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

theatlantic.com

161–170 of 599 posts

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

#161

> 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?

> What if gpt5 is vaporware OpenAI decides what they call gpt5. They are waiting for a breakthrough that would make people "wow!". That's not even very difficult and there are multiple paths. One is a much smarter gpt4 which is what most people expect but another one is a real good voice-to-voice or video-to-video feature that works seamlessly the same way chatgpt was the first chatbot that made people interested.

It’s more than that. Because of what they’ve said publicly and already demonstrated in the 3->4 succession, they can’t release something incremental as gpt5.

Otherwise people might get the impression that we’re already at a point of diminishing returns on transformer architectures. With half a dozen other companies on their heels and suspiciously nobody significantly ahead anymore, it’s substantially harder to justify their recent valuation.

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

#162
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.

One of the above links is from the MIT Technology Review ...

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

#163
post #75

"Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot." - Sam Altman, https://ia.samaltman.com/ Reality: AI needs unheard amounts of en…

Wow that quote is absolutely crazy. “Discovery of all of physics”. I think that’s the worst puffery/lie I’ve ever heard by a CEO. Science requires experiments so the next LLM will have to be able to design CERN+++ level experiments down to the smallest detail. But that’s not even the hard part, the hard part is the actual energy requirements, which are literally astronomical. So it’s going to either have to discover…

I can't imagine anyone writing that paragraph of his with a straight face. The chuckling must've lasted a week.

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

#164
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…

> 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…

You are using "entropy" in a way I do not recognise.

Whatever you mean, our brains prove it's possible to have a system that uses 20 watts to demonstrate human-level intelligence.

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

#165

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.

Let’s say you got AGI, and it approximated a not so bright impulsive 12 year old boy. That would be an insane technological leap, but hardly one you’d want running the show.

AGI doesn’t mean smarter than the best humans.

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

#166

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

They made medical claims. That's a very bad idea if you aren't 100% sure

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

#167
post #127

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"

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

I think her end product was too clearly defined for anything she was doing to be passed as progress. I don't think you could make the case for her.

You can make a case that partial self driving is a route to FSD, the ISS is en route to Mars and (you can make a potentially slightly less compelling case) LLMs are on the way to AGI.

No one can make a case that lady was en route to the tech she promised

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

#168

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.

You can walk to where they're waiting for you.

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not a believer in general intelligence myself, all we have are a small pile of specific intelligences. But if it does exists then it would be godlike to us. I can't guess at the motivations of somebody who would want to bootstrap a god, but I doubt that Altman is so strapped for cash that his primary motivator is coming up with something to sell.

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

#170
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.

Are you sure you can get to that with transformers?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SkcM4hwgH3AP6iqjs/can-you-ge...

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