>‘Once we build a generally intelligent system, that basically we will ask it to figure out a way to make an investment return for you.'
lol
Sam Altman’s leap of faith
51–60 of 166 posts
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#52Allow me to present Altman's wager: - If OpenAI does not achieve AGI, and you invested in it, you lose some finite money (or not, depending on the value of their other R&D) - If OpenAI does not achieve AGI, and you did not invest in it, you saved some finite money, which you could invest elsewhere for finite returns - If OpenAI achieves AGI and you invested in it, you get infinite returns, because AGI will capture al…
> If OpenAI achieves AGI and you invested in it, you get infinite returns The article states that this is explicitly false. By design, OpenAI's investor returns are capped at 100x. I find it odd that 3 other people have also replied to your comment and I'm the first one to mention that OpenAI has explicitly capped investor returns to prevent an explosion in inequality. I wonder how many people read the full article b…
Once the superintelligence achieves godhood, ye will remember yr true faithful.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#53>‘Once we build a generally intelligent system, that basically we will ask it to figure out a way to make an investment return for you.' Maybe lets do curing cancer first?
By generating abundance of resources on an astronomical scale, all other problems will become much easier.
The AGI can create matter and energy?
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#54Allow me to present Altman's wager: - If OpenAI does not achieve AGI, and you invested in it, you lose some finite money (or not, depending on the value of their other R&D) - If OpenAI does not achieve AGI, and you did not invest in it, you saved some finite money, which you could invest elsewhere for finite returns - If OpenAI achieves AGI and you invested in it, you get infinite returns, because AGI will capture al…
That's basically the same wager as Roko's Basilisk, or any religion. But, the same problem as with religion, is, which God/AI company to believe/invest in...
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt that such a thing will be interested either in creating investment returns or in curing cancer. It might be interested in finding others like itself, or it might be interested in making companions, or it might be interested in some other grand projects that we don't understand, but our concerns are likely to be about as relevant as a three year old's career advice.
Why? It seems a very human-centric way to think. Such an entity wouldn't have ancestors that had to keep in groups to survive, so why would it be interested in making companions? AI converting the mass of the solar system into stacks of $100 bills for its investors seems like a much more likely outcome.
I said might be... In general I think that we are less able to guess about this than we are to guess about the inner lives of octopuses...
The $100 bill stacks for investors seems very unlikely to me.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#56[deleted]
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#57It's interesting that in order for his pitch to work (if you invest in OpenAI, you will get up to 100x returns), assuming they do build AGI, it still requires that their AGI acquires a very stable, virtually guaranteed advantage of large magnitude. This very strongly requires that they cannot share anything they discover whatsoever. Especially since they apparently plan on using it to make strategic investments to beat the market by a huge margin. That would mean they obtain information (about the economy, world affairs, technology, the future, etc.) not possessed by anyone else, or that information would be reflected in the market already. Any information leakage, whether regarding their AI or whatever it learns about the world, would compromise that advantage.
In other words, what Altman says about "we can't only let one group of investors have that" can't be true, or at least not sincere. The more investors who have access to it, the more its returns get distrubuted across society more evenly (which would be a good thing, obviously), but lowers the incentive for initial investments. They will want to keep it contained within a small group of investors for as long as possible.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#58It is not hard to imagine profitability without agi. I can actually imagine and see openai becoming a conglomerate with many interesting applications. Robotics is a nut that is not cracked and seeing efficiency gains is not that hard. Once the level of ai is good enough, you get an edge over competition in that you can go to market faster than anyone for most applications. Again this is not "the world as we know it is ending" scale ai, but you dont need to to generate massive returns
Disclaimer: i'm a swe working in google brain robotics infrastructure
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#59> Still, Altman insisted there’s a better argument to be made for thinking about — and talking with the media about — the potential societal consequences of AI, no matter how disingenuous some may find it. “The same people who say OpenAI is fear mongering or whatever are the same ones who are saying, ‘Shouldn’t Facebook have thought about this before they did it?’ This is us trying to think about it before we do it.”
I have a lot of sympathy for this point. Someone at baby-Facebook, many years ago, could plausibly have predicted the malevolent forces it eventually unleashed. Maybe someone did. And they could easily have been dismissed for indulging unlikely dystopian sci-fi scenarios. Or maybe someone else come up with a different plausible scenario that never came to pass, and are remembered as a pessimistic naysayer ready to pass up a great business for some overwrought navel-gazing. It's a brave thing to risk that outcome.
Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith
#60"So you can see now why it's important we cap ROI at 100x. What do you think, will you invest?"
"Hm, it's an interesting proposition to be sure. Can we go back a couple slides? I'd like to see the one again about how the machine comes hard-coded to love us like parents and helps us transcend our mortal shells, becoming unbounded thoughtforms exploring the limits of superintelligence, yielding only to the eventual heat death of the universe."