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

491–500 of 599 posts

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

#491

Post by neuroelectron »

I'm surprised nobody noticed the elephant in the room, the fact that ChatGPT has a very hard woke slant. That said, -o1 has gotten a lot better but it's not as uncensored and unbiased as GPT-3 was when it was first released. For a while GPT-4 was very clearly biased for the left and U.S. Democrats particularly.

Now keep in mind that this is going to be the default option for a lot of forums and social media for automated moderation. Reddit is already using it a lot and now a lot of the front page is clearly feedback farming for OpenAI. What I'm getting at is we're moving towards a future where only a certain type of dialog will be allowed on most social media and Sam Altman and his sponsors get to decide what that looks like.

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

#492

Post by immibis »

Schiendelman wrote: post #284
silvestrov wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that Microsoft's moat was the copyright law and ability to bully the hardware companies with exclusive distribution contracts. Writing a new DOS (or Windows 3) from scratch is something a lot of developers could do. They just couldn't do it legally. And thus it was easy to bully Compaq and others into only distributing PCs with DOS/Windows installed. For some time you even had to pay the Microsoft fee when yo…

If this was their most important moat for you, what is their moat now that it is gone?

They don't have one, which is why they're struggling to maintain market share. They run solely on brand loyalty, and slightly on competing with AWS and GCP to sell server hosting to people with more money than sense.

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

#493

Post by changing1999 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #264
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?

The thing is, you can be economical. You don't need a GPT-4 quality model for everything. Some things are just low value where a 3.5 model would do just fine. I never use the $20 plan but I access everything via API and i spend a couple of dollars per month. Although lately I have a home server that can do llama 3.1 8b uncensored and that actually works amazingly well.

I use Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k at home and that pretty much covers all my LLM needs. Don't see a reason to pay for GPT-4.

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

#494

Post by QuantumGood »

renegade-otter wrote: post #436
QuantumGood wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He knows as well as anyone about the 5 year hueristic (length too long to be meaningful), so he's trying to say "over 5 years", but still hold onto the sense of "meaningful estimate". My sense about Sam is that he trusts his PR instinct to be usefully manipulative enough that he doesn't think he has to plan it carefully in order for his statements to be maximally opaquely manipulative. (He speaks cleverly and manipulatively without a lot of effort.)

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

#496

Post by jcgrillo »

richardw wrote: post #488
jcgrillo wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Do you have any points that aren’t about the people you disagree with?

Yes...

> Argue the facts.

What?

> What are the limits that prevent progress on the dimension of replicating human intelligence?

I don't work in that field, but as a layman I'd wager the lack of clear technical understanding of what animal intelligence actually is, let alone how it works is the biggest limitation.

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

#497

Post by danielmarkbruce »

xbar wrote: post #440
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Are you saying the average AI researcher isn't good? I'm not arguing with you, I just can't parse what you are saying here.

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

#498

Post by AmigoCharlie »

cowmix wrote: post #373
s1artibartfast wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It feels like he’s hedging against the very future his company might be shaping. I dont think the prepping can really be taken as evidence anything nefarious. Prepping simply means someone thinks there is a risk with hedging against, even if they are strongly opposed to that outcome. I think you see many of the rich prepping because they can, but It says little about their desire for catastrophic events. Prepping fo…

I don’t think ultra-wealthy preppers want catastrophic events to happen, and I agree that prepping in itself isn’t nefarious. My concern is more about the mindset it can encourage. When someone like Altman—who has significant influence over the future of technology—starts focusing on a solid “Plan B,” it might lead them to take more risks, consciously or unconsciously. Having what they believe is a safe fallback coul…

Your concern is very clear and very appropriate. Hironically, I feel that those who seem to not understand what you're implying, even if they are open to prepping, in an Apocalypse wouldn't fare that well: as the basic requirement for survival, more than any prepping, is and will remain wisdom.

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

#499

Post by vasilipupkin »

throwgfgfd25 wrote: post #490
vasilipupkin wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you telling me his articke is much better written ?

Come on.

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

#500

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman's entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don't get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present."

Old tactic.

The project that would eventually became Microsoft Corp. was founded on it. Gates told Ed Roberts the inventor of the first personal computer that he had a programming for it. He had no such programming langugage.

Gates proceeded to espouse "vapourware" for the decades. Arguably Microsoft and its disciples are still doing so today.

Will the tactic ever stop working. Who knows.

Focus on the future that no one can predict, not the present that anyone can describe.

Post reply on HN