Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 599 posts

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

#151

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

edgyquant wrote: post #92
BoredPositron wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Elons lies are way different. He mostly is just optimistic about time frames. Since Sam Altman and ChatGPT became mainstream the narrative is about the literal end of the world and OpenAI, and their influencer army, has made doomerism their entire marketing strategy.

When you're taking in money it's not blind optimism. They sold gullible people a feature that was promised to be delivered in the near future. Ten years later it's clearly all a fraud.

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

#152

Post by [deleted] »

Mistletoe wrote: post #129
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".

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by jacknews »

Does anyone take him at face value anyway?

The other issue is that AI's 'boundless prosperity' is a little like those proposals to bring an asteroid made of gold back to earth. 20m tons, worth $XX trillion at current prices, etc. The point is, the gold price would plummet, at the same time as the asteroid, or well before, and the promised gains would not materialize.

If AI could do everything, we would no longer be able (due to no-one having a job), let alone willing, to pay current prices for the work it would do, and so again, the promised financial gains would not materialize.

Of course in both cases, there could be actual societal benefits - abundant gold, and abundant AI, but they don't translate directly to 'prosperity' IMHO.

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

#154

Post by plaidfuji »

vbezhenar wrote: post #106
est wrote: post #74

sama is best match with today's LLM because of the "scaling law" like Zuckerberg described. Everyone is burning cash to race to the end, but the billion dollar question is, what is the end for transformer based LLM? Is there an end at all?

The end is super-human reasoning along with super-human intuition, based on humanity knowledge.

Sure, and the end of biotech is perfect control of the human body from pre-birth until death, but innovation has many bottlenecks. I would be very surprised if the bottlenecks to LLM performance are compute and model architecture. My guess is it’s the data.

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

#155

Post by ergonaught »

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.

All knowledge is incomplete and partial, which is another way of saying "wrong", therefore all "vision" is hallucination. This discussion would not be happening without hallucinators with a crowd sharing their delusion. Humanity generally doesn't find the actual truth sufficiently engaging to accomplish much beyond the needs of immediate survival.

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

#156

Post by twelve40 »

dagw wrote: post #72
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…

barber demands paper cash only...I have to stand in line at USPS and DMV Surely this is just a case of the future not being evenly distributed. All of these 'problems' are already solved and the solution is implemented somewhere, just not where you happen to be.

You're probably right. I'll wait until it gets better distributed. It's just that personally, it's been hard to reconcile the grandiose talk with what's actually around me, that's all.

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

#157

Post by Null-Set »

djjfksbxn wrote: post #139
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…

A CEO has a fiduciary duty to lie.

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

#158

Post by butterfly42069 »

blindriver wrote: post #136
butterfly42069 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well I didn't say everyone could pull it off successfully

I think the more abstract and less defined the end goal is, the easier it is to make everything look like progress.

The blood testing lady was a pass/fail really. FSD/AGI are things where you can make anything look like a milestone. Same with SpaceX going to Mars.

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

#159

Post by moogly »

edgyquant wrote: post #92
BoredPositron wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Elons lies are way different. He mostly is just optimistic about time frames. Since Sam Altman and ChatGPT became mainstream the narrative is about the literal end of the world and OpenAI, and their influencer army, has made doomerism their entire marketing strategy.

> He mostly is just optimistic about time frames

Perhaps if you have a selective memory. There's plenty of collections of straight-up set-in-stone falsehoods on the internet to find, if you're interested.

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

#160

Post by ben_w »

nicomeemes wrote: post #147
ben_w wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's no metaphor here, I meant literally doing those things.

I followed up the point about AGI meaning different things by giving a common and sufficient standard of reference.

Your brain is evidence that it's "even possible".

Post reply on HN