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Sam Altman’s leap of faith

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Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#141

Post by mindgam3 »

m_fayer wrote: post #59

> Still, Altman insisted there’s a better argument to be made for thinking about — and talking with the media about — the potential societal consequences of AI, no matter how disingenuous some may find it. “The same people who say OpenAI is fear mongering or whatever are the same ones who are saying, ‘Shouldn’t Facebook have thought about this before they did it?’ This is us trying to think about it before we do it.”…

I was at baby-Facebook (offered PM job there in 2007, went to Bebo instead, stayed close for years with many engineers/execs). Justifying OpenAI’s fear-mongering by pointing to Facebook is disingenuous and possibly harmful as I attempt to explain at the bottom of a separate top level comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19955146

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#142

Post by olivermarks »

MegaButts wrote: post #110
olivermarks wrote: post #108

TechCrunch is a site that has historically promoted these types of chimeras for gain and then subsequently been prominent in writing post mortems and knocking ideas down, much like the tabloid press do with showbiz personalities.

Should they not discuss the potential benefits of a new technology or the failure of an attempted technology? You're basically complaining about them reporting on technology, which is their purpose.

Not complaining, just commenting that Techcrunch historically tend to be at the hype extremes at top and bottom of boom and bust cycles. Therefore good to take with a pinch of salt or two

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#143

Post by tim333 »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #99

I feel that most of the people that are truly bullish on AI have never actually programmed it to understand how far we have to go and how primitive the solutions actually are. I see some powerful statistical tools for categorization and optimization under finely crafted conditions but nothing else. We have a long way to go.

I probably fit that category - bullish and not programmed all that much. A couple of reasons to be bullish - the actual brain may use quite simple solutions as well. We are hacked together from DNA transcribing to about 15,000 proteins of which about 13% seem brain specific which you might think can't result in that much algorithmic complexity. Also there seems progress with things like AlphaZero beating humans at all perfect knowledge board games, getting quite good at StarCraft, driving cars if rather badly and so on.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#144

Post by notahacker »

arugulum wrote: post #113
notahacker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

tbf I wasn't 100% sure whether you were tongue-in-cheek or had just spent way too much time taking variants of this argument seriously on LessWrong...

(also, as much as I'm also tongue in cheek when talking about AGIs punishing [infinite numbers of simulations of] Sam Altman for backing the wrong AGI project, I'm dead serious about them potentially being able to turn a decent profit selling advanced data processing to Silicon Valley startups. And let's face it, Sam's a much better CEO to be able to help them achieve that than AI Rapture anyway)

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#145

Post by fludlight »

jacquesm wrote: post #130
whyenot wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donald Trump could "solve" global warming in less than 30 minutes with a call to the military. Vladimir Putin has a similar option. Depopulation and nuclear winter would do the trick. Of course I am being glib, but we are living in a world where two people have the power to end civilization any time they want to. Something that I think is important to remember when talking about risks of AI.

For risks of nuclear deterrence one would hope that the military would follow Trump's orders, for humanity one would hope that they would not because he's about as stable as 74 year old nitroclycerine.

The US/Soviet/Russian/Chinese military junior->senior brass have been around for long enough to acknowledge the necessary co-existence of the others.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#146

Post by fludlight »

chrischen wrote: post #96
ngrilly wrote: post #89

In 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…

The AI’s solution to global warming that humans cannot solve is to kill all humans.

...or wait for humans to self-destruct. "Humans self-destructing...wait...cannot kill humans...standby...most humans dead of own volition..."

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#147

Post by atomical »

ridewinter wrote: post #85
seibelj wrote: post #67

I have been a big skeptic of self-driving cars and other AI promises for years, taking my downvotes as armchair futurists predicted a self-driving car would be picking me up any day now, well before it was popular to be a contrarian after Tesla and Uber killed their drivers. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Also notice the original links have the breathless hype from journalists who know-nothing and eat up whatever techno…

David Deutsch, father of the quantum computer, says that we can only automate and program something that we understand, and that we do not understand human intelligence or how creativity works. And AGI is not possible until we do.

Relevant link:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artifici...

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#148

Post by atomical »

hindsightbias wrote: post #71
seibelj wrote: post #67

I have been a big skeptic of self-driving cars and other AI promises for years, taking my downvotes as armchair futurists predicted a self-driving car would be picking me up any day now, well before it was popular to be a contrarian after Tesla and Uber killed their drivers. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Also notice the original links have the breathless hype from journalists who know-nothing and eat up whatever techno…

I just wish there were tools to analyze all the claims and projections against reality - just to identify who actually grasps a market reality. How do I find the Micheal Burry of AI? Is there a way to short AI?

Perhaps there is a way to use prediction markets, like Augur, to short it.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#149

Post by davidivadavid »

d_burfoot wrote: post #112

I 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.

Pretty sure people want solutions to their problems in general. AGI is the ultimate product for that. It's a general problem solver. At least in theory.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#150

Post by davidivadavid »

wpietri wrote: post #37
atomical wrote: post #28

I want to short Altman and his startup. How do I do it? Prediction markets?

Sadly, as far as I know, it's impossible to short startups, but I wish it were otherwise. After I made a comment hear last year about prediction markets and startups [1] a VC got in touch with me to kick the idea around. To my mind one of SV's big problems is the high level of hype and herd-following. It's a certainty money is getting wasted on fashionable ideas of the day (e.g., "Uber for X"), and some sort of infor…

I've toyed with the idea of building a website where you can build mock portfolios of startups based on e.g. Crunchbase data (I'm not sure if there's enough data publicly available to do it nicely). You could add bells and whistles such as shorting, and gradually transition it to use real dollars instead of fake money.
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