It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by throwaway42668 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:27 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #424

throwaway42668 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alternatively, it might make capital available to other things.

It's at least theoretically possible that all the liquidity and leverage in the top of the market could tire itself of chasing the next tulip mania.

For instance, $6 Billion could have gone into climate tech instead of ElizaX.

My problem with these dumb hype cycles is all the other stuff that gets starved in their wake.

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

#432

Post by falcor84 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:27 PM UTC

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…

> ... 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can't quickly replicate.

Where did that assertion come from? Has anyone come close to replicating either of these yet (other than possibly Google, who hasn't fully released their thing yet either), let alone "quickly"? I wouldn't be surprised if it's these "sideways" architectural changes actually give OpenAI a deeper moat than just working on larger models.

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

#433

Post by bad_user » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:28 PM UTC

richardw wrote: post #292

azinman2 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say you got AGI, and it approximated a not so bright impulsive 12 year old boy. That would be an insane technological leap, but hardly one you’d want running the show. AGI doesn’t mean smarter than the best humans.

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…

A 12 year old that doesn't interact with the world.

Many believe that AGI will happen in robots, and not in online services, simply because interacting with the environment might be a prerequisite for developing consciousness.

You mentioned boredom, which is interesting, as boredom may also be a trait of intelligence. An interesting question is if it will want to live at all. Humans have all these pleasure sensors and programming for staying alive and reproducing. The unburdened AGI in your description might not have good reasons to live. Marvin, the depressed robot, might become real.

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

#434

Post by dcre » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:33 PM UTC

falcor84 wrote: post #432

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…

> ... 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can't quickly replicate. Where did that assertion come from? Has anyone come close to replicating either of these yet (other than possibly Google, who hasn't fully released their thing yet either), let alone "quickly"? I wouldn't be surprised if it's these "sideways" architectural changes actually give OpenAI a deeper moat than just working on…

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is at least as good as 4o.

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

#435

Post by cdchn » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:37 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #433

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…

A 12 year old that doesn't interact with the world. Many believe that AGI will happen in robots, and not in online services, simply because interacting with the environment might be a prerequisite for developing consciousness. You mentioned boredom, which is interesting, as boredom may also be a trait of intelligence. An interesting question is if it will want to live at all. Humans have all these pleasure sensors an…

>simply because interacting with the environment might be a prerequisite for developing consciousness.

We can't even define what consciousness is yet, let alone whats required to develop it.

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

#436

Post by renegade-otter » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

QuantumGood wrote: post #421

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.

4000 days is just a few thousand days, but it's [checks notes] over 10 years away.

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

#437

Post by richk449 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

whamlastxmas wrote: post #312

lolinder wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the fact that they actually did dissolve the safety team formerly led by Ilya Sutskever in the aftermath of Altman's coup [0]? I'm genuinely unsure what part of this you're questioning. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-17/openai-di...

Like literally the third sentence makes it clear it was restructuring team dynamics but not eliminating safety goals or even losing the employees that are safety focused. There are many safety focused people at OpenAI and they never fired or laid off people in a safety team which is what people infer from “dissolve the safety team” when it’s used as a bullet point of criticism

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dissolve

Definitions of dissolve:

to cause to disperse or disappear

to separate into component parts

to become dissipated (see DISSIPATE sense 1) or decompose

BREAK UP, DISPERSE

Those seem like pretty accurate descriptions of what happened. Yes, dissolve can also mean something stronger, so perhaps it is fair to call the statement ambiguous. But it isn’t incorrect.

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

#438

Post by throwup238 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

agentcoops wrote: post #281

lrg10aa wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does look like an exit. Employees were given the chance to cash in some of their shares at $86 billion valuation. Altman is getting shares. New "investors" are Microsoft and Nvidia. Nvidia will get the money back as revenue and fuel the hype for other customers. Microsoft will probably pay in Azure credits. If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably mean…

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…

Agreed. These liquidity events are a way to retain and reward early employees while allowing the founders to recover their personal finances and buckle down for the growth phase.

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

#439

Post by swiftcoder » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:40 PM UTC

I feel like the time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word was probably when he was shilling for an eyeball-scanning cryptocurrency...

But apparently as a society we like handing multi-billion dollar investments to folks with a proven track record of (not actually shipping) complete bullshit.

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

#440

Post by xbar » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:44 PM UTC

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #416

xbar wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

That is certainly true. But the market began searching in earnest for "really competent X" in this field only about 2 years ago. Before that, it was a decidedly opt-in affair..