It's time to acknowledge that Sam Altman is a fraud (snollygoster?) who is running a con that has allowed him to raise billions of dollars.
Large language model "Artificial Intelligence" in general, and OpenAI in particular have nothing of value to deliver at their current state, and likely will never have anything to deliver, because they are bullsh%$ generators that have no understanding at all:
OpenAI announced this week that it has raised $6.6 billion in new funding and that the company is now valued at $157 billion overall. This is quite a feat for an organization that reportedly burns through $7 billion a year—far more cash than it brings in—but it makes sense when you realize that OpenAI’s primary product isn’t technology. It’s stories.
Case in point: Last week, CEO Sam Altman published an online manifesto titled “The Intelligence Age.” In it, he declares that the AI revolution is on the verge of unleashing boundless prosperity and radically improving human life. “We’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI,” he writes. Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics. He predicts that we may have an all-powerful superintelligence “in a few thousand days.” All we have to do is feed his technology enough energy, enough data, and enough chips.
Maybe someday Altman’s ideas about AI will prove out, but for now, his approach is textbook Silicon Valley mythmaking. In these narratives, humankind is forever on the cusp of a technological breakthrough that will transform society for the better. The hard technical problems have basically been solved—all that’s left now are the details, which will surely be worked out through market competition and old-fashioned entrepreneurship. Spend billions now; make trillions later! This was the story of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, and of nanotechnology in the 2000s. It was the story of cryptocurrency and robotics in the 2010s. The technologies never quite work out like the Altmans of the world promise, but the stories keep regulators and regular people sidelined while the entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors build empires. (The Atlantic recently entered a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)
As an aside here, the fact that The Atlantic has partnered with OpenAI is not a surprise. Enthusiastic support of bad ideas is core branding for them.
Despite the rhetoric, Altman’s products currently feel less like a glimpse of the future and more like the mundane, buggy present. ChatGPT and DALL-E were cutting-edge technology in 2022. People tried the chatbot and image generator for the first time and were astonished. Altman and his ilk spent the following year speaking in stage whispers about the awesome technological force that had just been unleashed upon the world. Prominent AI figures were among the thousands of people who signed an open letter in March 2023 to urge a six-month pause in the development of large language models ( LLMs) so that humanity would have time to address the social consequences of the impending revolution. Those six months came and went. OpenAI and its competitors have released other models since then, and although tech wonks have dug into their purported advancements, for most people, the technology appears to have plateaued. GPT-4 now looks less like the precursor to an all-powerful superintelligence and more like … well, any other chatbot.
I call it a slightly improved ELIZA program, but basically it's the same thing.
Short version: A parrot has speech, but it does not have language, and LLMs are much the same.
………
In Altman’s rendering, this moment in time is just a waypoint, “the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity.” He still argues that the deep-learning technique that powers ChatGPT will effectively be able to solve any problem, at any scale, so long as it has enough energy, enough computational power, and enough data. Many computer scientists are skeptical of this claim, maintaining that multiple significant scientific breakthroughs stand between us and artificial general intelligence. But Altman projects confidence that his company has it all well in hand, that science fiction will soon become reality. He may need $7 trillion or so to realize his ultimate vision—not to mention unproven fusion-energy technology—but that’s peanuts when compared with all the advances he is promising.
There’s just one tiny problem, though: Altman is no physicist. He is a serial entrepreneur, and quite clearly a talented one. He is one of Silicon Valley’s most revered talent scouts. If you look at Altman’s breakthrough successes, they all pretty much revolve around connecting early start-ups with piles of investor cash, not any particular technical innovation.
Actually, if you look at Altman's career, he's not even a particularly good rainmaker. He created a failed social network (Loopt) whose "Special Sauce" was that it would spy on you even more intensely than Facebook, he was fired from YCombinator for not showing up to work and personally trading in companies that they backed, etc.
He's just a bunco artist.
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