It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:29 PM UTC

jt2190 wrote: post #175

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…

> AI needs unheard amounts of energy… … and it always will? It seems terribly limiting to stop exploring the potential of this technology because it’s not perfect right now . Energy consumption of AI models does not feel like an unsolvable problem, just a difficult one.

AI, i.e. deep learning, consumes huge amounts of energy because it has to train on gigantic amounts of data and the training algorithms are borderline efficient. So to stop using huge amounts of energy someone would have to come up with a way to get the same results without relying on deep learning.

In other words all we need is a new technology revolution like the deep learning revolution, except one centered around a radically new approach that overcomes every limitation of deep learning.

Now: how likely do you think this is to happen any time soon? Note that the industry and most of academia have bet the bank on deep learning partly because they think that prospect is extremely unlikely.

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

#292

Post by richardw » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:30 PM UTC

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.

A 12 year old that doesn’t sleep, eat, or forget, learns anything within seconds, can replicate and work together with fast as light communication and no data loss when doing so. Arrives out of the womb knowing everything the internet knows. Can work on one problem until it gets it right. Doesn’t get stale or old. Only had emotion if it’s useful. Can do math and simulate. Doesn’t get bored. Can theoretically improve its own design and run experiments with aforementioned focus, simulation ability, etc.

What could you do at 12, with half of these advantages? Choose any of them, then give yourself infinite time to use them.

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

#293

Post by jdiez17 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:31 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?

I did a similar calculation a few weeks ago:

Humans consume about 100W average power (2000 kcal to watt hours/24 hours). So 8 billion people consume ~800 GW. Call it 1 TW. Average world electric power generation is 28000 TWh / (24*365 hours) ~3 TW.

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

#294

Post by pounderstanding » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:31 PM UTC

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.

> AGI doesn’t mean smarter than the best humans.

Technically no, but practically...

12 year old limitations are: A. gets tired, needs sleep B. I/O limited by muscles

Probably there are more, but if 12 year old could talk directly to electric circuits and would not need sleep or even a break, then that 12 year old would be leaps and bounds above the best human in his field of interest.

(Well motivation to finish the task is needed though)

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

#295

Post by twodave » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

The amount of comparisons I see between some theoretical AGI and something more akin to a science fiction like Jane from the Ender saga or the talking head from That Hideous Strength is I guess not surprising. But in both of those cases the only way to make the plot work was to make the AI literally an other-worldly being.

I am personally not sold on AGI being possible. We might be able to make some poor imitation of it, and maybe an LLM is the closest we get, but to me it smacks of “man attempts to create life in order to spite his creator.” I think the result of those kinds of efforts will end more like That Hideous Strength (in disaster).

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

#296

Post by chuckledog » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

senko wrote: post #212

BearOso wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think LLM technology, not necessarily all of CNN, has plateaued. We've used up all the human discourse, so there's nothing to train it on. It's like fossil fuels. They took billions of years to create and centuries to consume. We can't just create more. Another problem is that the data sets are becoming contaminated, creating a reinforcement cycle that makes LLMs trained on more recent data worse. My thoughts are t…

Actually, the sources we had (everything scraped from the internet) turns out to be pretty bad. Imagine not going to school and instead learning everything from random blog posts or reddit comments. You could do it if you read a lot, but it's clearly suboptimal. That's why OpenAI, and probably every other serious AI company, is investing huge amounts in generating (proprietary) datasets.

GitHub, especially filtered by starred repos, is a pretty high quality dataset.

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

#297

Post by mark_l_watson » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

I appreciate everything that OpenAI has done, the science of modeling and the expertise in productization.

But, but, but… their drama, or Altman’s drama is now too much for me, personally.

With a lot of reluctance I just stopped doing the $20/month subscription. The advanced voice mode is lots of fun to demo to people, and o1 models are cool, but I am fine just using multiple models for chat on Abacus.AI and Meta, an excellent service, and paid for APIs from Google, Mistral, Groq, and OpenAI (and of course local models).

I hope I don’t sound petty, but I just wanted to reduce their paid subscriber numbers by -1.

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

#298

Post by whamlastxmas » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

Schiendelman wrote: post #276

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…

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

#299

Post by FireBeyond » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:33 PM UTC

arrobbiato wrote: post #243

mrangle wrote: post #215

I can't imagine taking The Atlantic seriously on anything. My word. You aren't actually supposed to read the endless ragebait. Contrary to the Atlantic's almost always intentionally misleading framing, the "dot com boom" did in fact go on to print trillions later and it is still printing them. After what was an ultimately marginal if account clearing dip for many. I say that as someone who would be deemed to be an Ai…

> I can't imagine taking The Atlantic seriously on anything. Agreed - I stopped taking The Atlantic seriously after their 2009 cover story, "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?"[1] To ignore CDOs, the Glass-Steagal repeal, the co-option of the ratings agencies and the dissolution of lending standards, and instead blame the Great Recession on a few obnoxious megapastors is to completely discard the magazine's credibilit…

Really, you can't see a connection between people promoting ever supernatural rewards for being money and prosperity-driven and stoking that fire right alongside rampant capitalism and reckless decisions on how to protect our financial and economic wellbeing? Especially when even some very very bright people still believe in imaginary creatures in the sky and use that to shape and guide their decision process?

Maybe not "cause", but "contribute notably to".

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

#300

Post by latexr » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:34 PM UTC

0x1ceb00da wrote: post #185

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-...

https://youtu.be/dbKwJM06fRM

Technically true, but also doesn’t advance the conversation in any way. Eventually no one will exist or care about anything, but until then everyone will have to live with the decisions and apathy of those who came before.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995