Nailed it 12 Years ago... damn it, then after all Sam is not just talk and money. I just got humbled. This make me reconsider all my POV about Sam Altman.

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9dev 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, maybe don't. He's a smart guy for sure, but that really doesn't redeem him from the awful qualities he undoubtedly has—insatiable greed, a compulsion to lie and manipulate, a special flavour of god complex, no moral compass at all, and more.

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embedding-shape 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> insatiable greed, a compulsion to lie and manipulate, a special flavour of god complex, no moral compass at all, and more

Besides these traits that every CEO/big-time investor seems to share, is there anything uniquely awful with Altman?

	▲	aleph_minus_one 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> is there anything uniquely awful with Altman? His involvement in Worldcoin (now named "World"), i.e. biometric scanning of huge populations.
	▲	9dev 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Besides the fact that he's an especially awful specimen (the lying and manipulation alone made it to the news several times), I just don't think that a rather clear-sighted blog post from 12 years ago is a valid reason to change your views about Altman.

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trilogic 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I am the last person on earth who would ever write a positive thing about Altman, but can´t lie neither, a fact is a fact, there available to everyone. Fair is fair.

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imiric 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There is some good insight here, but I wouldn't say that he "nailed it".

We still don't have computer programs that are able to "decide" what "they" "want" to do. We have programs that can mimic this behavior, but the implementation is effectively the same as the chess and flight programs we've had for decades: searching a gigantic solution space very quickly. What's changed is the amount of data and compute we can throw at the problem.

The emergent behavior we observe from these systems is the result of our human inability to comprehend the relationships and patterns in the vast amount of data we feed them. We assign anthropomorphic qualities like creativity, intelligence, reasoning, thinking, etc., to this behavior in an attempt to make the technology more approachable, and, of course, more marketable, which fuels further investments.

What's very much uncertain is whether continuing to scale up will lead us to machines that can do all of the things Altman talks about. There's disagreement about this even between leading figures in the field, but being negative about it is not as profitable.