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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

#351

Post by namaria »

ben_w wrote: post #338
namaria wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever you mean, it took 13 billion years and the whole universe as far as we can tell to create the 20 watt human intelligence brain. And it doesn't take 20 watt of energy to maintain humans, it takes a whole ecosystem capable of sustaining a human population. And for us to operate at our current level of information processing it takes a whole planetary civilization. So no you haven't proved anything by saying th…

> Whatever you mean, it took 13 billion years and the whole universe as far as we can tell to create the 20 watt human intelligence brain. It's grossly unreasonable to include the entire history of the universe given the Earth only formed about 4 billion years ago; and given that evolution wasn't even aiming for intelligence, even starting from our common ancestors being small rodents 65 million years ago is wildly o…

I never said human intelligence is impossible.

All I am saying is that Sam Altman's promises (remember the original topic) hinge on breaking thermodynamics.

Humans evolved on a planet that was just so. The elements on Earth that make life possible couldn't have been created in a younger universe. So it take the full history of the universe to produce human intelligence. It also doesn't exist in a vacuum. Current human civilization is not a collection of 8 billion 20 watt boxes.

> As for human intelligence on a chip? Well, (1) it's been quite a long time since humans were capable of designing the circuits manually, given the feature size is now at the level where quantum mechanics must be accounted for or you get surprise tunnelling between gates; and (2) one of the things being automated is feature segmentation and labelling of neural micrographs, i.e. literally brain scanning: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32619485/

I don't understand any of this so I won't comment.

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

#352

Post by arrobbiato »

FireBeyond wrote: post #299
arrobbiato wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You might argue that faith, in its various manifestations, is the root of all economic distortions and malaises. That being said, no, I don’t think that a subset of evangelical Christianity caused or meaningfully contributed to the 2009 crash, since there are abundant facts and analyses to the contrary. To believe otherwise would be, ironically, an act of faith.

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

#353

Post by s1artibartfast »

GolfPopper wrote: post #306
Schiendelman wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there! I've done a huge amount of political organizing in my life, for common good - influencing governments to build tens of billions of dollars worth of electric rail infrastructure. I'm also a big prepper. It's important to understand that stigmatizing prepping is very dangerous - specifically to those who reject it. Whether it's a gas main break, a forest fire, an earthquake, or a sci-fi story, encouraging peo…

There's a difference between resilience and being prepared for the unexpected on one hand (a go-bag (for sudden travel, not Mad Max), on- and off-site backups of data & physical documents, a couple weeks of food & water, an emergency expenses account separate from savings, plus physical currency) and, on the other hand, being under the delusion that hiding in a super-stocked bunker is any sort of acceptable answer to…

Wouldn't you prefer someone fearful of the apocalypse and who takes it seriously running such a company over someone who is ambivalent or doesn't consider it a risk?

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

#354

Post by Filligree »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #210
refulgentis wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dunno, magically fabricating a part is fundamentally different than magically deciding where and when to do so. Right. It sounds to me like you agree and are repeating the comment but are framing as disagreeable. I'm sure I'm missing something.

The person you replied to suggests that the analogy of a 3d printer building a part does not hold, as LLM-based coding systems are able to both "print" some code, and decide where and when to do so. I tend to agree with them. What people seem to miss about LLM coding systems, IMO: a) deciding on the capabilities of an LLM to code after a brief browser session with 4o/claude is comparable to waking up a coder in the m…

(D) includes me, and does sound fun. Got any references?

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

#355

Post by namaria »

ben_w wrote: post #160
nicomeemes wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're lazily mixing metaphors here. This is the problem in all such discussions, it often gets reduced to some combination of hand waving and hype training. "AGI" means different things to everyone, okay? Then it's a meaningless term. It's like saying hey with a quantum computer of enormous size, we could simulate molecular interactions at a level impossible with current technology. I would love for us to be able to…

There's no metaphor here, I meant literally doing those things. I followed up the point about AGI meaning different things by giving a common and sufficient standard of reference. Your brain is evidence that it's "even possible".

> Your brain is evidence that it's "even possible".

All your brain proves is that a universe can produce planetary ecosystems capable of supporting human civilizations made of very efficient brain carrying mammals.

It definitely doesn't prove that these mammals can create boxes capable 'solve physics, poverty and global warming' if we just give Sam Altman enough electricity and chips. Or dollars to that effect.

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

#356

Post by wildermuthn »

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…

The only reason Sam would leave OpenAI is if he thought AGI could only be achieved elsewhere, or that AGI was impossible without some other breakthrough in another industry (energy, hardware, etc).

High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention — the holy grail of technology. Nothing could be more ambitious, and if we know anything about Altman, it is that his ambition has no ceiling.

Having said all of that, OpenAI appears to be all in on brute-force AGI and swallowing the bitter lesson that vast and efficient compute is all you need. But they’ve overlooking a massive dataset that all known biological intelligences rely upon: qualia. By definition, qualia exist only within conscious minds. Until we train models on qualia, we’ll be stuck with LLMs that are philosophical zombies — incapable of understanding our world — a world that consists only of qualia.

Building software capable of utilizing qualia requires us to put aside the hard problem of consciousness in favor of mechanical/deterministic theories of consciousness like Attention-Schema Theory (AST). Sure, we don’t understand qualia. We might never understand. But that doesn’t mean we can’t replicate.

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

#357

Post by peteforde »

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…

Respectfully, this is an incredibly weak take.

You are making a lot of assumptions about someone's ability to learn with AND without assistance, while also making rather sci-fi leaps about our brain somehow being able to differentiate between learning that has somehow been tainted by the tendrils of ML overlords.

The models and the user interface around them absolutely will continue to improve far faster than any one person's ability to obtain subject mastery in a field.

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

#358

Post by esskay »

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.

What stops it getting more intelegent? That's litterally its primary aim. Its only limit as to how quickly it does that is hardware capacity, and I'd be shocked if it didn't somehow theorise to itself that it can and should expand its knowledge in any way possible.

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

#359

Post by gizmo »

getpost wrote: post #285
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…

I don't know anything, but isn't Sam already rich? And, if OpenAI is in a position to capture profits in an expanding AI industry, isn't this the best possible time to lock-in equity for long term gains and trillionaireship? For many people, sadly, one can never be rich enough. My point is, planning for both short term exit, and long term gains, is essentially the same in this particular situation. What a boon! Nice…

Sam was already a billionaire years ago. He is one of SV most prolific investors, with equity in hundreds of startups. He writes big checks as well from time to time, Helion for instance he gave 375 million.
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