Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit • Hacker News Board

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#621

Post by philipwhiuk » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 9:05 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #444

ks2048 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s embarrassing and should be noted when he’s treated as a guru (as in today when I guess he gave a talk at Neurips conference) Of course, he should be listened to and treated as a true expert. But, it’s becoming more clear in viewing public people that extreme success can warp people’s perspective.

I mean, he wasn't that far off. The Turing test is well and truly beaten, regardless of how you define it, and I sure wouldn't want to go up against o1-pro in a programming or math contest. Robotics being "solved" was indeed a stupid thing to assert because that's a hornet's nest of wicked problems in material science, mechanical engineering, and half a dozen other fields. Given a suitable robotic platform, though, 2…

> The Turing test is well and truly beaten, regardless of how you define it

Unless the question the human asks is 'How many l's in llama'

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Post by philipwhiuk » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 9:06 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #449

agnosticmantis wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the achievements in the past couple of years are astonishing, bordering on magic. Yet, confidently promising AGI/self-driving/mars landing in the next couple of years over and over when the confidence is not justified makes you a conman by definition. If the number 3 means nothing and can become 7 or 17 or 170 why keep pulling these timelines out of their overconfident asses? Did we completely solve robotics…

Self-driving is not so much a technological problem as it is a political problem. We have built a network of roads that (self-evidently) can't be safely navigated by humans, so it's not fair to demand better performance of machines. At least, not as long as they have to share the road with us. 'AI' landings on Mars are the only kind of landings possible, due to latency. JPL indisputably pwned that problem long before…

The cars are still worse than humans.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Post by ben_w » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 9:13 PM UTC

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #468

Biologist123 wrote: post #198

I’m neither an Elon fanboy nor a hater. But I do wonder both what he possesses and is possessed by to have created not just a successful company, but era-defining companies plural.

SpaceX is era defining. The rest are pretty run of the mill. One could also say that SpaceX happened because the US desperately needed a launch vehicle of their own.

Hmm.

I would argue that Tesla became era-defining by the efforts of Musk; and I get the impression that within the USA Tesla is still leading with regard to electric personal transport.

Worldwide is a different matter: other brands have learned lessons, replicated what he did right, improved on what he did wrong — so while he's still defined the beginning of the era of electric cars, he's no longer important to the ongoing success of them.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#624

Post by jdminhbg » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 9:15 PM UTC

llamaimperative wrote: post #211

jdminhbg wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way comparative advantage works, even if an AGI is better than me at Task A and Task B, if it is better at Task A than Task B, it'll do Task A and I'll do Task B. I think a lot of people confuse AGI with infinite AGI.

… what No, you’re confusing finite AGI for an AGI that can only compete with a single person at a time. In a world of AGI better-than-humans at both A and B, it’s a whole lot cheaper to replicate AGI that’s better at A and B and do both A and B than it is to employ human beings who do B badly.

Again, you're just assuming you can infinitely replicate AGI, and there's no reason to think that's the case. It's only always cheaper to replicate AGI if there is no resource constraint on doing so.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#625

Post by ben_w » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #131

kelseyfrog wrote: post #89

Maybe a weird question, but how does a capitalist economy work where AGI-performed-labor is categorically less expensive than human-performed labor? Do most people who labor for wages just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?

The question shows a total disconnect from reality. People who are unemployed with no money today don't die. Even street people don't die. If AGI labor is cheaper and as effective as human labor, prices will drop to the point where the necessities cost very little. People will be able to support themselves working part-time jobs on whatever hasn't been automated. The tax system will become more redistributive and may…

> People will be able to support themselves working part-time jobs on whatever hasn't been automated

That assumes anything remains that hasn't been automated.

The "G" in "AGI" means different things to different people, because generality isn't really a boolean that you have or don't have, but if the AGI has a G at least as general as human intelligence, then everything we can do will be automated.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#626

Post by ben_w » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

jdminhbg wrote: post #624

llamaimperative wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… what No, you’re confusing finite AGI for an AGI that can only compete with a single person at a time. In a world of AGI better-than-humans at both A and B, it’s a whole lot cheaper to replicate AGI that’s better at A and B and do both A and B than it is to employ human beings who do B badly.

Again, you're just assuming you can infinitely replicate AGI, and there's no reason to think that's the case. It's only always cheaper to replicate AGI if there is no resource constraint on doing so.

AGI that is competent enough to perform any task better than a human, can perform tasks of controlling robots and mining equipment and construction equipment and factories and compute foundaries, to create more robots and mining equipments and etc. etc.

Look up into the sky tonight. That glowing white-ish disk is made of the resource constraints, and is a tiny fraction of the resources available.

It may be a finite quantity of resources, but with regards to the economic impact it's enough that it may as well be infinite compared to what humans can do… and what we can experience as a consumer. I mean, sure, a McKendree cylinder is bigger than an O'Neill cylinder, but the scale of what's being suggested by AGI is literally everyone getting their own personal fleet of 60 or so O'Neill cylinders — enough to spend a lifetime exploring, to be a playground for anything any of us want. Demand gets saturated.

And even that's not enough.

From the other side of the equation, we humans have a basic energy cost to staying alive.

There are already domains where AI can do things for energy costs so low that it isn't "economical" to pay for the calories needed to keep a human brain conscious long enough to notice that it has seen the result, much less to do that task.

Should that become true across all domains, there's no comparative advantage to keeping us alive. Hide the farm where your food grew behind PV, disassemble the sand and clay in the soil into constituent atoms and use the silicon to make more compute or more power.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#627

Post by sebastiennight » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 9:36 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #493

sumedh wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI has no such advantage yet: a text-based API is about as commoditized as a technology It has branding, for most people AI is ChatGpt. Once you reach critical mass, getting people to switch becomes difficult if your product is good enough and most people are happy.

Branding is a very weak moat outside fashion industry and similar places - outside visible status symbols. It's a relatively strong moat for clothes, watches, even things like the iPhone. But for things you do alone at home, this quickly goes away. Uber is a strong brand, everyone associated non-taxi taxis with Uber. When Bolt came around in much of Europe, and offered the same service with better wait times (they we…

> Branding is a very weak moat outside fashion industry and similar places - outside visible status symbols.

Have you tried getting someone to switch from Chrome to Firefox?

UI is basically the same, the product is more performant (faster load, easy to disable all ads, etc). But the moat is how resistant a normal user is to switch from the thing they've used without having to think about it, to the new thing.

I can definitely see the ChatGPT app becoming as "sticky" as Chrome.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Post by famouswaffles » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 9:37 PM UTC

__loam wrote: post #606

famouswaffles wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think there's a big difference between companies like Google and Amazon that were operated unprofitably for years How many years before they reached this point ? chatgpt.com had 3.8B visits last month and was #8 in Internet worldwide traffic. It is the software product with by far the fastest adoption of any software product in history. "Some of the largest fundraising in Silicon Valley" you say ? Well, that sound…

What part of poor unit economics do you not understand?

What part of unreasonable time frames do you not understand ?

What's so poor about the unit economics in the frame we're talking about ?

Open ai is one of the fastest growing in revenue and adoption. It's not like you even know to what degree free subs are being compensated by currently. Do you even realize how much Language model costs have gone down in just 2 years ?

You're the one who said, there's a difference between the likes of Uber and Google/Amazon who apparently could have pivoted to profitability much sooner but then conveniently ignore the question of when this pivot become possible.

Newsflash: almost everyone looks poor unit this soon out.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#629

Post by ENGNR » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

linotype wrote: post #215

kulahan wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine that's what he's doing. He's willing to put a lot of company money into getting the city on Mars started, because if he's first there, he's gonna set himself (or his dynasty?) up to make hundreds of billions of dollars. Being effectively in control of your own planet? Neat. Scary too.

Doing what exactly? What industry could Mars possibly support profitably?

I don’t know how deeply they analysed it, but Kurzgesagt seem to think the Martian moons have particular value as central gravity wells, to then reach further out to mine asteroids

https://youtu.be/dqwpQarrDwk?feature=shared

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Post by famouswaffles » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 9:53 PM UTC

chipsrafferty wrote: post #520

famouswaffles wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean nobody needs to bother with anecdotes here. chatgpt.com hit 3.7B visits in October and was #8 in worldwide internet traffic. Open AI say they have 300M weekly active users and 1B messages per day . The idea that it's some fad with no utility or that the general public knows little about it is at this point laughable. It's the software product with by far the fastest adoption any software product has ever seen.…

That actual isn't evidence at all that the general public knows a lot about it, or even uses it much. It can be a small group of very active users.

To put it frankly, not at this scale.

I don't know what you think nearly 4B visits per month is (and top ten in worldwide traffic) that "a small group of active users" can generate. 300M active users a week is not a small group and you do not get there without general public awareness.