Submitted 1 month ago by psychothumbs@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/
he declares that the AI revolution is on the verge of unleashing boundless prosperity and radically improving human life
I think he means productivity will go up 240% and we’ll get 8% raises to match, but we’ll spend all of it getting nickel-and-dimed on ‘premium human concierge’ services whenever we get stuck talking in circles with support chatbots
I bet in 10 years my insurance plan will no longer cover imaging being interpereted by a radiologist.
That’s a very sharp prediction I will run that by some people.
Considering how fractured medical billing is these days, often the techs contracted by your in-network doctors office are actually out-of-network.
Isn’t medical billing fun?
Yeah this might actually not be that far from reality. Computer vision already did a large amount of the lifting, with the massive pushes towards AI, AI will take the rest of us plebians healthcare.
He is a tech bro. Almost everything he is saying is a lie.
Almost everything tech bros say is to boost short term share prices. Any resemblance to the truth is coincidental.
*“Podcast-bro”
Yeah. It sucks I had to be downvoted into irrelevance way back when this clown was first becoming worshipped by the tech bros.
I don’t take pride in patting myself on the back, but I was fucking right all along about this douche.
The day of reckoning is approaching fast. May this teach a lesson to my fellow techies that tech billionaires aren’t any better than the others billionaires. I hope there won’t be another cryptoscam after LLMs 🤷♀️
Or, if there’s another one, I hope that it won’t consume massive amounts of energy. If techbros only hurt themselves, I suppose it’s fine.
How is LLM a cryptoscam?
When that major drama unfolded with him getting booted then re-hired. It was super fucking obvious that it was all about the money, the data, and the salesmanship He is nothing but a fucking tech-bro. Part Theranos, part Musk, part SBF, part (whatever that pharma asshat was), and all fucking douchebag.
AI is fucking snake oil and an excuse to scrape every bit of data like it’s collecting every skin cell dropping off of you.
I’d agree the first part but to say all Ai is snake oil is just untrue and out of touch. There are a lot of companies that throw “Ai” on literally anything and I can see how that is snake oil.
But real Ai, everything to protein folding to robotics is here to stay, good or bad. It’s already too valuable for governments to ignore. And Ai is improving at a rate that I think most are underestimating (faster than Moore’s law).
Martin Shkreli is the scumbag’s name you’re looking for.
From wikipedia: He was convicted of financial crimes for which he was sentenced to seven years in federal prison, being released on parole after roughly six and a half years in 2022, and was fined over 70 million dollars
Thank you!
It’s not snake oil. It is a way to brute force some problems which it wasn’t possible to brute force before.
And also it’s very useful for mass surveillance and war.
I never took him at his word.
Seriously, what dipshit is going, “hmm well now he’s gone too far!”
not only does he burn through cash, he burns through resources making life worse now for everybody: AI rivals crypto in resource waisting while not contributing at all to any improvements. I fail to see “brighter future” for us through AI as it is energy-intensive, unsustainable endeavor for which we are woefully unprepared both materially (energy efficiency, semiconductor manufacturing/recycling, etc) and psychologically (ethics etc.). Yeah, grand on paper, terrible in reality
What is really annoying is that there are a lot of really good data modeling applications, they are just in research areas. Generative AI is absolutely a waste of resources, but a ton of money and energy is spent on that instead of on the applications that are actually bearing fruit.
Generative AI is definitely useful - it’s mighty putty. It fills in gaps and sticks things together wonderfully. It let’s you easily do things near impossible before
It’s also best used sparingly
AI is worse than crypto. Most crypto projects use proof of stake which is way more resource efficient than mining. Also the morning that does happen usually happens where there is excess generation instead of azure datacenters
some crypto learned to be efficient, others did not. We still do have crypto-mining botnets. Crypto remains to be useless to humanity and very profitable for few. Same with AI. Same with stock market. Instead of producing something of value we keep on burning through resources while selected few enjoy bonfire others have to fight to stay alive…
Was this not obvious at the very least when his own board kicked him to the curb due to an inability to trust him?
Really? The guy behind the company called “Open” AI that has contributed the least to the open source AI communities, while constantly making grand claims and telling us we’re not ready to see what he’s got. We’re supposed to stop taking that guys word?
Wow, thanks journalists, what would we do without you.
Should your disappointment here really be pointed at the journalists?
Which group of people uncritically magnified his voice and others like it for years? Tech journalism builds the legacies of people like Musk, Bankman-Fried and Altman.
the techbros that think that with sufficiently advanced AI we could solve climate change are so stupid. like, we might not have a perfect solution, but we have ideas on how to start to make things better (less car-centric cities, less meat and animal products, more investment in public transport and solar), and it gets absolutely ignored. why would it be different when an AI gives the solution? unless they want the “eat fat-free food and you will be thin” solution to climate change, in which we change absolutely nothing of our current situation but it is magically ecological
I don’t think you’re imagining the same thing they are when you hear the word “AI”. They’re not imagining a computer that prints out a new idea that is about as good as the ideas that humans have come up with. Even that would be amazing (it would mean that a computer could do science and engineering about as well as a human) but they’re imagining a computer that’s better than any human. Better at everything. It would be the end of the world as we know it, and perhaps the start of something much better.
That’s the thing, there could be a human 10’000x smarter than Einstein telling us what to do… And it would still not happen.
There was a (fiction) book I was called “all the birds in the sky”. I really liked it. Highly recommend.
One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that’s like “the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project”. And I’m just screaming at the book “use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey”.
There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they’re difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.
$ GPT how do we solve climate change?
GPT: command not found
$ cd /home/chatgpt
cd: command not found
Name a CEO tech bro that isn’t a raving douche.
Does Woz count? He’s CEO of the Silicon Valley Comic Con (or he used to be anyway).
Also just gonna go with an old guard and say maybe Tom, once he sold Myspace he fucked right off. I think he has a travel blog or some shit.
Though I wouldn’t consider him a tech bro.
Oh I’m streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.
Stop trying to get make “streets ahead” happen!
Your criticism is so fetch.
Ohh i’m stroads ahead, i never heard of that term.
It’s beyond time to stop believing and parroting whatever would make your source the most money is literally true without verifying any of it.
News at 10! It was time to stop taking his word for everything. Quite a while back.
Applicable to everyone really, especially those that want to sell you something that sounds too good to be true.
He’s the musk in making
People did that? Lol
Who is Sam Altman?
(This is a rethorical question)
He is the cousin of Sam Mainman, who is an actual human being.
Don’t forget the lesser known Sam Shiftman and Sam Ctrlman.
And also the cousin of Sam Neuman. Another con artist, but this one relying on novel techniques.
The best time to stop taking Altman seriously was ten years ago.
The second best time is now.
I’ll keep my open source generative models and will be happy to watch this bozo and his cultists and the artbros all eat shit all year-round.
but for now, his approach is textbook Silicon Valley mythmaking
The difference is that in this case it is not hype—it is reality. It’s not a myth, it is happening right now. We are chugging inevitably down the track to the most dramatic discovery in human history. And Altman’s views on solving the climate crisis, disease, nuclear fusion… they are all within reach. If anything we need to increase our speed to get us there ASAP.
Tell me honestly, are you a bot or do you sincerely believe this shit and based on which qualification and experience?
Gunpowder, electricity, combustion engines, universal electronic computers, rocketry, lasers, plastics - none of these made any dramatic changes. It was all slow iterative process of fuzzy transitions and evolution.
While these made pretty fundamental impacts. Sam Altman’s company is using fuckloads of data to calculate some predictive coefficients, and the rest of its product can be done by students.
It’s just real-life power controllers trying their muscles at bending the tech industry with usual means - capturing resources and using them to assert control. There were no such resources in the beginning, and then datasets turned into something like oil.
Generally in computing (when a computer is a universal machine) everyone able to program can do a lot of things. This makes the equality there kinda inconvenient for real life bosses who can call airstrikes and deal in oil tankers.
There was the smart and slow way of killing that via slow oligopolization, but everyone can see how that doesn’t work well. Some people slowly move to better things, and some were fine with TV telling them how to live, they don’t even need Internet. All these technologies are still kinda modular and even transparent. And despite what many people think, both idealistic left and idealistic right build technologies for the same ultimate goal, so Fediverse is good and Nostr is good and everything that functions is good.
So - that works, but human societies are actually developing some kind of immunity to centralized bot-poisoned platforms.
To keep the stability of today’s elites (I’d say these are by now pretty international), you need something qualitatively different. A machine that is almost universal in solving tasks, but doesn’t give the user transparency. That’s their “AI”. And those enormous datasets and computing power are the biggest advantage of that kind of people over us. So they are using that advantage. That’s the kind of solution that they can do and we can’t.
Simultaneously to that there’s a lot of AI hype being raised to try and replace normal computing with something reliant on those centralized supply chains. Hardware production was more distributed before the last couple of decades. Now there are a few well-controllable centers. They simply want to do the same with consumer software. Because if the consumers don’t need something, they won’t have that something when they see a need.
All these aside, today’s kinds of mass surveillance can’t be done with something like that “AI”. There simply won’t be enough people to have sufficient control.
So - there are a few notable traits of this approach converging on the same interest.
It’s basically a project to conserve elites. The new generation of thieves and bureaucrats wants to become the new aristocracy.
You’re right. This is just “SaaS”, “cloud APIs” approach turned to 11 - making some thing unavailable to everyone unless they agree to agree with any conditions you come up in the future. For example, if Github Copilot becomes genuinely and uniquely very useful, that’s bad for the software development industry over the entire world: it means that every single software dev company will have to pay “tax” to Microsoft.
How do we not know that this isn’t an AI generated Sam Altman?
I would like to be able to listen to someone who is at the top of their game since it’s most likely them who know the most. If they are the CEO of a company about the thing, that would make sense. I’ve seen plenty of enthusiasts start their own company because they had a lot of knowledge on the subject. Who do i look for the best information about the tech of tomorrow if not the people who are making it?
Sam is actually a liar though.
Everyone in open source AI has been calling him a snake ever since llama1 came out. If you want a more authoritative source, look to the CEO of huggingface, oldschool AI researchers and such.
He is not the one making it.
Yann LeCun would probably be a better source. He does actual research (unlike Altman), and I’ve never seen him over-hype or fear monger (unlike Altman).
Now this is a sh.itjust.works comment if I ever saw one. Gold medal, keep it up.
Has people start making Sam Alternator’s AI image doing incendiary stuff? Maybe we should start doing that.
very_well_lost@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s time to stop taking any CEO at their word.
GrabtharsHammer@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The best time was 100 years ago. The second-best time is today.
very_well_lost@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Hear hear!
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 1 month ago
We should never have taken them at their word.
oconnordaniel@infosec.pub 1 month ago
Not just CEOs… basically everyone.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s time to take CEO’s money away!
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
The word it’s time to take the CEOs away
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I think the quote that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a bit older, and said about all the lessons of history before it.
Somehow humanity doesn’t like the wisest rules out there. And prefers to read Palanick and talk about post-modernism instead of looking at the root.