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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

#271

Post by ryandrake »

robertlagrant wrote: post #217
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…

> 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).

Most of what gets invented either 1. relies on its scarcity to extract value or 2. if it's not naturally scarce, it gets locked behind patents, copyrights, cartels, regulations, and license agreements between corporations, in order to keep the means of its production out of the hands of common people. Without that scarcity and ability to profit from it, it wouldn't be invented.

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

#273

Post by nicolas_t »

henry2023 wrote: post #141
coffeefirst wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve got a local llama 3.2 3B running on my macOS. I can query it for recipes, autocomplete obvious code (this is the only thing GitHub Copilot was useful for). And answer simple questions when provided with a little bit of context. All with much lower latency than an HTTP request to a random place, knowing that my data can’t be used to trading anything, and it’s free. It’s absolutely insane this is the real world no…

What do you use to interface with llama for autocomplete? and what editor do you use?

Not wanting my data to be sent to random places is what has limited my use of tools like copilot (so I'd only use it very sparingly after thinking if sending the data would be a breach of nda or not)

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

#274

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

vbezhenar wrote: post #130
coffeefirst wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. Search engine replacement. I'm using it for many queries I asked Google before. I still use Google, but less often. 2. To break procrastination loops. For example I often can't name a particular variable, because I can see few alternatives and I don't like all of them. Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT and often proceed with his opinion. 3. Navigating less known technologies. For example my Python knowledge is limited a…

>> 3. Navigating less known technologies. For example my Python knowledge is limited and I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it.

Respectfully but that's a bit like saying you don't need to learn how to ride a bicycle because you can use a pair of safety wheels. It's an excuse to not learn something, to keep yourself less knowledgeable and skillful than you could really be. Why stunt yourself? Knowledge is power.

See it this way: anyone can use ChatGPT but not everyone knows Python well, so you 'll never be able to use ChatGPT to compete with someone who knows Python well. You + limited knowledge of Python + ChatGPT Experiences like the one you relay in your comment makes me think using LLMs for coding in particular is betting on short-term gains for a disproportionately large long-term cost. You can move faster now, but there's a limit to what you can do that way and you'll never be able to escape it.

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

#275

Post by chirau »

CPLX wrote: post #261
throwintothesea wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The Atlantic is run by Jeffrey Goldberg and owned by Laurene Powell Jobs. Of course these people have agendas, it’s not exactly a secret.

It has to be owned by someone, that does not make it agenda driven. Who would you rather have it owned by so that it is not agenda driven?

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

#276

Post by Schiendelman »

cowmix wrote: post #267

I keep thinking about Sam Altman’s March ’23 interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast—this was after GPT-4’s release and before he was ousted as CEO. Two things he said really stuck with me: First, he mentioned wishing he was more into AI. While I appreciate the honesty, it was pretty off-putting. Here’s the CEO of a company building arguably the most consequential technology of our time, and he’s expressing apathy? That b…

Hi there!

I've done a huge amount of political organizing in my life, for common good - influencing governments to build tens of billions of dollars worth of electric rail infrastructure.

I'm also a big prepper. It's important to understand that stigmatizing prepping is very dangerous - specifically to those who reject it.

Whether it's a gas main break, a forest fire, an earthquake, or a sci-fi story, encouraging people to become resilient to disaster is incredibly beneficial for society as a whole, and very necessary for individuals. The vast, vast majority of people who do it are benefiting their entire community by doing so. Even, as much as I'm sure I'd dislike him if I met him, Sam Altman. Him being a prepper is good for us, at least indirectly, and possibly directly.

Just look at the stories in NC right now - people who were ready to clear their own roads, people taking in others because they have months of food.

Be careful not to ascribe values to behaviors like you're doing.

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

#277

Post by ForOldHack »

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…

Every single word he says Public is his product.

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

#278

Post by GolfPopper »

dmitrygr wrote: post #268

Someone took that grifter at his word ever? Haha! Wait you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder. Hahahaha

Apparently a whole lot of people think the guy who's running a for-proft eyeball-scanning cryptocurrency, "for the benefit of humanity" is very serious when he says his non-profit (but also for-profit) AI company is also "for the benefit of humanity".

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

#279

Post by Schiendelman »

layer8 wrote: post #260
golergka wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power means making things and providing services that people want, that make their lives better. Which is a good thing. We need more power, not less.

Almost all power consumed ends up as thermal energy in the environment.

That would be fine if we weren't preventing it from radiating out with greenhouse gases.

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

#280

Post by BryanLegend »

ForOldHack wrote: post #277
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…

Every single word he says Public is his product.

And he doesn't even use the shift key!
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