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

#311

Post by askafriend » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:37 PM UTC

BearOso wrote: post #122

austinkhale wrote: post #39

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 rea…

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…

Any thoughts on synthetic data?

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

#312

Post by whamlastxmas » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:37 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #249

whamlastxmas wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t even know how this fake news started

Maybe the fact that they actually did dissolve the safety team formerly led by Ilya Sutskever in the aftermath of Altman's coup [0]? I'm genuinely unsure what part of this you're questioning. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-17/openai-di...

Like literally the third sentence makes it clear it was restructuring team dynamics but not eliminating safety goals or even losing the employees that are safety focused. There are many safety focused people at OpenAI and they never fired or laid off people in a safety team which is what people infer from “dissolve the safety team” when it’s used as a bullet point of criticism

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

#313

Post by krick » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:38 PM UTC

Since it's paywalled, I assume we are discussing the title (as usual). It implies that there was the time when [we] took him at his word. Uh, ok, maybe. But what does it matter? "We" aren't the people at VCs who fund it, I suppose? So, what does it matter if "we" take him at his word? Hell, even if it suddenly went public, it still wouldn't mean much if we trust the guy or not, because we could buy shares for the same reason we buy crypto or TSLA shares.

As a matter of fact, I suspect the author of the article actually belongs to gullible minority who ever took Altman at his word, and now is telling everyone what they already knew. But so what? What are we even discussing? Nobody calls to remove their OpenAI (or, in fact, Anthropic, or whatever) account, as long as we find it useful for something, I suppose. It just makes no difference at all if that writer or his readers take Altman at his word, their opinions have no real effect on the situation, it seems. They are merely observers.

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

#314

Post by slashdave » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:39 PM UTC

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…

Perhaps someone should have considered what problem they are trying to solve before spending vast resources on the "solution"?

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

#315

Post by jdiez17 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:39 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #274

vbezhenar wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> and you'll never be able to escape it.

Slow down, cowboy. Getting a LLM to generate code for you that is immediately useful and doesn't require you to think too hard about it can stunt learning, sure, but even just reading it and slowly getting familiar with how the code works and how it relates to your original task is helpful.

I learned programming by looking at examples of code that did similar things to what I wanted, re-typing it, and modifying it a bit to suit my needs. From that point of view it's not that different.

I've seen a couple of cases first hand of people with no prior experience with programming learn a bit by asking ChatGPT to automate some web scraping tasks or spreadsheet manipulation.

> You + limited knowledge of Python + ChatGPT Substract ChatGPT from both sides and you have a rather obvious statement.

> 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.

How did you learn to ride a bicycle?

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

#316

Post by cgh » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:39 PM UTC

lrg10aa wrote: post #128

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…

It does look like an exit. Employees were given the chance to cash in some of their shares at $86 billion valuation. Altman is getting shares. New "investors" are Microsoft and Nvidia. Nvidia will get the money back as revenue and fuel the hype for other customers. Microsoft will probably pay in Azure credits. If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably mean…

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

#317

Post by golergka » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:40 PM UTC

lor_louis wrote: post #62

golergka wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of personal qualities, for some reason these people have achieved great things for themselves and humanity, whereas countless competitors, including many other rich assholes, have not.

Luck and money.

A lot of people have money, and luck can only explain a single case.

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

#318

Post by slenk » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:40 PM UTC

Same needs to happen to Elon Musk

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

#319

Post by mark_l_watson » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:40 PM UTC

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…

+1 for sure running LLMs 3.2 3B is super fast and useful. I have been pushing it for local RAG and code completion also. I bought a 32B memory Mac six months ago, which I now regret because the small local models are now extremely useful and run fine on old 8B memory Macs, and support all the fun experiments I want to do.

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

#320

Post by lotsoweiners » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 4:40 PM UTC

wkat4242 wrote: post #266

bee_rider wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people think* of ChatGPT not as the web UI, but as some mysterious, possibly thinking, machine which sits behind the web UI. That is, it is clear that there’s “something” behind the curtain, and there’s some concern maybe that it could get out, but there isn’t really clarity on where the thing stops and the curtain begins, or anything like that. This is more magical, but probably less wrong, than just thinkin…

An LLM is not going to go skynet. It's not smart enough and can't take initiative. An AGI however could. Once it reaches IQs of more than say 500 it would become very hard to control it.

Power cord?