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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

#191

Post by raincole »

nomilk wrote: post #97

tl;dr author complains that Sam's predictions of the future of AI are inflated (but doesn't offer any of his own), and complains that AI tools that surprised us last year look mundane now. The article is written to appeal to people who want to feel clever casually slagging off and dismissing tech. > it appears to have plateaued. GPT-4 now looks less like the precursor to a superintelligence and more like … well, any…

> it appears to have plateaued. GPT-4 now looks less like the precursor to a superintelligence and more like … well, any other chatbot.

This is such a ridiculous sentence.

GPT-4 now looks like any other chatbot because the technology advanced so the other chatbots are smarter now as well. Somehow the author is trying to twist this as a bad thing.

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

#193

Post by marcosdumay »

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?

There are plenty of examples of good things being unavailable due to market manipulation and corrupt government.

But I don't know of anything nearly as extreme as destroying an entire invention. Those tend to stick around.

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

#194

Post by bee_rider »

barrell wrote: post #115
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 would say LLMs are much less “produce a perfect part from nothing” and more “cut down a tree and get a the part you ask for, for a random model of car”

Car analogies are a little fraught because, I mean, in some cases you can even die if you put just the wrong parts in your car, and they are pretty complex mechanically.

If you had a printer that could print semi-random mechanical parts, using it to make a car would be obviously dumb, right? Maybe you would use it to make, like, a roller blade wheel, or some other simple component that can be easily checked.

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

#195

Post by m3kw9 »

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…

Dissolve the safety team. You just made everyone stop reading the rest of your post by falsely claiming that

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

#196

Post by tjpnz »

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…

>The wealthy and powerful will never allow free abundance of physical goods in the hands of the little people.

Then there would be a violent revolution which wrestles it out of their hands. The benefits of such a technology would be immediately obvious to the layman and he would not allow it to be hoarded by a select few.

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

#197

Post by marcosdumay »

rsynnott wrote: post #188
CoastalCoder wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sleep…

It only worked at the time because it benefited the public at large.

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

#199

Post by jijijijij »

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

How could they not. The word `wealth` or idea of "money" is completely misleading here. It's cancerous accumulation of resources and influence. They are completely detached from consequential reality. The human brain has not evolved to thrive under conditions of total, unconditional material abundance. People struggle to moderate sugar intake, imagine unlimited access to everything. And it's an inherently amoral existence leading to the necessity of unhinged internal models of the world to justify continuation and reward. Their sense of self-efficacy derailed in zero-g. Listen to them talk about fiction... They literally can't tell the price of a banana, how can they possibly get any meaningful story told? All that is left is the aesthetics and mechanical exterior of narration. How can there be love or friendship with normal people grounding you? You could make everyone you ever met during your lifetime a millionaire, while effectively changing nothing for yourself. Nobody can be this rich and not lose touch with common shared reality.

Billionaires are shameful for the collective, they should be shameful to everyone of us. They are fundamentally most unfit for leadership. They are evidence of civilizatory failure, the least we can do is not idolize them.

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

#200

Post by throwaway314155 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #183
azinman2 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imp…

Humans can survive in space and on the moon because our intelligence is robust to environments we never encountered (or evolved to encounter). That's "all" general intelligence is meant to refer to. General just means robust to the unknown.

I've seen some use "super" (as in superhuman) intelligence lately to describe what you're getting at.

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