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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

#321

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #200
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an intelligence to be "General" there would have to be no type of intelligence that it did not have access to (even if its capabilities in that domain were limited). The idea that that's what humans have strikes me as the same kind of thinking that led us to believe that earth was in the center of the universe. Surely there are ways of thinking that we have no concept of. General intelligence would be like an imp…

Humans can survive in space and on the moon because our intelligence is robust to environments we never encountered (or evolved to encounter). That's "all" general intelligence is meant to refer to. General just means robust to the unknown. I've seen some use "super" (as in superhuman) intelligence lately to describe what you're getting at.

Super feels to me like it's a difference in degree rather than in kind. Something with intelligences {A, b, c} might be super intelligent compared with {a, b, c}. i.e. more intelligent in domain A.

But if one has {a, b, c} and the other has {b, c, d} neither is more or less intelligent than the other, they just have different capabilities. "Super" is a bit too one-dimensional for the job.

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

#322

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

ben_w wrote: post #216
aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "robotaxi" I think they meant loosely "personal self driving car," not an automated taxi service. Waymo's overstated[1] success has let self-driving advocates do an especially pernicious bit of goalpost-shifting. I have been a self-driving skeptic since 2010, but if you had told me in 2010 that in 10-15 years we have robotaxis that were closely overseen by remote operators who can fill in the gaps I would have tho…

While I broadly agree that AI metrics have a "lies, damn lies, and statistics" problem that makes it hard to even agree how competent they are, if someone says "robotaxi" then I have no reason to expect they mean anything more nor less than "a taxi with no human driver". I would be shocked if we're really 50 years away from that level of AI. 50 years is a long time in computing — late 70s computers were still using p…

> , if someone says "robotaxi" then I have no reason to expect they mean anything more nor less than "a taxi with no human driver".

You have three reasons:

1) reading the comment in good faith

2) understanding 'robotaxi' is not a precise technical term

3) safely assuming that most commenters here know about Waymo

There is no reason to choose the most pedantic and smarmily bad-faith reading of the comment.

As for "50 years" - I don't care about electrical engineering, I am talking about intelligence. In the 1970s we had neural networks as smart as nematodes. Today they are as smart as spiders. Maybe in 50 years they will be as smart as bees. I doubt any of our children will live to see a computer as smart as a rat.

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

#323

Post by lolinder »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #312
lolinder wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's pretty obvious to most of us that "integrating the group more deeply across its research efforts to help the company achieve its safety goals" is the corporate spin for what was actually "disperse the group that thought its job was to keep Altman himself accountable to safety goals and replace them with a group that Altman personally leads".

Eliminating Ilya's team was part of the post-coup restructuring to consolidate Altman's power, and every tribute to "safety" paid since then is spin.

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

#324

Post by slashdave »

askafriend wrote: post #311
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…

Any thoughts on synthetic data?

Dead end. You cannot create information out of nothing.

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

#325

Post by flappyeagle »

almatabata wrote: post #265
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?

Funnily I came across an interview from around 5 years ago where he straight up admitted that he had no clue how to generate a return on investment back then (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcJlKg2Rc0&t=1920s ) "We have no current plans to make revenue." "We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue." "We have made a soft promise to investors that once we've built a general intelligence system, basically…

Or his honesty?

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

#326

Post by askafriend »

throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #288
javed6542 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would cost around $5 and about 5 hours of work to prove you wrong...

You clearly, clearly do not understand what I am saying. But sure, waste your time and money making a parrot that, unlike the author it mimics, is incapable of introspection, reflection, intellectual evolution or simply changing its mind. Words are words. Writers are writers. Writers are not words. ETA: consider what would actually be necessary to prove me wrong. And when you hear back from David Karpf about his will…

You articulate this position well. I've tried to convey something similar and it's tough to find the words to explain to people. I really like this phrase:

"Words are words. Writers are writers. Writers are not words."

I'm very bullish on AI/LLMs but I think we do need to have a better shared understanding of what they are and what they aren't. I think there's a lot of confusion around this.

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

#327

Post by slater »

flappyeagle wrote: post #325
almatabata wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily I came across an interview from around 5 years ago where he straight up admitted that he had no clue how to generate a return on investment back then (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcJlKg2Rc0&t=1920s ) "We have no current plans to make revenue." "We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue." "We have made a soft promise to investors that once we've built a general intelligence system, basically…

Or his honesty?

Or maybe both

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

#328

Post by VonGallifrey »

Apreche wrote: post #10
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.

It’s possible to insert a few sentences factually accounting for a person’s character without inserting a subjective judgement of character. For example you could say: Joey JoeJoe, billionaire CEO, who notably said horrible things, was convicted of some crimes, and ate three babies, was quoted as saying “machine learning is just so awesome”. There, you didn’t inject a judgement. You accurately quoted the subject. You…

> who notably said horrible things

How do you objectively decide which statements are horrible and which aren't?

The other stuff you listed are facts, but this one would be subjective. That isn't just providing contextual information, but adding personal bias into the reporting.

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

#330

Post by slashdave »

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?

Actually, CEOs, and other board members, are supposed to be held to certain standards. Specifically, honesty and integrity. Some charters explicitly include working for the public good. Let's not forget that and not get desensitized to certain behaviors.
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