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

All hype. Remember when the whole "oh we are so scared to release this model" happen back in the day and it was worse than GPT3?

All of these doing the rounds of foreign governments and acting like artificial general intelligence is just around the corner is what got him this fundraising round today. It's all just games.

I don't know. Today it's extremely expensive to start new manufacturing competitors. You have to go and ask for tons of capital merely to play the game and likely lose. Anyone with that much capital is probably going to be skeptical of some upstart and consult with established industry leaders. This would be the opportunity for those leaders to step in and take the tech for themselves.

So to solve this problem you need billions to burn on gambles. I guess that's how we ended up with VC's.

Sam Allan has to be a promoter and true believer. It is his job to do that and he does have new tech that didn’t exist before and it is game changing.

The issue is more that the company is hemorrhaging talent, and doesn’t have a competitive moat.

But luckily this doesn’t affect most of us, rather it will only possibly harm his investors if it doesn’t work out.

If he continues to have access to resources and can hire well and the core tech can progress to new heights, he will likely be okay.

OpenAI cant be working on AGI because they have no arc for production robotics controllers

AGI cannot exist in a box that you can control. We figured that out 20 years ago.

Could they start that? Sure theoretically. However they would have to massively pivot and nobody at OAI are robotics experts

That's a really good comment and insight, but understandably I think it is aimed at this forum and a technical audience. It landed well for me in terms of the near team impact of LLMs and other models. But outside this forum, I think our field is in a crisis from being very substantially oversold and undersold at the same time.

We have a very limited ability to define human intelligence, so it is almost impossible to know how near or far we are from simulating it. Everyone here knows how much a challenge it is to match average human cognitive abilities in some areas, and human brains run at 20 watts. There are people in power that may take technologists and technology executives at their word and move very large amounts of capital on promises that cannot be fulfilled. There was already an AI Winter 50 years ago, and there are extremely unethical figures in technology right now who can ruin the reputation of our field for a generation.

On the other hand, we have very large numbers of people around the world on the wrong end of a large and increasing wealth gap. Many of those people are just hanging on doing jobs that are actually threatened by AI. They know this, they fear this, and of course they will fight for their and their families lifestyles. This is a setup for large scale violence and instability. If there isn't a policy plan right now, AI will be suffering populist blowback.

Aside from those things, it looks like Sam has lost it. The recent stories about the TSMC meeting, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41668824, was a huge problem. Asking for $7T shows a staggering lack of grounding in reality and how people, businesses, and supply chains work. I wasn't in the room and I don't know if he really sounded like a "podcasting bro", but to make an ask of companies like that with their own capital is insulting to them. There are potential dangers of applying this technology; there are dangers of overpromising the benefits; and neither of them are well served when relatively important people in related industries thing there is a credibility problem in AI.