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It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

theatlantic.com

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Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#111

Post by [deleted] »

Analemma_ wrote: post #98
lolinder wrote: post #86

To recap OpenAI's decisions over the past year: * They burned up the hype for GPT-5 on 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can't quickly replicate. * They dissolved the safety team. * They switched to for profit and are poised to give Altman equity. * All while hyping AGI more than ever. All of this suggests to me that Altman is in short-term exit preparation mode, not planning for AGI…

Yeah, everything from OpenAI in the last year suggests they have nothing left up their sleeve, they know the competition is going to catch up very soon, and they're trying to cash out as fast as possible before the market notices. (In the Gell-Mann amnesia sense, make sure you take careful note of who was going "OAI has AGI internally!!!" and other such nonsense so you can not pay them any mind in the future)

[deleted]

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#112

Post by squarefoot »

hn72774 wrote: post #99
Aeolun wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need someone to tell you the truth you don’t need a CEO. What you need a CEO for is to sell you (and your investors) a vision.

Without the truth, a vision is a hallucination. It saddens me how easily someone with money and influence can elevate themselves to a quasi religious figure. In reality, this vision you speak of is more like the blind leading the blind.

> It saddens me how easily someone with money and influence can elevate themselves to a quasi religious figure.

If so many people wouldn't fall for claims without any proof, religions themselves would not exist.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#114

Post by patcon »

raincole wrote: post #69
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #15

> At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future I think the job of a CEO is not to tell you the truth, and the truth is probably more often than not, the opposite. What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? What is OpenAI worth then?

> What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? Sam Altman himself doesn't know whether it's the case. Nobody knows. It's the natural of R&D. If you can tell whether an architecture works or not with 100% confidence it's not cutting edge.

> Nobody knows.

I suspect it's a little different. AI models are still made of math and geometric structures. Like mathematicians, researchers are developing intuitions about where the future opportunities and constraints might be. It's just highly abstract, and until someone writes the beautiful Nautilus Mag article that helps a normie see the landscape they're navigating, we outsiders see it as total magic and unknowable.

But Altman has direct access to the folks intuiting through it (likely not validated intuitions, but still insight)

That's not to say I believe him. Motivations are very tangled and meta here

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#115

Post by barrell »

simpaticoder wrote: post #67

A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason. The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free. How would the car industry change if someone made a 3D printer that could make any part, including custom parts, with just electricity and air? It is a sea change to manufacturers and distributors, but ther…

I would say LLMs are much less “produce a perfect part from nothing” and more “cut down a tree and get a the part you ask for, for a random model of car”

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#116

Post by jasode »

melenaboija wrote: post #58

It is weird that one of the most valued markets (openai, microsoft investments, nvidia gpus, ...) is based on a stack that is available to anyone that can pay for the resources to train the models and that in my opinion still has to deliver to the expectations that have been created around it. Not saying it is a bubble but something seems imbalanced here.

>one of the most valued markets ... is based on a stack that is available to anyone

The sophisticated investors are not betting on future increasing valuations based on current LLMs or the next incremental iterations of it. That's a "static" perspective based on what outsiders currently see as a specific product or tech stack.

Instead, you have to believe in a "dynamic" landscape where OpenAI the organization of employees can build future groundbreaking models that are not LLMs but other AI architectures and products entirely. The so-called "moat" in this thinking would be the "OpenAI team to keep inventing new ideas beyond LLM". The moat is not the LLM itself.

Yes, if everyone focuses LLMs, it does look like Meta's free Llama models will render OpenAI worthless. (E.g. famous memo : https://www.google.com/search?q=We+have+no+Moat%2C+and+Neith...)

As an analogy, imagine that in the 1980s, Microsoft's IPO and valuation looks irrational since "writing programming code on the Intel x86 stack" is not a big secret. That stock analysis would then logically continue saying "Anybody can write x86 software such as Lotus, Borland, etc." But the lesson learned was that the moat was never the "Intel x86 stack"; the moat was really the whole Microsoft team.

That said, if OpenAI doesn't have any future amazing ideas, their valuation will crash.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#118

Post by rapind »

olliem36 wrote: post #94
simpaticoder wrote: post #67

A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason. The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free. How would the car industry change if someone made a 3D printer that could make any part, including custom parts, with just electricity and air? It is a sea change to manufacturers and distributors, but ther…

Great analogy! I'll borrow this when explaining my thoughts on how LLMs pose to replace software engineers.

I tried replacing myself (coding hat) and it was pretty underwhelming. Some day maybe.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#119

Post by ryandrake »

simpaticoder wrote: post #67

A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason. The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free. How would the car industry change if someone made a 3D printer that could make any part, including custom parts, with just electricity and air? It is a sea change to manufacturers and distributors, but ther…

> How would the car industry change if someone made a 3D printer that could make any part, including custom parts, with just electricity and air?

The invention would never see the light of day. If someone were to invent Star Trek replicators, they'd be buried along with their invention. Best Case it would be quickly captured by the ownership class and only be allowed to be used by officially blessed manufacturing companies, and not any individuals. They will have learned their lesson from AI and what it does to scarcity. Western [correction: all of] society is hopelessly locked into and dependent on manufacturing scarcity, and the idea that people have to pay for things. The wealthy and powerful will never allow free abundance of physical goods in the hands of the little people.

Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

#120

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

simpaticoder wrote: post #67

A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason. The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free. How would the car industry change if someone made a 3D printer that could make any part, including custom parts, with just electricity and air? It is a sea change to manufacturers and distributors, but ther…

I dunno, magically fabricating a part is fundamentally different than magically deciding where and when to do so.

AI can magically decide where to put small pieces of code. Its not a leap to imagine that it will later be good at knowing where to put large pieces of code.

I don't think it'll get there any time soon, but the boundary is less crisp than your metaphor makes it.

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