274
Sam Altman accused of being shady about OpenAI’s safety efforts
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Wow, who would have thought?
It seems the AI hype is shrinking (or at least slowing down), since people are more and more critical of it: intellectual property, workers rights, power consumption, climate impacts, usefulness and more.
If you want more reading, I recommend these:
I can’t recommend Ed Zitron’s blog enough: Where’s your Ed at
He did an interview with Adam Conover a month ago, which was also really interesting.
The other blog I highly recommend is The Luddite, e.g. Why is there an AI hype?
To be honest, I hope you are right. I was never a fan of it, and seeing people get on the hype train made it feel even more like something that needs more time to cook
What I dislike in hype trains is people who don't know fundamentals, but sincerely believe their hype is some game-changing invention, while I'm narrow-minded and plain stupid.
I like how we've seen the Humane AI pin, Rabbit R1 and that stupid Devin AI programmer.
The hype around their possibilities was so high. All of them were varying levels of scams.
You would think people would eventually figure out it's a scam but after watching scammers successfully use crypto over and over and over again, I'm not so sure.
It has to be just barely persuasive enough to trigger the hunger for impossible magic.
When I was a kid, I would look for Matrix in computer games. Some sandbox where you can make anything with any laws of physics and as complex as possible and without thinking and it would run fast. It was, ahem, year 2005, computer graphics wouldn't look so realistic. Well, Second Life exists, but it's not alive, real humans come there and they are.
Now when there's a tool to make something appear close to right for AIs, there won't be a shortage of such scams just like there isn't with dick enlarging pills.
It might start to be considered stupid in the society, but in secret a lot of people not understanding the fundamentals will still fall for such scams. Just like with dick enlarging pills!
The dog is out.
The thing with hype trains is you get aboard or get left behind. Maybe they hype leads to a ghost town destination, but as a massive business you'd rather be on the train than not.
If you're early enough to actually benefit from the ride,
you're early enough to do some research, then benefit from the ride.
Not if it's a Ponzi scheme, no. If you are in time to make others suckers and possibly even profit, then yeah. But that's similar for all Ponzi schemes.
It was clear pretty fast that there were fundamental limits to the technology that many were very happy to ignore. They're trying to brute force it instead but ran out of force.
Reminds me of how deep learning also has fundamental issues but Musk is saying every year that next year full self driving using that tech will be done.
Hating on it seems like the same hype train.
I can also recommend Ed Zitron's blog, it's good stuff, very in-depth and lots of alternative sources.
The criticism is so automatic now that most of it is just bandwagon doomsaying hot air. So thanks for linking to some more interesting sources.
You’re welcome!