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The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#21

Post by mupuff1234 »

invig wrote: post #5

GPT-4 is absolutely incredible and even if we never get beyond it the world is a much better place with it than without it. It makes total sense to bet on the team that made this being the best placed people in the world to advance it.

How exactly is the world so much better with GPT 4?

I'm not saying it's not cool tech or that the current level of LLMs don't have some impact, but "the world is so much better" is quite a stretch (unless you are a Nvidia shareholder)

Not to mention the adverse affect of job loss in industries such as customer service almost exclusively hurting people from poorer countries and lower socio economic levels.

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#22

Post by fromMars »

invig wrote: post #5

GPT-4 is absolutely incredible and even if we never get beyond it the world is a much better place with it than without it. It makes total sense to bet on the team that made this being the best placed people in the world to advance it.

From what I can tell, all the GPT team did was scale up ideas already there invented elsewhere in previous large language models.

I am not sure that is a reason to bet on them making any breakthroughs needed for AGI.

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#23

Post by __loam »

motbus3 wrote: post #3

The manoeuvre to become a for-profit organisation after years without paying taxes tells something deeper about OpenAI true way of operating. Accepting to do deals with people who have no shame for pulling such trick is to accept they will do it again in a much bigger scale.

Should be illegal.

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#25

Post by light_triad »

Sam has always been very skilled at dealing with the media: making grand pronouncements, apocalyptic statements, save the word predictions, rag to riches hero stories. Which is fine. It's hard to get anyone to pay attention to anything, and he's got a nice playbook (and product) to get people to pay attention.

The more interesting question, I think: is OpenAI actually a good business? Can they generate the resources they need to meet their goals and keep control, without selling to big tech companies that will derail their plans? Do they have enough of a moat and can they benefit from network effect to make their products more valuable over time, without getting copied? They realised they need a lot more capital then they initially thought. Time will tell if Microsoft is able to take over - see what recently happened with Inflection AI: After raising $1.3B, Inflection is eaten alive by its biggest investor, Microsoft https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/19/after-raising-1-3b-inflect...

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#26

Post by talldayo »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #20
talldayo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accomplishing more != Benefiting Humanity

GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 have benefited quite a lot of software engineers at a minimum. I don't see why GPT 5 would be any different.

My point stands; nobody can mistake this for charity, Sam Altman is selling a product. He is just as conniving as any other businessman when it comes time to act in his own personal interests, which makes him no better than a business as a steward for populist change. I hope OpenAI collapses, so that the market is forced to pick a more responsible leader.

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#27

Post by wslh »

motbus3 wrote: post #3

The manoeuvre to become a for-profit organisation after years without paying taxes tells something deeper about OpenAI true way of operating. Accepting to do deals with people who have no shame for pulling such trick is to accept they will do it again in a much bigger scale.

Nothing different than other smart business structurations, the focus in Sam, whatever he deserves, seems to be on purpose to not talk about the forest. Sam is an easy target, it does not require too much research.

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#28

Post by mindwok »

Jeez, I'm a Sam Altman skeptic but this is just another level. How about instead of attacking this guy and literally deconstructing a single-sentence tweet to make him out as an evil bogeyman, we make some constructive arguments for these so-called 'more reliable' ways of building AI and why the current approach is 'deeply flawed'?

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#29

Post by aleksiy123 »

aredox wrote: post #12
apantel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that’s too reductive. LLM’s can do all kinds of things, not just generate bullshit.

LLM can _pretend_ to do all kinds of things, and fall flat on their face as soon as they can't fake it.

Turns out pretending to do useful stuff is actually pretty useful.
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