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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29224 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.

He is a startup founder with a record high burnrate with a product that isn't good enough to be a commercial product. He has to bring in lots of customers promising it will soon be better. He wants to speedrun to a point in which he can actually generate revenue that can cover his costs.

Chatgpt is not good enough to replace developers, lawyers or any other qualified profession. It is an alternative to google without the ability to insert advertising. Github co-pilot isn't great for overall productivity.

Chatgpt is facing scaling laws. The bigger the model the more power it draws. The size of the model required to be useful is too large for today's hardware and power costs. They can no longer make a model orders of magnitude larger. The datasets are too large to fine tune manually.

Sam Altman is pretty much begging for a nuclear reactor and enough GPUs to swallow all that juice.

Chatgpt is facing scaling laws. The bigger the model the more power it draws. The size of the model required to be useful is too large for today's hardware and power costs. They can no longer make a model orders of magnitude larger. The datasets are too large to fine tune manually.

We'll see I guess. DeepSeek trained a GPT-4 level AI for $6 million (admittedly employing existing LLMs). They have also made huge efficiency gains in inference, charging just $0.14 per million tokens as compared to $3 per million output tokens with a comparable Claude model.

Software is becoming more efficient much more quickly than hardware. We might not need those terawatt scale data centers until after AGI is achieved.

On a theoretical level, absent some sort of woo about quantum computation in the human brain, there's no reason why silicon shouldn’t be vastly superior to synapses eventually.

I think the phrase "quantum woo" vastly understates the potential impact of quantum computing on machine learning. The quantum algorithm zoo, for example, lists a number of quantum machine learning algorithms. Several of these get exponential speed up from classical algorithms, but even a quadratic speedup of grover's algorithm would be game changing at the scale frontier models operate on.

I agree that most normie use of quantum in the brain is "woo". And I also agree that it's not been established that the brain relies on any quantum effects. But there is actual legitimate research in these directions and it seems wrong to offhandedly dismiss it.

Viable quantum computing dropping today (or even in the next decade or two) would also break almost all extant (asymmetric) cryptography. Yeah, NIST just recently published specs for post-quantum crypto, but I expect it'll be a decade before those are universally supported. Maybe less if it happens: SSL everywhere happened fairly fast, but became a real priority almost overnight. But if quantum were something any well-founded startup could do, nation-state actors could throw some impressive wrenches into any secure networks for a while.

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