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

511–520 of 599 posts

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

#511

Post by tialaramex »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #183
azinman2 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say you got AGI, and it approximated a not so bright impulsive 12 year old boy. That would be an insane technological leap, but hardly one you’d want running the show. AGI doesn’t mean smarter than the best humans.

For an intelligence to be "General" there would have to be no type of intelligence that it did not have access to (even if its capabilities in that domain were limited). The idea that that's what humans have strikes me as the same kind of thinking that led us to believe that earth was in the center of the universe. Surely there are ways of thinking that we have no concept of. General intelligence would be like an imp…

No. AGI is talking about the "general" human intelligence rather than specialism. An AGI would be as good as a human at both composing poetry and playing chess, both identifying bird calls and proving mathematical theorems. We don't know what a categorically superior intelligence would be so we can't rate some machine on that basis.

The Lem story "Golem XIV" concerns a machine which claims it possesses categorically superior intelligence, and further that another machine humans have built (which runs but seems unwilling to communicate with them at all) is even more intelligent still.

Golem tries to explain using analogies, but it's apparent that it finds communicating with humans frustrating, the way it might be frustrating to try to explain things to a golden retriever. Lem wrote elsewhere that the single commonality between Golem's intelligence and our own is curiosity, unlike Annie, Golem is curious about the humans which is why it's bothering to communicate with them.

Humans (of course) plot to destroy both machines. Annie eliminates the conspirators, betraying a hitherto un-imagined capability to act at great distance, and the story remarks that it seems she does so the way a human would swat a buzzing insect. She doesn't fear the humans, but they're annoying so she destroyed them without a thought.

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

#512

Post by woodruffw »

wildermuthn wrote: post #383
woodruffw wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, we don’t understand qualia. We might never understand. But that doesn’t mean we can’t replicate. I’m pretty sure it means exactly that. Without actually understanding subjective experience, there’s a fundamental doubt akin to the Chinese room. Sweeping that under the carpet and declaring victory doesn’t in fact victory make.

If the universe is material, then we already know with 10-billion percent certainty that some arrangement of matter causes qualia. All we have to do is figure out what arrangements do that. Ironically, we understand consciousness perfectly. It is literally the only thing we know — conscious experience. We just don’t know, yet, how to replicate it outside of biological reproduction.

> All we have to do is figure out what arrangements do that.

That’s the hard part!

> It is literally the only thing we know — conscious experience. We just don’t know, yet, how to replicate it outside of biological reproduction.

This conflates subjective experience as necessary (an uncontroversial observation) with actually understanding what subjective experience is.

Or put another way: we all know what it’s like to breathe, but this doesn’t imply knowledge of the pulmonary system.

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

#513

Post by Barrin92 »

wslh wrote: post #446
thruway516 wrote: post #189

"Altman is no physicist. He is a serial entrepreneur, and quite clearly a talented one" Not sure the record supports that if you remove OpenAi which is a work-in-progress and supposedly not going too great at the moment. A talented 'tech whisperer' maybe?

Sam Altman is only 39 years old. Like it or not, it would be a fallacy to assume he's shown everything he's capable of. He likely has much more to contribute in his lifetime.

I feel I read that sentence a lot when Sam Bankman Fried was still the darling of the tech intelligentsia, but the closer you are to the huckster and moneyman corner of the spectrum rather than the actual research side the less true that statement is.

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

#514

Post by refulgentis »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #210
refulgentis wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dunno, magically fabricating a part is fundamentally different than magically deciding where and when to do so. Right. It sounds to me like you agree and are repeating the comment but are framing as disagreeable. I'm sure I'm missing something.

The person you replied to suggests that the analogy of a 3d printer building a part does not hold, as LLM-based coding systems are able to both "print" some code, and decide where and when to do so. I tend to agree with them. What people seem to miss about LLM coding systems, IMO: a) deciding on the capabilities of an LLM to code after a brief browser session with 4o/claude is comparable to waking up a coder in the m…

Right, AI is good and will be good. I agree with you 110%. I quit a well-paying job and have gone a year without salary on this premise :)

However, I worry about the premise underlying your reply: a sense that this is somehow incompatible with the viewpoint being discussed.

i.e. it's perfectly cromulent to both think LLMs are and will continue to be awesome at coding, even believe they get much better. And also that you could give me ASI today, and there'd be an incredible long tail of work and processes to reformulate to pull off replacing most labor. It's like having infinite PhDs available by text message. Unintuitively, not that much help. I can't believe I'm writing that lol. But here we are.

Steve Sinfosky had a good couple long posts re: this on X that discuss this far better than I can.

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

#515

Post by wslh »

Barrin92 wrote: post #513
wslh wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam Altman is only 39 years old. Like it or not, it would be a fallacy to assume he's shown everything he's capable of. He likely has much more to contribute in his lifetime.

I feel I read that sentence a lot when Sam Bankman Fried was still the darling of the tech intelligentsia, but the closer you are to the huckster and moneyman corner of the spectrum rather than the actual research side the less true that statement is.

SBF was convicted for fraud, crossing legal and ethical lines that Sam Altman has not. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

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

#516

Post by wildermuthn »

jcgrillo wrote: post #461
wildermuthn wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s true by definition. If we invent a better-than-all-humans inventor, then human invention will give way. It’s a fairly simple idea, and not one I made up.

> then human invention will give way What? Would you mind explaining this?

It’s analogous to the automobile. People do still walk, bike, and ride horses, but the vast majority of productive land transportation is done by automobile. Same thing with electronic communication vs. written correspondence. New tech largely supplants old tech. In this case, the old tech is human ingenuity and inventiveness.

I don’t think this is a controversial take. Many people take issue with the premise that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. I’m just pointing out the logical conclusion of that scenario.

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

#517

Post by peteforde »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #397
peteforde wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, this is an incredibly weak take. You are making a lot of assumptions about someone's ability to learn with AND without assistance, while also making rather sci-fi leaps about our brain somehow being able to differentiate between learning that has somehow been tainted by the tendrils of ML overlords. The models and the user interface around them absolutely will continue to improve far faster than any one…

Just to clarify, I didn't say anything about the OP's "ability to learn". I know nothing about that and can't tell anything about it from their comment. I also didn't say anything about how our brain works, or about "the tendrils of ML overlords". If you want to have a debate, I'm all for it, but if you're going to go around imagining things that I may have said in another timeline then I don't see what's the point o…

Your comment said, in many more words, that to embrace LLMs for learning or knowledge enhancement might pay off in the short term but will leave you stunted and operating in a local maximum of potential and possibility.

You could be right, but I strongly suspect that you are actually wrong.

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

#518

Post by peteforde »

rocho wrote: post #486
peteforde wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If OpenAI sent out an email today informing me that to maintain access to the current 4o model I will have to pay $1000 a year, and that it would go up another $500 next year... it would still be well worth it to me.

To you maybe. But if Claude or any other competitor with similar features and performance keeps a lower price, most users will migrate there.

You could be right, but I suspect that you're underestimating the degree to which GPT has become the Kleenex of the LLM space in the consumer zeitgeist.

Based on all of the behaviour psychology books I've read, Claude would have to introduce a model that is 10x better and 10x cheaper - or something so radically different that it registers as an entirely new thing - for it to hit the radar outside of the tech world.

I encourage you to sample the folks in your life that don't work in tech. See if any of them have ever even heard of Claude.

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

#519

Post by wildermuthn »

woodruffw wrote: post #512
wildermuthn wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the universe is material, then we already know with 10-billion percent certainty that some arrangement of matter causes qualia. All we have to do is figure out what arrangements do that. Ironically, we understand consciousness perfectly. It is literally the only thing we know — conscious experience. We just don’t know, yet, how to replicate it outside of biological reproduction.

> All we have to do is figure out what arrangements do that. That’s the hard part! > It is literally the only thing we know — conscious experience. We just don’t know, yet, how to replicate it outside of biological reproduction. This conflates subjective experience as necessary (an uncontroversial observation) with actually understanding what subjective experience is. Or put another way: we all know what it’s like to…

Agree on hard. But at least possible.

I think a better analogy would be vision. Even with a full understanding of the eye and visual cortex, one can only truly understand vision by experiencing sight. If we had to reconstruct sight from scratch, it would be more important to experience sight than to understand the neural structure of sight. It gives us something to aim for.

We basically did that with language and LLMs. Transformers aren’t based on neural structures for language processing. But they do build upon the intuition that the meaning of a sentence consists of the meaning that each word in a sentence has in relation to every other word in a sentence — the attention mechanism. We used our experience of language to construct an architecture.

I think the same is true of qualia and consciousness. We don’t need to know how the hardware works. We just need to know how the software works, and then we can build whatever hardware is necessary to run it. Luckily there’s theories of consciousness out there we can try out, with AST being the best fit I’ve seen so far.

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

#520

Post by kevinventullo »

bitcharmer wrote: post #369
lolinder wrote: post #86

To recap OpenAI's decisions over the past year: * They burned up the hype for GPT-5 on 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can't quickly replicate. * They dissolved the safety team. * They switched to for profit and are poised to give Altman equity. * All while hyping AGI more than ever. All of this suggests to me that Altman is in short-term exit preparation mode, not planning for AGI…

It's funny and somehow disappointing how a year ago HN jerked off to Altman and down-voted any critical opinions of him. Just shows no social platform is free of strong group-think and mass hysteria.

It’s almost like people changed their opinions based on observed behaviors.
Post reply on HN