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Sam Altman’s leap of faith

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Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#81

Post by jonny_eh »

m_fayer wrote: post #59

> Still, Altman insisted there’s a better argument to be made for thinking about — and talking with the media about — the potential societal consequences of AI, no matter how disingenuous some may find it. “The same people who say OpenAI is fear mongering or whatever are the same ones who are saying, ‘Shouldn’t Facebook have thought about this before they did it?’ This is us trying to think about it before we do it.”…

> Someone at baby-Facebook, many years ago, could plausibly have predicted the malevolent forces it eventually unleashed

Someone there did, sort of. That was Dave Morin. According to a recent interview, he argued with leadership to keep facebook private, but failed. So he left to go start Path, which was like FB but totally private. Like OpenAI, it got lots of funding and hype, but never got off the ground.

The interview: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/without-fail/76hrml/an-early-f...

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#82

Post by tristanm »

Leary wrote: post #76
tristanm wrote: post #57

It's interesting that in order for his pitch to work (if you invest in OpenAI, you will get up to 100x returns), assuming they do build AGI, it still requires that their AGI acquires a very stable, virtually guaranteed advantage of large magnitude. This very strongly requires that they cannot share anything they discover whatsoever. Especially since they apparently plan on using it to make strategic investments to be…

Or AGI would provide so much benefit that it does not need to be exclusive to OpenAI for the company to accrue significant economic returns.

Yes. This is in the scenario where the benefits are widely distributed. But in that case the value of the entire planet goes up; You would not necessarily need to make an investment in OpenAI in order to reap benefits. Unless you think that scenario is more likely to happen with OpenAI and not via the usual academic research + shared industry research (which I don't see why that would be the case).

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#83

Post by NhanH »

tristanm wrote: post #82
Leary wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or AGI would provide so much benefit that it does not need to be exclusive to OpenAI for the company to accrue significant economic returns.

Yes. This is in the scenario where the benefits are widely distributed. But in that case the value of the entire planet goes up; You would not necessarily need to make an investment in OpenAI in order to reap benefits. Unless you think that scenario is more likely to happen with OpenAI and not via the usual academic research + shared industry research (which I don't see why that would be the case).

Something along this line: Google increases the entire value of the whole internet by a lot, but you also benefit more by investing in it in the early day.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#84

Post by tristanm »

idlewords wrote: post #70
tristanm wrote: post #57

It's interesting that in order for his pitch to work (if you invest in OpenAI, you will get up to 100x returns), assuming they do build AGI, it still requires that their AGI acquires a very stable, virtually guaranteed advantage of large magnitude. This very strongly requires that they cannot share anything they discover whatsoever. Especially since they apparently plan on using it to make strategic investments to be…

The implication is that Altman belongs to the 'hard takeoff' sect of AI religion that believes a feedback cycle of recursive self-improvement kicks in, so that the first AI to surpass human levels of intelligence is also the last.

You think so? I think if he thought hard takeoff was a real risk, he would be devoted to actually making their research "open", in the original sense of the word when Musk was in charge. According to the hard takeoff theory, it is more likely to occur due to "hardware overhangs", where big organizations accrue lots of compute infrastructure over time, but AI progress occurs in sudden jumps. Then all that infrastructure is just sitting there waiting to be eaten up by a hungry AI. These sudden jumps are more likely to occur if AI research is generally undertaken in a secretive manner, with leaks or espionage resulting in staggered spread of knowledge. This is at least my understanding.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#85

Post by ridewinter »

seibelj wrote: post #67

I have been a big skeptic of self-driving cars and other AI promises for years, taking my downvotes as armchair futurists predicted a self-driving car would be picking me up any day now, well before it was popular to be a contrarian after Tesla and Uber killed their drivers. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Also notice the original links have the breathless hype from journalists who know-nothing and eat up whatever techno…

David Deutsch, father of the quantum computer, says that we can only automate and program something that we understand, and that we do not understand human intelligence or how creativity works. And AGI is not possible until we do.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#87

Post by peaksingularity »

eb3c90 wrote: post #26
arugulum wrote: post #5

Allow me to present Altman's wager: - If OpenAI does not achieve AGI, and you invested in it, you lose some finite money (or not, depending on the value of their other R&D) - If OpenAI does not achieve AGI, and you did not invest in it, you saved some finite money, which you could invest elsewhere for finite returns - If OpenAI achieves AGI and you invested in it, you get infinite returns, because AGI will capture al…

It depends how much you worry about society going south because of climate breakdown (and how much you expect AGI to help or worsen the situation). My current view is that the current political hot potato status of AGI means it won't be developed anytime before the climate crisis really kicks in. At this point fiat money becomes worthless due to emergency measures. Your best bet now to help your future self is to spe…

I say we still have to try. Mankind won't get another shot at it.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#89

Post by ngrilly »

In the recorded interview, Sam Altman says climate change is such a hard problem that we need strong AI first to solve it. I have doubts about this for several reasons:

- Human psychology is one of the biggest obstacles (maybe the biggest) in solving climate change, and I'm not sure how a strong AI is supposed to fix that.

- Building carbon-neutral energy sources is a hard problem, but most experts are optimistic about our ability to solve this (for example, nuclear fusion).

- Considering that we have no idea when this strong AI will be ready (Sam acknowledges it in the interview), it would be dangerous for us to just rely on such a breakthrough to save the climate (and save our children, grand-children, etc.).

Edit: I'd be happy to know a bit more about how a strong AI, such as envisioned by OpenAI, could solve climate change :-)

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#90

Post by douglaswlance »

mcguire wrote: post #53
douglaswlance wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By generating abundance of resources on an astronomical scale, all other problems will become much easier.

The AGI can create matter and energy?

If it becomes self-improving and more intelligent than humans, it can figure out how to expand out into the solar system to take advantage of stellar energy and asteroid resources.

There is more energy and valuable matter off of the Earth.

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