It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:21 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by BearOso » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:23 PM UTC

austinkhale wrote: post #39

There are legit criticisms of Sam Altman that can be levied but none of them are in this article. This is just reductive nonsense. The arguments are essentially: 1. The technology has plateaued, not in reality, but in the perception of the average layperson over the last two years. 2. Sam _only_ has a record as a deal maker, not a physicist. 3. AI can sometimes do bad things & utilizes a lot of energy. I normally rea…

I think LLM technology, not necessarily all of CNN, has plateaued. We've used up all the human discourse, so there's nothing to train it on.

It's like fossil fuels. They took billions of years to create and centuries to consume. We can't just create more.

Another problem is that the data sets are becoming contaminated, creating a reinforcement cycle that makes LLMs trained on more recent data worse.

My thoughts are that it won't get any better with this method of just brute-forcing data into a model like everyone's been doing. There needs to be some significant scientific innovations. But all anybody is doing is throwing money at copying the major players and applying some distinguishing flavor.

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

#123

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:23 PM UTC

BoredPositron wrote: post #52

ThinkBeat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a CEO lies all the time, and investors make investments because of it, will that not turn out to become a problem for the CEO?

Well lets take Tesla, FSD and Elon as an example were a judge just ruled[0] that it's normal corporate puffery and not lies. [0] https://norcalrecord.com/stories/664710402-judge-tosses-clas...

The 5th circuit's loose attitude about deception is why all Elon's Xs live in Texas, or will soon.

It's not trivial. "Mere puffery" has netted Tesla about $1B in FSD revenue.

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

#124

Post by namaria » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:23 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #89

namaria wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said this before, at the root of all these technological promises lies a perpetual motion machine. They're all selling the reversal of thermodynamics. Any system complex enough to be useful has to be embedded in an ever more complex system. The age of mobile phone internet rests on the shoulders of an immense and enormously complex supply chain. LLMs are capturing low entropy from data online and distilling it f…

> It's physically impossible Your brain is proof to the contrary. AGI means different things to everyone, but a human brain definitely counts as "general intelligence", that implemented in silicon is enough to get basically all the things promised by AGI: if that's done at the 20 watts per brain that biology manages, then all of humanity can be simulated within the power envelope of the USA electrical grid… three tim…

> a human brain definitely counts as "general intelligence", that implemented in silicon is enough to get basically all the things promised by AGI: if that's done at the 20 watts per brain that biology manages, then all of humanity can be simulated within the power envelope of the USA electrical grid… three times over.

So far the only thing that has been proven is we can get low entropy from all the low entropy we've published on the internet. Will it get to a point where models can give us more low entropy than what is present in the training data? Categorically: no.

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

#125

Post by thegeomaster » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

superluserdo wrote: post #96

throwaway42668 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's okay to say it. It's a bubble. It was just the next in line to be inflated after crypto.

I wouldn't write it off as a bubble, since that usually implies little to no underlying worth. Even if no future technical progress is made, it has still taken a permanent and growing chunk of the use case for conventional web search, which is an $X00bn business.

A bubble doesn't necessarily imply no underlying worth. The dot-com bubble hit legendary proportions, and the same underlying technology (the Internet) now underpins the whole civilization. There is clearly something there, but a bubble has inflated the expectations beyond reason, and the deflation will not be kind on any player still left playing (in the sense of AI winter), not even the actually-valuable companies that found profitable niches.

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

#126

Post by rand0mx1 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

rubyfan wrote: post #109

I sort of wish there was a filter for my life that would ignore everything AI (stories about AI, people talking about AI and of course content generated by AI). The world has become a less trustworthy place for a lot of reasons and AI is only making it worse, not better.

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

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

#127

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

butterfly42069 wrote: post #51

ThinkBeat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a CEO lies all the time, and investors make investments because of it, will that not turn out to become a problem for the CEO?

It seems that continuously promising something is X weeks/months/years away is seen as optimism and belief, not blatant disregard for facts. I'm sure the defence is always, "but if we just had a bit more money, we would've got it done"

Elizabeth Holmes would like a referral to lawyer who could make that case.

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

#128

Post by lrg10aa » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

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…

It does look like an exit. Employees were given the chance to cash in some of their shares at $86 billion valuation. Altman is getting shares.

New "investors" are Microsoft and Nvidia. Nvidia will get the money back as revenue and fuel the hype for other customers. Microsoft will probably pay in Azure credits.

If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably means bankruptcy. But at that stage all parties have already got what they wanted.

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

#129

Post by Mistletoe » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:25 PM UTC

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…

For people that don't get the references, this graph is so helpful for understanding the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

It just keeps happening over and over. I'd say we are at "Negative press begins".

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

#130

Post by vbezhenar » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 2:25 PM UTC

coffeefirst wrote: post #107

vbezhenar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm paying my subscription and I'd probably pay 5x more if they would charge it to keep access to the current service. ChatGPT 4o is incredibly useful for me today, regardless of whether GPT5 will be good or not. I'm not sure how does that reflect OpenAI cost, but those company costs are just bubbles of air anyway.

Would you be willing to share how you're using it? I keep hearing from people who find these enormous benefits from LLMs. I've been liking them as a search engine (especially finding things buried in bad documentation), but can't seem to find the life-changing part.

1. Search engine replacement. I'm using it for many queries I asked Google before. I still use Google, but less often.

2. To break procrastination loops. For example I often can't name a particular variable, because I can see few alternatives and I don't like all of them. Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT and often proceed with his opinion.

3. Navigating less known technologies. For example my Python knowledge is limited and I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it. ChatGPT is just perfect for that kind of tasks, because I know what I want to get, I just miss some syntax nuances and I can quickly check the result. Another example is jq, it's very useful tool, but its syntax is arcane and I can't remember it even after years of occasional tinkering with it. ChatGPT builds jq programs like a super-human, I just show example JSON and what I want to get.

4. Not ChatGPT, but I think Copilot is based on GPT4, and I use Copilot very often as a smart autocomplete. I didn't really adopt it as a code writing tool, I'm very strict at code I produce, but it still helps a lot with repetitive fragments. Things I had to spend 10-20 minutes before, construction regexps or using editor macroses, I can now do with Copilot in 10-20 seconds. For languages like Golang where I must write `if err != nil` after every line, it also helps not to become crazy.

May be I didn't formulate my thoughts properly. It's not anything irreplaceable and I didn't become 10x programmer. But those tools are very nice and absolutely worth every penny I paid for it. It's like Intellij Idea. I can write Java in notepad.exe, but I'm happy to pay $100/year to Jetbrains and write Java in Idea.