Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 599 posts

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

#371

Post by breck »

In 2017 Daniel Gross, a YC partner at the time, recruited me to join the YC software team. Sam Altman was president of YC at this time.

During my interview with Jared Friedman, their CTO, I asked him what Sam was trying to create, the greatest investment firm of all time surpassing Berkshire Hathway, or the greatest tech company surpassing Google? Without hesitation, Jared said Google. Sam wanted to surpass Google. (He did it with his other company, OpenAI, and not YC, but he did it nonetheless)

This morning I tried Googling something and the results sucked compared to what ChatGPT gave me.

Google still creates a ton of value (YouTube, Gmail, etc), but he has surpassed Google in terms of cutting edge tech.

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

#372

Post by jerpint »

cyanydeez wrote: post #286
karmakaze wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's go with the no next gen models, then we'd be looking at an operationalized service. I might be up for paying $20/month for one. Certainly more value than I get from Netflix. All I would want from the service is a simple low-friction UI and continued improvements to keep up with or surpass competitors. They could manage that. The long-term problem may be access to quality/human-created training data. Especially…

Theres never going to be quality data at tge scale they need it. At best, theres a slow march to incremental improvements that look exactly like how human culture developed knowledge. And all the downsides will remain, the same way people, despite hundreds of good sourxes of info still prefer garbage.

Video data is still very much untapped and likely to unlock a step function worth of data. Current image-language models are trained mostly on {image, caption} pairs with a bit of extra fine tuning

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

#373

Post by cowmix »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #349
cowmix wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that prepping itself is completely fine, and people should be prepared for natural disasters, civil unrest, or whatever scenarios they’re most comfortable with. Building resilience is beneficial for both individuals and communities, and I can see how it plays an important role, especially in situations like the ones you mentioned in NC. My issue, though, is with someone like Sam Altman—a leader of an organiza…

>It feels like he’s hedging against the very future his company might be shaping. I dont think the prepping can really be taken as evidence anything nefarious. Prepping simply means someone thinks there is a risk with hedging against, even if they are strongly opposed to that outcome. I think you see many of the rich prepping because they can, but It says little about their desire for catastrophic events. Prepping fo…

I don’t think ultra-wealthy preppers want catastrophic events to happen, and I agree that prepping in itself isn’t nefarious. My concern is more about the mindset it can encourage. When someone like Altman—who has significant influence over the future of technology—starts focusing on a solid “Plan B,” it might lead them to take more risks, consciously or unconsciously. Having what they believe is a safe fallback could make them more comfortable pushing boundaries in ways that could accelerate instability. It’s not about wanting disaster, but rather how preparing for one might subtly shift decision-making. For instance, “AI safety team.. who needs it? amirite?!”

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

#374

Post by paradox460 »

rpgbr wrote: post #360

I’ll never understand how so many smart people haven’t realize that the biggest “hallucination” produced by AI was this Sam Altman.

He's been grifting long before the current AI hype

He went from a failed startup to president of yc to ultra wealthy investor in the span of about a decade. That's sus

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

#375

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #252
ComplexSystems wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can even take an enormous sample of articles that he has written and fine tune a model on it, so that it really sounds like him.

And it still won't produce the type of articles he produces. Because at the very least he is capable of writing new articles from something the LLM doesn't have: his brain. Seriously. This is just the parrot thing again. The fact that AI proponents confuse the form of words with authorial intent is mindbending to me. Wouldn't have confused Magritte, I think.

I’m not confused, I just disagree. I don’t think that authorial intent is something fundamentally different than text prediction.

When I’m writing out a comment, there’s no muse in my head singing the words to me. I have a model of who I am and what I believe - if I weren’t religious I might say I am that model - and I type things out by picking the words which that guy would say in response to the input I read.

(The model isn’t a transformer-based LLM, of course.)

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

#376

Post by ben_w »

namaria wrote: post #355
ben_w wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that's what you meant, then I agree with you.

What's the quote? "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t".

Even though it doesn't need to be a single human doing all of it, our brains as existence proofs of the physical possibility, not of our own understanding.

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

#377

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

raincole wrote: post #69
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, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? Sam Altman himself doesn't know whether it's the case. Nobody knows. It's the natural of R&D. If you can tell whether an architecture works or not with 100% confidence it's not cutting edge.

We got to ~gpt4 by scaling model parameters, and then several more companies did too.

That’s dead. OpenAI knows that much. There will be more, but they aren’t going to report that we’re doing incremental advances until there’s a significant breakthrough. They need to stay afloat and say what it takes to try and bridge the gap.

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

#378

Post by GolfPopper »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #353
GolfPopper wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

He doesn't seem fearful of the apocalypse. He seems to consider preparing for it to be a fun hobby.

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

#379

Post by ben_w »

namaria wrote: post #351
ben_w wrote: post #338

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. 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 huma…

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

If it hinged on that, then you would actually be saying it's impossible.

> The elements on Earth that make life possible couldn't have been created in a younger universe

Those statements also apply to the silicon and doping agents used in chip manufacture. They tell you nothing of relevance, we're not doing Carl Sagan's Apple Pie from scratch with AI, we're trying to get a thing like us.

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

#380

Post by hdivider »

In my view we should also stop taking the Great Technoking at his word and move away from lionizing this old well-moneyed elite in general.

Real technological progress in the 21st century is more capital-intensive than before. It also usually requires more diverse talent.

Yet the breakthroughs we can make in this half-century can be far greater than any before: commercial-grade fusion power (where Lawrence Livermore National Lab currently leads, thanks to AI[1]), quantum computing, spintronics, twistronics, low-cost room-temperature superconductors, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, nanotechnology.

Thus, it's much more about the many, not the one. Multi-stakeholder. Multi-person. Often led by one technology leader, sure, but this one person must uplift and be accountable to the many. Otherwise we get the OpenAI story, and end-justifies-the-means type of groupthink wrt. those who worship the technoking.

[1]: https://www.llnl.gov/article/49911/high-performance-computin...

Post reply on HN