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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

#31

Post by Dalewyn »

zmgsabst wrote: post #22
soared wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats.. not what journalism means. I don’t know where you got that definition, but I can’t find anything similar. Processing and displaying information is a huge part of journalism - ie assessing what is truth or fiction and communicating each as such. Wikipedia: > A journalist is a person who gathers information in the form of text, audio or pictures, processes it into a newsworthy form and disseminates it to the pu…

You’re injecting that “ie” — Wikipedia doesn’t say it as such. They’re describing collating and you’re describing evaluating.

And to add, evaluating is the responsibility of the reader.

If you're also tasking "journalists" to evaluate for you, you aren't a reader and they aren't journalists. You're just a dumb terminal getting programs (others' opinions) installed and they are influencers.

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

#32

Post by thelastgallon »

"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 energy. This will make climate significantly worse.

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

#33

Post by twelve40 »

well the good news is all that stuff comes with an expiration date, after which we will know if this is our new destiny or yet another cloud of smoke.

This is a good reminder:

> Prominent AI figures were among the thousands of people who signed an open letter in March 2023 to urge a six-month pause in the development of large language models (LLMs) so that humanity would have time to address the social consequences of the impending revolution

In 2024, ChatGPT is a weird toy, my barber demands paper cash only (no bitcoin or credit cards or any of that phone nonsense, this is Silicon Valley), I have to stand in line at USPS and DMV with mindless paper-shuffling human robots, marveling at humiliating stupidity of manual jobs, robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always. Let's check again in a "coupe of thousand days" i guess!

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

#34

Post by [deleted] »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #28
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #15

> At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future I think the job of a CEO is not to tell you the truth, and the truth is probably more often than not, the opposite. What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? What is OpenAI worth then?

If a CEO lies all the time, and investors make investments because of it, will that not turn out to become a problem for the CEO?

[deleted]

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

#35

Post by aomix »

api wrote: post #8
cyanydeez wrote: post #6

Better headline : It's too late to stop taking Sam Altman at his word See same with Elon Musk. Money turns genius to smooth brained egomaniacal idiots. See same with Steve Jobs

Money removes social feedback. You end up surrounded with bobble heads telling you how genius you are… because they want your money. This is terrible for human psychology. It’s almost like a kind of solitary confinement — solitary in the sense that you are utterly deprived of meaningful rich human contact.

I think about this comparison sometimes https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888?lan...

"Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"

Solitary confinement is a great comparison. But also not existing in the same reality is 99.99% of the population must really warp you too.

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

#36

Post by throwaway42668 »

api wrote: post #8
cyanydeez wrote: post #6

Better headline : It's too late to stop taking Sam Altman at his word See same with Elon Musk. Money turns genius to smooth brained egomaniacal idiots. See same with Steve Jobs

Money removes social feedback. You end up surrounded with bobble heads telling you how genius you are… because they want your money. This is terrible for human psychology. It’s almost like a kind of solitary confinement — solitary in the sense that you are utterly deprived of meaningful rich human contact.

Sam Altman is not a hapless victim at the mercy of the isolating effects of his financial success.

He was an opportunistic, amoral sociopath before he was rich, and the system he reaps advantage from strongly selects for hucksters of that particular ilk more than anything else.

He's just another Kalanick, Neumann, Holmes or Bankman-Fried.

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

#37

Post by meiraleal »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #15

> At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future I think the job of a CEO is not to tell you the truth, and the truth is probably more often than not, the opposite. What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? What is OpenAI worth then?

> What if gpt5 is vaporware

OpenAI decides what they call gpt5. They are waiting for a breakthrough that would make people "wow!". That's not even very difficult and there are multiple paths. One is a much smarter gpt4 which is what most people expect but another one is a real good voice-to-voice or video-to-video feature that works seamlessly the same way chatgpt was the first chatbot that made people interested.

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

#39

Post by austinkhale »

There are legit criticisms of Sam Altman that can be levied but none of them are in this article. This is just reductive nonsense.

The arguments are essentially:

1. The technology has plateaued, not in reality, but in the perception of the average layperson over the last two years.

2. Sam _only_ has a record as a deal maker, not a physicist.

3. AI can sometimes do bad things & utilizes a lot of energy.

I normally really enjoy the Atlantic since their writers at least try to include context & nuance. This piece does neither.

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

#40

Post by PKop »

bediger4000 wrote: post #3

This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles. I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.

Or more likely, the journalists don't know any better and believe the AI hype sold to them and promote it of their own accord.
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