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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

#141

Post by henry2023 »

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.

I’ve got a local llama 3.2 3B running on my macOS. I can query it for recipes, autocomplete obvious code (this is the only thing GitHub Copilot was useful for). And answer simple questions when provided with a little bit of context.

All with much lower latency than an HTTP request to a random place, knowing that my data can’t be used to trading anything, and it’s free.

It’s absolutely insane this is the real world now.

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

#143

Post by melenaboija »

jasode wrote: post #116
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 empl…

I agree in most of what you said. The main problem for me is that I dont see LLMs are as solid foundations to create a company as technology progress from the 80s.

Im 42 though and already feeling old to understand the future lol

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

#144

Post by btown »

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…

> specify the correct parts, in the correct order, and use the parts to good purpose

While the attention-based mechanisms of the current generation of LLMs still have a long way to go (and may not be the correct architecture) to achieve requisite levels of spatial reasoning (and of "practical" experience with how different shapes are used in reality) to actually, say, design a motor vehicle from first principles... that future is far more tangible than ever, with more access to synthetic data and optimized compute than ever before.

What's unclear is whether OpenAI will be able to recruit and retain the talent necessary to be the ones to get there; even if it is able to raise an order of magnitude more than competitors, that's no guarantee of success. My guess would be that some of the decisions that have led to the loss of much senior talent will slow their progress in the long run. Time will tell!

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

#145

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

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

> Sam Altman has explicitly said the next model will be an even bigger jump than between 3 and 4.

You say unironically on an article stating that Sam Altman cannot be taken at his word in a string of comments about him hyping up the next thing so he can exit strongly on the backs of the next greater fool. But seriously, I’m sure GPT-5 will be the greatest leap in history (OpenAI equity holder here).

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

#146

Post by refulgentis »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #120
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.

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

Right.

It sounds to me like you agree and are repeating the comment but are framing as disagreeable.

I'm sure I'm missing something.

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

#147

Post by nicomeemes »

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…

You're lazily mixing metaphors here. This is the problem in all such discussions, it often gets reduced to some combination of hand waving and hype training. "AGI" means different things to everyone, okay? Then it's a meaningless term. It's like saying hey with a quantum computer of enormous size, we could simulate molecular interactions at a level impossible with current technology. I would love for us to be able to do that- but where is the evidence it is even possible?

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

#148

Post by OKRainbowKid »

dimgl wrote: post #29
cyanydeez wrote: post #6

Better headline : It's too late to stop taking Sam Altman at his word See same with Elon Musk. Money turns genius to smooth brained egomaniacal idiots. See same with Steve Jobs

I'm not sure this is the same situation... SpaceX just began a mission to save stranded scientists in space. And Starlink has legitimate uses.

That doesn't make Musk any less of an egomaniacal idiot in my eyes.

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

#149

Post by kylecazar »

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…

Your post is a good summarization of what I believe as well.

But what's interesting when I speak to laymen is that the hype in the general public seems specifically centered on the composite solution that is ChatGPT. That's what they consider 'AI'. That specific conversational format in a web browser, as a complete product. That is the manifestation of AI they believe everyone thinks could become dangerous.

They don't consider the LLM API's as components of a series of new products, because they don't understand the architecture and business models of these things. They just think of ChatGPT and UI prompts (or it's competitor's versions of the same).

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

#150

Post by addcn »

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…

Printed this out and pasted it into my journal. Going to come back to it in a few years. This touches on something important I can’t quite put into words yet. Some fundamental piece of consciousness that is hard to replicate - desire maybe
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