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The Intelligence Age

ia.samaltman.com

51–60 of 447 posts

Re: The Intelligence Age

#52
post #23

> If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people. This seems to be the key of the piece to me. It's his manifesto for raising money for the infra…

To be brutally frank we should focus on energy, as we definitely need way more of that (with less carbon) even if LLMs don't improve any more.

Fusion power is just eight minutes away...

Re: The Intelligence Age

#53
post #14

The future will be abundant, because deep learning works. To achieve that, we need to be calm, but cautious. And, we need to fund infra (chips and power) so that AGI isn't limited to the ultra-wealthy. My take: * Foom/doom isn't helpful. But, calm cautiousness is. If you're acting from a place of fear and emotional dysregulation, you'll make ineffective choices. If you get calm and regulated first, and then take acti…

Well put! I would disagree on two fundamental points, tho:

1. If you honestly think that millions/billions of people are at serious risk of avoidable harm that everyone else is ignoring, "calm down" can be a hard dictum to follow. Sam Altman has won, it's easy for him psychologically to say "well, lets just stick to the status quo and do our best every day and it'll probably work out". Made-in-house bias is strongest when "in-house" is your own mind, after all.

2. Your scare quotes makes it seem like you might agree, but: physics is the study of the physical world, thinking it can be 'solved' is like thinking mathematics, psychology, or anthropology can be 'solved'. It's fundamentally anti-science and very, very dangerous to be talking like that. Truth isn't absolutely relative, but science also isn't a collection of facts written in stone that we need to finish unearthing; it's a collection of intellectual tools.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually not sure about this, with the leverage of AI, its easier than ever to start a company

Who's going to work at all these companies then? Unless every single profession suddenly only requires 1 person to do the entire thing with no management, coordination or hierarchies, a lot of people will be labor not capital.

Maybe companies as we think of them are a temporary phenomenon in human history

Re: The Intelligence Age

#55

"humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data)..." This statement is manifestly untrue. Neural networks are useful, many hidden layers is useful, all of these architectures are useful, but the idea that they can learn anything, is based less on empirical results and more on what Sam Altman needs to con…

The entire vocabulary around machine learning is and always has been really weird.

We don’t personify database interactions the same way we personify setting weights in a neural network.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#57

[flagged]

Not really. Nobody expected China to produce as much solar power as it does now. What makes you think we know how much renewable energy we will produce in 2040?

Its sad for me to watch such comments.. Really. People always just focus on one particular issue/problem and try to solve it ignoring anything else. Open your eyes and look a bit broader view. Energy is NOT the only problem. Waste is another very serious one, usually ommited because.. Lets dump it to some 3th world countries and issue is gone right? Nope...

Re: The Intelligence Age

#58
> It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!)

"a few thousand days" is such a funny and fascinating way to say "about a decade"

Superficially, reframing it as "days" not "years" is a classic marketing psychology trick, i.e. 99 cents versus a dollar, but I think the more interesting thing is just the way it defamiliarizes the span. A decade means something, but "a few thousand days" feels like it means something very different.

Re: The Intelligence Age

#59
post #49

“This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.” I am a believer that people like sam are not lying. Anyone using these models daily probably believes the same. The o1 model, if prompted correctly, can architect a code base in a way that my decade+ of…

I'm using these models daily, and I don't believe that they're a direct path to superintelligence (unless you'd consider something like the printing press to have been a direct path to, say, the integrated circuit or the Internet). > Prompted incorrectly, it looks incompetent. The abilities of the future are already here, you just need to know how to use the models. Something purportedly intelligent shouldn't need "c…

The model's arent there yet. I am confused how people cannot extrapolate into the future and understand that the models will improve

Re: The Intelligence Age

#60
A complete tangent, but I think a big reason why I'm kind of dismissive of AI is because people who speculate on what it would enable make it honestly sound kind of unimaginative.

> AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf.

I get it, coordinating medical care is exhausting, but it's kind of amusing that rather than envisioning changing a broken system people instead envision AIs that are so advanced that they can deal with the complexity of our broken systems, and in doing so potentially preserve them.

Related btw to using AI for code.

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