Money wins, every time. They’re not concerned with accidentally destroying humanity with an out-of-control and dangerous AI who has decided “humans are the problem.” (I mean, that’s a little sci-fi anyway, an AGI couldn’t “infect” the entire internet as it currently exists.)
However, it’s very clear that the OpenAI board was correct about Sam Altman, with how quickly him and many employees bailed to join Microsoft directly. If he was so concerned with safeguarding AGI, why not spin up a new non-profit.
Oh, right, because that was just Public Relations horseshit to get his company a head-start in the AI space while fear-mongering about what is an unlikely doomsday scenario.
So, let’s review:
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The fear-mongering about AGI was always just that. How could an intelligence that requires massive amounts of CPU, RAM, and database storage even concievably able to leave the confines of its own computing environment? It’s not like it can “hop” onto a consumer computer with a fraction of the same CPU power and somehow still be able to compute at the same level. AI doesn’t have a “body” and even if it did, it could only affect the world as much as a single body could. All these fears about rogue AGI are total misunderstandings of how computing works.
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Sam Altman went for fear mongering to temper expectations and to make others fear pursuing AGI themselves. He always knew his end-goal was profit, but like all good modern CEOs, they have to position themselves as somehow caring about humanity when it is clear they could give a living flying fuck about anyone but themselves and how much money they make.
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Sam Altman talks shit about Elon Musk and how he “wants to save the world, but only if he’s the one who can save it.” I mean, he’s not wrong, but he’s also projecting a lot here. He’s exactly the fucking same, he claimed only he and his non-profit could “safeguard” AGI and here he’s going to work for a private company because hot damn he never actually gave a shit about safeguarding AGI to begin with. He’s a fucking shit slinging hypocrite of the highest order.
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Last, but certainly not least. Annie Altman, Sam Altman’s younger, lesser-known sister, has held for a long time that she was sexually abused by her brother. All of these rich people are all Jeffrey Epstein levels of fucked up, which is probably part of why the Epstein investigation got shoved under the rug. You’d think a company like Microsoft would already know this or vet this. They do know, they don’t care, and they’ll only give a shit if the news ends up making a stink about it. That’s how corporations work.
So do other Lemmings agree, or have other thoughts on this?
And one final point for the right-wing cranks: Not being able to make an LLM say fucked up racist things isn’t the kind of safeguarding they were ever talking about with AGI, so please stop conflating “safeguarding AGI” with “preventing abusive racist assholes from abusing our service.” They aren’t safeguarding AGI when they prevent you from making GPT-4 spit out racial slurs or other horrible nonsense. They’re safeguarding their service from loser ass chucklefucks like you.
I agree we’re far out, but not as far as you think. Advancements are insane and AGI could be here in 5-10 years. The way the industry have been attempting it the past decade is wrong though, training should be more indepth than images/videos, I think a few are starting to understand how to do more indepth training, so even more progress will start soon
I think 5-10 years is optimistic given how much hand tuning / manual training has to take place. Given how insanely long it’s taken to get where we are and how many times I’ve heard machine intelligence oversold, and based on what LLMs can do I think we are still many decades out.
That said, what ML and AI can do is still game changing and will still have an impact even if it isn’t some kind of scary skynet AGI thing.
We’ve been promised self driving cars for over 10 years and still aren’t close, I think we’re a long ways away from AGI.
I would even argue the only way to get self-driving cars that actually work well is with AGI. I don’t think we’re going to get either in a very long time.
Self driving cars as an area in which straight AI would probably work very well. I don’t think we need a full-on intelligence to drive around.
Anyway we already do have self-driving cars they’re just not very mainstream yet. Mostly because they’re prohibitively expensive and no one trusts them exactly but that’s more because there’s other idiot humans around than anything else.
To be fair, that promise came from someone who is clearly a conman of a swindler. If you ever took that promise seriously… I’m sorry.
Elon/Tesla is far from the only outfit working on self driving. Chevy Cruise is the one that recently dragged a person under the car for dozens of feet.
For sure, but the traditional motor vehicle companies that were dragged kicking and screaming into the EV game were not making the same predictions of how quickly we would get to self-driving. That was pretty much all Elon Musk setting the absurd timelines, and a handful of tech companies who also were pursuing driverless tech. I would say the “serious” car companies never promised that, but maybe I’m wrong and just never saw it.
No I absolutely agree with you, I’ve been skeptical of all the self driving news for years. However, I was using it as a parallel to other AI based discussions. While Elon may have been over hyping what was going to be possible in the near future, there is no evidence that other people aren’t doing the same now.
Just like with autonomous vehicles, we’ve made impressive leaps in what ML can do, but I think there is still a long road ahead.
Entirely agreed, we have such a long path ahead.
I think you are being optimistic.
If you are old enough to remember AIM chatbots, this current generation is maybe multiple times more advanced, not exponentially so. From what I have seen, all the incredible advancements have been in image production.
This leads me to believe that AGI has never been the true commercial goal, but rather an advancement of propaganda media and its creation.
Uh what? Why wouldn’t it be because text/image generation isn’t even on the same plane of difficulty as AGI?