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

The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 83 posts

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#51

Post by nvy »

VelesDude wrote: post #48
nvy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam Altman is the poster child of the silicon valley techbro (derogatory). He and his orbiters have done real an irreparable harm to the Internet while profiting enormously from unlicensed copyrighted works (aka piracy). "Open" "AI" is pure hypocrisy, an embodiment of the two parallel sets of rules: one for the commons and one for the elite. Sama deserves more than a little pushback on and scrutiny of his claims.

> He and his orbiters have done real an irreparable harm to the Internet He and his orbiters have done real an irreparable harm to the ecosystem by pushing such intense compute systems unthinkingly.

You mean the environment? Absolutely.

We can't have discussion of that on HN, though, so the moderator has flagged it.

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#52

Post by __loam »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #47
__loam wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes never discuss technology critically, only grow and make more more more. Never consider the actual impact of your work, simply produce and consume.

I find that hilarious because I actually feel the opposite way. We have ignored the impact of what we do far, far too long. Forums like this facilitate this false dichotomy. Society IS tech. To believe otherwise is stupid. But I have found a mantra: if our conversation is in any way getting into whether somebody is good or bad? I am no longer a positive influence on society. This failed my test. It has nothing to do…

If society is tech, then people are society. Leadership should be scrutinized more than anyone else in the industry, they are ultimately responsible for setting the direction of the industry in our unfortunately corporate dominated tech sector. Flagging discussion about them because you think it's simply gossip is not helpful. If you don't like a conversation then don't participate in it.

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#53

Post by fastball »

__loam wrote: post #35
invig wrote: post #5

GPT-4 is absolutely incredible and even if we never get beyond it the world is a much better place with it than without it. It makes total sense to bet on the team that made this being the best placed people in the world to advance it.

I disagree strongly with this. GPT has: - Precipitated a new class of computationally intense and expensive systems at a time when we desperately need to be focused on sustainability and reducing power demands/increasing efficiency. - Devalued human labor without being high enough quality to truly replace it. - Grossly violated an unspoken social contract of the internet by abusing the commons, leading to many people…

- No, we just need better ways to generate electricity, which Sam Altman is also working on.

- If something is not replacing labor, it will not devalue it. In this case, GPT4 is replacing human labor, which is indeed devaluing those specific labors. But it is also unlocking new potential, which in the history of all technology has always been a net positive in the end.

- I wasn't aware of this unspoken social contract before OpenAI existed, but maybe I'm just ignorant.

- This is true, but this is also a trend that has been headed downward for a long time thanks to Google/SEO. The signal-to-noise ratio has indeed gone down due to GPT-powered blog spam, but honestly we needed to get our act together before GenAI anyway. This is actually lighting a fire under people's butts to find ways to avoid the AdSense/affiliate marketing fueled drivel.

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#54

Post by a_wild_dandan »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #38
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

Long time HN-er I'm flagging this. It's not because I give a hoot about sama but because this kind of crap is posted only to lead to endless discussion. Get to work. Focus. Whatever the hell Sam is can wait for another day.

I'll also flag, and I've never flagged anything before. Sam A's job is to sell Open AI. It's not not interesting that he talks about why is so great!

3rded.

There's nothing substantive in this article. The author expresses a seething hatred for OpenAI's CEO by repeatedly lampooning ("where's the evidence!?") brief quotes, without context, of Altman's opinions/predictions. I hope that the author escapes whatever rut made him so overwhelmingly bitter and resentful. I've been there, and it truly stinks. :/

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#55

Post by [deleted] »

rabbits77 wrote: post #40
mupuff1234 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is the world so much better with GPT 4? I'm not saying it's not cool tech or that the current level of LLMs don't have some impact, but "the world is so much better" is quite a stretch (unless you are a Nvidia shareholder) Not to mention the adverse affect of job loss in industries such as customer service almost exclusively hurting people from poorer countries and lower socio economic levels.

Yeah, I mean I work inside a Fortune 10 company and after countless man hours across multiple teams we have exactly zero LLM applications in production and the pipeline heading to production is empty. I guess it’s good at generating plausible blog spam and helping children with homework. I’ve used it to bootstrap my own writing. It’s not entirely useless but hardly world changing. I think the biggest commercial use r…

[deleted]

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#56

Post by jamesrom »

>(again without presenting evidence that historically extremely difficult problems are close to being solved)

This tells you everything you need to know about the author. Anyone that has solved difficult problems knows that evidence of being close to a solution is not a thing. In fact, by the time you're close, proving you're close is _harder_ than finishing the solution.

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#58

Post by artninja1988 »

mindcrime wrote: post #32
mindwok wrote: post #28

Jeez, I'm a Sam Altman skeptic but this is just another level. How about instead of attacking this guy and literally deconstructing a single-sentence tweet to make him out as an evil bogeyman, we make some constructive arguments for these so-called 'more reliable' ways of building AI and why the current approach is 'deeply flawed'?

> we make some constructive arguments for these so-called 'more reliable' ways of building AI and why the current approach is 'deeply flawed'? FWIW, Gary Marcus wrote an entire book[1] that, from what I can tell, purports to do that. I have not read the book (yet) so I can't personally attest to how well it meets that goal, but at least be aware that it exists. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Rebooting-AI-Building-Artifi…

Tldr. is that he's vaguely arguing for neuro symbolic ai without proposing anything specific that's implementable let alone building it himself. It's just snarky pointing out flaws and kvetching at people who actually build stuff with him.

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#59

Post by hackerlight »

__loam wrote: post #35
invig wrote: post #5

GPT-4 is absolutely incredible and even if we never get beyond it the world is a much better place with it than without it. It makes total sense to bet on the team that made this being the best placed people in the world to advance it.

I disagree strongly with this. GPT has: - Precipitated a new class of computationally intense and expensive systems at a time when we desperately need to be focused on sustainability and reducing power demands/increasing efficiency. - Devalued human labor without being high enough quality to truly replace it. - Grossly violated an unspoken social contract of the internet by abusing the commons, leading to many people…

It's easy to forget tangible win-win examples like this[1] or this[2]. Speaking from my personal experience, it's improved my life by reducing tedium associated with writing code. Small wins, but there's lots of them spread over many people. They are not abstract and it's harder to write grand narratives about them.

  > Precipitated a new class of computationally intense and expensive systems at a time when we desperately need to be focused on sustainability and reducing power demands/increasing efficiency.
Microsoft are building over 10GW of firmed renewables which will partly power their AI datacenters. It is not all greenwashing and cynicism. As far as emissions go, GPT should not be put in the same basket as truly wasteful sectors like beef or crypto mining. Everything takes energy, including productivity tools like GPT. The focus should be on sustainable growth and scaling firmed renewables, which is the only politically realistic way out of the climate crisis. Degrowth can't work, either on a political level, or on a company level given the competitive capitalist system that they exist in. I find this[3] is a good discussion on that topic.

  > Flooded the internet with unverifiable noise that looks credible
I agree with you on this. It's not all rosy, but let's not let social media off the hook. LLMs have not made long-form journalism worse, for example. The problem is the interaction of LLMs with incentives created by SEO algorithms and social media.

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/10463535/ontario-family-doctor-ar...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5478797/

[3] https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/is-green-growth-possib...

Re: The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

#60

Post by FreakLegion »

nvy wrote: post #51
VelesDude wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He and his orbiters have done real an irreparable harm to the Internet He and his orbiters have done real an irreparable harm to the ecosystem by pushing such intense compute systems unthinkingly.

You mean the environment? Absolutely. We can't have discussion of that on HN, though, so the moderator has flagged it.

Users flagged it.
Post reply on HN