Will Human ego, greed, selfishness lead to our destruction? (AI or not) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35364833
Hopefully, with as little collateral damage to the remaining life on this planet.
It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
81–90 of 599 posts
Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
#82> 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?
depends which investors lose money
Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
#83A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason. The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free. How would the car industry change if someone made a 3D printer that could make any part, including custom parts, with just electricity and air? It is a sea change to manufacturers and distributors, but ther…
There are plenty of plastic parts in cars and you can print them with 3D printer. I don't think that anything really changed because of that.
Because those are irrelevant to the point being made in the GP
Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
#84A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason. The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free. How would the car industry change if someone made a 3D printer that could make any part, including custom parts, with just electricity and air? It is a sea change to manufacturers and distributors, but ther…
There are plenty of plastic parts in cars and you can print them with 3D printer. I don't think that anything really changed because of that.
I think that is GP's point.
Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
#85> 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?
I'm paying my subscription and I'd probably pay 5x more if they would charge it to keep access to the current service. ChatGPT 4o is incredibly useful for me today, regardless of whether GPT5 will be good or not. I'm not sure how does that reflect OpenAI cost, but those company costs are just bubbles of air anyway.
Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
#86To 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 or even GPT-5. If he had another next generation model on the way he wouldn't have let the media call his "discount GPT-4" and "tree of thought" models GPT-5. If he sincerely thought AGI was on the horizon he wouldn't be eyeing the exit, and he likely wouldn't have gotten rid of the superalignment team. His actions are best explained as those of a startup CEO who sees the hype cycle he's been riding coming to an end and is looking to exit before we hit the trough of disillusionment.
None of this is to say that AI hasn't already changed a lot about the world we live in and won't continue to change things more. We will eventually hit the slope of enlightenment, but my bet is that Altman will have exited by then.
Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
#87Don't listen to David Karpfs of the world. Did he predict chat gpt? if you asked him in 2018, he would have said AI will never write a story
now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed.
Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think that’s right. First off, we don’t generally define jobs based on the closest computer analogy (we would be unhappy if the loggers returned with a list of things that happened in the woods, rather than a bunch of wood). The journalist’s job is to describe what actually is happening, and to provide enough context for readers to understand it. Some bias will inevitably creep in, because they can’t possibly…
>The journalist’s job is to describe what actually is happening, and to provide enough context for readers to understand it. The former is a journalist's job, the latter is the reader's concern and not the journalist. One of the reasons I consider journalism a cancer upon humanity is because journalists can't just write down "it is 35 degrees celsius today at 2pm", but rather "you won't believe how hot it is". Just j…
You're describing a microphone / voice recorder, not a journalist.
There are of course places you can go to get raw weather data, but a journalist might put it in context of what else is going on, interview farmers or climatologists about the situation, etc.
There are lots of kinds of journalism, but maybe most important is investigative journalism. They are literally doing an investigation - reading source material, actively seeking out the right people to interview and asking them right questions, following the leads to more information.
Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
#89well 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 f…
> It's physically impossible
Your brain is proof to the contrary. AGI means different things to everyone, but a human brain definitely counts as "general intelligence", that implemented in silicon is enough to get basically all the things promised by AGI: if that's done at the 20 watts per brain that biology manages, then all of humanity can be simulated within the power envelope of the USA electrical grid… three times over.
Re: It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
This is the Tesla Autopilot playbook, which seems to continue to work decently for that particular CEO
I'm not sure about the decency of it.
I remember all the articles praising the facade of a super-genius. It's a stark contrast to today.
People write about his trouble or his latest outburst like they would a neighborh's troubled kid. There's very little decency in watching people sink like that.
What's left after reality reassesserts itself, after the distortion field is gone? Mostly slow decline. Never to reach that high again.