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

481–490 of 599 posts

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

#481

Post by baking »

pj_mukh wrote: post #457
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…

Except the article makes none of these points. The article is saying: a) "the technology is overhyped", based on some meaningless subjective criteria, if you think a technology is overhyped, don't invest your money or time in it. No one's forcing you. b) "child abuse problems are more important", with a link to an article that clearly specifies that the child abuse problems have nothing to do with OpenAI. c) "it uses…

>So if everything about this AI boom fails what we'll be left with is a massive amount of abundant renewable energy

Except that someone has to pay for it. AI companies are only willing to pay for power purchase agreements, not capital expenses. Same with the $7T of chip fab. Invest your money in huge capital expenditures and our investors will pay you for it on an annual basis until they get tired of losing money.

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

#482

Post by baking »

getpost wrote: post #285
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 don't know anything, but isn't Sam already rich? And, if OpenAI is in a position to capture profits in an expanding AI industry, isn't this the best possible time to lock-in equity for long term gains and trillionaireship? For many people, sadly, one can never be rich enough. My point is, planning for both short term exit, and long term gains, is essentially the same in this particular situation. What a boon! Nice…

He is tied for last place on the most recent Forbes Billionaire list.

https://www.forbes.com/profile/sam-altman/

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

#483

Post by baking »

GolfPopper wrote: post #389
gizmo wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam was already a billionaire years ago. He is one of SV most prolific investors, with equity in hundreds of startups. He writes big checks as well from time to time, Helion for instance he gave 375 million.

To be clear, Altman invested $375 million in Helion Energy's 2021 funding round. Helion Energy a for-profit fusion energy company of which he is the chairman.

He is the Executive Chairman at Helion, which means he keeps a tight grip on that particular purse string.

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

#485

Post by rocho »

askafriend wrote: post #311
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…

Any thoughts on synthetic data?

See "AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y

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

#486

Post by rocho »

peteforde wrote: post #350
bhy wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But note that the price they can charge is based on market supply and demand. If Claude is priced at $20, ChatGPT won’t be able to ask $100.

If OpenAI sent out an email today informing me that to maintain access to the current 4o model I will have to pay $1000 a year, and that it would go up another $500 next year... it would still be well worth it to me.

To you maybe. But if Claude or any other competitor with similar features and performance keeps a lower price, most users will migrate there.

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

#487

Post by _hyn3 »

> The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires. (The Atlantic recently entered a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

Hilarious.

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

#488

Post by richardw »

jcgrillo wrote: post #469
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is an interesting delusion among web company workers that goes something like “technology progress goes steadily up and to the right” which I think comes from web company managers who constantly prattle on about “innovation”. Your word processor example is a good one, because at some point making changes to the UI just hurts users. So all that empty “innovation” that everyone needs to look busy doing is actuall…

Do you have any points that aren’t about the people you disagree with? Argue the facts. What are the limits that prevent progress on the dimension of replicating human intelligence?

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

#489

Post by [deleted] »

pj_mukh wrote: post #457
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…

Except the article makes none of these points. The article is saying: a) "the technology is overhyped", based on some meaningless subjective criteria, if you think a technology is overhyped, don't invest your money or time in it. No one's forcing you. b) "child abuse problems are more important", with a link to an article that clearly specifies that the child abuse problems have nothing to do with OpenAI. c) "it uses…

[deleted]

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

#490

Post by throwgfgfd25 »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #480
throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Oh dear me. I can't argue with you if this satisfies you.
Post reply on HN