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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

#181

Post by bee_rider »

kylecazar wrote: post #149
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'…

I think people think* of ChatGPT not as the web UI, but as some mysterious, possibly thinking, machine which sits behind the web UI. That is, it is clear that there’s “something” behind the curtain, and there’s some concern maybe that it could get out, but there isn’t really clarity on where the thing stops and the curtain begins, or anything like that. This is more magical, but probably less wrong, than just thinking of it as the prompt UI.

*(which is always a risky way of looking at it, because who the hell am I? Neither somebody in the AI field, nor completely naive toward programming, so I might be in some weird knows-enough-to-be-dangerous-not-enough-to-be-useful valley of misunderstanding. I think this describes a lot of us here, fwiw)

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

#182

Post by rsynnott »

__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.

> AI can magically decide where to put small pieces of code.

Magically, but not particularly correctly.

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

#183

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

azinman2 wrote: post #165
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #131

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.

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.

For an intelligence to be "General" there would have to be no type of intelligence that it did not have access to (even if its capabilities in that domain were limited). The idea that that's what humans have strikes me as the same kind of thinking that led us to believe that earth was in the center of the universe. Surely there are ways of thinking that we have no concept of.

General intelligence would be like an impulsive 12 year old boy who could see 6 spatial dimensions and regarded us as cartoons for only sticking to 3.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

addcn wrote: post #150
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

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by 0x1ceb00da »

latexr wrote: 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-...

https://youtu.be/dbKwJM06fRM

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

#187

Post by vundercind »

Dalewyn wrote: post #71
bee_rider wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The journalist is making a product for the reader in the best case, their job is to help the reader. The second example you mention is a typical example of clickbait journalism, where the journalist has betrayed the reader and is trying to steal their attention, because they actually serve advertisers. But the first example is not very useful either. That journalist could be replaced by a fully automated thermometer.…

>your definition, which you seem to have just… made up? See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/journal Specifically noun, senses 2B through 2F. I expect journalists to record journals and nothing more nor nothing less, not editorials or opinion pieces which are written by authors or columnists or whatever.

Why favor a definition of “journalist” that approximately nobody else uses? It seems like it would just make it hard to communicate.

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

#188

Post by rsynnott »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #179
ryandrake wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The closest real-life thing (and probably what a lot of believers in this particular conspiracy theory are drawing on directly) is probably the Phoebus lightbulb cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

It’s rather hard to imagine even something like that (and it’s pretty limited in scope compared to the grand conspiracy above) working today, though; the EC would definitely stomp on it, and even the sleepy FTC would probably bestir itself for something so blatant.

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

#190

Post by mppm »

Around the time of the board coup and Sam's 7-trillion media tour, there were multiple, at the time somewhat credible, rumors of major breakthroughs at Open AI -- GPT5, Q*, and possibly another unnamed project with wow-factor. However, almost a year has passed, and OpenAI has only made incremental improvements public.

So my question is: What does the AI rumor mill say about that? Was all that just hype-building, or is OpenAI holding back some major trump card for when they become a for-profit entity?

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