[HN Gopher] Three Observations
___________________________________________________________________
Three Observations
Author : davidbarker
Score : 179 points
Date : 2025-02-09 21:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.samaltman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.samaltman.com)
| imjonse wrote:
| "as we get closer to achieving AGI, we believe that trending more
| towards individual empowerment is important; the other likely
| path we can see is AI being used by authoritarian governments to
| control their population through mass surveillance and loss of
| autonomy."
|
| The AI being controlled by megacorps scenario conveniently left
| out.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Currently, OpenAI is the only real big corporation that
| controls it, but DeepSeek and the myriad academic researchers
| working on making the models even more efficient are smaller
| scale and fairly disruptive.
| pithanyChan wrote:
| > even more efficient are smaller scale and fairly
| disruptive.
|
| your tiny powerful PC "against" data centers running
| tickytackytock style brainwashing, priming rythms over days,
| weeks, months, personalized and perfectly timed with all that
| IoT you pass every day everywhere, just for the sale, the
| vote, disrupting your cognitive processes, watching you react
| and act, testing and quantifying your interactions and their
| (crawling:) _psycho-social_ envelopment of your
| development... berry undisruptive, if you ask me, all while
| you think you 're so very normal, thank you very much.
|
| not much to hope for except "uuuuh you can makes animes and
| animations for bluestergram and threats" and ADverse content
| for le Tube and run automated companies whose supply chains
| will be just that and maybe maybe maybe train a wAIfu to post
| on XXX to hopefully find an accelerating ( or exhilarating)
| and adequately perverted one made of flesh and so on ...
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Yep. There's a big difference between personal truth and
| statiscal truth.
|
| In the short term, an individual can avoid the megacorp
| manipulations. But society will change and those changes
| will affect the individual.
| coderenegade wrote:
| At this stage, it's looking entirely possible that large
| closed models aren't viable as a moat, because, by virtue
| of making the model available for use, you open yourself up
| to having your weights distilled. AI, like anything else,
| will hit diminishing returns, because there's only so far
| ahead you can look without error bars exploding, and beyond
| a certain point, writing "better" code is an academic
| exercise. Under these circumstances, it would be reasonable
| to expect that the average person could have a decent
| amount of useful intelligence at their fingertips.
|
| The cynic in me suspects that the result will be zero
| public access, and a b2b AI service model only from the big
| players. The optimist in me hopes that the genie has
| already been unbottled, and open weights (if not
| necessarily open source) has enough momentum to ensure that
| people can host this stuff on their own if they so choose.
| In both cases, training data will be so locked down it'll
| make breaking into the Pentagon look like an excursion to
| the sand pit.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have considerable
| control over state of the art models.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Even pointing that out is kind of a distraction from the real
| issue: DOGE is currently an excellent demonstration that the
| distinction between authoritarian governments and megacorps is
| a mostly-artificial one, which can and will be blurred to
| irrelevance if doing so is convenient for the powers that be.
| snozolli wrote:
| "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because
| it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito
| Mussolini
| Gys wrote:
| https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-
| quote-...
| snozolli wrote:
| Yeah, I've seen the two sites that claim that it's a fake
| quote. The link you posted contains a bunch of
| doublespeak in an attempt to avoid the fact that fascism
| leans very heavily into corporatism.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Whether it's fake or not is missing the point. Either
| way, Italian fascism was corporatist. But "corporatism"
| doesn't mean what people think it means. It refers to
| dealing with society in terms of different fields,
| professions, and industries, with "corporation" referring
| to groups that represented the common interests of those.
| It's not used here in the common sense of "legally
| recognized business" and it doesn't refer to rule by said
| businesses.
| card_zero wrote:
| So just say that and don't post a fake quote, jeez.
| Wikiquote has it under "misattributed":
|
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini#Misattribu
| ted
|
| "You won't win anyone over with fake quotes" -- Joan of
| Arc
| snozolli wrote:
| I didn't post a fake quote. I pasted a quote that two
| sites -- one of which is nearly a direct copy of the
| other -- claim is fake.
|
| Do you disagree that fascism leans heavily into
| corporatism? Surely you realize that's the point here,
| right? If your entire argument is "I don't believe that
| Mussolini actually wrote that" then we have nothing to
| discuss.
| coderenegade wrote:
| Sovereignty is the ultimate business, because you get paid
| just for existing. You become the ultimate rentier, because
| you own all land by default, and have a monopoly on violence.
|
| The British East India Company outright ruled vast areas of
| India; it was eventually nationalized, and all territories it
| controlled were ceded to the crown because it became too
| powerful in its own right.
| zazazache wrote:
| lol, lmao even
|
| 1) give me more money and i will make you rich 2) don't look at
| deepseek 3) I repeat: there is no reason to not keep giving me
| EXPONENTIALLY more money to boil all of the oceans
| llamaimperative wrote:
| > Over time, in fits and starts, the steady march of human
| innovation [alongside monumental efforts of risk mitigation of
| each new innovation] has brought previously unimaginable levels
| of prosperity and improvements to almost every aspect of people's
| lives.
|
| Anyway, AI/AGI will not yield economic liberation for the masses.
| We already produce more than enough for economic liberation all
| over the world, many times over. It hasn't happened. Why? Snuck
| in here:
|
| > the price of... a few inherently limited resources like land
| may rise even more dramatically.
|
| This is really the crux of it. The price of land will skyrocket,
| driving the "cost of living" (cost of land) wedge further between
| the haves and have-nots.
| derektank wrote:
| Can you define what you mean by economic liberation? For most
| of economic history, I think the definition would have been
| freedom from famine and slavery and I think on both counts
| we've been wildly successful. Both basically only occur in
| failed states, where there's either no government at all
| (Somalia, Sudan, parts of Iraq and Syria) or the government is
| an authoritarian dictatorship (North Korea, Venezuela)
|
| I ask, because I think you might be overestimating the ability
| of the current global system to produce "economic liberation",
| depending upon what you mean. A rough estimate of GDP per
| capita would put it at ~$20K if you adjust for purchasing
| power, less than $15K if you don't. That's well below what most
| people in the developed world would consider to be free of
| burden or worry and it assumes a completely equal distribution
| of all production, which is obviously unreasonable.
|
| We need to continue to push the ball forward in growing wealth
| by continuing to improve productivity, which is going to
| require continued advancements in technology like mass adoption
| of AI.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Oh sure, I'm not one of those "the world is so awful" people.
| We've made _immense_ progress on a lot of very important
| dimensions.
|
| Fair point on the current output not producing enough to
| really give people their time back.
|
| And yes I agree, we should continue pushing productivity
| forward. My point is only that productivity growth _by
| itself_ does not necessarily yield anything close to the
| optimal distribution of its benefits. In fact we have good
| reason to believe that higher tiers of technology which
| produce more technological leverage owned by fewer and fewer
| people are naturally _antagonistic_ to optimal distribution
| of its benefits.
|
| I'll take a fairly expansive definition of "optimal
| distribution" here to just say we should shoot at least for a
| distribution of wealth that is socially and politically
| stable for a free society in the long run.
| djeastm wrote:
| >A rough estimate of GDP per capita would put it at ~$20K if
| you adjust for purchasing power, less than $15K if you don't.
|
| Is that spread across only working adults or does it include
| children? A better metric to examine might be per family, if
| you have it.
| alexashka wrote:
| > Can you define what you mean by economic liberation?
|
| Not having to work outside of providing basic necessities for
| yourself and the rest of humanity.
|
| As for GDP - economists have been embarrassing and
| discrediting themselves for decades - please don't cite their
| propaganda in discussions about the real world.
|
| You need to measure real world things. Can we grow enough
| food, can we build enough shelter, can we transport goods,
| can we make clothes, basic medicine? Without working 40
| hours/week? The answer should be obvious.
|
| This insane talk of productivity is more economist
| propaganda. We've been plenty productive for a long time. The
| problem is an incompetent elite and a populace that continues
| to not believe their lying eyes, citing 'experts'.
| pithanyChan wrote:
| a) to be free from the enforcement of someones desperate
| desire to hard-code envy into children via products, ads and
| media
|
| b) to not have schools and teachers filter and then reinforce
| pupils for jobs that serve class construction
|
| c) to make sure that every kid can get it's near infinite and
| non-hazardous (before creative construction) LEGOs that they
| can play with in peaceful environments where fathers and
| mothers have enough on their accounts to provide peaceful and
| unhealthy-stress-free environments and food and water
|
| c) so that anyone can at least try long enough, if they so
| wish, to become a polymath scientist, artist and craftsman,
| and if it doesn't work out, to never have to be angry at some
| pre-emptively envious people who create and abuse crisis to
| drive pointlessly higher and higher prices that are NOT
| supported by any logic or otherwise reasonable justification
| lukev wrote:
| This is a key point. Given current overall levels of economic
| productivity, we should all be working 3-4 day weeks, at most.
|
| To whom do the benefits of all this newfound efficiency accrue?
| newAccount2025 wrote:
| To the 1%? Just look at the historic wealth distribution
| chart. It's wild.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Uni.
| ..
| regularization wrote:
| > Anyway, AI/AGI will not yield economic liberation for the
| masses. We already produce more than enough for economic
| liberation all over the world, many times over. It hasn't
| happened.
|
| In Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics, he studies work time
| of hunter gatherer tribes in Africa, Papua New Guinea, the
| Amazon etc. They often less work less than 40 hours a week. The
| hunter gatherer painting in caves in Chauvet seemed to have
| leisure time. Less hours than some fresh college grad pounding
| out C++ or C# for Electronic Arts any how.
|
| The past 50 years has seen the hourly wage stay flat while the
| profit workers create is sucked up by the heirs.
|
| Paying for four years if college to get a CS degree, then
| studying Leetcode, interning, working cheap as an
| associate/junior used to be seen as a good path, but obviously
| since late 2022 this has stagnated for most.
| kaashif wrote:
| > The past 50 years has seen the hourly wage stay flat while
| the profit workers create is sucked up by the heirs.
|
| Are you sure?
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N
|
| The reality is that so much wealth has been created that the
| US has seen rising wages AND rising inequality, with an
| increasing proportion of growth ending up benefiting capital,
| not labour.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Wait, that chart shows a 30% growth in _family_ income. For
| a per-worker income comparison you 'd need divide by the
| increase in dual-income families. Which has also increased
| by about 30% since 1975.
| kaashif wrote:
| Actually, real median personal income has increased 50%
| since 1975:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
|
| I believe you may have seen some number somewhere, it
| would be useful to have that to silence detractors.
| bko wrote:
| > Paying for four years if college to get a CS degree, then
| studying Leetcode, interning, working cheap as an
| associate/junior used to be seen as a good path, but
| obviously since late 2022 this has stagnated for most.
|
| What?
|
| Go to a state school, median amount is ~11k a year. Then
| study Leetcode for a month (free or $35). Buy Cracking the
| Coding Interview ($33 new). Get a job as a software engineer
| making a median wage of $140k
|
| Only on HN could someone see this opportunity set and think
| it's stagnated.
|
| https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/average-cost-
| of...
|
| https://builtin.com/salaries/us/software-engineer
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| > We already produce more than enough for economic liberation
| all over the world, many times over. It hasn't happened. Why?
|
| Because directing material resources towards that end requires
| a certain aggregate amount of willing/aligned general
| intelligence, which we simply don't have as a society. Failure
| after failure of socialist states demonstrate that human
| general intelligence is on average, uninterested in working
| towards the greater good. AGI won't have such limitations.
|
| The blog post even addresses this: "the cost of intelligence
| and the cost of energy constrain a lot of things".
|
| However, I actually do agree with you, but for a different
| reason. AGI is highly unlikely to yield economic liberation for
| the masses. Not because we won't have the intelligence
| capacity, but because the iota of people that will have their
| hands on the levers of power will in all likelyhood be
| uninterested in tending to the masses of now economically
| useless people.
| rand_r wrote:
| This is a great point. Life is tough because we are all
| competing in a game. Tweaking the rules of the game so that
| each basket is worth more points doesn't make the game easier
| for any player.
|
| From Henry George:
|
| > Now, to produce wealth, two things are required: labor and
| land. Therefore, the effect of labor-saving improvements will
| be to extend the demand for land. So the primary effect of
| labor-saving improvements is to increase the power of labor.
| But the secondary effect is to extend the margin of production.
| And the end result is to increase rent.
|
| > This shows that effects attributed to population are really
| due to technological progress. It also explains the otherwise
| perplexing fact that laborsaving machinery fails to benefit
| workers
| Isamu wrote:
| >explains the otherwise perplexing fact that laborsaving
| machinery fails to benefit workers
|
| I disagree, the reason why workers don't benefit is because
| they are mostly paid to put hours in. Owners claim the gains
| of better machinery because they reason it is a capital
| investment at the business level.
|
| Really I don't see why see why this is perplexing. What is
| really perplexing is that some economists thought that
| productivity gains would somehow accrue gains for workers.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| You say this isn't perplexing while commenting on an
| article by one of the most important people in industry
| repeating exactly this fallacy?
|
| HN is full of people who happily and earnestly propagate
| this "obvious" falsehood.
| graycat wrote:
| > The price of land will skyrocket
|
| Is that really true?
|
| Let's look at some data from Google, the World Bank, etc.:
| US land area: 3,532,316 square miles US
| population: 334.9 million 640 acres per square
| mile ( 640 * 3,532,316 ) / 334,900,000 =
| 6.750 acres per person Fertility rate: 1.66
| births per woman (2022) World Bank GDP
| growth rate: 2.5% annual change (2023) World Bank
|
| So, per family of four, that would be ( 4 *
| 640 * 3,532,316 ) / 334,900,000 = 27 acres per family
| of four
|
| "Skyrocket?" With the fertility rate of 1.66, the US population
| is falling so that the acres per person is increasing.
|
| A guess is that people are crowded into tall buildings in dense
| cities to reduce costs of communications. So, yes, in dense
| cities, the cost of land per acre is comparatively high.
|
| But the Internet is reducing the costs of communications
| meaning that people can move to land that is less densely
| populated and cheaper.
|
| So, for the near future, tough to believe:
|
| > The price of land will skyrocket
| llamaimperative wrote:
| If this logic worked, all land and therefore rent would
| currently be ~free since there's ample open space all over
| the continent.
|
| The price of land is set by the productivity of it.
| Productivity goes up (by increased density, public
| infrastructure, private investment, or technological
| advancement) -> price of land goes up.
| computerdork wrote:
| Actually, the part that that person was focusing on was
| that the fertility rate is below the replacement rate.
| Yeah, if we also decrease our immigration rate, our
| population could peak out even in a decade or two:
| https://www.axios.com/2023/11/09/us-population-decline-
| down-...
| graycat wrote:
| "Price of land goes up": In simple terms, the Internet is
| providing huge areas of land suddenly now feasible for use;
| the larger supply will lower US average costs per acre.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Empirically hasn't happened. It turns out people enjoy
| being near other people, so actually the increase in
| productivity has outstripped preference for less-dense
| living.
| talles wrote:
| TLDR:
|
| 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the
| resources used to train and run it.
|
| 2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12
| months, and lower prices lead to much more use.
|
| 3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is
| super-exponential in nature.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| With all due respect, I wouldn't be surprised if Sam Altman
| uses his own software to help him write his blog.
| bambax wrote:
| The only true part is 2.
|
| 1 is plainly false. Enormous ressources have been poured into
| models since the end 2023 and the "intelligence" (for lack of a
| better term) has stayed roughly the same, around the level of
| GPT-4. Nothing has happened since then.
|
| 3 is a philosophical opinion, not based on any falsifiable
| evidence.
|
| All in all: mostly FUD, as per the usual MO.
| uluyol wrote:
| How is 1 false? Log improvement means for 10x the cost the
| model is 2x as good. For 100x the cost, the model is 3x as
| good.
|
| Not a curve to be happy about TBH. You need to simultaneously
| find big efficiency wins and drive up costs substantially to
| get 4-5x improvements, and it is probably impossible to
| maintain good year on year improvements after the first 2-3
| years when you get all the low hanging fruit.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _1 is plainly false. Enormous ressources have been poured
| into models since the end 2023 and the "intelligence" (for
| lack of a better term) has stayed roughly the same, around
| the level of GPT-4. Nothing has happened since then._
|
| You need to spend some quality time with o1-pro and/or Gemini
| Pro 2.0 Experimental. It is not the case that there has been
| no progress since GPT4. CoT reasoning is a BFD.
| bdangubic wrote:
| _1 is plainly false. Enormous ressources have been poured
| into models since the end 2023 and the "intelligence" (for
| lack of a better term) has stayed roughly the same, around
| the level of GPT-4. Nothing has happened since then._
|
| this would be true only for people who have used the same
| model since 2023 :) Jesus!
| gloflo wrote:
| "as we get closer to achieving AGI"
|
| AGI as defined by OpenAI as s "AI systems that can generate at
| least $100 billion in profits", right? Because what they are
| doing has very little to do with actual AGI.
| csmpltn wrote:
| > "AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in
| profits"
|
| Like... a calculator? or Python?
| graypegg wrote:
| Linear Regression could be the world's first AGI /sarcasm
| fsndz wrote:
| The chief hype officer is back at it again. Altman is defending
| exponential progress when everything points to incremental
| progress with signs of diminishing returns. Altman thinks
| benefits will naturally trickle down when everything points to
| corporation replacing employees with AI to boost their profit
| margins. I now understand why some people say Sama might be
| wrong: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong
| bwfan123 wrote:
| "assume the sale" is the marketing tactic. ie, in every pitch,
| project that agi (whatever that means) is here, and is a
| persistent threat.
|
| unfortunately, ai is not search or social. there are no
| network-effects here. so, get-big-fast is not going to work.
| and slowly the masses start waking up and asking what the hell
| is this good for except as a fancy auto-complete.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Unfortunately there is essentially a loose federation of
| quasi-religious "cults" that have emerged around the topic of
| AI. For an otherwise mostly secular group of people, the lure
| of reinventing Abrahamic religion in their own image was
| inescapable. I feel like most sensible people took the off
| ramp by the time Roko's Basilisk popped up, but as we saw
| with the Zizians that's not always the case.
|
| So there's this thread of taking two assumptions at face
| value I see a lot here and elsewhere:
|
| 1. What we call "AI" now is actually some kind of AI, and the
| rest is just scaling up.
|
| 2. It's inevitable that AGI would conform to sci-fi tropes.
|
| Meanwhile we've been watching BILLIONS spent on data centers,
| power for data centers, water for data centers... all of that
| going in one end, and LLM's coming out the other.
|
| As long as the future AI overlord requires enough power and
| water to run a city, and the best it can manage amounts to a
| fun show, I'll keep my alarmism in check.
|
| But Altman, man he really know his audience, and he's going
| to sell sell sell, to an audience that's been primed on
| fiction and religion to believe in him like some kind of
| blank-faced prophet.
| csomar wrote:
| > Altman thinks benefits will naturally trickle down when
| everything points to corporation replacing employees with AI to
| boost their profit margins.
|
| That's not what he is saying. He is saying that this investment
| in AI will yield incredible returns and power. The investor
| will dominate the next decade(s) and thus you should invest. Of
| course, he has to say it in a careful way not to alarm
| politically correct people. But, in essence, he is trying to
| create investor FOMO to drive his next round.
| fsndz wrote:
| yeah that's mostly hype to get the next funding round
| jb_rad wrote:
| He explicitly stated progress is logarithmic.
|
| > 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of
| the resources used to train and run it.
| raghavtoshniwal wrote:
| The article you linked is from Sept '24 and points to the ARC-
| AGI test as "evidence" that we're not getting close.
|
| We're in Feb '25. ARC-AGI (at least the version they're
| referencing) already has been solved by AI at above average
| human level.
|
| >everything points to incremental progress with signs of
| diminishing returns.
|
| Seems like everything in just Dec '24/ Jan '25 points the other
| way. These models are already helping PhDs in novel research,
| they're already getting super human at coding (yes yes, they're
| not perfect and I'm sure someone on HN has this weird coding
| job that AI can't replace yet and they're very excited to shit
| over AI), but they've already replaced a lot of real software
| dev jobs.
|
| Also aren't you contradicting yourself?
|
| > everything points to incremental progress with signs of
| diminishing returns
|
| > corporation replacing employees with AI
|
| If we have incremental progress, how are corporations going to
| replace employees with AI?
| maleldil wrote:
| > getting super human at coding
|
| They're getting super-human at _competitive coding_, which is
| essentially identifying and writing algorithms. They _are
| not_ good at general coding, as demonstrated by their subpar
| scores at benchmarks like SWE-bench, and even those aren't
| particularly representative of what a real coding job is.
| raghavtoshniwal wrote:
| >subpar scores at benchmarks like SWE-bench
|
| The last few models have remarkably improved on SWE-bench
| too. o3 scores 73%, this number was in the low teens 16
| months ago. Willing to wager that SWE benchmark gets
| saturated before the end of 2025.
|
| > aren't particularly representative of what a real coding
| job
|
| I don't know about that, large swath of "real world" coding
| is writing plumbing and UIs for CRUD apps, they're getting
| really good at that as well. Anecdotally, engineers I know
| have gotten insanely productive with tools like Cursor.
| fsndz wrote:
| to get the score they had on ARC AGI, they had to fine-tune
| o3 on ARC AGI. That is hardly a sign of general intelligence
| or emergent capability.
|
| PhD novel research ? What is the novel research discovered by
| an LLM ever since the emergence of ChatGPT ? None. Despite
| all the knowledge these models accumulate in their weights
| they haven't been able to connect the dots and discover a lot
| of things humans haven't discovered, autonomously.
|
| Replace which software engineering job ? They are useful,
| sure; good at benchmarks, yes; but not a drop in replacement
| of any software engineer.
| bambax wrote:
| The very term "AGI" is a confession that the I in AI doesn't
| stand for intelligence.
|
| What is even the opposite of "general intelligence"? Specialized
| intelligence?
|
| But AI already has a large spectrum. It's not an expert system in
| this or that. It's quite _general_. But it 's not actually
| intelligent.
|
| We should replace "AGI" with "AAI": Actual Artificial
| Intelligence.
| wat10000 wrote:
| "AGI" because computers beat humans in many specific areas of
| intelligence. Chess playing used to be considered AI, for
| example. It wasn't too long ago that top human-level Go play
| was considered out of reach for computers, now computers exceed
| humans. But there isn't a system that matches or exceeds human
| intelligence in all aspects. That's what the G is for.
| edding4500 wrote:
| > In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller
| scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In
| another sense, it is the beginning of something for which it's
| hard not to say "this time it's different"; the economic growth
| in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world
| where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our
| families, and can fully realize our creative potential
|
| yeah, right. What world is this guy living in? An idealistic one?
| Will AI equally spread the profits of that economic growth he is
| talking about? I only see companies getting by on less menpower
| and doing fine, while poor people stay poor. Bravo. Well thought
| trhough, guy who now sells "AI".
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| "Anyone in 2035 should be able to marshall the intellectual
| capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025"
|
| There's a lot to unpack there. Maintain an internal 10-year
| technological lead compared to what's public with OpenAI?
| qwertox wrote:
| > 2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12
| months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this
| in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024,
| where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period.
| Moore's law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is
| unbelievably stronger.
|
| This is so exciting. I guess NVIDIA's Project DIGITS [0] will be
| the starting point for a bit more serious home lab usage of local
| LLMs, while still being a bit like what Quadro used to be in the
| pro/prosumer market in the 00s/10s.
|
| Now it's all RTX, and while differences still exist between pro
| gamer cards and workstation cards, most of what workstation GPUs
| were used back then is easily doable by pro gamer cards nowadays.
|
| Let's just hope that the quoted values are also valid for these
| prosumer devices like Project DIGITS.
|
| Also, let's hope that companies start targeting that user base
| specifically, like a Groq SBC.
|
| [0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-puts-grace-
| blackwe...
| caust1c wrote:
| The crux of the challenges AGI presents is hardly mentioned as a
| footnote in this blog:
|
| > In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between
| capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may
| require early intervention. We are open to strange-sounding ideas
| like giving some "compute budget" to enable everyone on Earth to
| use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just
| relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible
| has the desired effect.
|
| The primary challenge in my opinion is that access to AGI will
| dramatically accelerate wealth inequality. Driving costs lower
| will not magically enable the less educated to be better able to
| educate themselves using AGI, particularly if they're already at
| risk or on the edge of economic uncertainty.
|
| I want to know how people like sama are thinking about the
| economics of access to AGI in more broad terms, more than just a
| footnote in a utopian fluff piece.
|
| edit: I am an optimist when it comes to the applications around
| AI, but I have no doubt that we're in for a rough time as the
| world copes with the economic implications of it's applications.
| Globally, the highest paying jobs are knowledge workers and we're
| on the verge (relatively speaking) of making that work go the way
| that blue collar work did in post-war United States. There's a
| lot of hard problems ahead and it bothers me when people sweep
| them under the rug in the name of progress.
| timewizard wrote:
| > 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of
| the resources used to train and run it.
|
| We are burning cash so fast and getting very little in return for
| it. This is a death spiral and we refuse to admit it.
|
| > The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12
| months, and lower prices lead to much more use.
|
| We are entirely unconcerned with accuracy and refuse to see how
| the limitations of our product will not allow us to follow this
| simple economic aphorism into success.
|
| > The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is
| super-exponential in nature.
|
| You see, even though we're burning money at an exponentially
| increasing rate, some how this /linear/ increase in output is
| secretly "super-exponential" in nature. I have nothing to back
| this up but you just have to believe me.
|
| At least Steve Jobs build something worth having before
| bullshitting about it. This is just embarassing.
| guybedo wrote:
| At first AI models/systems/agents help employees be more
| productive.
|
| But i can't imagine a future where this doesn't lead to mass
| layoffs, or hiring freezes because these systems can replace tens
| or hundreds of employess, the end result being more and more
| unemployed people.
|
| Sure there's been the industrial revolution and the argument
| usually is: some people will lose their jobs but many other jobs
| will be created. I'm not sure this argument gonna hold this time
| given the magnitude of the change.
|
| Is there any serious study of the impact of AI on society and
| employment, and most importantly is there any solution to this
| problem ?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| In terms of solutions: UBI is frequently proposed. Depending on
| the degree to which AI and automation obsoletes human labor and
| increases, UBI could become arbitrarily redistributive.
| Increased output would keep inflation at bay, and the reduced
| incentive to work would be mitigated by the fact that there
| almost wouldn't need to be any incentives remaining for wealth
| creation.
|
| Such an AGI scenario might also raise some old questions about
| the degree to which wealth disparity-as-an-incentive-for-
| success remains useful and justifiable. One wonders how Altman
| would receive this proposal.
| kadushka wrote:
| I wonder what will happen to millions of people with $3k+/mo
| mortgages when they're all unemployed and UBI is only $2k/mo.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Sounds like the mortgage market would go through a
| correction? Or UBI would be bumped up to $4k. Lots of
| possible outcomes.
| hammock wrote:
| Not without pain. Housing correction would lead to
| foreclosures. Bumping UBI would lead to mortgage rates
| rising due to the ensuing inflation
| kadushka wrote:
| 30% of people in US pay mortgage, average payment is
| $2200. I have no idea where even $2k/mo of UBI will come
| from - when no one works, no one pays taxes. To avoid
| social unrest some new methods of wealth redistribution
| will have to appear. Why is nobody talking about this?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| If no one works no one pays _income_ taxes; this is one
| reason why I mentioned sales taxes in another comment.
| Income taxes are complicated to administer and a bad
| incentive structure anyway.
|
| Traditionally, sales taxes have been considered
| regressive because they are linear; you can't bracket
| them like income taxes, so they heavily burden the most
| poor. But a UBI is progressive enough that a flat sales
| tax to fund it should still leave society more equal.
| kadushka wrote:
| OK, so everyone gets UBI check today. Let's say 10% of
| that check will be spent on sales tax. Where the next
| month check is coming from?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The UBI check goes out every month; the sales tax
| percentage is adjusted until the revenue matches the
| amount sent out as UBI (or more optimistically, adjusted
| until inflation is kept to a stable target).
|
| Let's say that the sales tax reaches as high as 40%.
|
| This means that if you are unemployed and destitute and
| the UBI represents your entire spending power, ~40% of
| your UBI check goes back to the government when you spend
| it. If you are a rich guy living the good life on your
| property portfolio rental income and MSFT dividends, 40%
| of your spending also goes back to the government, which
| is many multiples of your UBI check (which constitutes a
| trivial amount of your income).
|
| Remember, the UBI doesn't amount to all gross income,
| even if nobody is employed. When you spend money to buy
| furniture, _somebody_ gets it as their income, even if it
| 's the shareholders of the IKEA robofactory. The people
| on the top will end up paying more into the system than
| they get out.
| kadushka wrote:
| So you're assuming rich guys will spend so much that 40%
| of their spent money will cover 60% of the entire UBI
| budget? Or do you also want rich guys to pay income tax?
| No matter how I look at this I don't see it working
| without a massive forced wealth redistribution from rich
| to poor.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| It's a mathematical certainty. Let me introduce it
| another way: the government imposes a 40% sales tax and
| then distributes the resulting revenue evenly as UBI,
| however much it is.
|
| Do you still have concerns about the program not covering
| the UBI budget?
|
| Aside from that, wealth follows a power law, so the rich
| guys do spend a lot. They have some very fancy champagne.
| I also elsewhere mentioned that the consumption value of
| land ownership (the equivalent rent) should be included
| in the sales tax, so that will be quite a substantial
| redistributionary force.
| camgunz wrote:
| There's ~127m households in the US. At even $2k/mo (read:
| roughly the poverty line) that's over $3 trillion, which
| is half the US annual budget. UBI as a justification for
| throwing millions of people out of work is a joke. But
| this is obvious: far and away the markets for these
| companies are other companies looking to replace humans,
| not humans looking to kick back and let AI make their
| money for them. No one running any of these companies
| seriously thinks there's a policy to ameliorate the
| effects of what they're building, let alone a policy
| that's actually achievable. The entire stance is
| "progress gonna progress, figure it out suckers". Not
| great!
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > UBI as a justification for throwing millions of people
| out of work is a joke
|
| AI is the justification; UBI is just the tourniquet.
| lmm wrote:
| They'll probably go bankrupt and have to move to flyover
| country. But if you've got a steady income and don't need
| to work then living in flyover country isn't so bad.
| guybedo wrote:
| yes, UBI is the solution usually proposed but i guess there's
| a few problems.
|
| First problem i see is UBI is gonna be paid by governments
| when it's (mega-)corporations making (disproportionate)
| profits thanks to AI and not employing humans anymore.
|
| Something would need to compensate for this.I guess a new
| taxes scheme based on the number of AI agents a company would
| employ ?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| If you ask me? A very large consumption tax would probably
| handle most of it, as well as some form of asset taxation
| (eg. on land and voting-rights shares, in terms of their
| equivalent rental value).
|
| This would basically amount to a leveling function across
| society: people consuming less than the mean earn (much)
| more in UBI than they pay in sales taxes. Wealthier people
| who consume more than average would pay in more than they
| get out. With wealth being power-law distributed, the
| wealthy would end up paying a lot more.
|
| Then you just tune the UBI value to achieve any desired
| balance of equality vs incentive to work, while adjusting
| the tax take to control inflation.
|
| The megacorp wealth flows back to the shareholders, who
| eventually will want to spend it on something.
| oefrha wrote:
| You think voting and taxation is gonna work if Altman and
| co. achieves and monopolizes AGI? They can have
| autonomous soldiers and weapons while precisely
| controlling information intake of approximately everyone.
| You only need be diplomatic when the power imbalance
| isn't too huge.
|
| I assume in that case they will pay everyone a small
| allowance so that people aren't too much of a nuisance
| and resistance is limited. As predicted by sci-fi.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I think there are a lot of plausible dystopian AI
| outcomes, up to and including the extinction of the human
| species. But that won't stop me from providing my
| preferred policy recommendations for dealing with the
| impacts of unemployment caused by automation.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| The core problem is uneven power distribution. Shaving
| off some percentages of corp revenue will not compensate
| enough for the rapidly growing power concentrations.
|
| Giving everyone ability to run open source AGI night do a
| bit of difference but if the big corps can run 1000x more
| of it the power differential will keep growing.
|
| There's maybe an opportunity to make (A)I crowdsourced
| and find better ways to make our shared brain power and
| GPU power more powerful than the cognitive power of data
| centres.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| >The megacorp wealth flows back to the shareholders, who
| eventually will want to spend it on something.
|
| This is called trickle down economics.
|
| >Wealthier people who consume more than average would pay
| in more than they get out. With wealth being power-law
| distributed, the wealthy would end up paying a lot more.
|
| The wealthy consume basically the same amount as
| everybody else in their day to day. They might purchase
| better quality goods. So consumption taxes are
| regressive. It is better to tax progressive wealth.
| s__s wrote:
| UBI is nonsensical. Give everyone 5k a month, and everyone is
| not 5k richer. All you've done is decrease the value of the
| dollar.
|
| Would love to be proven wrong.
| lxgr wrote:
| Your assumption holds in exactly one scenario: One where
| everybody is currently earning exactly the same amount of
| money and has the same net worth.
|
| Otherwise, such an UBI would indeed cause substantial
| redistribution, even after accounting for inflation and
| prices recalibrating.
| s__s wrote:
| To clarify. If everyone in the US is given an extra 5k a
| month do you believe that the price of goods and services
| remain the same as they are at present?
|
| If my landlord is charging me 2k for rent, does she not
| increase it knowing I now have an extra 5k of UBI
| monthly?
|
| Or, if there's a bidding war on a home that might
| typically sell as high as 300k, does that still hold true
| now that everyone has an extra 5k, or does the house sell
| for more?
|
| Will a plumber still charge $30 an hour when he has a
| guaranteed 5k on top of what he's making? Or will he
| start to bump his price up to make it worth his while?
|
| I really don't see how prices don't just climb and re-
| equalize so that we're back at square one. And your
| response didn't address that concern.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Prices would climb, but not "re-equalize." Let's say
| everything got 2x more expensive. People currently making
| very little could still afford much more. People
| currently making a lot could afford less.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| There's a lot to unpack here, so I hope you don't mind a
| long and nuanced reply.
|
| UBI on its own is obviously inflationary, like any other
| government spending. But it can be combined with taxes to
| reduce the growth in the money supply, as necessary to
| keep prices stable. Those taxes will tend to be aimed at
| the wealthy, and will take more than $5k/month away from
| them, so people bidding for a $300k home might have less
| purchasing power, not more.
|
| But also, AGI-fueled unemployment is likely very
| deflationary, and that is the premise of this
| conversation. Let's talk about your landlord's situation.
| Sure, your tenant is now getting $5k/month UBI, but
| they've also lost their job, and so has most of the
| population. There might not actually be more juice to
| squeeze out of that lemon than there used to be. Plus,
| workers won't be bidding up rents in (formerly) high-wage
| cities for jobs that don't exist anymore. Your unemployed
| tenant is only staying in town because they like the
| weather. They could move elsewhere if you charge too much
| rent; it won't affect their commute.
|
| The effect on prices will really vary a lot by type of
| good. For things that get effectively automated by AGI
| (let's say, for example... legal services and
| architectural drawings), the price may drop precipitously
| due to increased productivity. For other things
| (plumbing), the price would go up a lot. It would become
| quite rewarding to be a plumber.
|
| Lastly, depending on the types of goods demanded, prices
| can be quite stable. If you give everyone $1k and they
| use it to buy an iPhone, the price of iPhones might not
| even go up that much, because it gets cheaper to produce
| in large quantity. In fact, they may even get cheaper.
| However, if you give one person $100M and they use it to
| buy a yacht, you don't get the same efficiency benefits
| from economies of scale. A more even wealth distribution
| favors mass production of goods, which keeps prices low.
|
| We don't end up back at square one because:
|
| 1) The goal of UBI isn't to make everyone $5k richer, but
| to shrink the gap between rich and poor in a world where
| a few people are very rich from owning capital and many
| are poor due to a decrease in demand for labor.
|
| 2) We don't end up back at square one because at the end
| of the day, an unemployed person getting $5k/month has
| more purchasing power than if they got $0/month, even if
| prices do increase.
|
| 3) But aggregate prices don't even necessarily have to
| increase, because of changes to taxes and productivity,
| and also because of economies of scale.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| For a _reductio ad absurdum_ that might illustrate where
| your analysis falls down, consider how someone with net
| worth of $0 and someone with net worth of $100k would each
| be differently affected by getting a $5k handout,
| accompanied by a 10% decrease in the purchasing power of a
| dollar. The end result is not the same as the status quo.
|
| The intent is not to make _everyone_ richer, but to
| redistribute wealth in an equalizing direction. (In fact
| this might also make everyone slightly richer on average in
| real terms, because of second-order effects related to
| economies of scale that make it slightly easier to meet the
| growth in demand when wealth is distributed more evenly).
|
| Of course, the decreasing value of the dollar is an
| undesired side-effect of any government spending; this is
| why you counterbalance it with taxes to pull money back out
| of the system and control price growth. These taxes don't
| exactly cancel the UBI if they disproportionately fall on
| the wealthy; this is why I like consumption taxes, which
| fall more heavily on people who have more money to spend.
| fractaled wrote:
| 96% of us are already given ~5k a month for 40hr/week of
| work.
|
| If UBI is just printed, then sure there would be economic
| problems; but I think the idea is you redistribute it via
| taxation.
| nick111631 wrote:
| High interest rates, maybe a wealth tax, ought to do it.
| Cause deflation while giving UBI.
| tim333 wrote:
| Right now you are correct that giving everyone 5k would not
| produce more stuff so the dollars would devalue.
|
| The idea however is that at the same time as giving
| everyone 5k, AI workers would produce more than an extra
| 5k/head of stuff.
|
| As an alternative having the AIs produce all the cars and
| houses we need but giving all the money to Sam Altman
| wouldn't make sense as no one would have the money to buy
| them apart from Sam who couldn't use them all.
| shridharxp wrote:
| It would be interesting to consider where humans would find
| fulfillment when what they have done every day for years is
| rendered worthless.
| lamename wrote:
| Some would pursue less lucrative passions. Some would
| spiral into lazy Sunday behavior every day.
| JohnnyMarcone wrote:
| I like to think about what I did before I had to work.
| Young me would never worry about finding things to do and
| none of those things were economically valuable.
| s__s wrote:
| I firmly believe AI will become heavily taxed and regulated.
|
| It would be foolish to ban it, but equally foolish to allow it
| to replace a large percentage of your country's workforce. It
| would completely destabilize the economy and society as a
| whole.
|
| AI can do a lot of great things for humanity. Putting vast
| amounts of people out of a job is not one of those things.
|
| There needs to be more smart people talking about and studying
| what the future realistically looks like.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| The world's richest man has been empowered by the US
| government to gleefully lay off thousands of federal workers
| with no published plan beyond "delete government agencies"
| and his team is using AI as part of the execution. I'm
| skeptical that there are people in charge who think about
| anything other than consolidating their own power and lining
| their own pockets. I think the only AI taxes that might come
| into play are those that steer people towards services run by
| those already in power and disincentivize setting up your own
| AI infrastructure.
| raghavtoshniwal wrote:
| The world's richest man got handed this mandate by someone
| that was elected by millions of US citizens and he
| explicitly told them he will do this. Enough people in the
| US want to see this happen.
|
| I don't know if enough people would not agree to highly tax
| the corporations if they're themselves out of work and need
| the money to survive.
| tim333 wrote:
| Taxing and regulating the AI itself wouldn't work very well
| as competitors abroad or who skirt the regulations would be
| able to use it. You might be able to require human
| supervision so rather than AI replacing a programer who was
| laid off, the human would become the AIs supervisor.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Plenty of jobs that are decades away from automation. Will a
| robot climb on your roof to fix your A/C or repair your
| plumbing soon? Probably not. Now I'm sure some enterprising
| startup is trying, but seriously, it's not close.
|
| > But muh singularity!
|
| Sure, any day now Optimus will become sentient and replace home
| builders... or not.
|
| So yeah, probably less lawyers(yay), software techs,
| accountants, etc. But those dollars will flow to people taking
| vacations, renovating their homes, eating fancy food, etc. Who
| knows what the net effect will be in the long term?
| raghavtoshniwal wrote:
| Forget singularity, do you think the robotics problem is
| genuinely hard enough that if we devoted significant amount
| of intelligence to it, it would not get solved?
|
| >any day now Optimus will become sentient and replace home
| builders.
|
| I think you're kidding about being "sentient" but it feels
| like they just have to get somewhat good at a very few tasks
| and we would be able to automate some large swath of manual
| labour. We don't need that many fancy tricks to get there. A
| lot of people are already reporting significant speed ups in
| Bio research, why wouldn't we see that in robotics?
| dottjt wrote:
| Won't there be more jobs for people maintaining and servicing
| the data centers? Amongst all the other AI infrastructure?
| bglazer wrote:
| No, data centers require very minimal staffing. Like a few
| dozen people to staff a data center serving hundreds of
| millions of users
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| "AI will replace many workers" feels eerily similar to the
| message of the early 2000s in the US: "Tech/Knowledge workers
| from low cost locations will replace many workers from high
| cost locations." In truth, the high cost locations continued to
| grow, side-by-side, with low cost locations. To be clear: I am
| not speculating on the _why_ , rather only sharing what I see.
| neom wrote:
| Oh there have been LOADS over the years. The old ones say this
| is going to happen, the new ones say this is happening, the new
| new ones say oh btw our measurement systems for labour market
| and society during this change period are probably not accurate
| so we need new ones ASAP.
|
| https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%...
|
| https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-risk-of-automation-...
|
| https://news.mit.edu/2019/work-future-report-technology-jobs...
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.12001
|
| https://institute.global/insights/economic-prosperity/the-im...
|
| https://ipc.mit.edu/research/work-of-the-future/
| kadushka wrote:
| None of these links provide any guesses about the impact of
| AGI on unemployment rates. By AGI I mean AI that is as smart
| and as capable as an intelligent and highly educated human.
| What will happen when in a few years companies realize that
| AI systems do a better job than their human employees?
| awb wrote:
| Probably a similar transition to the Industrial Revolution,
| but much faster. Laborers had to learn skills that machines
| weren't better at.
|
| Any work that is information based is probably in for a
| dramatic shift.
|
| But maybe some areas that are less vulnerable: -
| Experiences (food, travel, accommodations, events, sports)
| - Manual labor (carpenters, plumbers, roofers) - Human
| connection (caregivers, therapists, teachers, coaches) -
| Public service (government, police, fire, healthcare) -
| Executives (CEOs, entrepreneurs)
|
| The Industrial Revolution completely changed the world, but
| there are still many tasks where a human is
| better/faster/cheaper than a physical machine, so it didn't
| replace everyone. My guess is that there will be some niche
| domains where humans are preferred to AGI.
| kadushka wrote:
| Sure. But transition to new professions will be a lot
| slower than layoffs. We are likely to face unprecedented
| unemployment rates for at least several years before
| people learn new skills, and meanwhile AI keeps improving
| and automates more and more professions (manual labor,
| public service, etc). Are you sure new professions will
| appear faster than old ones disappear?
| awb wrote:
| You might be right. I don't know if new professions will
| appear though. My guess is that people will transition to
| those existing fields that are less likely to be
| dominated by AGI.
|
| Tech has already disrupted industries like travel
| agencies, print journalism, video stores, bookstores,
| stock brokers, movies, etc.
|
| And you can see it coming for truck drivers, cab drivers,
| narrators and voice actors, etc.
|
| So we've already lived through a taste of it, but this
| round will be much broader and much faster IMO.
| neom wrote:
| ALL of these links mention it, maybe you didn't read all
| the material, the Blair Institute I linked as a whole in
| depth section just on it, in fact if you cntrl F "unemp"
| you'll find half the site turns yellow. The whole McKinley
| report starting at page 7 is about nothing but job market
| shifts for 10+ pages, and If you look at the OEDC report,
| you'll find lots of referenced to it, AND the ability to
| find further research (Mokyr et al., 2015).
| kadushka wrote:
| I searched for AGI and I didn't find it, perhaps I missed
| it? Could you please point me to _any_ discussion of the
| impact of AGI on unemployment rate?
| neom wrote:
| You're right, I am incorrect I didn't account for your
| nuance. My bad.
|
| I'll try to dig it up later but that was what I'd been
| reading on the final part of my comment, I'l try to find
| the report because it was good (I'll reply to my this
| comment later tonight if I find it) - but the reports
| I've read that kinda allude to that is more messaged as
| "AI automation is deeper than we expect" (I don't know
| these labour market economists are using the term AGI) -
| and the most recent recent stuff (late 2024) is basically
| saying our measurement criteria is wrong so we don't know
| what is going to happen at all too bad so sad.
|
| Telephone operators is the one most people go to because
| it happened quickly and it was a lot of people, but there
| was also a lot of manual work generally available back
| then.
| kadushka wrote:
| The report from Tony Blair institute is pretty good,
| unfortunately they write:
|
| _AI capabilities, however, are fast evolving. The next
| wave is expected to be "strong" or "general" AI (AGI).
| AGI applications will exhibit more autonomy, be able to
| adapt to different contexts and not be limited to
| specific tasks - similar to human capability. Beyond
| this, AI systems smarter than any individual human
| ("artificial super intelligence") and systems smarter
| than all humans ("the singularity") are possible further
| in the future.
|
| For the purposes of this project, we exclude these more
| advanced versions of AI because their disruptive
| potential is so great and they are still thought to be
| some decades away._
|
| Anthropic released some related economical analysis
| today: https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-anthropic-
| economic-index - looks interesting.
| vagab0nd wrote:
| Let's look 100 years ahead. With natural selection/evolution
| replaced by technology, it's not hard to imagine that the human
| species can survive with a much smaller population. So mass
| population decline plus space colonization will probably create
| a steady equilibrium, where the intrinsic value of a human
| equals the cost of keeping them alive.
| sealeck wrote:
| Reading between the lines, I get the feeling that OpenAI may be
| starting to feel desperate if they feel the need to drive the
| hype like this.
| iqandjoke wrote:
| The article is written for journalist (and investor). See the
| footnote.
| sealeck wrote:
| Totally. "AGI = $100bn of profit" lol
| raghavtoshniwal wrote:
| It feels like every major lab is saying the same thing:
|
| https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace
| https://www.wsj.com/video/events/the-race-for-true-ai-at-goo...
|
| Even folks _leaving_ OpenAI, who have no incentive to drive
| hype, are saying that we're very close to AGI.
| https://x.com/sjgadler/status/1883928200029602236
|
| Even folks like Yoshua Benjio, Hinton are saying we're close to
| it. The models keep getting better at an exponential.
|
| How much evidence does one need to dispel the "this is
| OpenAI/sama hype" argument?
| caseyy wrote:
| > How much evidence does one need to dispel the "this is
| OpenAI/sama hype" argument?
|
| For AGI hype, we need exactly one piece of evidence that
| machine AGI exists, or that we know how to build it.
| Otherwise, it's an exaggeration that AGI is imminent -
| otherwise known as hype. Or maybe it's hope, but sama
| suggests it should be an expectation.
| sealeck wrote:
| These are all people running AI labs! They want investment,
| and what better way to get investment than to tell people
| you're going to create Terminator? The people leaving OpenAI
| are joining other labs - their livelihoods depend on AI
| companies receiving investment: "it is difficult to get a man
| to understand something, when his salary depends on his not
| understanding it".
|
| > The models keep getting better at an exponential [sic].
|
| We don't know if this is true. A lot of growth that appears
| exponential is often quadratic
| (https://longform.asmartbear.com/exponential-growth/) or
| follows a logistic function (e.g. Moore's law).
|
| Additionally there's a LOT of benchmark gaming going on, and
| a lot of the benchmark solving is not down to having a
| process that actually solves the problems; it just turns out
| that the problems already kind of lie in the span of text on
| the internet.
| raghavtoshniwal wrote:
| I feel insane cognitive dissonance when I read a comment
| like this. I know/hope what you're saying is in good faith
| and you aren't trolling. Yet my own experience on how good
| these models have become and how rapidly they're improving
| makes me feel like we're talking about 2 completely
| different things.
|
| Screw the benchmarks, it feels insane how much utility
| these models already provide in my life and that they keep
| getting better. I guess all my problems are simple and and
| "lie in the span of text on the internet", but they're
| still extremely valuable to me.
| sealeck wrote:
| People are capable of having really deep conversations
| with ELIZA (program which just asked questions about
| things you said). I think there's a kind of "ooh it's
| language it must be clever" which I think is mistaking
| the symptom for the effect.
|
| I'm not denying that the large language models may have
| some (marginal) utility, I'm saying that they're not
| going to magically turn into Skynet, no matter how much
| people dream.
|
| I suspect they are not going to have as many applications
| as people claim: we are a few years in now and we see
| that the applications are trailing WAY behind the huge
| level of investment into building datacenter
| infrastructure. There's some good stuff in FT AlphaVille
| about this.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I like AI, and I use it every day. I'm not a software
| dev, but I do write software professionally, and I also
| use AI for designing and architecting solutions. I feel
| the technology is eminently useful, and it's made me
| maybe 20-30% more productive, which is massive. I can
| reconcile all this without believing a lot of the hype
| and outlandish claims, and without feeling it's a
| cognitive disonance.
| PollardsRho wrote:
| > The models keep getting better at an exponential.
|
| Isn't it the opposite? Marginal improvements require
| exponentially more investment, if we believe Altman. AI is
| expanding into different areas, and lots of improvements have
| been made in less saturated fields, but performance on older
| benchmarks has plateaued, especially relative to compute
| costs.
|
| Even if you focus on areas where growth is rapid, the history
| of technology shows many, many examples of rapid growth
| hitting different bottlenecks and stopping. Futurists have
| predicted common flying cars for decades and decades, but
| it'll be a long, long time before helicopters are how people
| commute to work. There are fundamental physical limitations
| to the concept that technological advancement does not
| trivialize.
|
| Maybe the problems facing potential AGI have relatively
| straightforward technological solutions. Maybe, like neural
| networks already have shown, it will take decades of hardware
| advancements before advancements conceived of today can see
| practice. Maybe replicating human-level intelligence requires
| hardware much closer to the scale of the human brain than
| we're capable of making right now, with a hundred trillion
| individual synapses each more complex than any neuron in an
| artificial neural network.
| 93po wrote:
| Sam plainly wrote that intelligence of the log of training
| resources, but that's presumably written in the context of
| GPT4 style LLMs. The intelligence gains we're seeing right
| now are not a result of a 100x increase in traditional
| training resources but rather new ways of training and
| agentic processes.
| abc-1 wrote:
| I refuse to listen to anyone who has done nothing in life but
| maximize their wealth and power, play corporate political games,
| and grift investors for all they're worth. Shame the actual
| innovators don't blog much, usually because they're too busy
| doing the actual work.
| azinman2 wrote:
| > the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we
| can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much
| more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our
| creative potential.
|
| I think this is extremely myopic to assume things like "have much
| more time to enjoy with our families" unless that time is because
| you're unemployed. Every major technology over the past couple
| hundred years has been paired with such promises, and it's never
| materialized. Only through unions did we get 8h days and
| weekends. Electricity, factory farming, etc has not made me work
| any less, even if I do different things than I would have 200
| years ago.
|
| I think it's also odd to assume the only things preventing curing
| all disease is the lack of intelligence and scale. There are so
| many more factors that go into this, and into an already
| competitive landscape (biology) which is constantly evolving and
| changing. With every new technique innovated (eg CRISPR) and
| every new discovery (eg immunotherapy) proven, the directions of
| what's possible changes. If AGI is thru LLMs as we know it (color
| me skeptical), they do not have the ability to absorb such new
| possibilities and change on a dime.
|
| I could go on and on but this is just a random comment on the
| internet. I understand the original post is meant to achieve
| certain goals at a specific word length, but not diving into all
| of to see possibilities (including failure modes in his
| extraordinarily optimistic assumptions) is quite irresponsible if
| he is truly meant to be a leader for a bold new future.
| twright wrote:
| The line you quoted caught my eye too and confused why it was
| in there without an explicit or implicit mention of "in ten
| years we'll be so productive we'll have 3-day work weeks".
|
| I think you make a great point about LLM's being able to absorb
| new possibilities. I like to cite the invention of the MRI
| machine as an incredible innovation that took three independent
| discoveries over forty years to realize, not to mention
| commercialize. Maybe if (big if) when AGI comes it will be able
| to spit out dozens of inventions that are some culmination of
| similarly independent discoveries but I'm not going to hold my
| breath. We have to remember they are just extremely good
| regurgitation machines which, in my experience, why I've found
| they're nearly useless in niche programming tasks.
| dimgl wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone is convinced this will empower individuals.
| On the contrary: if we get this tech "right" enough, the
| inequality gap will become an inequality chasm... There is no
| financial incentive to pay humans when a machine is a fraction of
| the cost.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| The next fifty years are going to be quite interesting.
| chad_oliver wrote:
| If each human body needs 0.2 acre of land to grow the food
| necessary for subsistence, what happens when the price of
| intelligence keeps dropping and one person's intelligence (even
| when directed towards the highest-value use!) is not enough to
| afford the use of that land? In other words, what happens when
| humans are no longer economically viable?
|
| Jevon's Paradox means that the demand for intelligence will
| keep rising as the cost drops, so I can't help but expect a
| steady increase in the economic value of land _when used for
| AI_. It'll take a long time before it exceeds the economic
| value of land when used for human subsistence, but the growth
| curves are not pointing in encouraging directions.
| jpadkins wrote:
| AGI / human overlords that cater to AGI won't need earth
| resources for more than a few decades. There will be a
| bootstrapping period, reliant on earth resources but soon it
| will be much cleaner to have solar/nuclear in space and have
| robotic mining of raw resources from asteroids.
| smokel wrote:
| _> The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12
| months, and lower prices lead to much more use. ... Moore's law
| changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably
| stronger._
|
| Moore waited at least five years [1] before deriving his law. On
| top of that, I don't think that it makes much sense to compare
| commercial pricing schemes to technical advancements.
|
| [1] http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/moore-
| crammingm...
| bibanez wrote:
| The "10x every 12 months" is pure salesman from sama. An
| engineer wouldn't do these extrapolations from little data in
| good faith.
| signatoremo wrote:
| He is talking about cost. Are you saying price didn't go down
| 10 times the last 12 months? How much data is too little?
| NewJazz wrote:
| 1 year of data is indeed too little if you are trying to
| forecast one year ahead. Also the pricing is set by OpenAI.
| We don't know their actual costs decreased by that factor.
| Only that they cut their prices.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| We don't know OpenAI's actual cost, but presumably Sam
| does know.
| lmm wrote:
| I'm sure he does, but why would he ever tell the truth
| about it except by coincidence?
| bfdm wrote:
| The retail price, or the actual cost to deliver? Those are
| not the same thing. Cost to deliver could actually mean
| something. Retail pricing is approximately meaningless.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| In context, retail pricing is very meaningful. The next
| sentence is "lower prices lead to much more use". That
| is, price elasticity of demand is large, and here price
| is retail price.
| 42lux wrote:
| Compute costs are pretty much the same for high vram cards?
| benterix wrote:
| I know this is subjective but he is comparing GPT-4 to 4o.
| The new model definitely felt lighter and faster, so
| probably cheaper for them to maintain, but at the same time
| very often gave worse answers than GPT-4.
| wwwtyro wrote:
| > Moore waited at least five years [1] before deriving his law.
|
| OpenAI has been around since 2015. Even if we give them four
| years to ramp up, that's still five years worth of data. If
| you're referring to the example he gave of token cost, that
| could just be him pulling two points off his data set to serve
| as an example. I don't know that's the case, of course, but I
| don't see anything in his text that contradicts the point.
|
| > I don't think that it makes much sense to compare commercial
| pricing schemes to technical advancements.
|
| How about Kurzweil's plot [1]?
|
| [1]
| https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2011/kurzweilfig.1.jpg
| tim333 wrote:
| That Kurzweil plot is a bit ancient, up to 1998 or something
|
| There's a better one that goes to 2023 https://www.bvp.com/as
| sets/uploads/2024/03/Price_Computation...
|
| The rate of progress is more like the Moore's law 18 month
| doubling. That's compute per dollar rather than Moore's
| transistor density.
|
| I think 10x per year is a bit questionable - it's way out of
| line with the Kurzweil trend.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| Yeah, price performance definitely seems to be the more
| important metric here. Anyone can get more compute by
| building a bigger and more expensive chip, but per-dollar
| metrics can't be gamed so easily. Though even in that plot,
| it's only doubled every ~2.3 years since 2008.
|
| (I'd be especially interested in amortized price
| performance, i.e., the number of useful computations from a
| system over its lifetime, divided by the total cost to
| build, maintain, and operate it. That's going to be the
| ultimate constraint on what you can do with a given amount
| of funding.)
| avs733 wrote:
| Yeah that was my first thought, don't sully the name of Gordon
| Moore with this.
|
| This sounds more like an insight into how things are working at
| open ai than anything else. And I'm not sure if deep seek and
| others are going to follow his nice rules.
|
| More generally, transistors are a technical phenomenon...they
| are either smaller (and work) or don't. The thing I really
| don't feel enough folks appreciate about AGI is it's a social
| phenomenon - not in the making of it but in the pragmatic
| reality of it.
|
| To a sufficient number of folks the current version is AGI, I
| see students every day trust it more than themselves. To bosses
| it also might be, if it's more intelligent than you average
| employee than that's sufficiently general intelligence to
| replace them. So far, I've really tried but don't beyond
| generating the most basic outline I have yet to find a model
| that helps with my work, so it's not intelligent for me.
|
| I'm aware of the benchmarks but they don't matter outside of
| places like HN. intelligence is and, likely, will always be
| social before it is technical and that makes these laws..not
| useful?
| Eliezer wrote:
| I wonder who wrote this? Doesn't sound like Altman's voice.
|
| I wonder who theorized this? Altman isn't known for having models
| about AGI.
|
| To the actual theorist: Claiming in one paragraph that AI goes as
| log resources, and in the next paragraph that the resource costs
| drop by 10x per year, is a contradiction; the latter paragraph
| shows a dependence on algorithms that is nothing like "it's just
| the compute silly".
| Centigonal wrote:
| > Altman isn't known for having models about AGI.
|
| His blog posts about AGI predate OpenAI.
|
| https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
|
| https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2
| Eliezer wrote:
| Hadn't seen that before, and despite being bog-standard
| Bostrom it's still more of an attempt to hold a theory than
| I'd seen associated with him before. Note nonoverlap of
| writing style and theory with the present post.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Relevant:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-a...
| msp26 wrote:
| > one of our reasons for launching products early and often is to
| give society and the technology time to co-evolve
|
| Is this really true? O3 (not mini) is still being held for
| ""safety testing"", and Sora was announced so far before release.
| dbuser99 wrote:
| AI has to be the solution to everything to justify the kind of
| investments going into it right now.
|
| Sam's a savvy businessman so he obviously understands that and
| goes few steps further. He promises exponential returns and
| addresses any regulatory and societal concerns. This piece is
| strategically crafted, not for us, but for investors.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| > *By using the term AGI here, we aim to communicate clearly, and
| we do not intend to alter or interpret the definitions and
| processes that define our relationship with Microsoft. We fully
| expect to be partnered with Microsoft for the long term. This
| footnote seems silly, but on the other hand we know some
| journalists will try to get clicks by writing something silly so
| here we are pre-empting the silliness...
|
| OpenAI and Microsoft signed a profoundly silly contract with
| vague terms about AGI! It's petty to snipe about journalists
| asking silly questions: they are responding to the fact that Sam
| Altman and Satya Nadella are not serious people, despite all
| their money and power.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Trying to regulate AI so that it is used predominantly for good
| and not for evil is as futile as trying to regulate steam in the
| early 19th century to be used for good and not for evil. It
| turned out steam was mainly used for good, but nothing could stop
| the navies of the great powers build steam powered battleships.
|
| Nothing will stop the Chinese CCP to direct AI towards more state
| surveillance. Or any number of actors to use AI to create
| extremely lethal swarms of drones.
| chvid wrote:
| "The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the
| resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly
| training compute, data, and inference compute."
|
| Hasn't the latest big improvements in LLMs been due to change in
| approach/algorithm? Reasoning models and augmenting LLMs with
| external tools and internet access (agents and deep research).
|
| As far I can tell classical pure LLMs are only improving modestly
| at this point.
| ineptech wrote:
| > AI will seep into all areas of the economy and society; we will
| expect everything to be smart.
|
| I fear this is correct, but with "smart" in the sense of smart
| TVs. In economic terms, TVs are amazing compared to just a few
| years ago - more pixels, much cheaper, more functionality - but
| in practice they spy on you and take ten seconds to turn on and
| show unskippable ads. This is purely a social (legal, economic,
| etc) problem as opposed to a technical one, and its solution (if
| we ever find one) would be likewise. So it's frightening to see
| someone with as much power over the outcome say something like
| this:
|
| > In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between
| capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may
| require early intervention. We are open to strange-sounding ideas
| like giving some "compute budget" to enable everyone on Earth to
| use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just
| relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible
| has the desired effect.
|
| When capital has control of an industry, but voluntarily gives
| little pieces of it out to labor so that they can "share" the
| profit, I think we all know how that turns out. It does seem
| possible that AGI really will get built and really will seep into
| everything and really will create a ton of economic value. But
| getting from there to the part where it improves everyone's lives
| is a social problem, akin to the problem of smart TVs, and I
| can't imagine a worse plan to solve that problem than leaving it
| up to the capitalist that owns the AGIs.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| > The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is
| super-exponential in nature.
|
| I'm still stuck thinking about this point. I don't know that it's
| obviously true. Maybe a more bounded claim would make more sense,
| something like: increasing intelligence in the short-term has big
| compounding effects. But there's also a cap as society and
| infrastructure has to adapt. And I don't know how this plays out
| within an adversarial system where people might be competing for
| scarce resources like human attention.
|
| Taken to the extreme, one could imagine a fantasy/scifi scenario
| where each person is empowered like a god in their own universe,
| allowing them to experiment, learn and and create endlessly.
| jp42 wrote:
| 30 years ago, no one in my native place has seen telephone. Now
| every single person young and old are connected to the
| internet, conduct banking and other transaction via phone and
| many many other things.
|
| Many unimaginable things happened in last 30 year from vantage
| point of my native place. Assuming same level of of
| transformation for next 30 year it will be still massive
| progress. Given current tech and AI, the rate of progress for
| next 30 years will be far greater than last 30. So I am
| believer in AI and tech in general will make massive progress
| in next decade
| abetusk wrote:
| > 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of
| the resources used to train and run it.
|
| > 2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12
| months, and lower prices lead to much more use.
|
| > 3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence
| is super-exponential in nature.
|
| My own editorial:
|
| Point 1 is pretty interesting as if P != NP then this is
| essentially "we can't do better than random search". So, in order
| to find progressively better solutions as we increase the
| (linear) input, we need exponentially more resources to find the
| answer. While I believe P != NP it's interesting to see this play
| out in the context of learning and AI.
|
| Point 2 is semi well-known. I'm having trouble finding it but
| there was an article a while back talking about algorithmic
| efficiencies to the DFT (or DCT?) were outpacing efficiencies
| that could be just attributed to Moore's law. Meaning the DFT was
| improving a few orders of magnitude faster than just Moore's law
| would imply. I assume this is essentially a Wright's law but for
| attention, in some sense, where more attention to problems leads
| to better optimizations that dovetail with Moore's law.
|
| Point 3 seems like it's almost a corollary, at least in the short
| term. If intelligence is capturing the exponential search and it
| can be re-used to find further efficiency, as in point 2, you get
| super-exponential growth. I think Kurzweil mentioned something
| about this as well.
|
| I haven't read the whole article but this jumped out at me:
|
| > Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General
| Intelligence) benefits all of humanity.
|
| A bald faced lie. Their mission is to capture value from
| developing AGI. Any benefit to humanity is incidental.
| Foofoobar12345 wrote:
| So much negativity all the time. The fact remains that AI models
| are out in the public domain. If you're unable to see how that
| can improve the lives of an average person, that's a failure of
| imagination.
|
| Don't let megacorps dominance prevent individual action. The best
| way to be hopeful is to effect change in your immediate
| surroundings. Teach people how to leverage AI, then they won't be
| hold hostage to the tyranny of the beauraucrats - doctors,
| lawyers, accountants, politicians, software engineers, project
| managers, bankers, investment advisors etc.
|
| Yes, AI makes mistakes .. so what? Humans do too.
|
| Credit where credit is due - Sam may be no saint, but OpenAI
| deserves credit for launching this revolution. Directly or
| indirectly that led to the release of open models. Would the
| results have been the same without Sam? Nobody knows, not a point
| worth anybody's time debating.
|
| Given most of us here are software engineers, it's natural to
| feel threatened, there will be those of us whose skills will be
| made obsolete. And some of us will make the jump to the land of
| ideas, and these tools will empower us to build solutions that
| previously required large companies to build. Perhaps that might
| mean that we focus less on monetary rewards instead of change, as
| it becomes ever so easy to effect that change.
|
| To those whose skills will be made obsolete - you have a choice
| on whether you want to let that happen. Some amount of fear is
| healthy - keeps our mind alert and allows us to grow.
|
| There will be a growing pain, as our species evolves. We'll have
| to navigate that with empathy.
|
| Change starts from you. You are more powerful than you can
| imagine, at any given point.
| thrance wrote:
| > In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between
| capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may
| require early intervention.
|
| Marxist analysis from Sam Altman?
|
| > We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some "compute
| budget" to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we
| can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the
| cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect.
|
| I can't imagine a world in which billionaires (trillionaires?)
| would happily share their wealth to people whose work they don't
| need anymore. Honestly, I have more faith in a rogue ASI taking
| over the world to install a fair post-scarcity society than on
| current politicians and tech-oligarchs to give up a single cent
| to the masses.
| dustingetz wrote:
| each subsequent post is worse than the one before who is the
| audience for this drivel
| yapyap wrote:
| [flagged]
| blah2244 wrote:
| > AGI is a weakly defined term, but generally speaking we mean it
| to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at
| human level, in many fields.
|
| Is it just me, or is that an incredibly weak/vague definition for
| AGI? Feels like you could make the claim that AI is at this level
| already if you stretch the terms he used enough.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's funny, there used to be a pretty solid definition of AGI:
| a system that can pass the Turing Test. Then we got there, and
| it turned out that passing the Turing Test is actually pretty
| specialized and doesn't mean the system is as smart as a human
| in all aspects.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >Ensuring that the benefits of AGI are broadly distributed is
| critical. The historical impact of technological progress
| suggests that most of the metrics we care about (health outcomes,
| economic prosperity, etc.) get better on average and over the
| long-term, but increasing equality does not seem technologically
| determined and getting this right may require new ideas.
|
| I don't see why we should trust OpenAI's promises now, when
| they've broken promises in the past.
|
| See the "OpenAI has a history of broken promises" section of this
| webpage: https://www.safetyabandoned.org/
|
| In my view, state AGs should not allow them to complete their
| transition to a for-profit.
| noch wrote:
| > I don't see why we should trust OpenAI's promises now, when
| they've broken promises in the past.
|
| I don't see what "our" trust has to do with anything. Perhaps
| you're an investor in OpenAI and your trust matters to OpenAI
| and its plans? But for the rest of us, our trust doesn't
| matter. It would be like me saying, "I don't see why we should
| trust Saudi Aramco."
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > It would be like me saying, "I don't see why we should
| trust Saudi Aramco."
|
| It's completely fair response to say that if the CEO of Saudi
| Aramco performatively pens an article on how to mitigate the
| effects of global warming, while also profiting from it, and
| engaging in no tangible actions to fix the problem.
| noch wrote:
| > It's completely fair response
|
| My question, rephrased, is "so what"? What is my or our
| trust worth? What does us claiming we no longer trust Saudi
| Aramco achieve unless we are investors or perhaps other
| significant stakeholders?
| mrbungie wrote:
| Ask Musk how Tesla sales in EU are doing once enough
| people started distrusting him directly as a person.
|
| Economic votes are based partly on trust, and with enough
| swinging in the distrust direction, it would have a
| direct repercution on OAI financials.
| noch wrote:
| > Ask Musk how Tesla sales in EU are doing once enough
| people started distrusting him directly as a person.
|
| Have you looked at $TSLA recently?
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > "so what"?
|
| I totally understand your disenchantment, but if you feel
| that the mere opinions of the plebs are inconsequential^
| and hence pointless, why participate in a public forum at
| all?
|
| ^Demonstrably not true if you look at the history of
| popular movements that garnered real and durable change,
| all which gathered momentum from the disgruntled
| mumblings of the plebs
| noch wrote:
| > but if you feel that the mere opinions of the plebs are
| inconsequential^ and hence pointless, why participate in
| a public forum at all?
|
| That gets to the heart of the matter, actually.
| Personally I participate in order to get new information
| and learn new ideas. But yeah, being human and flawed, I
| do end up giving opinions and I notice most people just
| want to talk about opinions.
|
| But I digress. My question was specifically about the
| value of saying "I don't trust OpenAI".
| NewJazz wrote:
| Nonprofits make a social contract, purporting to operate for
| the public good, not profit.
|
| Trust that their operations are indeed benefiting the public
| and they are acting truthfully is important for making that
| social contract work.
|
| Shady companies doing shady things and keeping shady records
| doesn't incentivize any type of market participants --
| investors, consumers, philanthropists.
| noch wrote:
| > Nonprofits make a social contract, purporting to operate
| for the public good, not profit.
|
| This is obvious (though I disagree that there is a social
| contract, and if there is, it's worth the paper it's
| printed on) and everybody is aware what a nonprofit is. But
| your reply still doesn't answer my question. Another way of
| asking it is: how many other non-profits have you audited
| for trustworthiness before this conversation? What was the
| impact of your audit?
|
| Or is saying "we can no longer trust Sam Altman" just us
| twiddling our thumbs so we can signal our virtue to others
| or comfort ourselves in our own powerlessness? In less than
| a decade he'll have an army of humanoid sentient robots and
| probably be the wealthiest person on the planet, and we'll
| still be yelling "we can no longer trust him"?
| NewJazz wrote:
| That you disagree there is a social contract is
| unsurprising. You strike me as the type to be unaware of
| social norms.
|
| I've evaluated the veracity and sincerity of many
| nonprofits and for profit corporations alike.
|
| I have no idea what you're on about regarding sentient
| robots.
| noch wrote:
| > You strike me as the type to be unaware of social norms
|
| You have a weird way of talking to strangers. But, you
| know what they say about assumptions.
| NewJazz wrote:
| On what grounds could state AGs stop the move?
| pton_xd wrote:
| We can't even simulate a C. elegans worm with 1k cells and 302
| neurons. But, sure, a few more GPUs and we'll have AGI!
| drdeca wrote:
| This seems to be assuming that AGI would be similarly difficult
| to full brain emulation? This doesn't seem obviously true.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > This doesn't seem obviously true.
|
| Is this kind of "casting doubt" some kind of cheat code that
| suspends all disbelief?
|
| Anyway, yes it does seem absolutely obviously true that if
| you want to reproduce intelligence you must (at least at
| first) simulate it.
| ckw wrote:
| Reasoning models are more intelligent than C. elegans.
| drdeca wrote:
| It is easier to make a flying machine than it is to make a
| machine that flies by the exact principles that birds use
| to fly (with flapping wings and such).
|
| Do you have an argument for why general intelligence
| couldn't be like flight in this way? You just said that it
| is obvious. I do not share this intuition. Could you give
| an explanation for why you expect it to be unlike flight in
| this respect?
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > It is easier to make a flying machine than it is to
| make a machine that flies by the exact principles that
| birds use to fly
|
| do you think that "flying machines" aren't simulated
| before manufacturing?
| drdeca wrote:
| I believe airplanes were made before the first good
| simulations of bird flight.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| yes and they only flew ~100 feet
|
| https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-
| objects/1903-wright-fl...
| comp_throw7 wrote:
| This claim is already falsified by existing AI
| capabilities, which neither required simulating how humans
| solve similar problems, nor required understanding how to
| hand-code the relevant algorithms (and indeed we don't even
| have the interpretability tools to know what those
| algorithms are yet!).
| choilive wrote:
| Biological neurons != artificial neurons. You don't need to
| simulate biology to simulate intelligence. In the same way you
| don't need to flap wings to fly, or muscle fibers to move
| around.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| the day your neural network has 1 quintillion connections between
| each other wake me up because that is when we are getting
| anywhere close to AGI, billions and trillions are rookie numbers
| moralestapia wrote:
| >one quintillion connections
|
| What a load of nonsense.
| Animats wrote:
| _2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12
| months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this
| in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024,
| where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period.
| Moore's law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is
| unbelievably stronger._
|
| _3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence
| is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we
| see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in
| the near future._
|
| First, if the cost is coming down so fast, why the need for
| "exponentially increasing investment"? One could make the same
| exponential growth claim for, say, the electric power industry,
| which had a growth period around a century ago and eventually
| stabilized near 5% of GDP. The "tech sector" in total is around
| 9% of US GDP, and relatively stable.
|
| Second, only about half the people with college degrees in the US
| have jobs that need college degrees. The demand for educated
| people is finite, as is painfully obvious to those paying off
| college loans.
|
| This screed comes across as a desperate attempt to justify
| OpenAI's bloated valuation.
| choilive wrote:
| The costs are coming down fast because of the investment and
| would not happen independently of the investment. The same
| reason for Moore's law can be generalized as the
| learning/experience curve. You could make the argument that the
| demand for AI has a higher growth rate than the learning rate
| ex. if AI becomes 10x more cost efficient and results in demand
| growing 100x, you would also need to follow with an exponential
| growth in inference investment.
| jb_rad wrote:
| First, it requires exponential investment because
|
| > 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of
| the resources used to train and run it.
|
| Incremental improvements in intelligence require exponentially
| more resources. Only once that step is achieved can costs be
| reduced.
|
| Second, intelligence is not the same as education. Education is
| specialized, intelligence is general. Every modern convenience
| around you is the result of intelligence.
| esperent wrote:
| > The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of
| the resources used to train and run it.
|
| Didn't Deepseek disprove this? They trained a roughly equal
| model on an order of magnitude less compute.
| Lerc wrote:
| No, advances in efficiency were always expected (and indeed
| required because of this 'law')
|
| The principle is that if DeepSeek had have spent 10 or 100
| times as much as they did their model would have been a few
| times better.
|
| This rule is intended to be applied on top of all of the
| other advances.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > The principle is that if DeepSeek had have spent 10 or
| 100 times as much as they did their model would have been
| a few times better.
|
| If this is the case then OpenAI must have a model that is
| a few times better. Where is it?
| choilive wrote:
| You could also make an argument that the bulk of college
| degrees are not economically useful. The demand for certain
| kinds of education and knowledge is certainly finite - but the
| demand ceiling for general intelligence seems much much higher,
| and appears to be limited only by the cost of hiring ever
| smarter people.
| panarky wrote:
| "cost to use" != "cost to train"
|
| Elsewhere he says that model intelligence is determined by the
| log of the resources used to train it, and this relationship
| has been constant for many orders of magnitude.
|
| The implication is that it takes exponentially increasing
| investment to achieve a linear increase in intelligence.
|
| Exponentially increasing costs sound like a bad thing.
|
| But then he says the linear increase in intelligence generates
| exponentially increasing economic benefits.
|
| Those exponentially increasing benefits sounds like they might
| justify the exponentially increasing costs.
| frotaur wrote:
| Ok, but according to this, linear investments generate linear
| increase in economic benefits.
|
| So why the need to go exponential?
| panarky wrote:
| Because increasing investments and profits linearly would
| mean sub-linear growth in intelligence.
|
| Since Sam's only shot at immortality is reaching ASI in the
| next few years, sub-linear isn't fast enough.
|
| The purpose of ASI isn't to generate economic benefits for
| everyone else.
|
| The purpose of everyone else's economic benefits is to
| generate the ASI so Sam can live forever.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > Elsewhere he says that model intelligence is determined by
| the log of the resources used to train it, and this
| relationship has been constant for many orders of magnitude.
|
| If this relationship is constant then you must have a way to
| quantify "intelligence" in such a way that it can be compared
| like this. Care to share it?
| xbar wrote:
| Only two of those are observations.
| pplonski86 wrote:
| > Still, imagine it as a real-but-relatively-junior virtual
| coworker. Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or 1 million of them. Now
| imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work.
|
| I really don't want a future in which I had to supervise 1
| million of real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworkers. I would
| prefer 1 senior over 1 million juniors. I'm in the programming
| industry and I don't think that coding might be scaled.
| tunesmith wrote:
| We've just gotten through a big second generation of available
| models, but at least for the projects I'm on, I still feel just
| as far away as ever as being able to trust responses. I spent a
| few hours this weekend working on a side project that involved
| setting up a graphql server with a few basic query resolvers and
| field resolvers, and my experience with 4o, R1, o3-mini-high were
| all akin to arguing with too-confident junior engineers that were
| confused, without realizing it, about what they thought they
| knew. And this was basic stuff about simple graphql resolvers. I
| did have my first experience of o3-mini-high (finally, after much
| arguing) being able to answer something that R1 couldn't, though.
|
| It's weird, because it's still _wildly useful_ and my ideas for
| side projects are definitely more expansive than they used to be.
| And yet, I 'm really far from having any fear of replacement.
| Almost none of the answers I'm getting are truly nailing the
| experience of teaching me something new, while also having
| perfect accuracy. (I'm on ChatGPT+, not pro.)
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Same. I think the tools have gotten a little better with agent
| mode and all that but it still doesn't get anything even
| slightly complicated for an API it hasn't seen before. Like it
| hasn't gotten more intelligent since maybe Gpt 3.5.
|
| I quite like them as somebody who has a huge problem with onset
| procrastination. I immediately ask them to write something and
| criticize them and write it myself because whatever it comes up
| with is so damn stupid.
| cma wrote:
| Have you tried putting the API in context? Gemini has 2M
| context, where original 3.5 had like 4K and not great with
| it.
|
| While some large apis may not fit, not many that it hasn't
| seen before fit that bill. For updated large APIs you can put
| in the changelog but more work to gather all the detailed API
| changes and changed documentation on their own.
| sunpazed wrote:
| Even though I have a reasonable intuition and understanding of
| how a LLM works, I am still awe-struck each and every time I
| use one. The fact that I have a junior developer at my
| convenience is a huge efficiency gain. I've been able to
| automate the rudimentary elements and focus my time on the
| stuff that counts.
| aerhardt wrote:
| The other day o1 hallucinated on a question of some Salesforce
| object properties that are clearly laid out in the docs. It
| took me a while to disentangle it because it was very
| persuasive. I concur with you though, I still find the tech
| tremendously useful.
| DrScientist wrote:
| > we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases
|
| Sure we can _imagine_ it. However to make it happen, it 's not
| enough to imagine the end goal, you need to understand and
| execute every single step.
|
| I suspect his lack of knowledge about what's actually involved
| allows him to imagine it.
|
| ie I notice he hasn't declared a world free of software bugs and
| failures ( a much easier task ), before declaring a world free of
| bugs in human biology.
| belter wrote:
| > Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view
|
| And my coffee machine is plotting the Singularity...Let it be for
| the record in the future, AGI will be known as A Grand Illusion.
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