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

theatlantic.com

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

#51

Post by butterfly42069 »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #28
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #15

> At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future I think the job of a CEO is not to tell you the truth, and the truth is probably more often than not, the opposite. What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? What is OpenAI worth then?

If a CEO lies all the time, and investors make investments because of it, will that not turn out to become a problem for the CEO?

It seems that continuously promising something is X weeks/months/years away is seen as optimism and belief, not blatant disregard for facts.

I'm sure the defence is always, "but if we just had a bit more money, we would've got it done"

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

#52

Post by BoredPositron »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #28
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #15

> At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future I think the job of a CEO is not to tell you the truth, and the truth is probably more often than not, the opposite. What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? What is OpenAI worth then?

If a CEO lies all the time, and investors make investments because of it, will that not turn out to become a problem for the CEO?

Well lets take Tesla, FSD and Elon as an example were a judge just ruled[0] that it's normal corporate puffery and not lies.

[0] https://norcalrecord.com/stories/664710402-judge-tosses-clas...

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

#53

Post by namaria »

twelve40 wrote: post #33

well the good news is all that stuff comes with an expiration date, after which we will know if this is our new destiny or yet another cloud of smoke. This is a good reminder: > Prominent AI figures were among the thousands of people who signed an open letter in March 2023 to urge a six-month pause in the development of large language models (LLMs) so that humanity would have time to address the social consequences o…

I've said this before, at the root of all these technological promises lies a perpetual motion machine. They're all selling the reversal of thermodynamics.

Any system complex enough to be useful has to be embedded in an ever more complex system. The age of mobile phone internet rests on the shoulders of an immense and enormously complex supply chain.

LLMs are capturing low entropy from data online and distilling it for you while producing a shitton of entropy on the backend. All the water and energy dissipated at data centers, all the supply chains involved in building GPUs at the rate we are building. There will be no magical moment when it's gonna yield more low entropy than what we put in on the other side as training data, electricity and clean water.

When companies sell ideas like 'AGI' or 'self driving cars' they are essentially promising you can do away with the complexity surrounding a complex solution. They are promising they can deliver low entropy on a tap without paying for it in increased entropy elsewhere. It's physically impossible.

You want human intelligence to do work, you need to deal with all the complexities of psychology, economics and politics. You want complex machines to do autonomous work, you need an army of people behind it. What AGI promises is, you can replace the army of people with another more complex machine. It's a big bald faced lie. You can't do away with the complexity. Someone will have to handle it.

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

#54

Post by antirez »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #15

> At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future I think the job of a CEO is not to tell you the truth, and the truth is probably more often than not, the opposite. What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? What is OpenAI worth then?

Not possible since Claude is effectively GPT5 level in most tasks (EDIT: coding is not one of them). OpenAI lost the lead months ago. Altman talking about AGI (may take decades or years, nobody knows) is just the usual crazy Musk-style CEO thing that is totally safe to ignore. What is interesting is the incredible steady progresses of LLMs so far.

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

#56

Post by collingreen »

golergka wrote: post #41
thelastgallon wrote: post #32

"Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot." - Sam Altman, https://ia.samaltman.com/ Reality: AI needs unheard amounts of en…

So far it seems that AIs appetite for energy might finally pushing western countries back to nuclear, which would make climate significantly better.

Nuclear and everything we were using before is probably not better than just everything we were using before. Hopefully we can continue to reduce high emission or otherwise damaging power production even while power requirements grow.

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

#57

Post by llamaimperative »

Aeolun wrote: post #23
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #15

> At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future I think the job of a CEO is not to tell you the truth, and the truth is probably more often than not, the opposite. What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures? What is OpenAI worth then?

If you need someone to tell you the truth you don’t need a CEO. What you need a CEO for is to sell you (and your investors) a vision.

This is silly. Delusion kills more companies than facing reality with honesty does.

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

#58

Post by melenaboija »

It is weird that one of the most valued markets (openai, microsoft investments, nvidia gpus, ...) is based on a stack that is available to anyone that can pay for the resources to train the models and that in my opinion still has to deliver to the expectations that have been created around it.

Not saying it is a bubble but something seems imbalanced here.

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

#59

Post by ccppurcell »

golergka wrote: post #41
thelastgallon wrote: post #32

"Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot." - Sam Altman, https://ia.samaltman.com/ Reality: AI needs unheard amounts of en…

So far it seems that AIs appetite for energy might finally pushing western countries back to nuclear, which would make climate significantly better.

Nuclear cannot "make the climate better" but can perhaps slow the destruction down, only if it replaces fossil fuels, not if it is added on top due to increased energy consumption. In that case it's at best neutral.

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

#60

Post by golergka »

collingreen wrote: post #56
golergka wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far it seems that AIs appetite for energy might finally pushing western countries back to nuclear, which would make climate significantly better.

Nuclear and everything we were using before is probably not better than just everything we were using before. Hopefully we can continue to reduce high emission or otherwise damaging power production even while power requirements grow.

Power means making things and providing services that people want, that make their lives better. Which is a good thing. We need more power, not less.
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