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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

#131

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

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…

I don't really follow Altman's behavior much, but just in general:

> If he sincerely thought AGI was on the horizon he wouldn't be eyeing the exit

If such a thing could exist and was right around the corner, why would you need a company for it? Couldn't the AGI manage itself better than you could? Job's done, time to get a different hobby.

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

#132

Post by exitb »

vbezhenar wrote: post #85
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?

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.

That being said, 4o is functionally in the same league as Claude, which makes this a whole different story. One in which the moat is already gone.

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

#133

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

simonw wrote: post #76
twelve40 wrote: post #33

well the good news is all that stuff comes with an expiration date, after which we will know if this is our new destiny or yet another cloud of smoke. This is a good reminder: > Prominent AI figures were among the thousands of people who signed an open letter in March 2023 to urge a six-month pause in the development of large language models (LLMs) so that humanity would have time to address the social consequences o…

“robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always” We have them in San Francisco now (and Los Angeles and Phoenix, and Austin soon.)

By "robotaxi" I think they meant loosely "personal self driving car," not an automated taxi service.

Waymo's overstated[1] success has let self-driving advocates do an especially pernicious bit of goalpost-shifting. I have been a self-driving skeptic since 2010, but if you had told me in 2010 that in 10-15 years we have robotaxis that were closely overseen by remote operators who can fill in the gaps I would have thought that was much more plausible than fully autonomous vehicles. And the human operators are truly critical, even more so than a skeptic like me assumed: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... (sadly the interactive is necessary here and archives don't work, this is a gift link)

I still think fully autonomous vehicles on standard roads is 50+ years out. The argument was always that ~95% of driving is addressable by deep learning but the remaining ~5% involves difficult problem-solving that cannot be solved by data because the data does not exist. It will require human oversight or an AI architecture which is capable of deterministic reasoning (not transformers), say at least at the level of a lizard. Since we have no clue how to make an AI as smart as a lizard, that 5% problem remains utterly intractable.

[1] I have complained for years that Waymo's statisticians are comparing their cars to all human drivers when they should be comparing it to lawful human drivers whose vehicles are well-maintained. Tesla FSD proves that self-driving companies will respond to consumer demand for vehicles that speed and run red lights.

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

#134

Post by lolinder »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #131
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…

I don't really follow Altman's behavior much, but just in general: > If he sincerely thought AGI was on the horizon he wouldn't be eyeing the exit If such a thing could exist and was right around the corner, why would you need a company for it? Couldn't the AGI manage itself better than you could? Job's done, time to get a different hobby.

If such a thing was right around the corner, the person who controlled it would be the only person left who had any kind of control over their own future.

Why would you sell that?

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

#135

Post by stonethrowaway »

latexr wrote: post #103

Distorting the old Chinese proverb, “The best time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word was the first time he opened his mouth. The second best time is now”. We’ve known he’s a scammer for a long time. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

I would love to read a solid exposé of Worldcoin, but I don’t think I will get that from Buzzfeed or from The Atlantic. Both seemed to be agenda driven and hot headed. I’d like a more impartial breakdown ala AP-style news reporting.

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

#136

Post by blindriver »

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"

That’s not what happened to Theranos and Elisabeth Holmes

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

#137

Post by bboygravity »

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…

That comparison would make sense if the company was open source, non-profit, promised to make all designs available for free, took Elon Musk's money and then broke all promises includidng the one in its name and started competing with Musk.

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

#138

Post by [deleted] »

barrell wrote: post #100
raincole wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sam Altman has explicitly said the next model will be an even bigger jump than between 3 and 4. I think that was before 4o? I know 4o-mini and o1 for sure have come out since he said that

[deleted]

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

#139

Post by djjfksbxn »

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…

> A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason.

Why is it in your worldview a CEO “has to lie”?

Are you incapable of imagining one where a CEO is honest?

> The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free.

I’ll allow it if you stipulate that randomly and without reason when I ask for an alternator it prints me toy dinosaur.

> It is easy to imagine that the inventor of such a technology

As if the unethical sociopath TFA is about is any kind of, let alone the, inventor of genai.

> Being able to generate code/text/images is of no use to someone who doesn't know what to do with it.

Again, conveniently omitting the technology’s ever present failure modes.

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

#140

Post by diggan »

antirez wrote: post #93
diggan wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude is effectively GPT5 level Which model? Sonnet 3.5? I subscribed to Claude for while to test Sonnet/Opus, but never got them to work as well as GPT-4o or o1-preview. Mostly tried it out for coding help (Rust and Python mainly). Definitely didn't see any "leap" compared to what OpenAI/ChatGPT offers today.

Both, depending on the use case. Unfortunately Claude is better in almost every regard than ChatGPT but fo coding so far. So you would not notice improvements if you test it only for code. Where it shines is understanding complex things and ideas in long text, and the context window is AFAIK 2x than ChatGPT.

Tried it for other things too, but then they just seem the same (to me). Maybe I'll give it another try, if it has improved since last time (2-3 months maybe?). Thanks!
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