The Sam Altman Playbook: Fear, the Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

If you know about the author of this post Gary Marcus you can just as easily ascribe accusations of fear, The Denial of Uncertainties, Hype and self-promotion/grifting

For what it's worth, try to take it easy on each other in this thread: I cannot think of a worse messenger than Gary Marcus for this, he's directly equivalent to Sam, but on the downside.

AI-as-meme has been around long enough now that its being force-interpreted into two camps, "its all a scam, at best it only knows how to reproduce exact training data" and "it's glory shall have us working 0 hours by 2030". This article won't shed light on reality, the in-between.

ex. lets walk through the opening:

1) "How do you convince the world your ideas and business might ultimately be worth $7 trillion dollars" -- he's referring to an unsourced rumor, that never made any sense, that Mr. Altman approached Saudis for $7 trillion to build GPUs. Even the nonsensical gossip rag rumor explicitly has nothing to do with OpenAI, part of the "intrigue" was the perfidy of Sam doing it separate from OpenAI.

2) "Sam Altman is on a tour to raise money and raise valuations...at some of top universities in the world", figuratively, maybe, but not actually - they just raised a round in December and this isn't a company that needs to do PR at universities to catch investor attention.

3) "A few days ago at Stanford, Sam promised that AGI will be worth it, no matter how much it costs" -- actual quote: "I don't care if we burn $50 billion a year, we're building AGI and it's going to be worth it" -- that's not a "promise" nor "no matter how much it costs" -- yes, $50B is functionally 'no matter how much', so I'd give Gary charity of interpretation on that too - except as long as we're doing that, why are we over-reading Sam?

The current AI wave is a perfect application of Conway's law: the bullshit industry has generated the perfect bullshit machines, pretending to show intelligence when they only parrot what they've heard elsewhere - badly but convincingly.

Yes. But I predict we will eventually realize that's what humans do too.

So the ends justify the means?