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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Sam Altman Is Super Excited for a Great 2025

Link to blog post

Yesterday, Sam Altman posted this short personal blog post. The material takeaway is summarized in this paragraph;

We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

"AGI is right around the corner. Seriously, we mean it this time." Okay, I'll believe it when I see it and if that means I'm not worried enough about "alignment" and "safety" that's fine. Our robot overlord will smile upon me or he wont.

Sam's explicit assertion here will be debated on all the normal forms and tweet ecosystems. Thought pieces will be written by breathless techno-bros, techno-phobes, and all others. LessWrong is going to get out the Navel Gazer 6000.

None of that is particular alarming to me.

What is; the first 2/3rds of Sam's blog post.

This is because it is an amazing amalgam of personal-corpo speak that is straight out of a self-congratulatory Linkedin post. Here are some highlights (lowlights?);

Moving at speed in uncharted waters is an incredible experience, but it is also immensely stressful for all the players. Conflicts and misunderstanding abound.

The overwhelming feeling is gratitude; I know that someday I’ll be retired at our ranch watching the plants grow, a little bored, and will think back at how cool it was that I got to do the work I dreamed of since I was a little kid. I try to remember that on any given Friday, when seven things go badly wrong by 1 pm.

This three were particularly triggering for me:

Looking back, I certainly wish I had done things differently, and I’d like to believe I’m a better, more thoughtful leader today than I was a year ago.

I also learned the importance of a board with diverse viewpoints and broad experience in managing a complex set of challenges. Good governance requires a lot of trust and credibility. I appreciate the way so many people worked together to build a stronger system of governance for OpenAI that enables us to pursue our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.

My biggest takeaway is how much I have to be thankful for and how many people I owe gratitude towards: to everyone who works at OpenAI and has chosen to spend their time and effort going after this dream, to friends who helped us get through the crisis moments, to our partners and customers who supported us and entrusted us to enable their success, and to the people in my life who showed me how much they cared.

I think one of the points of near consensus on The Motte is a general hyper-suspicion to this kind of disingenuous koombayah style of writing. It's "Everyone love everyone", "we're all in this together" , "we made mistakes but that's okay because we care about one another."

This is exactly the kind of corpo-speak that both preceeds and follows a massive round of brutal layoffs based on the cold equations of a balance sheet. Or some sort of change in service to customers that is objectively absolutely worse. I am deeply surprised that it seems Sam has truly adopted this at his most personal level. This was not a sanitized press release from OpenAI, but something he posted on what appears to be his personal blog. Sure, many personal blogs become just as milquetoast as corporate press releases if/when a person gets famous enough, but, in the tech world, a personal blog or twitter account is usually the last bastion for, you know, actual real human style communication.

I had another post a few months ago about OpenAI. One of the things that came out of the comments was a sort of "verified rumor" that Sam Altman is a pure techno-accelerationist but without any sort of moral, theological, or virtuous framework. He simply wants to speedrun to the singularity because humans are kind of "whatever" in his eyes. This blog post, to me, provides some more evidence in favor of that. He's using the universal language of "nice to everybody" which is recognized - correctly - as the sound the big machine makes right before it thrashes you. This follows a pattern. OpenAI was a non-profit until it wasn't. Mr. Altman went to congress in 2023 to beg for totally not-regulatory capture for his own company but for, like, you know the good of everyone.

The technical merits and viability of AGI aside, the culture war angle here is that while many other groups are having meaningful open discussion about the future of economic, political, and social life with AIs/AGIs, Altman (and a few others like him) are using the cloaked, closed, and misleading language that has become the preferred dialect of the PMC. As I said, it is especially abundant right before they screw you over.

I think one of the points of near consensus on The Motte is a general hyper-suspicion to this kind of disingenuous koombayah style of writing.

I'd mostly agree.

It personally sets my teeth on edge to read something that clearly wants to inspire strong emotions in the reader or perhaps persuade them of something but doesn't actually speak of anything that is happening to be excited about.

Its the difference between saying "We've received and analyzed the test results which have provided us with an unparalleled depth of understanding regarding the intricate nuances of your overall health and physiological dynamics. The insights gained from this process are both illuminating and inspiring, offering an exciting roadmap for continued progress and optimization. We are deeply committed to partnering with you on this transformative journey, leveraging future interactions to refine our approach, enhance the granularity of our feedback, and will ensure you remain in top condition in the coming decades!"

(ironically, I used ChatGPT to generate the most corpo-speak version of that sentence possible)

vs. "The test came back negative. You're cancer free, congrats!"

The first just desperately wants you to feel good without delivering the information you actually would like to hear that would make you happy. The second actually gives you the reason to be happy because there's a tangible fact about the world that is 'good,' and you just needed to hear it said.

I also note that there are no concrete examples of how their products have improved productivity for any companies already. Either the examples they have are underwhelming or maybe they aren't allowed to discuss it? Otherwise why not talk about tangible achievements?

I'm increasingly annoyed when the AI 'insiders' will speak reverently about how they're instantiating a Godhead that will relieve us of all the miserable burdens of our mortal existence in the near future, but will get hugely cagey about how that's actually being done or why we can trust them do to his correctly. They talk about things in religious/spiritual terms when telling us what the future holds, but hew to corpo-speak and remain businesslike when asked about present status.

It reads like a particularly opaque sort of intentional hype cycle that might be mostly designed to inspire us to transfer tons of wealth to them before AI progress stalls out for a while.

It personally sets my teeth on edge to read something that clearly wants to inspire strong emotions in the reader or perhaps persuade them of something but doesn't actually speak of anything that is happening to be excited about.

Ironically, this would also describe the writing of AI/LLMs themselves when you prompt them to show any sort of character or express a "personal" opinion. At this rate Sam could get replaced by an actual AI halfway through the singularity and literally nobody would notice.

It reads like a particularly opaque sort of intentional hype cycle that might be mostly designed to inspire us to transfer tons of wealth to them before AI progress stalls out for a while.

If I had to guess they feel the AGI competition, current Claude is near-strictly better already and the recent Deepseek V3 seems quite close while being orders of magnitude cheaper (epistemic status: haven't tested much yet). If I had no big-dick reveals in the pipeline I'd probably look to cut and run too.

Ironically, this would also describe the writing of AI/LLMs themselves when you prompt them to show any sort of character or express a "personal" opinion.

It does, but at least with some prompt engineering you can get them to distill down to the actual informational content.

At this rate Sam could get replaced by an actual AI halfway through the singularity and literally nobody would notice.

Perhaps that's the joke. This is him asking the latest GPT model to spit out his annual report and see if anybody calls him on it.

If I had to guess they feel the AGI competition, current Claude is near-strictly better already and the recent Deepseek V3 seems quite close while being orders of magnitude cheaper (epistemic status: haven't tested much yet). If I had no big-dick reveals in the pipeline I'd probably look to cut and run too.

I already got suspicious when they released SORA to the wild, which is an impressive model but is now arriving late to the table in terms of publicly-available video generation capabilities.

OpenAI had what seemed like a 'comfortable' lead for about a year there, but if progress had remained exponential or even linear from the past models they should be running away with the game. Instead the other close competitors seem to be chomping steadily away at their lunch.

OpenAI had what seemed like a 'comfortable' lead for about a year there, but if progress had remained exponential or even linear from the past models they should be running away with the game. Instead the other close competitors seem to be chomping steadily away at their lunch.

"When you see exponential, think logistic" seems to remain a useful rule-of-thumb. (I'm not sure of the source; I find only me when I search but I know I didn't originate it)

Yep. I may be wrong but I seem to recall that there was a brief period of time where a lot of folks in the space did genuinely think improvements would continue to follow the exponential curve even if individual jumps between new models were a little smaller.

Or at least were willing to hype it that way. I'm prepared to be corrected if my memory is faulty there.

There was certainly a 'vibe' that we might have activated the fast takeoff scenario.

For what it's worth, this is still the vibe, indeed more than ever, and I do not understand what was the change you're implying you have noticed. After o3, the consensus of all top lab researchers seems to be "welp we're having superintelligence in under 5 years".

I guess I'd call it a bifurcation.

I read the material that suggests all the pieces are in place to achieve superintelligence.

But I'm also reading reports that the most recent training runs are seeing diminishing returns. So making the models BIGGER isn't giving the same results.

Which certainly explains why OpenAI hasn't pushed ChatGPT5 out the door, if it can't demonstrate as significant an improvement as 3-4 was.

So improvements and tweaks to existing models are giving us gains in the meantime, it isn't very clear to me where the quantum leap that will enable true AGI/Superintelligence is hiding. Which is more a me issue, I'm certainly not an insider. I'm just seeing two sides, those who think moar compute is good enough, and those who think its going to take some tricky engineering.

And Altman sure isn't telling us what he's seeing. So my question is whether he's playing cards close to the vest to avoid popping the hype bubble or because he really thinks he's going to blow us away with the next product. Possibly blow us away in the most literal meaning of the word.

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