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

Post by from-nibly » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 3:47 PM UTC

karmakaze wrote: post #247

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…

Let's go with the no next gen models, then we'd be looking at an operationalized service. I might be up for paying $20/month for one. Certainly more value than I get from Netflix. All I would want from the service is a simple low-friction UI and continued improvements to keep up with or surpass competitors. They could manage that. The long-term problem may be access to quality/human-created training data. Especially…

Post by ben_w » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 3:52 PM UTC

nobodyandproud wrote: post #225

__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.

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?

Post by javed6542 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 3:55 PM UTC

throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #252

ComplexSystems wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it still won't produce the type of articles he produces. Because at the very least he is capable of writing new articles from something the LLM doesn't have: his brain. Seriously. This is just the parrot thing again. The fact that AI proponents confuse the form of words with authorial intent is mindbending to me. Wouldn't have confused Magritte, I think.

Post by layer8 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 3:58 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #41

thelastgallon wrote: post #32

"Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot." - Sam Altman, https://ia.samaltman.com/ Reality: AI needs unheard amounts of en…

So far it seems that AIs appetite for energy might finally pushing western countries back to nuclear, which would make climate significantly better.

Post by throwaway984393 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #221

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…