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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

#221

Post by theptip »

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…

This argument simply asserts that the LLMs (or their successor systems including scaffolding) will asymptote somewhere below human capabilities.

It’s possible that this could happen but you need to propose a mechanism and metric for this argument to be taken seriously (and to avoid fooling yourself with moving goalposts). Under what grounds do you assert that the trend line will stop where you claim it will stop?

Yes, if super-human AGI simply never happens then the alignment problem is mostly solved. Seems like wishful thinking to me.

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

#222

Post by throwintothesea »

stonethrowaway wrote: post #135
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-...

I would love to read a solid exposé of Worldcoin, but I don’t think I will get that from Buzzfeed or from The Atlantic. Both seemed to be agenda driven and hot headed. I’d like a more impartial breakdown ala AP-style news reporting.

[flagged]

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

#223

Post by robertlagrant »

tjpnz wrote: post #196
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…

>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.

Only if someone can make money from it. If the people who have it can't do that (or won't) then it won't happen. E.g. there's no private industry for nuclear bombs selling to any bidder in the world. But anything else you just need to let people make companies and that'll get it out there, in a thousand shades of value to match all the possible demands.

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

#224

Post by throwintothesea »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #28
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #15

> At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future I think the job of a CEO is not to tell you the truth, and the truth is probably more often than not, the opposite. What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? What is OpenAI worth then?

If a CEO lies all the time, and investors make investments because of it, will that not turn out to become a problem for the CEO?

Come now, it's only lying when poor people do it, don'tcha know.

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

#225

Post by nobodyandproud »

__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.

As other comments have mentioned, AGI doesn't mean god-like or super-human intelligence.

For these models today, if we measure the amount of energy expended for training and inference how do humans compare?

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

#226

Post by yndoendo »

bambax wrote: post #178

> Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics. He predicts that we may have an all-powerful superintelligence “in a few thousand days.” It seems fair to say Altman has completed his Musk transformation. Some might argue it's inevitable. And indeed Bill Gates' books in the 90s made a lot of wild promises. But nothing that egregious.

Both of them remind me of Elizabeth Holmes. She ran Theranos through a promise of lies long enough they turned into fraud.

So far Musk has been pushing the lies out continually to try and prevent any possible exposure to fraud. Like "Getting to Mars will save humanity" or the latest "We will never reach Mars unless Trump is president again". Then again, self driving cars are just around the corner, as stated in 2014 with a fraudulently staged video of their technology, that they just need to work the bugs out.

Altman is making wild clams too with how Machine Learning will slow and reverse climate change while proving that the technology needs vast more resources, specially in power consumption, just to be market viable for business and personal usage.

All three play off people's emotions to repress critical thinking. They are no different than the lying preachers, I can heal you with a touch of my hand, that use religion to gain power and wealth. The three above are just replacing religion with technology.

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

#227

Post by Triphibian »

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.

All it would want to do is talk about Minecraft and the funny memes they saw.

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

#228

Post by robertlagrant »

throwintothesea wrote: post #222
stonethrowaway wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to read a solid exposé of Worldcoin, but I don’t think I will get that from Buzzfeed or from The Atlantic. Both seemed to be agenda driven and hot headed. I’d like a more impartial breakdown ala AP-style news reporting.

[flagged]

> although you won't find, like... fascism in there (sorry if you're disappointed)

I don't understand how HN can hit such highs sometimes, but also host nonsense like this.

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

#229

Post by throwintothesea »

Zigurd wrote: post #127
butterfly42069 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that continuously promising something is X weeks/months/years away is seen as optimism and belief, not blatant disregard for facts. I'm sure the defence is always, "but if we just had a bit more money, we would've got it done"

Elizabeth Holmes would like a referral to lawyer who could make that case.

Elizabeth Holmes screwed up by telling the wrong lies and also having the wrong chromosomes. She should've called some cave rescuers pedophiles, then maybe people would've respected her.
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