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OpenAI researchers warned of AI breakthrough before CEO ouster according to Reuters. It seems that, disappointingly, there's more to the Sama exit than just petty politics.
I had found myself greatly reassured by the thought that, actually, this whole debacle was just (human) politics as usual - and not the eerie dawn of some new era.
Have other motizens noticed a substantial disconnect between their foremost worry the past while, and that of the normies in their life? Everyone else is chanting for Palestine, and I'm chanting sotto voce for a decade or two more of human supremacy before the singularity. And anytime I could comfort myself by the thought that, well, Serious People are not yet concerned, I see some preposterous headline from selfsame Serious People about how hillwalking is white supremacy, or equivalent bullshit. The illusion is bollocked.
Hmm this sounds alarming, I wonder what the new capability was, it must be something very powerful and dange...
Oh.
Truth is, 90% of all work is stupid. The difference between a committee of competent Harvard grads from every major (smart and competent, but no genius) and the kind of people who create true innovation is a couple of orders of magnitude.
AI might be around the corner, but super-human intelligence that can innovate (Neumann, Terence Tao) is much much much farther away than we think.
I don’t think that’s a big gap. And many geniuses have also had very weird beliefs. So the typical Harvard grad can regurgitate a bunch of things smart people say and then make connections between different thoughts. Seems like OpenAI has accomplished that.
What’s a genius? It seems a bit autistic that they can ignore what they’ve learned and try new things. Some are legit insights and some completely stupid.
That sounds like an AI hallucination.
So then true innovation would just be a bunch of processing power testing whether the hallucination had some missed insight.
I’ve seen too many geniuses also do stupid stuff. Like Bill Gates I believe many here have said he was the top of the top. But he’s also done some dumb stuff and many things where I think I had better ideas.
I don’t think Musks is smarter than me at all. But he benefited from right place right time to gain some skills and maybe some different personality traits.
It is funny how many people believe themselves smarter than Musk yet he is probably the most accomplished person in human history in pursuits that clearly require a lot of intelligence.
Whenever I criticize Musk, people tell me I'm too anal about him overhyping his companies and what they're about to do. I suppose hype is par for the course and shouldn't be taken too seriously, but the only way a statement like this is even remotely close to true, is if he delivered on all the hype, and Starship was well on it's way to a crewed mission to Mars by next year, we already had self-driving robo-taxis, we had a functioning, profitable hyperloop somwhere, etc., etc., ALL of these predictions and promises would have to come true for him to be "the most accomplished person in human history in pursuits that clearly require a lot of intelligence". As it stands, I'd rate him below Trump.
You wildly understate how hard it is to start and build massive companies. Doing it three times in different fields (with two of them being crazy) is insane.
Building them from zero is hard, yes. Buying them and acting as the frontman might require some talent, but nothing that would put him anywhere near "the most accomplished person in human history in pursuits that clearly require a lot of intelligence". I'd also have to check the accomplishments of various titans of industry, but I honestly doubt he stands out.
The only one that really fits the bill is Tesla. And even then, he helped Tesla go from very small to very large.
My question for you is can you find one guy who was an early founder of two 100b+ companies?
Let’s figure out the list (and we can normalize for today’s dollars). Do you think it large or small?
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