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Can Sam Altman Be Trusted with the Future?

newyorker.com

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Re: Can Sam Altman Be Trusted with the Future?

#4

Post by andy_ppp »

Can any single person be trusted with potentially infinite power? Even those with good intentions will use that power to unevenly select for their own biases.

However, I’m still skeptical of AGI or even systems that replace programmers, but if it happens and we have most companies replacing 75% of their white collar jobs, who is going to buy their products? It seems very difficult to even understand what money is in a world where everything is done by machines.

I have a feeling that getting to even good enough with these systems is nearly impossible given their false positives and hallucinations.

Re: Can Sam Altman Be Trusted with the Future?

#7

Post by infecto »

“…the physically slight Altman stood on a table, flipped open his phone, declared that geolocation was the future…”

Maybe it fits the article’s tone, but does his size actually matter here? Feels like an odd detail. I might be biased since I don’t care much about company figureheads or the outrage or praise of either side.

Re: Can Sam Altman Be Trusted with the Future?

#8

Post by infecto »

andy_ppp wrote: post #4

Can any single person be trusted with potentially infinite power? Even those with good intentions will use that power to unevenly select for their own biases. However, I’m still skeptical of AGI or even systems that replace programmers, but if it happens and we have most companies replacing 75% of their white collar jobs, who is going to buy their products? It seems very difficult to even understand what money is in…

I don’t think AGI is imminent, but there’s already immense value in augmenting human workflows with LLMs. Yes, hallucinations and false positives exist—but I find that criticism often comes from people who don’t use these tools deeply. As a power user, the issue feels overstated and as an easy counter argument. We already are getting to a point where the tools are citing sources. The sources could be incorrect but that would be the same as a Human. As compute cost goes down or model efficient goes up, these problems would appear to be insignificant.
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