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OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

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Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#231

Post by noch »

ben_w wrote: post #223
noch wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the expected return on investment for "intelligence"? This is extremely hard to quantify […] if you listen to the AI-doomer folks, potentially an extremely negative return. Indeed. And that asymmetry is what makes a market: people who can more accurately quantify the value or risk of stuff are the ones who win. If it were easy then we'd all invest in the nearest AI startup or short the entire market and 100x…

That logic applies for AI-cynics rather than AI-doomers — the latter are metaphorically the equivalent of warning about CO2-induced warming causing loss of ice caps and consequent sea level rises and loss of tens of trillions of dollars of real estate as costal cities are destroyed… in 1896*, when it was already possible to predict, but we were a long way from both the danger and the zeitgeist to care. But only metap…

> That logic applies for AI-cynics rather than AI-doomers

Fwiw, I don't believe that there are any AI doomers. I've hung out in their forums for several years and watched all their lectures and debates and bookmarked all their arguments with strangers on X and read all their articles and …

They talk of bombing datacentres, and how their children are in extreme danger within a decade or how in 2 decades, the entire earth and everything on it will have been consumed for material or, best case, in 2000 years, the entire observable universe will have been consumed for energy.

The doomers have also been funded to the tune of half a billion dollars and counting.

If these Gen-X'ers and millennials really believed their kids right now were in extreme peril due to the stupidity of everyone else, they'd be using their massive warchest full of blank cheques to stockpile weapons and hire hitmen to de-map every significant person involved in building AI. After all, what would you do if you knew precisely who are in the groups of people coming to murder your child in a few years?

But the true doomer would have to be the ultimate nihilist, and he would simply take himself off the map because there's no point in living.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#234

Post by theideaofcoffee »

myhf wrote: post #140

Unimaginable Sums of Money Are All You Need The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Huge Sums of Money in the Natural Sciences Unimaginable Sums of Money Considered Harmful

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Unimaginable Sums of Money

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#235

Post by jpc0 »

jhanschoo wrote: post #106
aoeusnth1 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're talking about the economic impact here, AGI(X) could be defined as being able to do X% of white collar jobs independently with about as much oversight as a human worker would need. The exponential gains would come from increasing penetration into existing labor forces and industrial applications. The first arriver would have an advantage in being the first to be profitably and practically applicable to wh…

Why would the gains be exponential? Assume that X "first arrival" develops a model with a certain rnd investment, and Y arrives next year with investment that's an order of magnitude less costly by following, and there's a simple enough switchover for customers. That's what's meant by no defensible moat; a counterexample is Google up to 2022 where for more than a decade nothing else came close in value prop. Maybe X…

> ... Google up to 2022 where for more than a decade nothing else came close in value prop. Maybe X now has an even better model with more investment ...

I was very confused at this point because I haven't really seen X as a competitor to Google's ad business, at least not in investment and value prop... Then I saw you were using X as a variable...

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#236

Post by swiftcoder »

ben_w wrote: post #223
noch wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the expected return on investment for "intelligence"? This is extremely hard to quantify […] if you listen to the AI-doomer folks, potentially an extremely negative return. Indeed. And that asymmetry is what makes a market: people who can more accurately quantify the value or risk of stuff are the ones who win. If it were easy then we'd all invest in the nearest AI startup or short the entire market and 100x…

That logic applies for AI-cynics rather than AI-doomers — the latter are metaphorically the equivalent of warning about CO2-induced warming causing loss of ice caps and consequent sea level rises and loss of tens of trillions of dollars of real estate as costal cities are destroyed… in 1896*, when it was already possible to predict, but we were a long way from both the danger and the zeitgeist to care. But only metap…

> But only metaphorically the equivalent, as the maximum downside is much worse than that.

Maybe I'm a glass-half-full sort of guy, but everyone dying because we failed to reverse man-made climate change doesn't seem strictly better than everyone dying due to rogue AI

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#238

Post by ben_w »

noch wrote: post #231
ben_w wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That logic applies for AI-cynics rather than AI-doomers — the latter are metaphorically the equivalent of warning about CO2-induced warming causing loss of ice caps and consequent sea level rises and loss of tens of trillions of dollars of real estate as costal cities are destroyed… in 1896*, when it was already possible to predict, but we were a long way from both the danger and the zeitgeist to care. But only metap…

> That logic applies for AI-cynics rather than AI-doomers Fwiw, I don't believe that there are any AI doomers. I've hung out in their forums for several years and watched all their lectures and debates and bookmarked all their arguments with strangers on X and read all their articles and … They talk of bombing datacentres, and how their children are in extreme danger within a decade or how in 2 decades, the entire ea…

> or, best case, in 2000 years, the entire observable universe will have been consumed for energy

You're definitely mixing things up, and the set of things may include fiction. 2000 years doesn't get you out of the thick disk region of our own galaxy at the speed of light.

> The doomers have also been funded to the tune of half a billion dollars and counting.

I've never heard such a claim. LessWrong.com has funding more like a few million: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5n2ZQcbc7r4R8mvqc

> If these Gen-X'ers and millennials really believed their kids right now were in extreme peril due to the stupidity of everyone else, they'd be using their massive warchest full of blank cheques to stockpile weapons and hire hitmen to de-map every significant person involved in building AI. After all, what would you do if you knew precisely who are in the groups of people coming to murder your child in a few years?

The political capital to ban it worldwide and enforce the ban globally with airstrikes — what Yudkowsky talked about was "bombing" in the sense of a B2, not Ted Kaczynski — is incompatible with direct action of that kind.

And that's even if such direct action worked. They're familiar with the luddites breaking looms, and look how well that worked at stopping the industrialisation of that field. Or the communist revolutions, promising a great future, actually taking over a few governments, but it didn't actually deliver the promised utopia. Even more recently, I've not heard even one person suggest that the American healthcare system might actually change as a result of that CEO getting shot recently.

But also, you have a bad sense of scale to think that "half a billion dollars" would be enough for direct attacks. Police forces get to arrest people for relatively little because "you and whose army" has an obvious answer. The 9/11 attacks may have killed a lot of people on the cheap, but most were physically in the same location, not distributed between several in different countries: USA (obviously), Switzerland (including OpenAI, Google), UK (Google, Apple, I think Stability AI), Canada (Stability AI, from their jobs page), China (including Alibaba and at least 43 others), and who knows where all the remote workers are.

Doing what you hypothesise about would require a huge, global, conspiracy — not only exceeding what Al Qaida was capable of, but significantly in excess of what's available to either the Russian or Ukrainian governments in their current war.

Also:

> After all, what would you do if you knew precisely who are in the groups of people coming to murder your child in a few years?

You presume they know. They don't, and they can't, because some of the people who will soon begin working on AI have not yet even finished their degrees.

If you take Altman's timeline of "thousands of days", plural, then some will not yet have even gotten as far as deciding which degree to study.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#239

Post by niemandhier »

Investors observed the pattern that the largest platform eats the market and bet on openAI moving along the same paths.

I disagree, that phenomenon is tied to the social network like phenomena we saw with WhatsApp and Facebook and to the aggregator business model of Amazon and Google.

Mathematically we can describe the process by which these monopolies form as nodes joining graphs:

Each node selects graphs to connect to in such a way that the probability is proportional to the number of nodes in the graph.

Sure Amazon and google feature two types of nodes, but the observation still fits: Selling on Amazon makes sense if there are many customers, buying on Amazon makes sense if there are many offers.

OpenAIs business does not have this feature, it does not get intrinsically get more attractive by having more users.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#240

Post by conartist6 »

bruce511 wrote: post #136
cs702 wrote: post #21

This rings true to my ears: > There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble. Thus, effectively, OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution. The revolution is real, but it’s ultimately going to be a commodity technology layer, not the foundation of a defensible proprietary moat. In 1995 investors mistakenly…

There is no technical moat, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moat. Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was. There's no technical moat around online sales. And lots of companies sell online. But Amazon is still the biggest (by a long long way) (at least in the…

Amazon built a bit of a moat too: for example I happen to know that they own a patent on the photography setup that allows them to capture consistent product photos at scale.
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