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

theatlantic.com

391–400 of 599 posts

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

#391
I wonder how many governments and A-listers are investing heavily in the rapid development of commodity AI video that is indistinguishable from real video. Does it seem paranoid?

They would at least be more believable if they blast claims that a certain video must be fake, especially with how absurd and shocking it is.

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

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Open…

> High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention Citation? ...or are you just assuming that AGI will be able to solve all of our problems, appropos of nothing but Sam Altman's word? I haven't seen a single credible study suggest that AGI is anything more than a marketing term for vaporware.

Their marketing hyperbole has cheapened much of the language around AI, so naturally it excites someone who writes like the disciple of the techno-prophets

" High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention" What? I could certainly see all kinds of entertaining arguments for this, but to write it so matter of fact was cringe inducing.

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

#393

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…

> They dissolved the safety team.

I still don't get the safety team. Yes, I understand the need for a business to moderate the content they provide and rightly so. But elevating the safety to the level of the survival of humanity over a generative model, I'm not so sure. And even for so-called preventing harmful content, how can an LLM be more dangerous than the access of the books like The Anarchist Cookbook, the pamphlets on how to conduct guerrilla warfare, the training materials of how to do terrorisms, and etc? They are easily accessible on the internet, no?

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

#394
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a world context where the largest companies are more likely to stay private than IPO Which world is this?

From a Scottish Mortgage report: "companies are staying private for longer and until higher valuations". Amazon founded in 1994 1997 listed at $400m Google founded in 1998 2004 listed at $23bn Spotify founded in 2006 2018 listed at $27bn Airbnb founded in 2008 2020 listed at $47bn Epic games founded in 1991 2022 unlisted value $32bn Space Exploration founded in 2002 2022 unlisted value $125bn ByteDance founded in 201…

The only unlisted business there that could be considered among “the largest” is ByteDance. But they have a whole China thing going on, so not very representative of US/European markets.

I doubt any competitor to the largest businesses in US//Europe that is actually putting up good audited numbers is staying private. Even Stripe has been trying to go public, but it doesn’t have the numbers for the owners to want to yet.

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

#395
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI, i.e. deep learning, consumes huge amounts of energy because it has to train on gigantic amounts of data and the training algorithms are borderline efficient. So to stop using huge amounts of energy someone would have to come up with a way to get the same results without relying on deep learning. In other words all we need is a new technology revolution like the deep learning revolution, except one centered around…

This feels like a “fixed mindset” about energy, i.e. the way we generate and allocate energy today can not change. Of all the “wasteful” things we do with energy AI is not the top of my (very subjective) list of things to shut down.

No what I'm saying is that for the way we use energy to train neural nets can change in principle but nobody knows how to do it.

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

#396

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.

Nobody close the the edge of this tech seems to believe that this is true, and the 4o release suggests synthetic approaches work well.

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

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Just to clarify, I didn't say anything about the OP's "ability to learn". I know nothing about that and can't tell anything about it from their comment. I also didn't say anything about how our brain works, or about "the tendrils of ML overlords".

If you want to have a debate, I'm all for it, but if you're going to go around imagining things that I may have said in another timeline then I don't see what's the point of that.

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

#398
post #242

The field is extremely research oriented. You can't stay on top with good engineering and incremental development and refining. Google just paid over $2.4 billion to get Noam Shazeer back in the company to work with Gemini AI. Google has the deepest pool of AI researchers. Microsoft and Facebook are not far behind. OpenAI is losing researchers, they have maybe 1-2 years until they become Microsoft subsidiary.

You make it sound like AI researchers are in short supply.

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

#400

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…

> They dissolved the safety team. I still don't get the safety team. Yes, I understand the need for a business to moderate the content they provide and rightly so. But elevating the safety to the level of the survival of humanity over a generative model, I'm not so sure. And even for so-called preventing harmful content, how can an LLM be more dangerous than the access of the books like The Anarchist Cookbook, the pa…

Having a dedicated safety team (or as they called it "superalignment") makes sense if and only if you believe that your company is pursuing an actual sci-fi style artificial superintelligence that could put humanity itself at risk [0]:

> Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.

> How do we ensure AI systems much smarter than humans follow human intent?

This is a question that naturally arises if you are pursuing something that's superhuman, and a question that's pointless if you believe you're likely to get a really nice algorithm for solving certain kinds of problems that were hard to solve before.

Getting rid of the superalignment team showed which version Altman believes is likely.

[0] https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/

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