Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 599 posts

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

#471

Post by peteforde »

SoftTalker wrote: post #362
peteforde wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even summarize how much GPT4x has helped me teach myself engineering skills over the past two years. It can help me accomplish highly specific and nuanced things in CAD, plan interactions between component parts (which it helped me decide) on PCBs that it helps me to lay out, figure out how to optimize everything from switching regulators to preparing for EM certification. And I could say this about just abou…

> I honestly don't understand how the folks reading HN don't intuitively and passionately lean into that. It's a freaking superpower. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Many of us here would see our jobs eliminated by a sufficiently powerful AI, perhaps some have already experienced it. You might as well. If you use AI so much, what value do you…

Only time will tell. In the meantime, I am not losing any sleep.

There's a lot of people in technical roles who chose to study programming and work at tech companies because it seemed like it would pay more than other roles. My own calculation is that the tech-but-could-have-just-as-easily-been-a-lawyer cohort will be the first to find themselves replaced. Is that a revealing a bias? Absolutely.

Actual hackers, in the true sense, will have no trouble finding ways to continue to be useful and hopefully well compensated.

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

#472

Post by [deleted] »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #375
throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it still won't produce the type of articles he produces. Because at the very least he is capable of writing new articles from something the LLM doesn't have: his brain. Seriously. This is just the parrot thing again. The fact that AI proponents confuse the form of words with authorial intent is mindbending to me. Wouldn't have confused Magritte, I think.

I’m not confused, I just disagree. I don’t think that authorial intent is something fundamentally different than text prediction. When I’m writing out a comment, there’s no muse in my head singing the words to me. I have a model of who I am and what I believe - if I weren’t religious I might say I am that model - and I type things out by picking the words which that guy would say in response to the input I read. (The…

[deleted]

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

#473

Post by m3kw9 »

throwintothesea wrote: post #218
m3kw9 wrote: post #186

The Atlantic is really going out of their way to hate on Altman. That publication has always been a bit of a whack job of an outfit

The techbro whining about as staid a publication as the Atlantic is truly hilarious. They published some of the first pieces in support of abolition, and now you're upset that they're swinging at the richest grifter in Silicon Valley. Get a grip.

He brought us AI that is about to change almost everything, be grateful for the magic intelligence in the sky

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

#474

Post by dcre »

falcor84 wrote: post #467
dcre wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh, sorry I wasn't clear, I was referring to the advanced (speech-to-speech) voice mode, which for me is the highlight of this "omni" thing, rather than to the "strength" of the model.

I thought that might be the case. On that: even though other big players haven't copied that particular feature, I doubt (though I'm not by any means an expert) that it's anywhere near as hard to replicate as the fundamental model. I do agree that at least product-wise, they're trying to differentiate through these sort of model-adjacent features, but I think these are classic product problems requiring product solutions rather than deep tech innovation. Claude Artifacts, GPT Canvas, speech, editor integration, GitHub integration, live video integration, that kind of stuff.

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

#475

Post by CPLX »

chirau wrote: post #275
CPLX wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Atlantic is run by Jeffrey Goldberg and owned by Laurene Powell Jobs. Of course these people have agendas, it’s not exactly a secret.

It has to be owned by someone, that does not make it agenda driven. Who would you rather have it owned by so that it is not agenda driven?

It’s not a hypothetical we aren’t assuming spherical cows today. Those specific people have a long and public track record that answers this question.

It’s not a secret, like I said. There are plenty of editors out there who have never decided to concoct ludicrous stories of Al Queda bases in the Amazon to name one example.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/10/28/in-the-party-o...

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

#476

Post by NitpickLawyer »

Filligree wrote: post #354
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person you replied to suggests that the analogy of a 3d printer building a part does not hold, as LLM-based coding systems are able to both "print" some code, and decide where and when to do so. I tend to agree with them. What people seem to miss about LLM coding systems, IMO: a) deciding on the capabilities of an LLM to code after a brief browser session with 4o/claude is comparable to waking up a coder in the m…

(D) includes me, and does sound fun. Got any references?

Saw a private demo, felt as giddy as I felt when deepmind showed Mario footage. No idea when it'll be out.

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

#477

Post by KPGv2 »

jerpint wrote: post #372
cyanydeez wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Video data is still very much untapped and likely to unlock a step function worth of data. Current image-language models are trained mostly on {image, caption} pairs with a bit of extra fine tuning

Do you think it matters that there's orders of magnitude less video (and audio) data than text data?

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

#478

Post by throwgfgfd25 »

askafriend wrote: post #326
throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly, clearly do not understand what I am saying. But sure, waste your time and money making a parrot that, unlike the author it mimics, is incapable of introspection, reflection, intellectual evolution or simply changing its mind. Words are words. Writers are writers. Writers are not words. ETA: consider what would actually be necessary to prove me wrong. And when you hear back from David Karpf about his will…

You articulate this position well. I've tried to convey something similar and it's tough to find the words to explain to people. I really like this phrase: "Words are words. Writers are writers. Writers are not words." I'm very bullish on AI/LLMs but I think we do need to have a better shared understanding of what they are and what they aren't. I think there's a lot of confusion around this.

> I really like this phrase:

Thank you. I don't think it really explains the distinction, of course. It just makes it clear there necessarily must be one, and it can't be wished away by discussions of larger training sets, more token context, or whatever. It never will be wished away.

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

#479

Post by throwgfgfd25 »

throwintothesea wrote: post #218
m3kw9 wrote: post #186

The Atlantic is really going out of their way to hate on Altman. That publication has always been a bit of a whack job of an outfit

The techbro whining about as staid a publication as the Atlantic is truly hilarious. They published some of the first pieces in support of abolition, and now you're upset that they're swinging at the richest grifter in Silicon Valley. Get a grip.

It also famously published As We May Think.

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

#480

Post by vasilipupkin »

throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #176
vasilipupkin wrote: post #87

Don't listen to David Karpfs of the world. Did he predict chat gpt? if you asked him in 2018, he would have said AI will never write a story now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed.

> now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed. You really cannot.

Really? Are you sure ? His article can basically be summed up as don’t believe AI hype from Sama. It’s not particularly well written, he’s no Nabokov. ChatGPT bangs out stuff like this effortlessly. Here, I did it for you https://chatgpt.com/share/67019a6c-453c-8006-88aa-6f32435492...
Post reply on HN