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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

#411

Post by gojomo »

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 think you're projecting a short-term cash-out mentality here.

Altman's actions are even more consistent with total confidence & dedication to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever. Plus, a desire to retain more personal control over that outcome – & not just conventional wealth! – than was typical with prior breakthroughs.

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

#412

Post by Vespasian »

lolinder wrote: post #400
hintymad wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 superin…

And importantly it's also a question that would need an answer if the alignment should be with "individual groups" rather than "humanity".

It won't do Sam Altman and friends any good if they are the richest corpses after an unaligned AI goes rogue.

So it would be in their were egoistical self interest to make sure it doesn't.

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

#413

Post by danielmarkbruce »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #110

Nobody is taking Sam Altman at his word lol, these ideas about intelligence have been believed for a long time in the tech world and the guy is just the best at monetizing them. People are pursuing this path because of a general conviction in these ideas of themselves, I guess to people like Atlantic writers Sam Altman is the first time they've encountered them but it really has nothing to do with Sam Altman.

100% this. He isn't even saying anything novel (I mean that in a good way).

On top of that, the advance in models for language and physical simulation based models (for protein prediction and weather forecasting as examples) has been so rapid and unexpected that even folks who were previously very skeptical of "AI" are believers - it ain't because Sam Altman is up there talking a lot. I went from AI skeptic to zealot in about 18 months, and I'm in good company.

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

#414

Post by KaiserPro »

theptip wrote: post #244
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…

What data are you using to back up this belief? Progress on benchmarks continues to improve (see GPT-o1). The claim that there is nothing left to train on is objectively false. The big guys are building synthetic training sets, moving to multimodal, and are not worried about running out of data. o1 shows that you can also throw more inference compute at problems to improve performance, so it gives another dimension t…

> Progress on benchmarks continues to improve (see GPT-o1).

thats not evidence of a step change.

> The big guys are building synthetic training sets

Yes, that helps to pre-train models, but its not a replacement for real data.

> not worried about running out of data.

they totally are. The more data, the more expensive it is to train. Exponentially more expensive.

> o1 shows that you can also throw more inference compute

I suspect that its not actually just compute, its changes to training and model design.

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

#416

Post by danielmarkbruce »

xbar wrote: post #398
nabla9 wrote: 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.

For almost all jobs X, "really competent X" are in exceedingly short supply.

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

#417

Post by mikeocool »

titanomachy wrote: post #262
from-nibly wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt $20 a month is going to cover it. How much would you.pay before you weren't getting a good deal?

If we’re talking about inference costs alone (minimal new training) I think it would cover it. I started doing usage-based pricing through openrouter instead of paying monthly subscriptions, and my modest LLM use costs me about $3/month. Unless you think that the API rates are also priced below cost.

According the New York Times [1], OpenAI told investors that they're costs are increasing as more people use their product, and they are planning to increase the cost of ChatGPT from $20 to $44 over the next five years. That certainly suggests that they're selling inference at a loss right now.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt...

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

#418

Post by wildermuthn »

mrmetanoia wrote: post #392
talldayo wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s true by definition. If we invent a better-than-all-humans inventor, then human invention will give way. It’s a fairly simple idea, and not one I made up.

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

#419

Post by KaiserPro »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #110

Nobody is taking Sam Altman at his word lol, these ideas about intelligence have been believed for a long time in the tech world and the guy is just the best at monetizing them. People are pursuing this path because of a general conviction in these ideas of themselves, I guess to people like Atlantic writers Sam Altman is the first time they've encountered them but it really has nothing to do with Sam Altman.

Someone is buying enough of his bullshit to invest a few billion into openAI.

The problem is, when it pops, which it will, it'll fuck the economy.

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

#420

Post by thordenmark »

pstuart wrote: post #346
richardw wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 12 year old that doesn’t sleep, eat, or forget, learns anything within seconds, can replicate and work together with fast as light communication and no data loss when doing so. Arrives out of the womb knowing everything the internet knows. Can work on one problem until it gets it right. Doesn’t get stale or old. Only had emotion if it’s useful. Can do math and simulate. Doesn’t get bored. Can theoretically improve…

And then with advancement, reaches teenage maturity and tells everyone to fuck off.

As someone who has teenagers right now, I can confirm that this is accurate.
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