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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

newyorker.com

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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#291

Post by stonyrubbish »

stavros wrote: post #237
einrealist wrote: post #198

I don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning', all while subsidising the real costs to capture the market. So much SciFi BS and extrapolation about a technology that is useful if adopted with care. This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of…

> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning' If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ".

> "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ".

It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin to believe the stochastic parrot is actually wise.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#292

Post by giwook »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #170
giwook wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any plans to tackle any of the other folks who might be mentioned in the same sentence as Altman, like Darius Amodei?

[flagged]

Huh? It's a genuine question. The article is great and the writer did a fantastic job.

Please try to give people the benefit of the doubt though I know it's hard in today's society.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#293

Post by stavros »

ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

There's a very minor typo in the article:

> “Investors are, like, I need to know you’re gonna stick with this when times get hard,”

Should be:

> “Investors are like, I need to know you’re gonna stick with this when times get hard,”

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#294

Post by ronanfarrow »

philip1209 wrote: post #285
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

For what it’s worth, the story, while focused on OpenAI, is not uncritical of Anthropic. It explores whether there is a wider race to the bottom in terms of safety, and erosion of even some of Anthropic’s commitments.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#295

Post by ks2048 »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #164

> Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted “money and power.” Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, “Happy to not become rich on this, so long as no one else is.” In another, he asks, “So what do I really want?” Among his answers is “Financially what will take me to $1B.” I can't im…

It's not surprising. I made this comment on HN before, but if you follow him on Twitter, it's pretty remarkable - the CTO of one of the most important technology companies in the world and he has never (that I've seen) posted something with some technical insight, or just anything interesting about technology. It's just boring truisms, cliches, empty statements, etc.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#297

Post by Rover222 »

einrealist wrote: post #198

I don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning', all while subsidising the real costs to capture the market. So much SciFi BS and extrapolation about a technology that is useful if adopted with care. This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of…

Yeah and everything is just atoms. If you reduce anything enough it’s not real.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#298

Post by bluefirebrand »

chromacity wrote: post #245
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #164

> Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted “money and power.” Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, “Happy to not become rich on this, so long as no one else is.” In another, he asks, “So what do I really want?” Among his answers is “Financially what will take me to $1B.” I can't im…

Eh. It doesn't start or stop with people like Altman, Zuckerberg, or Nadella. I think it's a symptom of a broader problem in tech. Half the people on this site made a decision to work at companies that do shady things, and they did that to maximize personal wealth. The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so…

> The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary

I hope that's not true. If it is, we live in a bleak world indeed.

I can confidently say I've never once dreamed of having billions. I've never wanted billions. Not even in a fanciful manner. What would I do with that money? Buy mansions and megayachts? That's loser stuff

Most of what I want out of life cannot be bought. The pieces that come with a price tag, like a comfortable home, do not require billions

I think only sociopaths want billions because they don't understand spending your life seeking things that actually matter, like family and human connection

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#299

Post by game_the0ry »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #87
game_the0ry wrote: post #75

For those curious about how sama got to where he got and stayed on top for so long, I recommend you read the book: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. I am fairly confident when I say this -- sama is a sociopath. I don't know how anyone with solid intuition could even come to any other conclusion than the guy is deeply weird and off-putting. Some concepts from the book: > Core trait: The defining characteristic…

I suspect there's some other category, which isn't really a sociopath and isn't really a not-sociopath, which we don't have a good definition for. We only say a lot of CEOs are sociopaths because they're in that third category we haven't named, where they're very good at manipulating people, but also can feel conscience, guilt, remorse, etc, perhaps just muted or easier to justify against. E.g. if you think you're do…

> I suspect there's some other category, which isn't really a sociopath and isn't really a not-sociopath, which we don't have a good definition for.

There is -- I call it "corpo sociopath." The corpo sociopath really comes out in the workplace, less so in personal life.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#300

Post by game_the0ry »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #230
xg15 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a third category, that's just a sociopath as seen by themself.

I doubt most sociopaths, when they’re honest, would agree they feel much guilt or remorse at all. Whereas the people in the category I’m describing might feel those things, but prioritize those feelings far below the benefits of achieving what they set out to achieve.

> I doubt most sociopaths, when they’re honest, would agree they feel much guilt or remorse at all.

Yes that is the core trait I highlighted in the 1st bullet.

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