Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking.
Would have to be energy. Data centres have light human footprints. And Altman wants to fabricate the chips in the Middle East, not America [1].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/openai-s-...
e: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249770/microsoft-three-...
only after they are already built
There will therefore be a sudden supply of half a million such factories.
Think the Matrix, only the futuristic artificial intelligence isn't harvesting human brainpower/heat -- instead most people work at power plants.
My assumption is that the data centers would mostly be staffed by those who will have to manually audit data going in and out of the LLMs on a daily basis. There would also be a need to generate/curate the test data that the LLMs will have train on. There is potential for half a million jobs, but is that what you would want to have human effort invested in, is the real question.
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Or he wants his suppliers to be a regulated utility while he sells 100% margin products on top of it?
Or he wants all the greater fools now wherever they are so he can get out before the collapse?
It feels like this is a case of following the money to understand the real goals, since it's unclear to me that AGI is that goal.
>Or he wants his suppliers to be a regulated utility while he sells 100% margin products on top of it?
Near term yep - soon as regulatory capture drops. They'll make out like bandits.
>Or he wants all the greater fools now wherever they are so he can get out before the collapse?
Then this, by the time competition catches up anyway because there are no real moats here besides regulation
>Wait, he wants his open product to be like a utility with low profits for maximized reach?
Then this is what remains, in a sea of other providers.
Financially? Pump and Dump, baby. Though I reckon the end result will still be intelligence flowing like water.
Ironically, much of the observed behaviour is instrumentally convergent for most of the suggested ultimate goals.
Trying to make a safe and aligned AGI or a statutory government monopoly would both get about half the things we've seen.
The other half is stuff which is collectively mutually exclusive on all goals, but humans aren't perfect logical spheres in a vacuum, so it could still be basically any of them.
at this point, the lofty goals are a distraction from celebrating the utility of what we have, incremental upgrades, and reduced resource usage.
> As the availability of electricity became more widespread, people found better ways of using it.
This is very heartwarming.
I have a fond fantasy that those folks are laughing their asses off whenever we call the software stuff “high technology”.
Some people like to say that everything is harder in game development, but I'd say that it's even more so in semiconductor systems engineering. Tracing problems through every layer of the factory is like playing Elden Ring without a monitor. All you get is a guy in Korea who speaks very bad English to describe the scene for you. I can guarantee there is nowhere you will find more cursed problems. Imagine enduring a root cause analysis that winds up attributing a yield issue to fertilizer being spread on a field 20 miles away.
I can’t think of many examples where he said something in an interview and it really challenged or surprised me. By contrast, any random hour with Lisa Su and you will come away quite impressed and easily understand why she is her company’s leader.
Plenty of smart money behind Altman, though, so maybe he shows up stronger behind the scenes.
[Edit: added "aloof" due to perceived aloofness.]
A common sentiment about SpaceX and Musk is that the employees also believe in the mission of making space accessible and going to Mars. Musk has been consistent on that being SpaceX's eventual goal since founding it, and he stuck through it even when SpaceX was one failure away from missing payroll. All of his early employees still publicly support this mission, even after retiring or moving on to found their own space companies.
Altman comes off as a "say anything to keep the money flowing" type guy even to his own employees. The fractured leadership all seems to suggest that he can't even manage to convince the people who work with him the most that he actually believes in his oft-repeated lofty goals regarding AGI.
What would be a concrete example of this? Has Salesforce revenue increased with their AI offerings? Has Microsofts?
Writing of LLMs a being useless isn't wrong and unproductive, but assuming that they are universally applicable, or that they can function without supervision is also very wrong and potentially dangerous.
If AI fails to deliver its promises or fails to do so in the short timeframes implicitly proposed by the ecosystem, I expect dark times in terms of growth for the tech industry at least for a while.
Anecdote: As a on-off tech shopper dealing with some big providers from time to time, I can sniff the reek of desperation when trying to sell GenAI stuff. And that's weird.
I’m kind of curious where it all leads to. There’s a non zero chance it’s amazing given what is in my hands today is already amazing compared to what was in my hands 3 years ago.
I don’t think the choice is like AI or curing cancer. I think it’s more like Doge coin and meme stocks or whatever finance fad.
And profit!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311509
Pure evil.
Whatever else he has done, he ranks super-super-low on the empathy scale...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
Search for "car payments". It's heartbreaking :'(
If I ran a company, I would not hire this man.
Edit: what is this lesswrong site about?
Shit
When all else fails, pitch your idea to the right officials in the USG and you'll make bank. And if you do it right, you won't even be doing anything at all. There are companies getting 8-10 figures a year to fail at upgrading systems from DOS to literally anything not DOS. It's a very low bar, but a profitable one if you can pull it off.
It also had hundreds of contractors and employs 200+ full time employees. It consumes $40M worth of electricity each year and uses 1.7 million gallons of water each day for cooling.
So it sure doesn't seem like it unless we want to get into a debate around how much perceived useful data and value the NSA gets out of spying on Americans and foreign countries.
I read some article about how the federal retirement system is about up to $500m over the last 20 years on a failed outsourcing the digitization of their paper system. They are apparently not much closer to having a digital version than they were when they started something like 3-4 contractors ago. Specifically the storage hub in West Virginia.
There has to be some sort of grift in that kinda waste. How do that many companies not move the needle and get to keep the money?
There has been much scrutiny over how much the ArriveCAN app cost to develop and who was subcontracted for its development. Contracts show that the federal government will spend close to $54 million with 23 separate subcontractors. A Parliamentary committee ordered federal departments to submit contracting documents related to the app but have been told that the names of subcontractors cannot be released citing issues of confidentiality. In October 2022, two developers at two separate IT companies took part in a hackathon where they both developed duplicates of the ArriveCAN app in under two days, for an estimated cost of $250,000.
No one in program offices (the offices responsible for these system developments) has the proper expertise to judge IT/software contracts or the IT/software portion of contracts. And, they won't listen to you because they've got a contractor or two sitting on their shoulder whispering into their ear things that are very wrong (this got a Colonel I worked with in trouble once) and leads to very biased decision making, away from reality and in favor of the grifters.
This is a reliable thing. There are some really good people in gov't, but they don't seem to make their way to the program offices. So without expertise and good judgement, you get these 8-10 figure (or maybe worse) boondoggles.
Reminds me of a quote I saved from Kevin Kelly's book The Inevitable, which was published in 2016. I saved it because it sounded so absurd at the time. To be clear, it sort of still does sound absurd to me, who remain moderately skeptical about AI (though admittedly less so than in 2016, largely because of the following sentence). What's very serious is how much money and old-fashioned brainpower is going into making this future real. I don't know whether the metaphor was arrived at independently, derives from the same source, or is just an obvious way of thinking about the world when you've drunk the right flavor of Kool-Aid.
> Amid all this activity, of a picture of our AI future is coming into view, and it is not the HAL 9000—a discrete machine animated by a charismatic (yet potentially homicidal) humanlike consciousness—or a Singularitan rapture of superintelligence. The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. You’ll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century past. Three generations ago, many a tinkerer struck it rich by taking a tool and making an electric version. Take a manual pump; electrify it. Find a hand-wringer washer; electrify it. The entrepreneurs didn’t need to generate the electricity; they brought it from the grid and used it to automate the previously manual. Now everything that we formerly electrified we will cognify. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or more valuable by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.
Reality today seems to be anyone who's getting decent results out of ML is doing something slightly different according to the specifics of their domain. You can't take a chatbot LLM and expect it to predict the weather, architect a building, drive a car, and fold laundry.
What happens if giving to everyone and their mothers ends up in low usage? Are they going to blame scale again and ask for a Dyson Sphere?
And it's kind of funny to see how well MS has played that particular instrument. A partnership with Sam got them 49% ownership and got rid of the doomer faction. The 75% profit share makes any future investors look long and hard at investing into what looks to be a capital-intensive low-revenue business right now.
Which makes it likely that OAI will run out of money, and oops, let's see if there aren't suddenly more than 49% ownership. And MS has a technology where they were long behind. (My bet is that the majority ownership will happen this funding round, because Sam is desperate)
The only way that doesn't happen is if Sam manages a massive investment round and finds a path to profit before the money's burned up. And the beauty of it is that the early 49% ownership means they only need to make a comparatively tiny investment this round to still be a majority owner in the company, with a 75% revenue share until their money is fully recouped. And the other investors get to bear the majority of the risk for the much larger funding round.
This are all utterly logical plays if you are willing to accept Sam is somebody who can make things move, loves gambling, and is a narcissist.
I really do think he's being played by a virtuoso, and it gives me great joy to watch that unfold.
Downright harmful in some cases.
the "muh job" angle is well and good, but if this really convinces you, i got a bridge to sell. maybe sam thinks we all are into making podcasts now.