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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

#421

Post by QuantumGood »

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…

His recent statement that AGI may "only be a few thousand days away" is clearly an attempt to find a less quotable way of extending estimates while barely reducing hype. History generally shows that estimates of "more than five years away" are meaningless.

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

#422

Post by semi-extrinsic »

richardw wrote: post #339
theptip wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument simply asserts that the LLMs (or their successor systems including scaffolding) will asymptote somewhere below human capabilities. It’s possible that this could happen but you need to propose a mechanism and metric for this argument to be taken seriously (and to avoid fooling yourself with moving goalposts). Under what grounds do you assert that the trend line will stop where you claim it will stop? Yes…

This. It’s far harder to think of reasons that limits will endure, in a world where innovation by inches has always produced improvements. Everyone brings out the current state and technology. Those are transient.

WTF? Look at a word processor today, and then one from 1999, and tell me again how technology always keeps improving dramatically.

The standard electrical wall sockets that you use have not really changed since WW2. For load bearing elements in buildings, we don't have anything substantially better today than 100 years ago. There is a huge list of technological items where we've polished out almost every last wrinkle and a 1% gain once a decade is hailed as miraculous.

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

#423

Post by xbar »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #303

It’s really sad to see all the personal attacks and cynicism that has no basis in reality. OpenAI has an amazing product and was first to market with something game changing for billions of people. Calling him a fraud and scammer is super ridiculous

I do not know about any of that or your feelings of sadness.

I have skepticism of his predictions, and disregard for his exaggerations.

I have a ChatGPT subscription and build features on OpenAI technology.

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

#424

Post by KaiserPro »

throwaway42668 wrote: post #66
melenaboija wrote: post #58

It is weird that one of the most valued markets (openai, microsoft investments, nvidia gpus, ...) is based on a stack that is available to anyone that can pay for the resources to train the models and that in my opinion still has to deliver to the expectations that have been created around it. Not saying it is a bubble but something seems imbalanced here.

It's okay to say it. It's a bubble. It was just the next in line to be inflated after crypto.

I mean OpenAI is a bubble, if it pops, its big enough to take the rest of tech with it.

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

#425

Post by switch007 »

slashdave wrote: post #330
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?

Actually, CEOs, and other board members, are supposed to be held to certain standards. Specifically, honesty and integrity. Some charters explicitly include working for the public good. Let's not forget that and not get desensitized to certain behaviors.

That ship has long, long sailed

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

#426

Post by KaiserPro »

xbar wrote: post #409
jt2190 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI needs unheard amounts of energy… … and it always will? It seems terribly limiting to stop exploring the potential of this technology because it’s not perfect right now . Energy consumption of AI models does not feel like an unsolvable problem, just a difficult one.

I think you should study the tragedy of the commons to understand why it always will.

Energy isnt a common. It costs.

Also the tragedy of the commons is based on a number of flawed assumptions on how commons work.

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

#427

Post by lolinder »

gojomo wrote: post #411
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.

> you're projecting a short-term cash-out mentality

I'm a software engineer comfortably drawing a decent-but-not-FAANG paycheck at an established company with every intention of taking the slow-and-steady path to retirement. I'm not projecting, I promise.

> to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever

Except that OpenAI isn't a faraway leader. Their big news this week was them finally making an effort to catch up to Anthropic's Artifacts. Their best models do only marginally better in the LLM Arena than Claude, Gemini, and even the freely-released Llama 3.1 405B!

Part of why I believe Altman is looking to cash out is that I think he's smart enough to recognize that he has no moat and a very small lead. His efforts to get governments to pull up the ladder have largely failed, so the next logical choice is to exit at peak valuation rather than waiting for investors to recognize that OpenAI is increasingly just one in a crowd.

[0] https://lmarena.ai/

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

#428

Post by financetechbro »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #366
agentcoops wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for anyone who has been intimately involved with this last generation of "unicorns", it really does not look like an "exit" if that means bankruptcy, end of the company, betrayal of goals, or what have you: for a high-growth startup of approximately ten years, finding liquidity for employees is perhaps counter-intuitively a sign of deep maturity and that the company is concerned for the long haul (and that in…

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

Agreed. OP is crossing some wires. More companies are staying private right now (not by choice). Not necessarily or only the “largest companies”

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

#429

Post by wslh »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #408
wslh wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it differently. ChatGPT holds a unique position because it has the most important asset in tech: user attention. Building a brand and capturing a significant share of eyeballs is one of the hardest challenges for any company, startup or not. From a business standpoint, the discussion around GPT-5 or AGI seems secondary. What truly matters is the growing number of users paying for ChatGPT, with potential for mon…

> What truly matters is the growing number of users paying for ChatGPT, with potential for monetization through ads or other services in the future. If the end goal is monetization of ChatGPT with ads, it will be enshittified to the same degree as Google searches. If you get to that, what is the benefit of using ChatGPT if it just gives you the same ads and bullshit as Google?

I mentioned ads as just one potential avenue for monetization. My main point is that OpenAI's current market position and strong brand awareness are the real differentiators. They're in a unique spot where they have the user's attention, which offers a range of monetization options beyond just ads. The challenge for them will be to balance monetization with maintaining the user experience that made them successful in the first place.

Also, don't forget the recent Apple partnership [1], a very strong signal of their strategic positioning. Aligning with Apple reinforces their credibility and opens up even more opportunities for innovation and expansion, beyond just monetizing through ads. I just searched through this thread, and it seems the Apple partnership isn't being recognized as a significant achievement under Sam Altman's tenure as CEO, which is surprising given its importance.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40328927

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

#430

Post by lesuorac »

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.

People are taking Altman at his word.

He was literally invited to congress to speak about AI safety. Sure, perhaps people that have a longer memory of the tech world don't trust him. That's actually not a lot of people. A lot of people just aren't following tech (like my in-laws).

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