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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

#171

Post by surgical_fire »

golergka wrote: post #49
surgical_fire wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were never geniuses. They were just rich assholes propped up by other rich assholes. "It's too late to stop conflating wealth with intelligence"

Regardless of personal qualities, for some reason these people have achieved great things for themselves and humanity, whereas countless competitors, including many other rich assholes, have not.

> achieved great things for themselves and humanity

For themselves? Absolutely.

For humanity? Perhaps we have wildly different ideas of what is good for humanity.

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

#172

Post by keiferski »

rubyfan wrote: post #109

I sort of wish there was a filter for my life that would ignore everything AI (stories about AI, people talking about AI and of course content generated by AI). The world has become a less trustworthy place for a lot of reasons and AI is only making it worse, not better.

Sounds like a good startup idea. Just be sure to use AI for this filter so you can get funded.

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

#173

Post by silvestrov »

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'd say that Microsoft's moat was the copyright law and ability to bully the hardware companies with exclusive distribution contracts.

Writing a new DOS (or Windows 3) from scratch is something a lot of developers could do.

They just couldn't do it legally.

And thus it was easy to bully Compaq and others into only distributing PCs with DOS/Windows installed. For some time you even had to pay the Microsoft fee when you wanted a PC with Linux installed.

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

#174

Post by surfingdino »

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…

Not enough plastics, glass, or metal in the air to make it happen. You need a scrapyard. Actually, that's how the LLMs treat knowledge. They run around like Wall-E grabbing bits at random and assembling them in a haphazard way to quickly give you something that looks like the thing you asked for.

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

#175

Post by jt2190 »

thelastgallon wrote: post #32

"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…

> AI needs unheard amounts of energy…

… and it always will? It seems terribly limiting to stop exploring the potential of this technology because it’s not perfect right now. Energy consumption of AI models does not feel like an unsolvable problem, just a difficult one.

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

#176

Post by throwgfgfd25 »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #87

Don't listen to David Karpfs of the world. Did he predict chat gpt? if you asked him in 2018, he would have said AI will never write a story now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed.

> now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed.

You really cannot.

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

#177

Post by rsynnott »

I mean, in general, if you’re taking CEOs at their word, and particularly CEOs of tech companies at their word, you’re gonna have a bad time. Tech companies, and their CEOs, predict all manner of grandiose nonsense all the time. Very little of it comes to pass, but through the miracle of cognitive biases some people do end up filtering out the stuff that doesn’t happen and declaring them visionary.

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

#178

Post by bambax »

> Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics. He predicts that we may have an all-powerful superintelligence “in a few thousand days.”

It seems fair to say Altman has completed his Musk transformation. Some might argue it's inevitable. And indeed Bill Gates' books in the 90s made a lot of wild promises. But nothing that egregious.

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

#179

Post by CoastalCoder »

ryandrake wrote: post #119
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…

> 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? The invention would never see the light of day. If someone were to invent Star Trek replicators, they'd be buried along with their invention. Best Case it would be quickly captured by the ownership class and only be allowed to be used by officially blessed manufacturing com…

I'm curious if this is true.

Are there specific historical examples of this that come to mind?

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

#180

Post by throwgfgfd25 »

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

Jobs was a sort of cracked genius and a very imperfect human who wanted to be a better human. Money didn't make him worse, or better. It didn't really change him at all on a personal level. It didn't even make him more confident, because he was always that. Look back through anecdotes about him in his life and he's just the same guy, all the time.

Even the stories I heard about him from one of his indirect reports back in the pre-iCEO "Apple is still fucked, NeXT is a distracted mess" era were just like stories told about him from the dawn of Apple and in the iPhone era.

Musk and Altman are opportunists. Musk appears to be a maligant narcissist. Neither seem in a rush to be better humans.

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