OpenAI boss Sam Altman wants $7tn. For all our sakes, pray he doesn’t get it::The man behind ChatGPT is wooing the UAE to invest in energy-hungry AI. But if it turns out his tech can’t fix the world, he’s got his escape plan
Tech billionaires trying to solve the world’s problems is a bit like a cancer trying to save its host from organ failure
Oof. I’m gonna use that. 👏
they are not trying to solve anything really, they just think they are the next best thing earth has ever seen so they have the right to do everything
Well, Altman isn’t even a billionaire…
You’re playing checkers, not chess.
I’m not 100% sure what you mean by that, but I’m trying to say that, if Altman is a problem due to his wealth, then the bar to becoming a problem is substantially lower than a billion dollars.
That poster is not implying he’s a tech billionaire, he’s saying tech billionaires are jerking themselves off to throw money at AI because it’s good for business.
Fair enough, that wasn’t clear to me.
Serious question: why does everyone in silicon valley have a god complex?
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I think it’s Steve Jobs’ popularity and following, where his own god complex was an important trait. Then some people realized that if you imitate it, you get more money and publicity, and normies will believe you more. Then, of course, with power it’s not hard to really develop one.
Socialism for monopolies but not for starving and sick people.
Fuck these people.
This is a face born to be punched. Much like the Zuckfuck or the Muskrat.
They should use that non-creepy picture of him.
Hm? Oh. Oh right.
A “product” of any kind will not solve our problems.
A phone is a product, and it solves a lot of problems.
I used to print out mapquest directions to wherever I drove. Now I can just use navigation so I seldom miss turns on dark streets anymore.
Products can solve problems, that’s why people pay for them
I think they mean existential problems, like our belligerent lumbering towards the violent self-destruction of humanity.
Wake me up when “ai” makes the amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere trend downward. Generative AI is just a way to burn electricity to take value produced by humans and then replace those same humans, all to line the pockets of the companies that can afford to churn all the data in the world.
For the handful of genuinely cool and interesting things it can do, the number of extremely awful costs and externalities is like 1000x worse.
You nailed it.
If he wants $7tn, he better pay for all the content he stole to do it. Fuck these guys, wanting to become unfathomably rich off other people’s labour.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But then his company, OpenAI, launched ChatGPT, and suddenly he was everywhere – touring the world, giving interviews to gushing journalists, granting audiences to awestruck politicians etc.
When someone examines a photo and says, ‘Oh, he’s feeling this and this and this,’ all these subtle emotions, I look on with alien intrigue.” Altman’s great strengths, concluded Friend, “are clarity of thought and an intuitive grasp of complex systems.
Well, as the Register helpfully points out, it’s enough cash “to gobble up Nvidia, TSMC, Broadcom, ASML, Samsung, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and every other chipmaker, designer, intellectual property holder, and equipment vendor of consequence in their entirety – and still have trillions left over”.
They are ecstatic about AI because finally a technology has arrived that apparently could fix everything – economic growth, healthcare, productivity, education, even the climate crisis.
Our future, apparently, depends on infinite amounts of what the industry now calls “compute”, and Altman is lauded because only he has had the courage to say out loud how much of it is needed in order to save civilisation.
Sing it proudThe former US employment secretary, Robert Reich, has written a thoughtful Substack post titled “Why I preach to the choir”.
The original article contains 847 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
For all our sakes, pray he doesn’t get it
It doesn’t really go into why not.
If governments are going to be pouring money into something, I’d prefer it to be in the tech industry.
Imagine a cold-war / Oppenheimer situation where all the governments are scared that America / Russia / UAE will reach AI supremacy before {{we}} do? Instead of dumping all the moneyz into Lockheed Martin or Raytheon for better pew pew machines - we dump it into better semiconductor machinery, hardware advancements, and other stuff we need for this AI craze.
In the end we might not have a useful AI, but at least we’ve made progression in other things that are useful
What benefits to “AI supremacy” are there? Going to hand the keys to defense and the internet to it? What could go wrong…
What benefits to “AI supremacy” are there?
I wasn’t saying there was any, I was saying there are benefits to the race towards it.
In the sense of - If you could pick any subject that world governments would be in a war about - “the first to the moon”, “the first nuclear” or “first hydrogen bomb”, or “the best tank” - or “the fastest stealth air-bomber”
I think if you picked a “tech war” (AI in this case) - Practically a race of who could build the lowest nm fabs, fastest hardware, and best algorithms - at least you end up with innovations that are useful
There are many uses for AI that governments are interested in. Deepfakes, cheaper and more subtle ways to influence public opinions on the internet (by being able to instantly deploy thousands or millions of fully automated bots that are able to express their “opinions” in a way that is indistinguishable from humans), accurate and automated analysis of public discourse on the large scale, etc. And if you have an edge over other countries then you are able to influence their public opinions and detect (and possible counteract) when they try to influence you.
AI is very good at analysing human-generated data, as well as generating data that looks human-created. Any entity that deals with (and desires to control) a large number of people (of which governments are prime examples) will find many uses for it.
Why not? Here’s one reason - because the planet is burning from climate change and we need a shit ton more resources for solving it. It’s unlikely that AI would help much with that. Of course the UAE isn’t too interested in the world moving away from fossil fuels.
Ok, sure. So in a tech race, if energy is a bottleneck - and we’d be pouring $7tn into tech here - don’t you think some of the improvements would be to Power usage effectiveness (PUE) - or a better Compute per Power Ratio?
Every time we make tech use 1/2 as much power per unit of work , something comes along to need 3 times as much work. AI, Blockchain, etc.
The phenomenon you describe is called Jevons paradox. Absent a law to safeguard the increased efficiency, the waste will follow quickly.
There may be PUE. However AI adds significant net new energy expenditure. Even if you get higher efficiency per compute unit, you’re still burning more coal and gas, or using renewable capacity that could be going towards replacing coal and gas. And then in this particular example 7T is a huge amount of capital that could move the needle on so many difficult climate problems like decarbonizing steel, concrete and ag. I think spending that on AI that will likely only accelerate us towards planetary ecosystem destruction is … not great to say it politely. 😂 Climate change is an existential problem for our species. The lack of AI advancement, even the lack of AGI is not. If there was any likely solution to climate change that could come out of AI, I might think differently. However we have all the computation methods needed to analyze and solve what we can about climate change. We just need much more resources in doing those things now.
Speaking of compute optimization, someone who’s actually built chips just chimed in on the matter.
China already produces more carbon by itself than the entire West combined
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/
That just shows you can still use electricity, as long as it’s not from coal
I’m GLAD we don’t Tax him OR his TRILLION dollar company!
Before he was a thundering asshat at Y Combinator, he started a mobile company that sold your location to brands called Loopt. He’s a piece of work.
I am thinking of getting a tomtom. Tired of my phone trying to throw a fit when I disable location after I’ve figured out my way to my destination.
So much of this advertising economy depends on it and we just give it away.
Just learn how to navigate properly with a map. You know where you are (hopefully) and you look up where you’re going. Do your own routing, it’s not hard and once you’ve been doing it for awhile you’ll have instinctive routes you use to link different areas. No location permissions required.
If you use navigation all the time you can become like my ex-wife. Lost without it, in her own city. Exercise your brain by finding your way around with landmarks and signage, I have never used navigation apps because I know my way across three provinces, and can navigate the major cities just based on my instinctive mental maps of them.
I’m not about to downvote you, but, I seriously don’t miss paper maps.
Every time there’s a new neighborhood somewhere you have no freaking clue where a road is because you need to go out and buy the latest paper map.
I’ll just use open street map thanks.
I’m not talking about paper maps, I use Google maps myself. I do like the feel of a paper map but they aren’t practical anymore for the reasons you mentioned.
I even search for my destination and look at where I’m going.
However I don’t use the navigation feature. Never seen the need. If I can’t find my way around the city without an AI holding my hand, I’ve got dementia.
The US collects about 5 trillion in revenue a year. This fucker wants a budget on the scale of the biggest revenue of a country on earth. That’s more power than the president has. Fuck this guy. Nobody deserves that much trust.
Bruh
I’d be jumping on the ceiling with 700 AUD. The hell is he gonna do with 7000000000000 USD?
