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AI (2014)

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: AI (2014)

#41

Post by Jensson »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #33
elevatortrim wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That world is not necessarily bleak. We currently have two broad mechanisms to equate people's value. *Employees:* Easy to replace = Low Salary = Gets Few Resources Hard to replace = High Salary = Gets Many Resources *Entrepreneurs:* Output consumed low = Low Pay = Gets Few Resources Output consumed high = High Pay = Gets Many Resources (Resource consumption ignored) In a world where machines do everything, aspects o…

I don't see how this doesn't equally apply to the pre-AI economy. The results there have been quite stark, with the "entrepreneurs" ending up far better off than the "employees".

> I don't see how this doesn't equally apply to the pre-AI economy. The results there have been quite stark, with the "entrepreneurs" ending up far better off than the "employees".

This is wrong, in most cases the entrepreneur is worse off than the employees, since the entrepreneur spent all his savings on the projects and the employees walks away with all the money they got from their salaries.

And even when it is fully funded by external investors most of the time the founder just gets to keep the salary since the company fails and become worthless.

The only time the entrepreneur is better off is when the company succeeds and becomes big, but that is rare, most of the time it is better to be an employee.

Re: AI (2014)

#42

Post by imiric »

trilogic wrote: post #8

Nailed it 12 Years ago... damn it, then after all Sam is not just talk and money. I just got humbled. This make me reconsider all my POV about Sam Altman.

There is some good insight here, but I wouldn't say that he "nailed it".

We still don't have computer programs that are able to "decide" what "they" "want" to do. We have programs that can mimic this behavior, but the implementation is effectively the same as the chess and flight programs we've had for decades: searching a gigantic solution space very quickly. What's changed is the amount of data and compute we can throw at the problem.

The emergent behavior we observe from these systems is the result of our human inability to comprehend the relationships and patterns in the vast amount of data we feed them. We assign anthropomorphic qualities like creativity, intelligence, reasoning, thinking, etc., to this behavior in an attempt to make the technology more approachable, and, of course, more marketable, which fuels further investments.

What's very much uncertain is whether continuing to scale up will lead us to machines that can do all of the things Altman talks about. There's disagreement about this even between leading figures in the field, but being negative about it is not as profitable.

Re: AI (2014)

#43

Post by ugtr3 »

kolinko wrote: post #34
DeathArrow wrote: post #27

In a sane world AI revolution would be driven by the likes of Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy, Yann LeCun and not by a brigade of Sam Altmans.

As someone who spent most of my time with computer scientists - the last thing I’d like would be for them to run the world.

Yup. Unhinged to put it mildly.

People who are liberal artsy at the core but do computer science? Yes.

Re: AI (2014)

#44

Post by croes »

Jensson wrote: post #4

> And maybe we don't want to build machines that are concious in this sense. The most positive outcome I can think of is one where computers get really good at doing, and humans get really good at thinking. If we never figure out how to make computers creative, then there will be a very natural division of labor between man and machine. This is where LLM is currently going. Not really AGI since they can't think like…

The problem is most people’s job depends on doing the work part and not the figuring out the new things part.

So you just lose your job.

Re: AI (2014)

#45

Post by Jensson »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #38
Jensson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's really thinking and creativity all the way down if you try to learn to do things well Yes, everyone starts out creative. But we all can tell the difference between a worker that is still creative and learning and a worker that gave up creativity and is just doing his job. The first will still be useful in this AI age the second will be replaced by AI learning what he already knows.

> But we all can tell the difference between a worker that is still creative and learning and a worker that gave up creativity and is just doing his job. The first will still be useful in this AI age the second will be replaced by AI learning what he already knows. Rather: the workers who are (still) creative are typically a huge annoyance to their bosses.

Yeah, and that is how people stop being creative as they get punished for it while their uncreative peers gets praised. It happens to most people in school or early in their career, few gets to keep their creativity.

In a new world where creativity is valued higher more people could probably keep their creativity.

Re: AI (2014)

#46

Post by mofeien »

Jensson wrote: post #4

> And maybe we don't want to build machines that are concious in this sense. The most positive outcome I can think of is one where computers get really good at doing, and humans get really good at thinking. If we never figure out how to make computers creative, then there will be a very natural division of labor between man and machine. This is where LLM is currently going. Not really AGI since they can't think like…

> > The most positive outcome I can think of is one where computers get really good at doing, and humans get really good at thinking.

> This is where LLM is currently going.

This is not where LLMs are currently going. They are trained and benchmarked explicitly in all areas that humans produce economically and cognitively valuable work: STEM fields, computer use, robotics, etc.

Systems are already emerging where AI agents autonomously orchestrate subagents which again all work towards a goal autonomously and only from time to time communicate with you to give you status updates.

Thinking that you as a slow human will be needed for much longer to fill some crucial role in this AI system that it cannot solve by itself, and to bring some crucial skill of creativity or thinking to the table that it cannot generate itself is just wishful thinking. And to me personally, telling an AI to "do cool thing X" without having made any contribution to it beyond the initial prompt also feels very depressing and seems like much less fun than actually feeling valued in what I do. I'm sorry for sounding harsh.

Re: AI (2014)

#47

Post by aleph_minus_one »

embedding-shape wrote: post #18
9dev wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, maybe don't. He's a smart guy for sure, but that really doesn't redeem him from the awful qualities he undoubtedly has—insatiable greed, a compulsion to lie and manipulate, a special flavour of god complex, no moral compass at all, and more.

> insatiable greed, a compulsion to lie and manipulate, a special flavour of god complex, no moral compass at all, and more Besides these traits that every CEO/big-time investor seems to share, is there anything uniquely awful with Altman?

> is there anything uniquely awful with Altman?

His involvement in Worldcoin (now named "World"), i.e. biometric scanning of huge populations.

Re: AI (2014)

#48

Post by ugtr3 »

mpalmer wrote: post #19

The most positive outcome I can think of is one where computers get really good at doing, and humans get really good at thinking Steve Yegge said on some podcast recently that AI is going to have to come up with a more visual medium for communicating, because people don't want to read several paragraphs . He shared this uncritically, seemingly without judgement or disappointment. Yegge himself is a former Googler and…

Correct.

LLM’s are the virus of the mind - people think so what? I get my output and move on.

Yeah.. no. You need that thinking capacity to protect yourself. Once that’s gone en-masse, what’s left of the democratic system (not much) will completely collapse. Congrats to legally creating an environment that yields oligarchy.

Altman and his cronies yearn for a swath of people who cannnot think for themselves.

Re: AI (2014)

#49

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Jensson wrote: post #45
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we all can tell the difference between a worker that is still creative and learning and a worker that gave up creativity and is just doing his job. The first will still be useful in this AI age the second will be replaced by AI learning what he already knows. Rather: the workers who are (still) creative are typically a huge annoyance to their bosses.

Yeah, and that is how people stop being creative as they get punished for it while their uncreative peers gets praised. It happens to most people in school or early in their career, few gets to keep their creativity. In a new world where creativity is valued higher more people could probably keep their creativity.

> In a new world where creativity is valued higher

This is in my opinion a very dubious assumption. :-(

Re: AI (2014)

#50

Post by ugtr3 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #35
jack_pp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well was Jobs a "doer"? Did he get his hands dirty on the code? Or did he use his employees how we would like to use LLMs?

> Well was Jobs a "doer"? Jobs' talent was that he was an incredibly talented salesman.

Why do people write such nonsense?

Jobs envisioned the iPad and iPhone. Did he do the physical work? No. But he created direction.

Everyone around him at that time has commented on this. Are you going to claim they’re all lying?

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