infinite rewards with people who aren't part of the inner circle, or even punish people who joined inner circles with the express inte…
>Has the same issue as Pascal's.
I get the feeling that some people (maybe not this commenter) are missing the point I'm making.
Yes, Pascal's wager is flawed - which is why I'm modeling the Altman's wager after it.
I thought I had made the wording and respective payoff statements sufficiently tongue-in-cheek, but I guess this is Poe's law biting back.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#114In the recorded interview, Sam Altman says climate change is such a hard problem that we need strong AI first to solve it. I have doubts about this for several reasons: - Human psychology is one of the biggest obstacles (maybe the biggest) in solving climate change, and I'm not sure how a strong AI is supposed to fix that. - Building carbon-neutral energy sources is a hard problem, but most experts are optimistic abo…
> Building carbon-neutral energy sources is a hard problem, but most experts are optimistic about our ability to solve this (for example, nuclear fusion).
Having been in the carbon-neutral energy sources industry for a while, I agree with your statement, but not your example. There are already carbon-neutral energy sources that exist and are cheap and competitive (solar and wind). So while it would be great if nuclear could eventually join the ranks of cheap carbon neutral sources, that's not currently the hard part. The hard part is (1) scaling up deployment and integration of these new sources, and (2) figuring out how to deal with all the stranded assets that are being displaced by new renewables.
But, yes, I agree that these are hard problems, experts are optimistic, and AI isn't a blocker since the issues are around business model, regulation, and political influence.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#115In the recorded interview, Sam Altman says climate change is such a hard problem that we need strong AI first to solve it. I have doubts about this for several reasons: - Human psychology is one of the biggest obstacles (maybe the biggest) in solving climate change, and I'm not sure how a strong AI is supposed to fix that. - Building carbon-neutral energy sources is a hard problem, but most experts are optimistic abo…
We need to price the cost of environment into the cost of goods. There needs to be room for the economics of environmentally friendly companies to outperform the economics of environmentally damaging companies. This will result in investment into environmental improvement and not rely on individuals having to tread on ‘environmental egg shells’ in a world of environmentally damaging products. Demand Environmental Economics from your politicians.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#116This whole premise that one can generate profits out of AGI is ridiculous. If AGI comes to fruition, it won’t be working to make profits for anyone. The idea that we would end up with a Friendly AGI that would prostrate itself to the destructive Super Apex Predator of this planet is laughable. That AGI would work diligently to pay investors off 100x is..well..a lame duck that won’t take off...it cant even barely limp…
Why, in principle, would it not be possible for us to design an AGI, that would have care for our (all sentient beings') welfare or care for the investors' profit as (one of) its core goal(s)? To make a biological comparison, the vast majority of humans have a deep, intrinsic need to procreate and have children. It doesn't really follow from some rational analysis — it's just there, presumably "imbued" into us by evo…
> Why, in principle, would it not be possible for us to design an AGI, that would have care for our (all sentient beings') welfare or care for the investors' profit as (one of) its core goal(s)?
Because we don't know how to design goal functions. Furthermore, how would the AI measure "welfare"? Maybe the way it maximizes welfare is horrifying to us. Look at how easy it is to hack current image recognition neural nets, then imagine a solution to the human welfare problem that is as far from an image of a dog as an image of pink noise is.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#117In the recorded interview, Sam Altman says climate change is such a hard problem that we need strong AI first to solve it. I have doubts about this for several reasons: - Human psychology is one of the biggest obstacles (maybe the biggest) in solving climate change, and I'm not sure how a strong AI is supposed to fix that. - Building carbon-neutral energy sources is a hard problem, but most experts are optimistic abo…
I agree w/ you, but devil's advocate: Perhaps arriving at "I'm not sure how" is the logic underlying Altman's conclusion. That is, for any problem x that human's attempt but cannot seem to wrap their heads around (i.e. resolve to "I'm not sure how to solve x"), then x is in the family of AGI-hard problems. Here x = climate change, and b/c we don't know how to solve x (be it challenges across tech/social/political/etc…
Hmmmm, the issue with train of thought is that it assumes Altman is dismissing many other energy experts' who are saying they do know how to solve x. Silicon Valley can't be that much of a bubble to think that just because it hasn't figured out how to deal with climate change, that no one else can either.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#118I like OpenAI and hope they succeed. But it's a bit ironic that the president of YC has become the CEO of a company that ignores YC's most hallowed slogan: "Make Something People Want". As far as I know, nobody's been clamoring for super-powerful language models or human-level DOTA bots.
Remember that this is a company that funded a medical debt collection startup.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#119I like his body language. When he can't or doesn't want to answer a question he stares right into the person's eyes and nods affirmatively as if he's telling them something really certain while non-answering. I'm definitely going to start doing that.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#120"the opportunity with artificial general intelligence is so incomprehensibly enormous that if OpenAI manages to crack this particular nut, it could “maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe" This feels a bit too Kurzweilian to me. I still don't understand how we go from General AI --> ??? --> Infinite $$$
> I still don't understand how we go from General AI --> ??? --> Infinite $$$
I still don't understand how we go from classifiers to AGI. We've done amazing things with classifiers, especially over the last few years with deep learning, but they're still just classifiers and I don't see any path from where we are now to actual "intelligence".