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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

#231

Post by Capricorn2481 »

Null-Set wrote: post #157
djjfksbxn wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason. Why is it in your worldview a CEO “has to lie”? Are you incapable of imagining one where a CEO is honest? > The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free. I’ll allow it if you stipulate that randomly and without reason when I ask for an alternator it…

A CEO has a fiduciary duty to lie.

A CEO that is the CEO of a publicly traded company who has over-leveraged their position and is now locked into chasing growth even if the company they're running suffers has a fiduciary duty to lie. There are plenty of CEOs not in this position.

I'm not talking about Altman in particular, I'm just annoyed with this constant spam on HN about how we all need to turn a blind eye to snake oil salesman because "that's just how it's supposed to be for a startup."

For a forum that complains about how money ruins everything, from the Unity scandal to OSS projects being sponsored and "tainted" by "evil companies," it's shocking to see how often golden boy executives are excused. I wish people had this energy for the much smaller companies trying to be profitable by raising subscriptions once in the 20 years they've been running, but instead they are treated like they burned a church. It truly is an elitist system.

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

#232

Post by meroes »

vbezhenar wrote: post #106
est wrote: post #74

sama is best match with today's LLM because of the "scaling law" like Zuckerberg described. Everyone is burning cash to race to the end, but the billion dollar question is, what is the end for transformer based LLM? Is there an end at all?

The end is super-human reasoning along with super-human intuition, based on humanity knowledge.

And some Mongols, Romans, etc probably said continually expanding their boarders would give them comparable contemporary heights.

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

#233

Post by ComplexSystems »

throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #176
vasilipupkin wrote: post #87

Don't listen to David Karpfs of the world. Did he predict chat gpt? if you asked him in 2018, he would have said AI will never write a story now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed.

> now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed. You really cannot.

You can even take an enormous sample of articles that he has written and fine tune a model on it, so that it really sounds like him.

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

#234

Post by whamlastxmas »

m3kw9 wrote: post #195
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

I don’t even know how this fake news started

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

#235

Post by cheschire »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #209
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…

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…

LLMs aren't really simulating intelligence so much as echoing intelligence.

The problem is when the hype machine causes the echoes to replace the original intelligence that spawned the echoes, and eventually those echoes fade into background noise and we have to rebuild the original human intelligence again.

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

#236

Post by nobodyandproud »

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.

This is great insight. Science fiction does a great job inspiring technology research, but we forget that real-world accomplishments can be much humbler and still astonishing all the same.

I'm a bit tired of the hype surrounding LLMs, but all the same for very mundane and humbler tasks that require some intelligence modern LLMs manage to surprise me on a daily basis.

But it rarely accomplishes more than what a small collection of humans with some level of expertise can achieve, when asked.

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

#237

Post by cableshaft »

vbezhenar wrote: post #85
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?

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.

Yeah I stopped my subscription during 4 thinking it wasn't super useful, but 4o does seem to handle programming logic pretty well. Better than me if given the same timeframe (of seconds) at least.

It's helped me stay productive on days when my brain just really doesn't want to come up with a function that does some annoying fairly complex bit of logic and I'd probably waste a couple hours getting it working.

Before I'd throw something like that at it, and it'd give me something confidently that was totally broken, and trying to go back and forth to fix it was a waste of my time.

Now I get something that works pretty well but maybe I just need to tweak something a bit because I didn't give it enough context or quite go over all the inconsistencies and exceptions in the business logic given by the requirements (also I can't actually use it on client machines so I have to type it manually to and from another machine, so I'm not copy pasting anything so I try to get away with typing less).

I'm not typing anything sensitive, btw, this is stuff you might find on Stack Overflow but more convoluted, like "search this with this exception and this exception because that's the business requirement and by these properties but then go deeper into this property that has a submenu that also needs to be included and provide a flatlist but group it by this and transform it so it fits this new data type and sort it by this unless this other property has this value" type of junk.

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

#238

Post by theptip »

The better reason to stop taking Altman at his word is on the subject of OpenAI building AGI “for the benefit of humanity”.

Now that he’s restructuring the company to be a normal for-profit corp, with a handsome equity award for him, we should assume the normal monopoly-grabbing that we see from the other tech giants.

If the dividend is simply going to the shareholder (and Altman personally) we should be much more skeptical about baking these APIs into the fabric of our society.

The article is asinine; of course a tech CEO is going to paint a picture of the BHAG, the outcome that we get if we hit a home run. That is their job, and the structure of a growth company, to swing for giant wins. Pay attention to what happens if they hit. A miss is boring; some VCs lose some money and nothing much changes.

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

#239

Post by bhy »

vbezhenar wrote: post #85
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?

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.

But note that the price they can charge is based on market supply and demand. If Claude is priced at $20, ChatGPT won’t be able to ask $100.

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

#240

Post by Capricorn2481 »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #110

Nobody is taking Sam Altman at his word lol, these ideas about intelligence have been believed for a long time in the tech world and the guy is just the best at monetizing them. People are pursuing this path because of a general conviction in these ideas of themselves, I guess to people like Atlantic writers Sam Altman is the first time they've encountered them but it really has nothing to do with Sam Altman.

> Nobody is taking Sam Altman at his word lol

ITT: People taking Sam at his word.

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