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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

#211

Post by tonetheman »

coffeefirst wrote: post #107
vbezhenar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm paying my subscription and I'd probably pay 5x more if they would charge it to keep access to the current service. ChatGPT 4o is incredibly useful for me today, regardless of whether GPT5 will be good or not. I'm not sure how does that reflect OpenAI cost, but those company costs are just bubbles of air anyway.

Would you be willing to share how you're using it? I keep hearing from people who find these enormous benefits from LLMs. I've been liking them as a search engine (especially finding things buried in bad documentation), but can't seem to find the life-changing part.

[dead]

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

#212

Post by senko »

BearOso wrote: post #122
austinkhale wrote: post #39

There are legit criticisms of Sam Altman that can be levied but none of them are in this article. This is just reductive nonsense. The arguments are essentially: 1. The technology has plateaued, not in reality, but in the perception of the average layperson over the last two years. 2. Sam _only_ has a record as a deal maker, not a physicist. 3. AI can sometimes do bad things & utilizes a lot of energy. I normally rea…

I think LLM technology, not necessarily all of CNN, has plateaued. We've used up all the human discourse, so there's nothing to train it on. It's like fossil fuels. They took billions of years to create and centuries to consume. We can't just create more. Another problem is that the data sets are becoming contaminated, creating a reinforcement cycle that makes LLMs trained on more recent data worse. My thoughts are t…

Actually, the sources we had (everything scraped from the internet) turns out to be pretty bad.

Imagine not going to school and instead learning everything from random blog posts or reddit comments. You could do it if you read a lot, but it's clearly suboptimal.

That's why OpenAI, and probably every other serious AI company, is investing huge amounts in generating (proprietary) datasets.

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

#213

Post by l33t7332273 »

pulvinar wrote: post #208
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?

You're asking for historical examples of great inventions that were hidden from history. I only know of those great inventions that I've hidden... There are a number of counterexamples though. Henry Ford, etc.

Just wondering if you’ve actually hidden inventions you would actually consider to be great?

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

#214

Post by FrustratedMonky »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #131
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…

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.

"why would you need a company for it? Couldn't the AGI manage itself better than you could?"

Well, you still have to have the baby, and raise it a little. And wouldn't you still want to be known as the parent of such a bright kid as AGI? Leaving early seems to be cutting down on his legacy, if a legacy was coming.

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

#215

Post by mrangle »

I can't imagine taking The Atlantic seriously on anything. My word. You aren't actually supposed to read the endless ragebait.

Contrary to the Atlantic's almost always intentionally misleading framing, the "dot com boom" did in fact go on to print trillions later and it is still printing them. After what was an ultimately marginal if account clearing dip for many.

I say that as someone who would be deemed to be an Ai pessimist, by many.

But its wildly early to declare anything to be "what it is" and only that, in terms of ultimate benefit. Just like it was and is wild to declare the dot com boom to be over.

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

#216

Post by ben_w »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #133
simonw wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always” We have them in San Francisco now (and Los Angeles and Phoenix, and Austin soon.)

By "robotaxi" I think they meant loosely "personal self driving car," not an automated taxi service. Waymo's overstated[1] success has let self-driving advocates do an especially pernicious bit of goalpost-shifting. I have been a self-driving skeptic since 2010, but if you had told me in 2010 that in 10-15 years we have robotaxis that were closely overseen by remote operators who can fill in the gaps I would have tho…

While I broadly agree that AI metrics have a "lies, damn lies, and statistics" problem that makes it hard to even agree how competent they are, if someone says "robotaxi" then I have no reason to expect they mean anything more nor less than "a taxi with no human driver".

I would be shocked if we're really 50 years away from that level of AI. 50 years is a long time in computing — late 70s computers were still using punched tape:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Punch_Verifica...

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

#217

Post by robertlagrant »

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…

> Western society is hopelessly locked into and dependent on manufacturing scarcity, and the idea that people have to pay for things.

How do you reconcile that with the fact that Western society has invented, improved, and supplied many of the things we lament that other countries don't have (and those countries also lament it - it's not just our own Stockholm Syndrome).

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

#218

Post by throwintothesea »

m3kw9 wrote: post #186

The Atlantic is really going out of their way to hate on Altman. That publication has always been a bit of a whack job of an outfit

The techbro whining about as staid a publication as the Atlantic is truly hilarious. They published some of the first pieces in support of abolition, and now you're upset that they're swinging at the richest grifter in Silicon Valley. Get a grip.

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

#219

Post by dgoodell »

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…

And that’s not really the same thing. Did someone invent the LED bulb in 1920 and that cartel crushed it? Not really.

In reality, the biggest problem was they had no incentive to invest in new lighting technology research, although they had the money to do so. It takes a lot of effort to develop a new technology, and significantly more to make it practical and affordable.

I think the story of the development of the blue LED which led to modern LED lighting is more illustrative of the real obstacles of technological development.

Companies/managers don't want to invest in R&D bc it’s too uncertain and they typically are more interested in the short term.

And it’s hard for someone without deep technical knowledge to identify a realistic worthwhile technical idea from a bad one. So they focus on what they can understand and what they can quantify ().

And even technical people can fail to properly evaluate ideas that are even slightly outside their area of expertise (or even sometimes the ones that are within it )

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