It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/

by redwoolf • 2 years ago

703 568 2 years ago

Last week, CEO Sam Altman published an online manifesto titled “The Intelligence Age.” In it, he declares that the AI revolution is on the verge of unleashing boundless prosperity and radically improving human life.

bediger40002• 2 years ago

This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles.

I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.

MailleQuiMaille• 2 years ago

Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense.

Is it even possible ? Like, don't you know the political inclination of any website/journal you read ? I feel like this search of "The Objective Truth" is just a chimera. I'd rather articles combine pros and cons of everything they discuss tbh

Moto7451• 2 years ago

There’s a difference between having natural human biases you try to avoid when reporting by using the usual context sentence (where, when, to whom something was stated), quote, appositive denoting speaker, quote format and writing “this guy is full of crap” or “you really need to believe this person” while cherry picking statements.

You can easily find examples of each. Both NYT and Slate are considered left leaning and at the same time have been the professional stomping grounds of right leaning writers that started their own media companies that are not left leaning. Everyone has a bias and they don’t have to work somewhere with that same bias, especially if you just stick to the paper’s style guide. On the same substance the two media outlets present the same topic very differently. Sometimes I appreciate the Slate format for the author’s candor and view being injected (like being pointed on Malcom Gladwell). Sometimes I just want to know the facts as clearly stated as possible (I don’t care if the author doesn’t believe in climate change, tell me what happened when North Carolina flooded).

smogcutter• 2 years ago

Yes, you’ve rediscovered the curriculum of a journalism 101 class.

Dalewyn5• 2 years ago

A journalist's job is to journal something, exactly like how NTFS keeps a journal of what happens.

A journalist doing anything other than journaling is not a journalist.

So people getting quoted verbatim is perfectly fine. If the quoted turns out to be a liar, that's just part of the journal.

llamaimperative2• 2 years ago

You’re describing a PR representative. Simply the decision of what to cover is inherently selective and driven by an individual’s and a culture’s priorities.

i80and• 2 years ago

That sounds more like stenography than anything else

bee_rider6• 2 years ago

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 describe every event that has ever happened to their subject. But for example if they are interviewing somebody who usually lies, it would be more accurate to at least include a small note about that.

soared• 2 years ago

Thats.. not what journalism means. I don’t know where you got that definition, but I can’t find anything similar. Processing and displaying information is a huge part of journalism - ie assessing what is truth or fiction and communicating each as such. Wikipedia: > A journalist is a person who gathers information in the form of text, audio or pictures, processes it into a newsworthy form and disseminates it to the public. This is called journalism.

bediger40002• 2 years ago

A journalist's job is to journal something, exactly like how NTFS keeps a journal of what happens.

Your choice of metaphor points out problems with your definition. Avid Linux users will be immediately biased against what you wrote, true though it may be, because you assumed that NTFS is the predominant, or even good example of journaling file systems.

booleandilemma• 2 years ago

Sounds like you would be a bad journalist.

muddi900• 2 years ago

So they should report anything anyone says?

Because selecting whom to report is editorializing by your standards. It creates a bias and gives importance aome over others.

Woke Derangement Syndrome has taken the best of us.

Apreche• 2 years ago

It’s possible to insert a few sentences factually accounting for a person’s character without inserting a subjective judgement of character.

For example you could say:

Joey JoeJoe, billionaire CEO, who notably said horrible things, was convicted of some crimes, and ate three babies, was quoted as saying “machine learning is just so awesome”.

There, you didn’t inject a judgement. You accurately quoted the subject. You gave the reader enough contextual information about the person so they know how much to trust or not-trust the quote.

secondcoming• 2 years ago

"Nelson Mandela, convicted of some crimes, calls for World Peace"

cogman10• 2 years ago

This does often happen (depending on the leaning of the newspaper, it's omitted if the figure is someone supported and emphasized otherwise).

A major problem, though, is headlines don't and can't carry this context. And those are the things most people read.

The best you'll get is "Joey JoeJoe says machine learning is just so awesome" or at best "Joey JoeJoe comments on ML. The 3rd word will blow you away!".

afavour• 2 years ago

Extreme examples are easy. But you can pick and choose which facts to present to the reader to affect the judgement they’re making. It would be trivially easy to paint Bill Gates as either a legendary humanitarian or a ruthless capitalist egotist to someone that’s never heard of him.

VonGallifrey• 2 years ago

who notably said horrible things

How do you objectively decide which statements are horrible and which aren't?

The other stuff you listed are facts, but this one would be subjective. That isn't just providing contextual information, but adding personal bias into the reporting.

PKop• 2 years ago

Or more likely, the journalists don't know any better and believe the AI hype sold to them and promote it of their own accord.

goles• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/lDcx5

cyanydeez3• 2 years ago

Better headline : It's too late to stop taking Sam Altman at his word

See same with Elon Musk.

Money turns genius to smooth brained egomaniacal idiots. See same with Steve Jobs

api• 2 years ago

Money removes social feedback. You end up surrounded with bobble heads telling you how genius you are… because they want your money. This is terrible for human psychology. It’s almost like a kind of solitary confinement — solitary in the sense that you are utterly deprived of meaningful rich human contact.

yownie• 2 years ago

it's this more than anything else I wish the general public would understand, those same bobble heads that surround celebrities and eventually warp all sense of costs of common everyday items. We often only see the end result of this when so-and-so celebrity declares bankruptcy and the masses cheer.

In reality they've been vampire sucked dry by close family / friends / salesmen for years and didn't know it.

aomix• 2 years ago

I think about this comparison sometimes https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888?lan...

"Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"

Solitary confinement is a great comparison. But also not existing in the same reality is 99.99% of the population must really warp you too.

throwaway426683• 2 years ago

Sam Altman is not a hapless victim at the mercy of the isolating effects of his financial success.

He was an opportunistic, amoral sociopath before he was rich, and the system he reaps advantage from strongly selects for hucksters of that particular ilk more than anything else.

He's just another Kalanick, Neumann, Holmes or Bankman-Fried.

surgical_fire2• 2 years ago

They were never geniuses. They were just rich assholes propped up by other rich assholes.

"It's too late to stop conflating wealth with intelligence"

golergka4• 2 years ago

Regardless of personal qualities, for some reason these people have achieved great things for themselves and humanity, whereas countless competitors, including many other rich assholes, have not.

imjonse• 2 years ago

Are you seriously suggesting Altman is a genius? Or Musk for that matter?

dimgl• 2 years ago

I'm not sure this is the same situation... SpaceX just began a mission to save stranded scientists in space. And Starlink has legitimate uses.

OKRainbowKid• 2 years ago

That doesn't make Musk any less of an egomaniacal idiot in my eyes.

throwgfgfd258• 2 years ago

Jobs was a sort of cracked genius and a very imperfect human who wanted to be a better human. Money didn't make him worse, or better. It didn't really change him at all on a personal level. It didn't even make him more confident, because he was always that. Look back through anecdotes about him in his life and he's just the same guy, all the time.

Even the stories I heard about him from one of his indirect reports back in the pre-iCEO "Apple is still fucked, NeXT is a distracted mess" era were just like stories told about him from the dawn of Apple and in the iPhone era.

Musk and Altman are opportunists. Musk appears to be a maligant narcissist. Neither seem in a rush to be better humans.

jijijijij• 2 years ago

How could they not. The word `wealth` or idea of "money" is completely misleading here. It's cancerous accumulation of resources and influence. They are completely detached from consequential reality. The human brain has not evolved to thrive under conditions of total, unconditional material abundance. People struggle to moderate sugar intake, imagine unlimited access to everything. And it's an inherently amoral existence leading to the necessity of unhinged internal models of the world to justify continuation and reward. Their sense of self-efficacy derailed in zero-g. Listen to them talk about fiction... They literally can't tell the price of a banana, how can they possibly get any meaningful story told? All that is left is the aesthetics and mechanical exterior of narration. How can there be love or friendship with normal people grounding you? You could make everyone you ever met during your lifetime a millionaire, while effectively changing nothing for yourself. Nobody can be this rich and not lose touch with common shared reality.

Billionaires are shameful for the collective, they should be shameful to everyone of us. They are fundamentally most unfit for leadership. They are evidence of civilizatory failure, the least we can do is not idolize them.

neuroelectron3• 2 years ago

Keep in mind that this is going to be the default option for a lot of forums and social media for automated moderation. Reddit is already using it a lot and now a lot of the front page is clearly feedback farming for OpenAI. What I'm getting at is we're moving towards a future where only a certain type of dialog will be allowed on most social media and Sam Altman and his sponsors get to decide what that looks like. Since he's of YComb stock, the zeitgeist here seems to be let him cook, that is until he doesn't share the wealth with his market-cornering pals here.

deepsquirrelnet3• 2 years ago

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?

Aeolun3• 2 years ago

If you need someone to tell you the truth you don’t need a CEO.

What you need a CEO for is to sell you (and your investors) a vision.

llamaimperative2• 2 years ago

This is silly. Delusion kills more companies than facing reality with honesty does.

hn72774• 2 years ago

Without the truth, a vision is a hallucination.

It saddens me how easily someone with money and influence can elevate themselves to a quasi religious figure.

In reality, this vision you speak of is more like the blind leading the blind.

naveen99• 2 years ago

The future is not binary, it’s a probability.

ThinkBeat• 2 years ago

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?

angulardragon03• 2 years ago

This is the Tesla Autopilot playbook, which seems to continue to work decently for that particular CEO

butterfly420693• 2 years ago

It seems that continuously promising something is X weeks/months/years away is seen as optimism and belief, not blatant disregard for facts.

I'm sure the defence is always, "but if we just had a bit more money, we would've got it done"

BoredPositron• 2 years ago

Well lets take Tesla, FSD and Elon as an example were a judge just ruled[0] that it's normal corporate puffery and not lies.

[0] https://norcalrecord.com/stories/664710402-judge-tosses-clas...

Agentus• 2 years ago

Well i think this conversation chain has played out multiple times all the way spanning back to at least Ben Edison. Often times nothing is certain in a business where you need to take a chance trying to bring an imagined idea into fruition with millions of investor money.

Ceos are more often come from marketing backgrounds than other disciplines for the very reason they have to sell stakeholders, employees, investors on the possibilities. If a ceos myth making turns out to be a lie 50 to 80 percent of the time then hes still a success as with Edison, Musk, Jobs, and now Altman.

But i think AI ceos seem to be imagining and peddling wilder fancier myths than the average. If AI technology pans out then i dont feel theyre unwarranted. I think theres enough justification but im biased and have been doing AI for 10 years.

To ur question, If a ceos lies dont accidently turn true eventually as with the case of Holmes then yes its a big problem.

rubyfan3• 2 years ago

depends which investors lose money

throwintothesea4• 2 years ago

Come now, it's only lying when poor people do it, don'tcha know.

meiraleal• 2 years ago

What if gpt5 is vaporware

OpenAI decides what they call gpt5. They are waiting for a breakthrough that would make people "wow!". That's not even very difficult and there are multiple paths. One is a much smarter gpt4 which is what most people expect but another one is a real good voice-to-voice or video-to-video feature that works seamlessly the same way chatgpt was the first chatbot that made people interested.

deepsquirrelnet3• 2 years ago

It’s more than that. Because of what they’ve said publicly and already demonstrated in the 3->4 succession, they can’t release something incremental as gpt5.

Otherwise people might get the impression that we’re already at a point of diminishing returns on transformer architectures. With half a dozen other companies on their heels and suspiciously nobody significantly ahead anymore, it’s substantially harder to justify their recent valuation.

antirez2• 2 years ago

Not possible since Claude is effectively GPT5 level in most tasks (EDIT: coding is not one of them). OpenAI lost the lead months ago. Altman talking about AGI (may take decades or years, nobody knows) is just the usual crazy Musk-style CEO thing that is totally safe to ignore. What is interesting is the incredible steady progresses of LLMs so far.

diggan2• 2 years ago

Claude is effectively GPT5 level

Which model? Sonnet 3.5? I subscribed to Claude for while to test Sonnet/Opus, but never got them to work as well as GPT-4o or o1-preview. Mostly tried it out for coding help (Rust and Python mainly).

Definitely didn't see any "leap" compared to what OpenAI/ChatGPT offers today.

raincole2• 2 years ago

What if gpt5 is vaporware, and there’s no equivalent 3 to 4 leap to be realized with current deep learning architectures?

Sam Altman himself doesn't know whether it's the case. Nobody knows. It's the natural of R&D. If you can tell whether an architecture works or not with 100% confidence it's not cutting edge.

barrell4• 2 years ago

Sam Altman has explicitly said the next model will be an even bigger jump than between 3 and 4.

I think that was before 4o? I know 4o-mini and o1 for sure have come out since he said that

patcon• 2 years ago

Nobody knows.

I suspect it's a little different. AI models are still made of math and geometric structures. Like mathematicians, researchers are developing intuitions about where the future opportunities and constraints might be. It's just highly abstract, and until someone writes the beautiful Nautilus Mag article that helps a normie see the landscape they're navigating, we outsiders see it as total magic and unknowable.

But Altman has direct access to the folks intuiting through it (likely not validated intuitions, but still insight)

That's not to say I believe him. Motivations are very tangled and meta here

deepsquirrelnet3• 2 years ago

We got to ~gpt4 by scaling model parameters, and then several more companies did too.

That’s dead. OpenAI knows that much. There will be more, but they aren’t going to report that we’re doing incremental advances until there’s a significant breakthrough. They need to stay afloat and say what it takes to try and bridge the gap.

mrbungie• 2 years ago

A typical CEO's job is to guard and enforce a narrative. Great ones also work at adding to the narrative.

But it is always about the narrative.

mola• 2 years ago

I thought it was about directing the execution of the company business. Defining strategy and being a driving force behind it.

But you are right, we live in a post truth influencer driven world. It's all about the narrative.

latexr4• 2 years ago

What a shitty world we constructed for ourselves, where the highest positions of power with the highest monetary rewards depend on being the biggest liar. And it’s casually mentioned and even defended as if that’s in any way acceptable.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

vbezhenar5• 2 years ago

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.

coffeefirst2• 2 years ago

Would you be willing to share how you're using it?

I keep hearing from people who find these enormous benefits from LLMs. I've been liking them as a search engine (especially finding things buried in bad documentation), but can't seem to find the life-changing part.

exitb• 2 years ago

That being said, 4o is functionally in the same league as Claude, which makes this a whole different story. One in which the moat is already gone.

cableshaft• 2 years ago

Yeah I stopped my subscription during 4 thinking it wasn't super useful, but 4o does seem to handle programming logic pretty well. Better than me if given the same timeframe (of seconds) at least.

It's helped me stay productive on days when my brain just really doesn't want to come up with a function that does some annoying fairly complex bit of logic and I'd probably waste a couple hours getting it working.

Before I'd throw something like that at it, and it'd give me something confidently that was totally broken, and trying to go back and forth to fix it was a waste of my time.

Now I get something that works pretty well but maybe I just need to tweak something a bit because I didn't give it enough context or quite go over all the inconsistencies and exceptions in the business logic given by the requirements (also I can't actually use it on client machines so I have to type it manually to and from another machine, so I'm not copy pasting anything so I try to get away with typing less).

I'm not typing anything sensitive, btw, this is stuff you might find on Stack Overflow but more convoluted, like "search this with this exception and this exception because that's the business requirement and by these properties but then go deeper into this property that has a submenu that also needs to be included and provide a flatlist but group it by this and transform it so it fits this new data type and sort it by this unless this other property has this value" type of junk.

bhy• 2 years ago

But note that the price they can charge is based on market supply and demand. If Claude is priced at $20, ChatGPT won’t be able to ask $100.

almatabata• 2 years ago

Funnily I came across an interview from around 5 years ago where he straight up admitted that he had no clue how to generate a return on investment back then (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcJlKg2Rc0&t=1920s)

"We have no current plans to make revenue."

"We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue."

"We have made a soft promise to investors that once we've built a general intelligence system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you."

The fact he has no clue how to generate revenue with an AGI without asking it, shows his lack of imagination.

flappyeagle• 2 years ago

Or his honesty?

slashdave8• 2 years ago

Well, I mean the actual answer is raise more money from investors. But it is better to leave things up to the imagination of the listener.

qnleigh• 2 years ago

The fact he has no clue how to generate revenue with an AGI without asking it...

I wouldn't take this statement at face value any more than anything else a CEO says. For example, maybe he still had to appease the board, and talking about making profit would be counterproductive. Maybe he gave this answer because it signals that he's in it for the long game and investors should be too.

slashdave8• 2 years ago

Actually, CEOs, and other board members, are supposed to be held to certain standards. Specifically, honesty and integrity. Some charters explicitly include working for the public good. Let's not forget that and not get desensitized to certain behaviors.

switch007• 2 years ago

That ship has long, long sailed

thelastgallon• 2 years ago

"Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot." - Sam Altman, https://ia.samaltman.com/

Reality: AI needs unheard amounts of energy. This will make climate significantly worse.

golergka4• 2 years ago

So far it seems that AIs appetite for energy might finally pushing western countries back to nuclear, which would make climate significantly better.

collingreen• 2 years ago

Nuclear and everything we were using before is probably not better than just everything we were using before. Hopefully we can continue to reduce high emission or otherwise damaging power production even while power requirements grow.

ccppurcell• 2 years ago

Nuclear cannot "make the climate better" but can perhaps slow the destruction down, only if it replaces fossil fuels, not if it is added on top due to increased energy consumption. In that case it's at best neutral.

kibwen• 2 years ago

Unfortunately no, this is not how it works.

The relative quantity of power provided by nuclear (or renewables, for that matter) is NOT our current problem. The problem is the absolute quantity of power that is provided by fossil fuels. If that number does not decrease, then it does not matter how much nuclear or renewables you bring online. And nuclear is not cheaper than fossil fuels (even if you remove all regulation, and even if you build them at scale), so it won't economically incentivize taking fossil fuel plants offline.

ben_w13• 2 years ago

Only if they build the reactors then go bankrupt leaving the rectors around for everyone else. Likewise if they build renewables to power the data centres.

UncleMeat• 2 years ago

A world where we produce N watt-hours of energy without nuclear plants and a world where we produce N+K watt-hours of energy with K watt-hours coming from nuclear has exactly the same effect on the climate.

layer82• 2 years ago

Almost all energy consumed for computation turns into heat. Increasing energy consumption therefore doesn’t help the climate, in particular if you don’t source it from incoming heat from the sun (photovoltaics or wind energy).

meroes3• 2 years ago

Wow that quote is absolutely crazy. “Discovery of all of physics”. I think that’s the worst puffery/lie I’ve ever heard by a CEO. Science requires experiments so the next LLM will have to be able to design CERN+++ level experiments down to the smallest detail. But that’s not even the hard part, the hard part is the actual energy requirements, which are literally astronomical. So it’s going to either have to discover a new method of energy generation along the way or something else crazy. The true barrier for physics is energy right now. But that’s just the next level of physics, that’s not ALL of it.

Edit: Also why are you getting downvoted...

moogly2• 2 years ago

I can't imagine anyone writing that paragraph of his with a straight face. The chuckling must've lasted a week.

jt21902• 2 years ago

AI needs unheard amounts of energy…

… and it always will? It seems terribly limiting to stop exploring the potential of this technology because it’s not perfect right now. Energy consumption of AI models does not feel like an unsolvable problem, just a difficult one.

YeGoblynQueenne8• 2 years ago

AI, i.e. deep learning, consumes huge amounts of energy because it has to train on gigantic amounts of data and the training algorithms are borderline efficient. So to stop using huge amounts of energy someone would have to come up with a way to get the same results without relying on deep learning.

In other words all we need is a new technology revolution like the deep learning revolution, except one centered around a radically new approach that overcomes every limitation of deep learning.

Now: how likely do you think this is to happen any time soon? Note that the industry and most of academia have bet the bank on deep learning partly because they think that prospect is extremely unlikely.

xbar5• 2 years ago

I think you should study the tragedy of the commons to understand why it always will.

twelve402• 2 years ago

well 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 of the impending revolution

In 2024, ChatGPT is a weird toy, my barber demands paper cash only (no bitcoin or credit cards or any of that phone nonsense, this is Silicon Valley), I have to stand in line at USPS and DMV with mindless paper-shuffling human robots, marveling at humiliating stupidity of manual jobs, robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always. Let's check again in a "coupe of thousand days" i guess!

namaria9• 2 years ago

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 for you while producing a shitton of entropy on the backend. All the water and energy dissipated at data centers, all the supply chains involved in building GPUs at the rate we are building. There will be no magical moment when it's gonna yield more low entropy than what we put in on the other side as training data, electricity and clean water.

When companies sell ideas like 'AGI' or 'self driving cars' they are essentially promising you can do away with the complexity surrounding a complex solution. They are promising they can deliver low entropy on a tap without paying for it in increased entropy elsewhere. It's physically impossible.

You want human intelligence to do work, you need to deal with all the complexities of psychology, economics and politics. You want complex machines to do autonomous work, you need an army of people behind it. What AGI promises is, you can replace the army of people with another more complex machine. It's a big bald faced lie. You can't do away with the complexity. Someone will have to handle it.

ben_w13• 2 years ago

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.

dagw• 2 years ago

barber demands paper cash only...I have to stand in line at USPS and DMV

Surely this is just a case of the future not being evenly distributed. All of these 'problems' are already solved and the solution is implemented somewhere, just not where you happen to be.

twelve402• 2 years ago

You're probably right. I'll wait until it gets better distributed. It's just that personally, it's been hard to reconcile the grandiose talk with what's actually around me, that's all.

simonw• 2 years ago

“robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always”

We have them in San Francisco now (and Los Angeles and Phoenix, and Austin soon.)

aithrowawaycomm2• 2 years ago

By "robotaxi" I think they meant loosely "personal self driving car," not an automated taxi service.

Waymo's overstated[1] success has let self-driving advocates do an especially pernicious bit of goalpost-shifting. I have been a self-driving skeptic since 2010, but if you had told me in 2010 that in 10-15 years we have robotaxis that were closely overseen by remote operators who can fill in the gaps I would have thought that was much more plausible than fully autonomous vehicles. And the human operators are truly critical, even more so than a skeptic like me assumed: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... (sadly the interactive is necessary here and archives don't work, this is a gift link)

I still think fully autonomous vehicles on standard roads is 50+ years out. The argument was always that ~95% of driving is addressable by deep learning but the remaining ~5% involves difficult problem-solving that cannot be solved by data because the data does not exist. It will require human oversight or an AI architecture which is capable of deterministic reasoning (not transformers), say at least at the level of a lizard. Since we have no clue how to make an AI as smart as a lizard, that 5% problem remains utterly intractable.

[1] I have complained for years that Waymo's statisticians are comparing their cars to all human drivers when they should be comparing it to lawful human drivers whose vehicles are well-maintained. Tesla FSD proves that self-driving companies will respond to consumer demand for vehicles that speed and run red lights.

Zigurd3• 2 years ago

Waymo is at the threshold of how speech recognition reached a tipping point through decades of grinding effort. I worked on speech recognition applications in the '80s when the best of it was just barely usable for carefully crafted use cases. Now taxis can be automated well enough if you have the right sensor suite and an exquisitely mapped environment. Waymo can do this for 0.05% of ride hailing riders, if 28M Ubers per day and 100k Waymos per week are reasonably accurate. This is like when connected speech started working with a good mic in a quiet environment. Now automated multi-speaker transcription with background noise, crosstalk, and whatever mic you got works. Back in the day some serious people were convinced speech recognition on that level would be impossible without solving AGI.

iamsrp• 2 years ago

robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always.

You can walk to where they're waiting for you.

thwg• 2 years ago

TSMC has stopped way earlier.

austinkhale• 2 years ago

There are legit criticisms of Sam Altman that can be levied but none of them are in this article. This is just reductive nonsense.

The arguments are essentially:

1. The technology has plateaued, not in reality, but in the perception of the average layperson over the last two years.

2. Sam _only_ has a record as a deal maker, not a physicist.

3. AI can sometimes do bad things & utilizes a lot of energy.

I normally really enjoy the Atlantic since their writers at least try to include context & nuance. This piece does neither.

BearOso• 2 years ago

I think LLM technology, not necessarily all of CNN, has plateaued. We've used up all the human discourse, so there's nothing to train it on.

It's like fossil fuels. They took billions of years to create and centuries to consume. We can't just create more.

Another problem is that the data sets are becoming contaminated, creating a reinforcement cycle that makes LLMs trained on more recent data worse.

My thoughts are that it won't get any better with this method of just brute-forcing data into a model like everyone's been doing. There needs to be some significant scientific innovations. But all anybody is doing is throwing money at copying the major players and applying some distinguishing flavor.

senko• 2 years ago

Actually, the sources we had (everything scraped from the internet) turns out to be pretty bad.

Imagine not going to school and instead learning everything from random blog posts or reddit comments. You could do it if you read a lot, but it's clearly suboptimal.

That's why OpenAI, and probably every other serious AI company, is investing huge amounts in generating (proprietary) datasets.

theptip3• 2 years ago

What data are you using to back up this belief?

Progress on benchmarks continues to improve (see GPT-o1).

The claim that there is nothing left to train on is objectively false. The big guys are building synthetic training sets, moving to multimodal, and are not worried about running out of data.

o1 shows that you can also throw more inference compute at problems to improve performance, so it gives another dimension to scale models on.

askafriend2• 2 years ago

Any thoughts on synthetic data?

_cs2017_• 2 years ago

To avoid disappointment, just think of the mass news media as a (shitty) LLM. It may occasionally produce an article that on the surface seems to be decently thought out, but it's only because the author accidentally picked a particularly good source to regurgitate. Ultimately, they just type some plausible sentences without knowing or caring about the quality.

croes• 2 years ago

If Sam claimed we'll fix climate with the help of AI, he is either a liar or a fool.

Our problem isn't technology, it's humans.

Unless he suggests mass indoctrination per AI AI won't fix anything.

wicndhjfdn• 2 years ago

Our economy runs on market makers AI, Blockchain, whether they are what they seem in the long run is beside the point. They're sole purpose is to generate economic activity. Nobody really cares if they pan out.

fnordpiglet• 2 years ago

While I agree anyone taking sam Altman at his word is and always was a fool, this opinion piece by a journalism major at a journalism school giving his jaded view of technology is the tired trope that is obsessed with the fact reality in the present is always reality in the present. The fact I drive a car that’s largely - if not entirely - autonomous in highly complex situations, is fueled by electricity alone, using a super computer to play music from an almost complete back catalog of everything released at my voices command, on my way to my final cancer treatment for a cancer that ten years ago was almost always fatal, while above me constellations of satellites cooperate via lasers to provide global high speed wireless internet being deployed by dozens upon dozens of private rocket launches as we prepare the final stretch towards interplanetary spaceships, over which computers can converse in true natural language with clear human voices with natural intonation…. Well. Sorry, I don’t have to listen to Sam Altman to see we live in a magical era of science fiction.

The most laughable part of the article is where they point at the fact that in the past TWO YEARS we haven’t gone from “OMG we’ve achieved near perfect NLP” to “Deep thought tell us the answer to life the universe and everything” as some sort of huge failure is patently absurd. If you took Altman at his word on that one, you probably also scanned your eye ball for fake money. The truth though is that the rate of change in the products his company is making is still breath taking - the text to speech tech in the latest advanced voice release (recognizing it’s not actually text to speech but something profoundly cooler, but that’s lost on journalism majors teaching journalism majors like the author) puts to shame the last 30 years of TTS. This alone would have been enough to have a fairly significant enterprise selling IVR and other software.

When did we go from enthralled by the rate of progress to bored that it’s not fast enough? That what we dream and what we achieve aren’t always 1:1 but that’s still amazing? I get that when we put down the devices and switch off the noise we are still bags of mostly water, our back hurts, we aren’t as popular as we wish we were, our hair is receding, maybe we need invisiline but flossing that tooth every day is easier and cheaper, and all the other shit that makes life much less glamorous than they sold us in the dot com boom, or nanotech, etc, as they call out in the article.

But the dot com boom did succeed. When I started at early Netscape no one used the internet. We spun the stories of the future this article bemoans to our advantage. And it was messier than the stories in the end. But now -everyone- uses the internet for everything. Nanotechnology permeates industry, science, tech, and our every day life. But the thing about amazing tech that sounds so dazzling when it’s new is -it blends into the background- if it truly is that amazingly useful. That’s not a problem with the vision of the future. It’s the fact that the present will never stop being the present and will never feel like some illusory gauzy vision you thought it might be. But you still use dot coms (this journalism major assessment of tech was published on a dot com and we are responding on a dot com) and still live in a world powered by nanotechnology, and AI promised in TWO YEARS is still mind boggling to anyone who is thinking clearly about what the goal posts for NLP and AI were five years ago.

hnadhdthrow123• 2 years ago

Will Human ego, greed, selfishness lead to our destruction? (AI or not)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35364833

m2024• 2 years ago

Hopefully, with as little collateral damage to the remaining life on this planet.

flenserboy• 2 years ago

that ship sailed a long time ago

melenaboija2• 2 years ago

It is weird that one of the most valued markets (openai, microsoft investments, nvidia gpus, ...) is based on a stack that is available to anyone that can pay for the resources to train the models and that in my opinion still has to deliver to the expectations that have been created around it.

Not saying it is a bubble but something seems imbalanced here.

throwaway426683• 2 years ago

It's okay to say it. It's a bubble.

It was just the next in line to be inflated after crypto.

superluserdo• 2 years ago

I wouldn't write it off as a bubble, since that usually implies little to no underlying worth. Even if no future technical progress is made, it has still taken a permanent and growing chunk of the use case for conventional web search, which is an $X00bn business.

KaiserPro4• 2 years ago

I mean OpenAI is a bubble, if it pops, its big enough to take the rest of tech with it.

jasode• 2 years ago

one of the most valued markets ... is based on a stack that is available to anyone

The sophisticated investors are not betting on future increasing valuations based on current LLMs or the next incremental iterations of it. That's a "static" perspective based on what outsiders currently see as a specific product or tech stack.

Instead, you have to believe in a "dynamic" landscape where OpenAI the organization of employees can build future groundbreaking models that are not LLMs but other AI architectures and products entirely. The so-called "moat" in this thinking would be the "OpenAI team to keep inventing new ideas beyond LLM". The moat is not the LLM itself.

Yes, if everyone focuses LLMs, it does look like Meta's free Llama models will render OpenAI worthless. (E.g. famous memo : https://www.google.com/search?q=We+have+no+Moat%2C+and+Neith...)

As an analogy, imagine that in the 1980s, Microsoft's IPO and valuation looks irrational since "writing programming code on the Intel x86 stack" is not a big secret. That stock analysis would then logically continue saying "Anybody can write x86 software such as Lotus, Borland, etc." But the lesson learned was that the moat was never the "Intel x86 stack"; the moat was really the whole Microsoft team.

That said, if OpenAI doesn't have any future amazing ideas, their valuation will crash.

melenaboija2• 2 years ago

I agree in most of what you said. The main problem for me is that I dont see LLMs are as solid foundations to create a company as technology progress from the 80s.

Im 42 though and already feeling old to understand the future lol

silvestrov• 2 years ago

I'd say that Microsoft's moat was the copyright law and ability to bully the hardware companies with exclusive distribution contracts.

Writing a new DOS (or Windows 3) from scratch is something a lot of developers could do.

They just couldn't do it legally.

And thus it was easy to bully Compaq and others into only distributing PCs with DOS/Windows installed. For some time you even had to pay the Microsoft fee when you wanted a PC with Linux installed.

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

Of course no corporate executive can be taken at their word, unless that word is connected to a legally binding contract, and even then, the executive may try to break the terms of the contract, and may have political leverage over the court system which would bias the result of any effort to bring them to account.

This is not unusual - politicians cannot be taken at their word, government bureaucrats cannot be taken at their word, and corporate media propagandists cannot be taken at their word.

The fact that the vast majority of human beings will fabricate, dissemble, lie, scheme, manipulate etc. if they see a real personal advantage from doing so is the entire reason the whole field of legally binding contract law was developed.

simpaticoder• 2 years ago

A 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 there would still be a need for mechanics and engineers to specify the correct parts, in the correct order, and use the parts to good purpose.

It is easy to imagine that the inventor of such a technology would probably start talking about printing entire cars - and if you don't think about it, it makes sense. But if you think about it, there are problems. Making the component of a solution is quite different than composing a solution. LLMs exist in the same conditions. Being able to generate code/text/images is of no use to someone who doesn't know what to do with it. I also think this limitation is a practical, tacit solution to the alignment problem.

vbezhenar5• 2 years ago

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.

edgyquant2• 2 years ago

Because those are irrelevant to the point being made in the GP

rendall2• 2 years ago

I think that is GP's point.

olliem36• 2 years ago

Great analogy! I'll borrow this when explaining my thoughts on how LLMs pose to replace software engineers.

rapind• 2 years ago

I tried replacing myself (coding hat) and it was pretty underwhelming. Some day maybe.

barrell4• 2 years ago

I would say LLMs are much less “produce a perfect part from nothing” and more “cut down a tree and get a the part you ask for, for a random model of car”

bee_rider6• 2 years ago

Car analogies are a little fraught because, I mean, in some cases you can even die if you put just the wrong parts in your car, and they are pretty complex mechanically.

If you had a printer that could print semi-random mechanical parts, using it to make a car would be obviously dumb, right? Maybe you would use it to make, like, a roller blade wheel, or some other simple component that can be easily checked.

ryandrake2• 2 years ago

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?

The invention would never see the light of day. If someone were to invent Star Trek replicators, they'd be buried along with their invention. Best Case it would be quickly captured by the ownership class and only be allowed to be used by officially blessed manufacturing companies, and not any individuals. They will have learned their lesson from AI and what it does to scarcity. Western [correction: all of] society is hopelessly locked into and dependent on manufacturing scarcity, and the idea that people have to pay for things. The wealthy and powerful will never allow free abundance of physical goods in the hands of the little people.

CoastalCoder• 2 years ago

I'm curious if this is true.

Are there specific historical examples of this that come to mind?

tjpnz• 2 years ago

The wealthy and powerful will never allow free abundance of physical goods in the hands of the little people.

Then there would be a violent revolution which wrestles it out of their hands. The benefits of such a technology would be immediately obvious to the layman and he would not allow it to be hoarded by a select few.

d0gsg0w00f• 2 years ago

I don't know. Today it's extremely expensive to start new manufacturing competitors. You have to go and ask for tons of capital merely to play the game and likely lose. Anyone with that much capital is probably going to be skeptical of some upstart and consult with established industry leaders. This would be the opportunity for those leaders to step in and take the tech for themselves.

So to solve this problem you need billions to burn on gambles. I guess that's how we ended up with VC's.

robertlagrant2• 2 years ago

Western society is hopelessly locked into and dependent on manufacturing scarcity, and the idea that people have to pay for things.

How do you reconcile that with the fact that Western society has invented, improved, and supplied many of the things we lament that other countries don't have (and those countries also lament it - it's not just our own Stockholm Syndrome).

__MatrixMan__5• 2 years ago

I dunno, magically fabricating a part is fundamentally different than magically deciding where and when to do so.

AI can magically decide where to put small pieces of code. Its not a leap to imagine that it will later be good at knowing where to put large pieces of code.

I don't think it'll get there any time soon, but the boundary is less crisp than your metaphor makes it.

refulgentis3• 2 years ago

I dunno, magically fabricating a part is fundamentally different than magically deciding where and when to do so.

Right.

It sounds to me like you agree and are repeating the comment but are framing as disagreeable.

I'm sure I'm missing something.

rsynnott3• 2 years ago

AI can magically decide where to put small pieces of code.

Magically, but not particularly correctly.

bboygravity• 2 years ago

That comparison would make sense if the company was open source, non-profit, promised to make all designs available for free, took Elon Musk's money and then broke all promises includidng the one in its name and started competing with Musk.

djjfksbxn• 2 years ago

A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason.

Why is it in your worldview a CEO “has to lie”?

Are you incapable of imagining one where a CEO is honest?

The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free.

I’ll allow it if you stipulate that randomly and without reason when I ask for an alternator it prints me toy dinosaur.

It is easy to imagine that the inventor of such a technology

As if the unethical sociopath TFA is about is any kind of, let alone the, inventor of genai.

Being able to generate code/text/images is of no use to someone who doesn't know what to do with it.

Again, conveniently omitting the technology’s ever present failure modes.

Null-Set• 2 years ago

A CEO has a fiduciary duty to lie.

btown• 2 years ago

specify the correct parts, in the correct order, and use the parts to good purpose

While the attention-based mechanisms of the current generation of LLMs still have a long way to go (and may not be the correct architecture) to achieve requisite levels of spatial reasoning (and of "practical" experience with how different shapes are used in reality) to actually, say, design a motor vehicle from first principles... that future is far more tangible than ever, with more access to synthetic data and optimized compute than ever before.

What's unclear is whether OpenAI will be able to recruit and retain the talent necessary to be the ones to get there; even if it is able to raise an order of magnitude more than competitors, that's no guarantee of success. My guess would be that some of the decisions that have led to the loss of much senior talent will slow their progress in the long run. Time will tell!

kylecazar• 2 years ago

Your post is a good summarization of what I believe as well.

But what's interesting when I speak to laymen is that the hype in the general public seems specifically centered on the composite solution that is ChatGPT. That's what they consider 'AI'. That specific conversational format in a web browser, as a complete product. That is the manifestation of AI they believe everyone thinks could become dangerous.

They don't consider the LLM API's as components of a series of new products, because they don't understand the architecture and business models of these things. They just think of ChatGPT and UI prompts (or it's competitor's versions of the same).

bee_rider6• 2 years ago

I think people think* of ChatGPT not as the web UI, but as some mysterious, possibly thinking, machine which sits behind the web UI. That is, it is clear that there’s “something” behind the curtain, and there’s some concern maybe that it could get out, but there isn’t really clarity on where the thing stops and the curtain begins, or anything like that. This is more magical, but probably less wrong, than just thinking of it as the prompt UI.

*(which is always a risky way of looking at it, because who the hell am I? Neither somebody in the AI field, nor completely naive toward programming, so I might be in some weird knows-enough-to-be-dangerous-not-enough-to-be-useful valley of misunderstanding. I think this describes a lot of us here, fwiw)

addcn• 2 years ago

Printed this out and pasted it into my journal. Going to come back to it in a few years. This touches on something important I can’t quite put into words yet. Some fundamental piece of consciousness that is hard to replicate - desire maybe

plaidfuji2• 2 years ago

Desire is a big part of it! Right now LLMs just respond. What if you prompted an LLM, “your goal is to gain access to this person’s bank account. Here is their phone number. Message with them until you can confirm successful access.”

Learning how to get what you want is a fundamental skill you start learning from infancy.

surfingdino• 2 years ago

Not enough plastics, glass, or metal in the air to make it happen. You need a scrapyard. Actually, that's how the LLMs treat knowledge. They run around like Wall-E grabbing bits at random and assembling them in a haphazard way to quickly give you something that looks like the thing you asked for.

throwaway57522• 2 years ago

That's a really good comment and insight, but understandably I think it is aimed at this forum and a technical audience. It landed well for me in terms of the near team impact of LLMs and other models. But outside this forum, I think our field is in a crisis from being very substantially oversold and undersold at the same time.

We have a very limited ability to define human intelligence, so it is almost impossible to know how near or far we are from simulating it. Everyone here knows how much a challenge it is to match average human cognitive abilities in some areas, and human brains run at 20 watts. There are people in power that may take technologists and technology executives at their word and move very large amounts of capital on promises that cannot be fulfilled. There was already an AI Winter 50 years ago, and there are extremely unethical figures in technology right now who can ruin the reputation of our field for a generation.

On the other hand, we have very large numbers of people around the world on the wrong end of a large and increasing wealth gap. Many of those people are just hanging on doing jobs that are actually threatened by AI. They know this, they fear this, and of course they will fight for their and their families lifestyles. This is a setup for large scale violence and instability. If there isn't a policy plan right now, AI will be suffering populist blowback.

Aside from those things, it looks like Sam has lost it. The recent stories about the TSMC meeting, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41668824, was a huge problem. Asking for $7T shows a staggering lack of grounding in reality and how people, businesses, and supply chains work. I wasn't in the room and I don't know if he really sounded like a "podcasting bro", but to make an ask of companies like that with their own capital is insulting to them. There are potential dangers of applying this technology; there are dangers of overpromising the benefits; and neither of them are well served when relatively important people in related industries thing there is a credibility problem in AI.

cheschire• 2 years ago

LLMs aren't really simulating intelligence so much as echoing intelligence.

The problem is when the hype machine causes the echoes to replace the original intelligence that spawned the echoes, and eventually those echoes fade into background noise and we have to rebuild the original human intelligence again.

theptip3• 2 years ago

This argument simply asserts that the LLMs (or their successor systems including scaffolding) will asymptote somewhere below human capabilities.

It’s possible that this could happen but you need to propose a mechanism and metric for this argument to be taken seriously (and to avoid fooling yourself with moving goalposts). Under what grounds do you assert that the trend line will stop where you claim it will stop?

Yes, if super-human AGI simply never happens then the alignment problem is mostly solved. Seems like wishful thinking to me.

richardw8• 2 years ago

This. It’s far harder to think of reasons that limits will endure, in a world where innovation by inches has always produced improvements. Everyone brings out the current state and technology. Those are transient.

lawn• 2 years ago

The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free.

I think the insight is that some people truly believe that LLMs would be exactly as groundbreaking as a magical 3D printer that prints out any part for free.

And they're pumping AI madly because of this belief.

slashdave8• 2 years ago

Perhaps someone should have considered what problem they are trying to solve before spending vast resources on the "solution"?

est• 2 years ago

sama is best match with today's LLM because of the "scaling law" like Zuckerberg described. Everyone is burning cash to race to the end, but the billion dollar question is, what is the end for transformer based LLM? Is there an end at all?

vbezhenar5• 2 years ago

The end is super-human reasoning along with super-human intuition, based on humanity knowledge.

plaidfuji2• 2 years ago

Sure, and the end of biotech is perfect control of the human body from pre-birth until death, but innovation has many bottlenecks. I would be very surprised if the bottlenecks to LLM performance are compute and model architecture. My guess is it’s the data.

Mistletoe2• 2 years ago

Are you sure you can get to that with transformers?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SkcM4hwgH3AP6iqjs/can-you-ge...

meroes3• 2 years ago

And some Mongols, Romans, etc probably said continually expanding their boarders would give them comparable contemporary heights.

lolinder8• 2 years ago

To 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.

Analemma_• 2 years ago

Yeah, everything from OpenAI in the last year suggests they have nothing left up their sleeve, they know the competition is going to catch up very soon, and they're trying to cash out as fast as possible before the market notices.

(In the Gell-Mann amnesia sense, make sure you take careful note of who was going "OAI has AGI internally!!!" and other such nonsense so you can not pay them any mind in the future)

lrg10aa• 2 years ago

It does look like an exit. Employees were given the chance to cash in some of their shares at $86 billion valuation. Altman is getting shares.

New "investors" are Microsoft and Nvidia. Nvidia will get the money back as revenue and fuel the hype for other customers. Microsoft will probably pay in Azure credits.

If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably means bankruptcy. But at that stage all parties have already got what they wanted.

jameslk• 2 years ago

If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably means bankruptcy.

I don’t believe this is accurate. I think this is what you’re referring to?:

Under the terms of the new investment round, OpenAI has two years to transform into a for-profit business or its funding will convert into debt, according to documents reviewed by The Times.

That just means investors want the business to be converted from a nonprofit entity into a regular for-profit entity. Not that they need to make a profit in 2 years, which is not typically an expectation for a company still trying to grow and capture market share.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/technology/openai-valuati...

agentcoops2• 2 years ago

I think for anyone who has been intimately involved with this last generation of "unicorns", it really does not look like an "exit" if that means bankruptcy, end of the company, betrayal of goals, or what have you: for a high-growth startup of approximately ten years, finding liquidity for employees is perhaps counter-intuitively a sign of deep maturity and that the company is concerned for the long haul (and that investors/the market believe this is likely).

At about the ten year mark, there has to be a changing of the guards from the foot soldiers who give their all that an unlikely institution could come to exist in the world at scale to people concerned more with stabilizing that institution and ensuring its continuity. In almost every company that has reached such scale in the last decade, this has often meant a transition from an executive team formed of early employees to a more senior C-team from elsewhere with a different skillset. In a world context where the largest companies are more likely to stay private than IPO, it's a profoundly important move to allow some liquidity for longterm employees, who otherwise might be forced to stay working at the company long past physical burnout.

cgh• 2 years ago

Mistletoe2• 2 years ago

For people that don't get the references, this graph is so helpful for understanding the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

It just keeps happening over and over. I'd say we are at "Negative press begins".

__MatrixMan__5• 2 years ago

I don't really follow Altman's behavior much, but just in general:

If he sincerely thought AGI was on the horizon he wouldn't be eyeing the exit

If such a thing could exist and was right around the corner, why would you need a company for it? Couldn't the AGI manage itself better than you could? Job's done, time to get a different hobby.

lolinder8• 2 years ago

If such a thing was right around the corner, the person who controlled it would be the only person left who had any kind of control over their own future.

Why would you sell that?

azinman22• 2 years ago

Let’s say you got AGI, and it approximated a not so bright impulsive 12 year old boy. That would be an insane technological leap, but hardly one you’d want running the show.

AGI doesn’t mean smarter than the best humans.

FrustratedMonky• 2 years ago

"why would you need a company for it? Couldn't the AGI manage itself better than you could?"

Well, you still have to have the baby, and raise it a little. And wouldn't you still want to be known as the parent of such a bright kid as AGI? Leaving early seems to be cutting down on his legacy, if a legacy was coming.

nobodyandproud2• 2 years ago

As other comments have mentioned, AGI doesn't mean god-like or super-human intelligence.

For these models today, if we measure the amount of energy expended for training and inference how do humans compare?

SoftTalker3• 2 years ago

Altman's AGI is Musk's full self-driving car.

Zondartul2• 2 years ago

If we figure out AGI, that still doesn't mean a singularity. I'm going to speak as though we're on the brink of AI outthinking every human on earth (we are not) but bear with me, I want to make it clear we're not going jobless any time soon.

For starters, we still need the AI (LLMs for now) to be more efficient, i.e. not require a datacenter to train and deploy. Yes, I know there are tiny models you can run on your home pc, but that's comparing a bycicle to a jet.

Second, for an AGI it meaningfully improve itself, it has to be smarter than not just any one person, but the sum total of all people it took to invent it. Until then no single AI can replace our human tech sphere of activity.

As long as there are limits to how smart an AI can get, there are places where humans can contribute economically. If there is ever to be a singularity, it's going to be a slow one, and large human AI vompanies will be part of the process for many decades still.

m3kw94• 2 years ago

Dissolve the safety team. You just made everyone stop reading the rest of your post by falsely claiming that

whamlastxmas6• 2 years ago

I don’t even know how this fake news started

karmakaze2• 2 years ago

Let's go with the no next gen models, then we'd be looking at an operationalized service. I might be up for paying $20/month for one. Certainly more value than I get from Netflix. All I would want from the service is a simple low-friction UI and continued improvements to keep up with or surpass competitors. They could manage that.

The long-term problem may be access to quality/human-created training data. Especially if the ones that control that data have AI plans of their own. Even then I could see OpenAI providing service to many of them rather than each of them creating their own models.

from-nibly• 2 years ago

I doubt $20 a month is going to cover it. How much would you.pay before you weren't getting a good deal?

cyanydeez3• 2 years ago

Theres never going to be quality data at tge scale they need it.

At best, theres a slow march to incremental improvements that look exactly like how human culture developed knowledge.

And all the downsides will remain, the same way people, despite hundreds of good sourxes of info still prefer garbage.

ForOldHack• 2 years ago

Every single word he says Public is his product.

BryanLegend• 2 years ago

And he doesn't even use the shift key!

getpost• 2 years ago

I don't know anything, but isn't Sam already rich? And, if OpenAI is in a position to capture profits in an expanding AI industry, isn't this the best possible time to lock-in equity for long term gains and trillionaireship?

For many people, sadly, one can never be rich enough. My point is, planning for both short term exit, and long term gains, is essentially the same in this particular situation. What a boon! Nice problem to have!

mirekrusin• 2 years ago

For some people the question "how much?" has only one answer – "more."

gizmo• 2 years ago

Sam was already a billionaire years ago. He is one of SV most prolific investors, with equity in hundreds of startups. He writes big checks as well from time to time, Helion for instance he gave 375 million.

baking5• 2 years ago

He is tied for last place on the most recent Forbes Billionaire list.

https://www.forbes.com/profile/sam-altman/

wslh6• 2 years ago

I see it differently. ChatGPT holds a unique position because it has the most important asset in tech: user attention. Building a brand and capturing a significant share of eyeballs is one of the hardest challenges for any company, startup or not. From a business standpoint, the discussion around GPT-5 or AGI seems secondary. What truly matters is the growing number of users paying for ChatGPT, with potential for monetization through ads or other services in the future.

semi-extrinsic2• 2 years ago

What truly matters is the growing number of users paying for ChatGPT, with potential for monetization through ads or other services in the future.

If the end goal is monetization of ChatGPT with ads, it will be enshittified to the same degree as Google searches. If you get to that, what is the benefit of using ChatGPT if it just gives you the same ads and bullshit as Google?

deepfriedchokes• 2 years ago

The internet has destroyed the value of user attention and brands; everyone has the attention span of a gnat and the loyalty of an addict. They will very quickly move on to the next shiny thing.

wildermuthn5• 2 years ago

The only reason Sam would leave OpenAI is if he thought AGI could only be achieved elsewhere, or that AGI was impossible without some other breakthrough in another industry (energy, hardware, etc).

High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention — the holy grail of technology. Nothing could be more ambitious, and if we know anything about Altman, it is that his ambition has no ceiling.

Having said all of that, OpenAI appears to be all in on brute-force AGI and swallowing the bitter lesson that vast and efficient compute is all you need. But they’ve overlooking a massive dataset that all known biological intelligences rely upon: qualia. By definition, qualia exist only within conscious minds. Until we train models on qualia, we’ll be stuck with LLMs that are philosophical zombies — incapable of understanding our world — a world that consists only of qualia.

Building software capable of utilizing qualia requires us to put aside the hard problem of consciousness in favor of mechanical/deterministic theories of consciousness like Attention-Schema Theory (AST). Sure, we don’t understand qualia. We might never understand. But that doesn’t mean we can’t replicate.

talldayo2• 2 years ago

High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention

Citation?

...or are you just assuming that AGI will be able to solve all of our problems, appropos of nothing but Sam Altman's word? I haven't seen a single credible study suggest that AGI is anything more than a marketing term for vaporware.

woodruffw2• 2 years ago

Sure, we don’t understand qualia. We might never understand. But that doesn’t mean we can’t replicate.

I’m pretty sure it means exactly that. Without actually understanding subjective experience, there’s a fundamental doubt akin to the Chinese room. Sweeping that under the carpet and declaring victory doesn’t in fact victory make.

Zondartul2• 2 years ago

Future NeuroLink collab? Grab the experience of qualia right from the brains of those who do the experiencing.

bitshiftfaced• 2 years ago

All while hyping AGI more than ever.

Maybe not, since Altman pretty much said they no longer want to think it terms of "how close to AGI?". Iirc, he said they're moving away from that and instead want to move towards describing the process as hitting new specific capabilities incrementally.

bitcharmer• 2 years ago

It's funny and somehow disappointing how a year ago HN jerked off to Altman and down-voted any critical opinions of him. Just shows no social platform is free of strong group-think and mass hysteria.

kevinventullo• 2 years ago

It’s almost like people changed their opinions based on observed behaviors.

hintymad• 2 years ago

They dissolved the safety team.

I still don't get the safety team. Yes, I understand the need for a business to moderate the content they provide and rightly so. But elevating the safety to the level of the survival of humanity over a generative model, I'm not so sure. And even for so-called preventing harmful content, how can an LLM be more dangerous than the access of the books like The Anarchist Cookbook, the pamphlets on how to conduct guerrilla warfare, the training materials of how to do terrorisms, and etc? They are easily accessible on the internet, no?

lolinder8• 2 years ago

Having a dedicated safety team (or as they called it "superalignment") makes sense if and only if you believe that your company is pursuing an actual sci-fi style artificial superintelligence that could put humanity itself at risk [0]:

Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.
How do we ensure AI systems much smarter than humans follow human intent?

This is a question that naturally arises if you are pursuing something that's superhuman, and a question that's pointless if you believe you're likely to get a really nice algorithm for solving certain kinds of problems that were hard to solve before.

Getting rid of the superalignment team showed which version Altman believes is likely.

[0] https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/

stainablesteel• 2 years ago

i disagree that it looks like an exit, i think altman is here for the long haul. he's got a great platform and a lot of AI competitors are also preparing for the long term. no one cares about who has the best model for the next year or two, they care who has it for the next 20.

gojomo2• 2 years ago

I think you're projecting a short-term cash-out mentality here.

Altman's actions are even more consistent with total confidence & dedication to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever. Plus, a desire to retain more personal control over that outcome – & not just conventional wealth! – than was typical with prior breakthroughs.

lolinder8• 2 years ago

you're projecting a short-term cash-out mentality

I'm a software engineer comfortably drawing a decent-but-not-FAANG paycheck at an established company with every intention of taking the slow-and-steady path to retirement. I'm not projecting, I promise.

to a vision where OpenAI is the 1st and faraway leader in the production of the most valuable 'technology' ever

Except that OpenAI isn't a faraway leader. Their big news this week was them finally making an effort to catch up to Anthropic's Artifacts. Their best models do only marginally better in the LLM Arena than Claude, Gemini, and even the freely-released Llama 3.1 405B!

Part of why I believe Altman is looking to cash out is that I think he's smart enough to recognize that he has no moat and a very small lead. His efforts to get governments to pull up the ladder have largely failed, so the next logical choice is to exit at peak valuation rather than waiting for investors to recognize that OpenAI is increasingly just one in a crowd.

[0] https://lmarena.ai/

QuantumGood2• 2 years ago

His recent statement that AGI may "only be a few thousand days away" is clearly an attempt to find a less quotable way of extending estimates while barely reducing hype. History generally shows that estimates of "more than five years away" are meaningless.

renegade-otter• 2 years ago

4000 days is just a few thousand days, but it's [checks notes] over 10 years away.

CurrentB• 2 years ago

"a few thousand days away" feels like such a duplicitous way to phrase something when "a few years" would be more natural to everyone on the planet. It just seems intentionally manipulative and not even trying to hide it. I've never been an anti-ceo type person but something about Altman sketches me out

falcor842• 2 years ago

... 4o and o1, which are great step changes but nothing the competition can't quickly replicate.

Where did that assertion come from? Has anyone come close to replicating either of these yet (other than possibly Google, who hasn't fully released their thing yet either), let alone "quickly"? I wouldn't be surprised if it's these "sideways" architectural changes actually give OpenAI a deeper moat than just working on larger models.

dcre2• 2 years ago

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is at least as good as 4o.

pj_mukh2• 2 years ago

Except the article makes none of these points. The article is saying:

a) "the technology is overhyped", based on some meaningless subjective criteria, if you think a technology is overhyped, don't invest your money or time in it. No one's forcing you.

b) "child abuse problems are more important", with a link to an article that clearly specifies that the child abuse problems have nothing to do with OpenAI.

c) "it uses too much energy and water". OpenAI is paying fair market price for that energy and what's more the infrastructure companies are using those profits to start making massive investments in alternative energy [1]. So if everything about this AI boom fails what we'll be left with is a massive amount of abundant renewable energy (the horror!)

Probably the laziest conjecture I have endured from The Atlantic.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/artificial-intelligen...

baking5• 2 years ago

So if everything about this AI boom fails what we'll be left with is a massive amount of abundant renewable energy

Except that someone has to pay for it. AI companies are only willing to pay for power purchase agreements, not capital expenses. Same with the $7T of chip fab. Invest your money in huge capital expenditures and our investors will pay you for it on an annual basis until they get tired of losing money.

weebull• 2 years ago

Paying fair market price for energy and water is only fair if you don't need extra infrastructure put in place to support you. If you're expecting the local government to build you electricity generating capacity... No. That's not right.

At best, you're forcing old generation capacity that would have been retired to stay online. At worst you're forcing the government to take loans to invest in new capacity you may not be around to pay for in a few years, leaving the public finances holding the ball.

throwoutway2• 2 years ago

Don't forget the board coup, the coup-reversal, complete takeover, then co-founders leaving, and Mira leaving

lolinder8• 2 years ago

Yes, all of that definitely plays into the sense that not all is well at OpenAI.

Slight nit: a board can't start a coup because a coup is an illegitimate attempt to take power and the board's main job is to oversee the CEO and replace them if necessary. That's an expected exercise of power.

The coup was when the CEO reversed the board's decision to oust him and then ousted them.

vasilipupkin3• 2 years ago

Don'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.

throwgfgfd258• 2 years ago

now you can use AI to easily write the type of articles he produces and he's pissed.

You really cannot.

ComplexSystems• 2 years ago

You can even take an enormous sample of articles that he has written and fine tune a model on it, so that it really sounds like him.

vasilipupkin3• 2 years ago

Really? Are you sure ? His article can basically be summed up as don’t believe AI hype from Sama. It’s not particularly well written, he’s no Nabokov. ChatGPT bangs out stuff like this effortlessly. Here, I did it for you https://chatgpt.com/share/67019a6c-453c-8006-88aa-6f32435492...

nomilk• 2 years ago

tl;dr author complains that Sam's predictions of the future of AI are inflated (but doesn't offer any of his own), and complains that AI tools that surprised us last year look mundane now.

The article is written to appeal to people who want to feel clever casually slagging off and dismissing tech.

it appears to have plateaued. GPT-4 now looks less like the precursor to a superintelligence and more like … well, any other chatbot.

What a pathetic observation. Does the author not recall how bad chatbots were pre-LLMs?

What LLMs can do blows my mind daily. There might be some insufferable hype atm, but gees, the math and engineering behind LLMs is incredible, and it's not done yet - they're still improving from more compute alone, not even factoring in architecture discoveries and innovations!

raincole2• 2 years ago

it appears to have plateaued. GPT-4 now looks less like the precursor to a superintelligence and more like … well, any other chatbot.

This is such a ridiculous sentence.

GPT-4 now looks like any other chatbot because the technology advanced so the other chatbots are smarter now as well. Somehow the author is trying to twist this as a bad thing.

asadotzler• 2 years ago

If everyone can catch up so easily, OAI has no moat and SamA is further full of shit asserting that they do.

latexr4• 2 years ago

Distorting the old Chinese proverb, “The best time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word was the first time he opened his mouth. The second best time is now”. We’ve known he’s a scammer for a long time.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

stonethrowaway2• 2 years ago

I would love to read a solid exposé of Worldcoin, but I don’t think I will get that from Buzzfeed or from The Atlantic. Both seemed to be agenda driven and hot headed. I’d like a more impartial breakdown ala AP-style news reporting.

rmltn• 2 years ago

One of the above links is from the MIT Technology Review ...

latexr4• 2 years ago

I don’t think I will get that from Buzzfeed

BuzzFeed News is not BuzzFeed. They were a serious news website¹ staffed by multiple investigative journalists, including a Pulitzer winner heading that division. They received plenty of awards and recognition.² It is indeed a shame they shared a name with BuzzFeed and that no doubt didn’t help, but it does not detract from their work.

or from The Atlantic.

There was no Atlantic link. The other source was MIT Technology Review.

I’d like a more impartial breakdown ala AP-style news reporting.

The Associated Press did report on it³, and the focus was on the privacy implications too. The other time they reported on it⁴ was to announce Spain banned it for privacy concerns.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News#Awards_and_recog...

³ https://apnews.com/article/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-sam-altm...

⁴ https://apnews.com/article/worldcoin-spain-eyeballs-privacy-...

0x1ceb00da• 2 years ago

https://youtu.be/dbKwJM06fRM

latexr4• 2 years ago

Technically true, but also doesn’t advance the conversation in any way. Eventually no one will exist or care about anything, but until then everyone will have to live with the decisions and apathy of those who came before.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

klabb3• 2 years ago

Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics.

Yes. We've been through this again and again. Technology does not follow potential. It follows incentive. (Also, “all of physics”? Wtf is he smoking?)

It’s much more pleasant fantasizing about a benevolent future AI, one that fixes the problems wrought by climate change, than dwelling upon the phenomenal energy and water consumption of actually existing AI today.

I mean, everything good in life uses energy, that’s not AIs fault per se. However, we should absolutely evaluate tech anchored in the present, not the future. Especially with something we understand so poorly like emergent properties of AI. Even when there’s an expectation of rapid changes, the present is a much better proxy than yet-another sociopath with a god-complex whose job is to be a hype-man. Everyone’s predictions are garbage. At least the present is real.

rubyfan3• 2 years ago

I sort of wish there was a filter for my life that would ignore everything AI (stories about AI, people talking about AI and of course content generated by AI).

The world has become a less trustworthy place for a lot of reasons and AI is only making it worse, not better.

rand0mx1• 2 years ago

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

rubyfan3• 2 years ago

Thanks! Now I just need to filter my LinkedIn feed and the corporate AI leaders at work.

keiferski• 2 years ago

Sounds like a good startup idea. Just be sure to use AI for this filter so you can get funded.

wslh6• 2 years ago

Do you use LLMs?

KaoruAoiShiho• 2 years ago

Nobody is taking Sam Altman at his word lol, these ideas about intelligence have been believed for a long time in the tech world and the guy is just the best at monetizing them. People are pursuing this path because of a general conviction in these ideas of themselves, I guess to people like Atlantic writers Sam Altman is the first time they've encountered them but it really has nothing to do with Sam Altman.

Capricorn24812• 2 years ago

Nobody is taking Sam Altman at his word lol

ITT: People taking Sam at his word.

danielmarkbruce3• 2 years ago

100% this. He isn't even saying anything novel (I mean that in a good way).

On top of that, the advance in models for language and physical simulation based models (for protein prediction and weather forecasting as examples) has been so rapid and unexpected that even folks who were previously very skeptical of "AI" are believers - it ain't because Sam Altman is up there talking a lot. I went from AI skeptic to zealot in about 18 months, and I'm in good company.

KaiserPro4• 2 years ago

Someone is buying enough of his bullshit to invest a few billion into openAI.

The problem is, when it pops, which it will, it'll fuck the economy.

lesuorac• 2 years ago

People are taking Altman at his word.

He was literally invited to congress to speak about AI safety. Sure, perhaps people that have a longer memory of the tech world don't trust him. That's actually not a lot of people. A lot of people just aren't following tech (like my in-laws).

nottorp• 2 years ago

The time to stop taking him seriously was when he started his "fear AI, give me the monopoly" campaign.

richrichie• 2 years ago

He seems like any other tech “evangelical” to me.

jacknews• 2 years ago

Does anyone take him at face value anyway?

The other issue is that AI's 'boundless prosperity' is a little like those proposals to bring an asteroid made of gold back to earth. 20m tons, worth $XX trillion at current prices, etc. The point is, the gold price would plummet, at the same time as the asteroid, or well before, and the promised gains would not materialize.

If AI could do everything, we would no longer be able (due to no-one having a job), let alone willing, to pay current prices for the work it would do, and so again, the promised financial gains would not materialize.

Of course in both cases, there could be actual societal benefits - abundant gold, and abundant AI, but they don't translate directly to 'prosperity' IMHO.

rsynnott3• 2 years ago

I mean, in general, if you’re taking CEOs at their word, and particularly CEOs of tech companies at their word, you’re gonna have a bad time. Tech companies, and their CEOs, predict all manner of grandiose nonsense all the time. Very little of it comes to pass, but through the miracle of cognitive biases some people do end up filtering out the stuff that doesn’t happen and declaring them visionary.

bambax• 2 years ago

Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics. He predicts that we may have an all-powerful superintelligence “in a few thousand days.”

It seems fair to say Altman has completed his Musk transformation. Some might argue it's inevitable. And indeed Bill Gates' books in the 90s made a lot of wild promises. But nothing that egregious.

yndoendo• 2 years ago

Both of them remind me of Elizabeth Holmes. She ran Theranos through a promise of lies long enough they turned into fraud.

So far Musk has been pushing the lies out continually to try and prevent any possible exposure to fraud. Like "Getting to Mars will save humanity" or the latest "We will never reach Mars unless Trump is president again". Then again, self driving cars are just around the corner, as stated in 2014 with a fraudulently staged video of their technology, that they just need to work the bugs out.

Altman is making wild clams too with how Machine Learning will slow and reverse climate change while proving that the technology needs vast more resources, specially in power consumption, just to be market viable for business and personal usage.

All three play off people's emotions to repress critical thinking. They are no different than the lying preachers, I can heal you with a touch of my hand, that use religion to gain power and wealth. The three above are just replacing religion with technology.

whamlastxmas6• 2 years ago

This is some really out there thinking, and I think you need to do some basic fact checking bc some of this just isn’t true

n2d4• 2 years ago

The difference between those is that Musk and Altman make wrong predictions about the future; Holmes with Theranos made wrong statements about the present.

One of them is illegal, the other isn't.

m3kw94• 2 years ago

The Atlantic is really going out of their way to hate on Altman. That publication has always been a bit of a whack job of an outfit

throwgfgfd258• 2 years ago

That publication has always been a bit of a whack job of an outfit

This is a bizarre take about a 167-year-old, continuously published magazine.

FireBeyond3• 2 years ago

There's quite a number of posts here that seem determined to attack the integrity of The Atlantic... hm. Everything from "their writers are scared that they'll lose their jobs" to complaints about twenty year old articles not panning out correctly.

throwintothesea4• 2 years ago

The techbro whining about as staid a publication as the Atlantic is truly hilarious. They published some of the first pieces in support of abolition, and now you're upset that they're swinging at the richest grifter in Silicon Valley. Get a grip.

m3kw94• 2 years ago

He brought us AI that is about to change almost everything, be grateful for the magic intelligence in the sky

throwgfgfd258• 2 years ago

It also famously published As We May Think.

thruway516• 2 years ago

"Altman is no physicist. He is a serial entrepreneur, and quite clearly a talented one"

Not sure the record supports that if you remove OpenAi which is a work-in-progress and supposedly not going too great at the moment. A talented 'tech whisperer' maybe?

wslh6• 2 years ago

Sam Altman is only 39 years old. Like it or not, it would be a fallacy to assume he's shown everything he's capable of. He likely has much more to contribute in his lifetime.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

I feel I read that sentence a lot when Sam Bankman Fried was still the darling of the tech intelligentsia, but the closer you are to the huckster and moneyman corner of the spectrum rather than the actual research side the less true that statement is.

mppm• 2 years ago

Around the time of the board coup and Sam's 7-trillion media tour, there were multiple, at the time somewhat credible, rumors of major breakthroughs at Open AI -- GPT5, Q*, and possibly another unnamed project with wow-factor. However, almost a year has passed, and OpenAI has only made incremental improvements public.

So my question is: What does the AI rumor mill say about that? Was all that just hype-building, or is OpenAI holding back some major trump card for when they become a for-profit entity?

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

All hype. Remember when the whole "oh we are so scared to release this model" happen back in the day and it was worse than GPT3?

All of these doing the rounds of foreign governments and acting like artificial general intelligence is just around the corner is what got him this fundraising round today. It's all just games.

javed65422• 2 years ago

probably just waiting for the election to be over before releasing the next gen models

minimaxir• 2 years ago

Q* turned out to be GPT-o1, which was objectively overhyped.

whoiscroberts• 2 years ago

Any person that thinks “automating human thought” is good for humanity is evil.

m3kw94• 2 years ago

You all just sit back and not pick at every word he says, just sit calmly and let him cook. And he’s been cooking

kopirgan• 2 years ago

I generally don't take anyone other than Leon at his word. \s

bhouston• 2 years ago

Sam Allan has to be a promoter and true believer. It is his job to do that and he does have new tech that didn’t exist before and it is game changing.

The issue is more that the company is hemorrhaging talent, and doesn’t have a competitive moat.

But luckily this doesn’t affect most of us, rather it will only possibly harm his investors if it doesn’t work out.

If he continues to have access to resources and can hire well and the core tech can progress to new heights, he will likely be okay.

AndrewKemendo• 2 years ago

OpenAI cant be working on AGI because they have no arc for production robotics controllers

AGI cannot exist in a box that you can control. We figured that out 20 years ago.

Could they start that? Sure theoretically. However they would have to massively pivot and nobody at OAI are robotics experts

mrangle2• 2 years ago

I can't imagine taking The Atlantic seriously on anything. My word. You aren't actually supposed to read the endless ragebait.

Contrary to the Atlantic's almost always intentionally misleading framing, the "dot com boom" did in fact go on to print trillions later and it is still printing them. After what was an ultimately marginal if account clearing dip for many.

I say that as someone who would be deemed to be an Ai pessimist, by many.

But its wildly early to declare anything to be "what it is" and only that, in terms of ultimate benefit. Just like it was and is wild to declare the dot com boom to be over.

architango2• 2 years ago

I can't imagine taking The Atlantic seriously on anything.

Agreed - I stopped taking The Atlantic seriously after their 2009 cover story, "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?"[1] To ignore CDOs, the Glass-Steagal repeal, the co-option of the ratings agencies and the dissolution of lending standards, and instead blame the Great Recession on a few obnoxious megapastors is to completely discard the magazine's credibility.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/did-chr...

FireBeyond3• 2 years ago

Really, you can't see a connection between people promoting ever supernatural rewards for being money and prosperity-driven and stoking that fire right alongside rampant capitalism and reckless decisions on how to protect our financial and economic wellbeing? Especially when even some very very bright people still believe in imaginary creatures in the sky and use that to shape and guide their decision process?

Maybe not "cause", but "contribute notably to".

throwintothesea4• 2 years ago

The Gang Learns That Normal People Don't Take Sam Altman Seriously

tightbookkeeper• 2 years ago

Journalists smell blood in the water. When times were looking better they gave him uncritical praise.

theptip3• 2 years ago

The better reason to stop taking Altman at his word is on the subject of OpenAI building AGI “for the benefit of humanity”.

Now that he’s restructuring the company to be a normal for-profit corp, with a handsome equity award for him, we should assume the normal monopoly-grabbing that we see from the other tech giants.

If the dividend is simply going to the shareholder (and Altman personally) we should be much more skeptical about baking these APIs into the fabric of our society.

The article is asinine; of course a tech CEO is going to paint a picture of the BHAG, the outcome that we get if we hit a home run. That is their job, and the structure of a growth company, to swing for giant wins. Pay attention to what happens if they hit. A miss is boring; some VCs lose some money and nothing much changes.

xyst• 2 years ago

Sam Altman is the modern version of a snake oil salesman

nabla92• 2 years ago

The field is extremely research oriented. You can't stay on top with good engineering and incremental development and refining.

Google just paid over $2.4 billion to get Noam Shazeer back in the company to work with Gemini AI. Google has the deepest pool of AI researchers. Microsoft and Facebook are not far behind.

OpenAI is losing researchers, they have maybe 1-2 years until they become Microsoft subsidiary.

xbar5• 2 years ago

You make it sound like AI researchers are in short supply.

danielmarkbruce3• 2 years ago

For almost all jobs X, "really competent X" are in exceedingly short supply.

nabla92• 2 years ago

Good AI researchers and research teams are.

The whole LLM era was started with the 2017 "Attention is all you need" paper by Google Brain/Research and nobody has done anything same magnitude since.

Noam Shazeer was one of the authors.

wg0• 2 years ago

At the expense of irking many, I'd like to add Musk to the list if someone didn't already.

From robotics, neurology, transport to everything in between - not a word should be taken as is.

cowmix3• 2 years ago

I keep thinking about Sam Altman’s March ’23 interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast—this was after GPT-4’s release and before he was ousted as CEO. Two things he said really stuck with me:

First, he mentioned wishing he was more into AI. While I appreciate the honesty, it was pretty off-putting. Here’s the CEO of a company building arguably the most consequential technology of our time, and he’s expressing apathy? That bugs me. Sure, having a dispassionate leader might have its advantages, but overall, his lack of enthusiasm left a bad taste in my mouth. Why IS he the CEO then?

Second, he talked about going on a “world tour” to meet ChatGPT users and get their feedback. He actually mentioned meeting them in pubs, etc. That just sounded like complete BS. It felt like politician-level insincerity—I highly doubt he’s spoken with any end-users in a meaningful way.

And one more thing: Altman being a well-known ‘prepper’ doesn’t sit well with me. No offense to preppers, but it gives me the impression he’s not entirely invested in civilization’s long-term prospects. Fine for a private citizen, but not exactly reassuring for the guy leading an organization that could accelerate its collapse.

Schiendelman5• 2 years ago

Hi there!

I've done a huge amount of political organizing in my life, for common good - influencing governments to build tens of billions of dollars worth of electric rail infrastructure.

I'm also a big prepper. It's important to understand that stigmatizing prepping is very dangerous - specifically to those who reject it.

Whether it's a gas main break, a forest fire, an earthquake, or a sci-fi story, encouraging people to become resilient to disaster is incredibly beneficial for society as a whole, and very necessary for individuals. The vast, vast majority of people who do it are benefiting their entire community by doing so. Even, as much as I'm sure I'd dislike him if I met him, Sam Altman. Him being a prepper is good for us, at least indirectly, and possibly directly.

Just look at the stories in NC right now - people who were ready to clear their own roads, people taking in others because they have months of food.

Be careful not to ascribe values to behaviors like you're doing.

whamlastxmas6• 2 years ago

I had a prepper phase too and I’m as leftist and pro human as they come. It’s just fun to organize and plan and has nothing to do with alex jones selling me on the frogs turning gay. And if there’s ever a natural disaster (like I just lost water for a week due to a hurricane) it’s nice to have things like 55 gallons of fresh water on standby.

cowmix3• 2 years ago

I agree that prepping itself is completely fine, and people should be prepared for natural disasters, civil unrest, or whatever scenarios they’re most comfortable with. Building resilience is beneficial for both individuals and communities, and I can see how it plays an important role, especially in situations like the ones you mentioned in NC.

My issue, though, is with someone like Sam Altman—a leader of an organization that could potentially accelerate the downfall of civilization—being so deeply invested in prepping. Altman isn’t just a regular guy preparing for emergencies; he’s an incredibly wealthy individual who has openly discussed stockpiling machine guns and setting up private land he can retreat to at a moment’s notice. It’s that level of preparation, combined with his position at the helm of one of the most consequential tech companies, that doesn’t sit well with me. It feels like he’s hedging against the very future his company might be shaping.

GolfPopper4• 2 years ago

There's a difference between resilience and being prepared for the unexpected on one hand (a go-bag (for sudden travel, not Mad Max), on- and off-site backups of data & physical documents, a couple weeks of food & water, an emergency expenses account separate from savings, plus physical currency) and, on the other hand, being under the delusion that hiding in a super-stocked bunker is any sort of acceptable answer to the possible collapse of civilization.

And Altman is definitely in the latter camp with, "But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."[1]

That a guy who says the above, and also says that AI may be an existential threat to humanity, also runs the world's most prominent AI company is disturbing.

1. https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper

dmitrygr• 2 years ago

Someone took that grifter at his word ever? Haha! Wait you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder. Hahahaha

GolfPopper4• 2 years ago

Apparently a whole lot of people think the guy who's running a <checks notes> for-proft eyeball-scanning cryptocurrency, "for the benefit of humanity" is very serious when he says his non-profit (but also for-profit) AI company is also "for the benefit of humanity".

throwaway918299• 2 years ago

I’m just expecting a Microsoft acquisition and Altman exits and moves on to his next grift.

twodave• 2 years ago

The amount of comparisons I see between some theoretical AGI and something more akin to a science fiction like Jane from the Ender saga or the talking head from That Hideous Strength is I guess not surprising. But in both of those cases the only way to make the plot work was to make the AI literally an other-worldly being.

I am personally not sold on AGI being possible. We might be able to make some poor imitation of it, and maybe an LLM is the closest we get, but to me it smacks of “man attempts to create life in order to spite his creator.” I think the result of those kinds of efforts will end more like That Hideous Strength (in disaster).

mark_l_watson2• 2 years ago

I appreciate everything that OpenAI has done, the science of modeling and the expertise in productization.

But, but, but… their drama, or Altman’s drama is now too much for me, personally.

With a lot of reluctance I just stopped doing the $20/month subscription. The advanced voice mode is lots of fun to demo to people, and o1 models are cool, but I am fine just using multiple models for chat on Abacus.AI and Meta, an excellent service, and paid for APIs from Google, Mistral, Groq, and OpenAI (and of course local models).

I hope I don’t sound petty, but I just wanted to reduce their paid subscriber numbers by -1.

whamlastxmas6• 2 years ago

It’s really sad to see all the personal attacks and cynicism that has no basis in reality. OpenAI has an amazing product and was first to market with something game changing for billions of people. Calling him a fraud and scammer is super ridiculous

meroes3• 2 years ago

Game changing for billions? Please give an example. I’m fine to be proven wrong but I don’t know what you could mean.

whamlastxmas6• 2 years ago

It will teach you anything in any language step by step and answer every single question directly without having to google stuff and find only semi adjacent question and answers. It has completely replaced the need to google things in many instances. I think this is pretty game changing and it’s available to billions of people.

xbar5• 2 years ago

I do not know about any of that or your feelings of sadness.

I have skepticism of his predictions, and disregard for his exaggerations.

I have a ChatGPT subscription and build features on OpenAI technology.

krick• 2 years ago

Since it's paywalled, I assume we are discussing the title (as usual). It implies that there was the time when [we] took him at his word. Uh, ok, maybe. But what does it matter? "We" aren't the people at VCs who fund it, I suppose? So, what does it matter if "we" take him at his word? Hell, even if it suddenly went public, it still wouldn't mean much if we trust the guy or not, because we could buy shares for the same reason we buy crypto or TSLA shares.

As a matter of fact, I suspect the author of the article actually belongs to gullible minority who ever took Altman at his word, and now is telling everyone what they already knew. But so what? What are we even discussing? Nobody calls to remove their OpenAI (or, in fact, Anthropic, or whatever) account, as long as we find it useful for something, I suppose. It just makes no difference at all if that writer or his readers take Altman at his word, their opinions have no real effect on the situation, it seems. They are merely observers.

slenk• 2 years ago

Same needs to happen to Elon Musk

yumraj• 2 years ago

Open AI’s AGI is like Tesla’s completely automated self driving.

So close, yet so far. And, both help the respective CEOs in hyping the respective companies.

rpgbr• 2 years ago

I’ll never understand how so many smart people haven’t realize that the biggest “hallucination” produced by AI was this Sam Altman.

paradox460• 2 years ago

He's been grifting long before the current AI hype

He went from a failed startup to president of yc to ultra wealthy investor in the span of about a decade. That's sus

breck• 2 years ago

In 2017 Daniel Gross, a YC partner at the time, recruited me to join the YC software team. Sam Altman was president of YC at this time.

During my interview with Jared Friedman, their CTO, I asked him what Sam was trying to create, the greatest investment firm of all time surpassing Berkshire Hathway, or the greatest tech company surpassing Google? Without hesitation, Jared said Google. Sam wanted to surpass Google. (He did it with his other company, OpenAI, and not YC, but he did it nonetheless)

This morning I tried Googling something and the results sucked compared to what ChatGPT gave me.

Google still creates a ton of value (YouTube, Gmail, etc), but he has surpassed Google in terms of cutting edge tech.

hdivider• 2 years ago

In my view we should also stop taking the Great Technoking at his word and move away from lionizing this old well-moneyed elite in general.

Real technological progress in the 21st century is more capital-intensive than before. It also usually requires more diverse talent.

Yet the breakthroughs we can make in this half-century can be far greater than any before: commercial-grade fusion power (where Lawrence Livermore National Lab currently leads, thanks to AI[1]), quantum computing, spintronics, twistronics, low-cost room-temperature superconductors, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, nanotechnology.

Thus, it's much more about the many, not the one. Multi-stakeholder. Multi-person. Often led by one technology leader, sure, but this one person must uplift and be accountable to the many. Otherwise we get the OpenAI story, and end-justifies-the-means type of groupthink wrt. those who worship the technoking.

[1] https://www.llnl.gov/article/49911/high-performance-computin...

luxuryballs• 2 years ago

I wonder how many governments and A-listers are investing heavily in the rapid development of commodity AI video that is indistinguishable from real video. Does it seem paranoid?

They would at least be more believable if they blast claims that a certain video must be fake, especially with how absurd and shocking it is.

wnevets• 2 years ago

He just needs a paltry trillion dollars to make this AI thing happen. Stop being so short sighted.

ortusdux• 2 years ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41744167

7e• 2 years ago

I mean, there is a reason the board tried their best to exorcise Sam Altman him from the company. OpenAI could be the next Loopt.

swiftcoder2• 2 years ago

I feel like the time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word was probably when he was shilling for an eyeball-scanning cryptocurrency...

But apparently as a society we like handing multi-billion dollar investments to folks with a proven track record of (not actually shipping) complete bullshit.

ein0p• 2 years ago

Anyone who takes startup CEOs at their word has never worked in a startup. The plasticity of their ethics is legendary when there’s a prospect of increasing the revenues.

EchoReflection• 2 years ago

according to the book "The Sociopath Next Door", approximately 1 in 25 Americans is a "sociopath" who "does not feel shame, guilt, or remorse, and can do anything at all without what "normal" people think of as an internal voice labeling things as "right" or "wrong". It makes sense to me that sociopaths would be over-represented among C-level executives and "high performers" in every field.

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-sociopat...

angarg12• 2 years ago

Remember, these technologies already have a track record. The world can and should evaluate them, and the people building them, based on their results and their effects, not solely on their supposed potential.

But that's not how the market works.

razodactyl• 2 years ago

I think we should consider companies that create or own their own hardware, the ability to generate cheap electricity and the ability of neural networks to continuously learn.

I still "feel the AGI". I think Ben Goertzel'a recent talk on ML Street Talk was quite grounded / too much hype clouds judgement.

In all honesty, once the hype dies down, even if AGI/ASI is a thing - we're still going to be heads down back to work as usual so why not enjoy the ride?

Covid was a great eye-opener, we dream big but in reality people jump over each other for... toilet paper... gotta love that Gaussian curve of IQ right?

euphetar• 2 years ago

While I do not have much sympathy for Altman, the article is very low quality and contains zero analysis

Yeah, maybe on the surface chatbots turned out to be chatbots. But you have to be a poor journalist to stop your investigation of the issue at that and conclude AI is no big deal. Nuance, anyone?

_davide_• 2 years ago

Did I ever? :')

_hyn3• 2 years ago

The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires. (The Atlantic recently entered a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

Hilarious.

neuroelectron3• 2 years ago

I'm surprised nobody noticed the elephant in the room, the fact that ChatGPT has a very hard woke slant. That said, -o1 has gotten a lot better but it's not as uncensored and unbiased as GPT-3 was when it was first released. For a while GPT-4 was very clearly biased for the left and U.S. Democrats particularly.

Now keep in mind that this is going to be the default option for a lot of forums and social media for automated moderation. Reddit is already using it a lot and now a lot of the front page is clearly feedback farming for OpenAI. What I'm getting at is we're moving towards a future where only a certain type of dialog will be allowed on most social media and Sam Altman and his sponsors get to decide what that looks like.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

"At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman's entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don't get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present."

Old tactic.

The project that would eventually became Microsoft Corp. was founded on it. Gates told Ed Roberts the inventor of the first personal computer that he had a programming for it. He had no such programming langugage.

Gates proceeded to espouse "vapourware" for the decades. Arguably Microsoft and its disciples are still doing so today.

Will the tactic ever stop working. Who knows.

Focus on the future that no one can predict, not the present that anyone can describe.

tim333• 2 years ago

Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become

Is kind of a boring way of looking at things. I mean we have fairly good chatbots and image generators now but it's where the future is going that's the interesting bit.

Lumping AI in with dot coms and crypto seems a bit silly. It's a different category of thing.

(By the way Sam being shifty or not techy or not seems kind of incidental to it all.)

kthejoker2• 2 years ago

Can't stop something you never started.

It's funny we coach people not to ascribe human characteristics to LLMS..

But we seem equally capable of denying the very human characteristics in our would be overlords.

Which warlord will we canonize next?

msephton• 2 years ago

Sam blinks furiously when he's not telling the truth.

make3• 2 years ago

I sympathize, but I feel like people are over-selling the "end of AI".

The progress that we've seen in the past two years has been completely insane compared to literally any other field. LLMs complete absolutely insane reasoning tasks, including math proofs at the level of a "mediocre grad student" (which is super impressive). For better or worse, image generation & now video generation is indistinguishable from the real thing, a lot of the times.

I think that crazy business types and media really overhyped the fuck out of AI so fucking high, that even with such strong progress, it's still not enough.

It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

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