The Atlantic is really going out of their way to hate on Altman. That publication has always been a bit of a whack job of an outfit

The amount of comparisons I see between some theoretical AGI and something more akin to a science fiction like Jane from the Ender saga or the talking head from That Hideous Strength is I guess not surprising. But in both of those cases the only way to make the plot work was to make the AI literally an other-worldly being.

I am personally not sold on AGI being possible. We might be able to make some poor imitation of it, and maybe an LLM is the closest we get, but to me it smacks of “man attempts to create life in order to spite his creator.” I think the result of those kinds of efforts will end more like That Hideous Strength (in disaster).

"At a high enough level of abstraction, Altman's entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don't get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present."

Old tactic.

The project that would eventually became Microsoft Corp. was founded on it. Gates told Ed Roberts the inventor of the first personal computer that he had a programming for it. He had no such programming langugage.

Gates proceeded to espouse "vapourware" for the decades. Arguably Microsoft and its disciples are still doing so today.

Will the tactic ever stop working. Who knows.

Focus on the future that no one can predict, not the present that anyone can describe.

Anyone who takes startup CEOs at their word has never worked in a startup. The plasticity of their ethics is legendary when there’s a prospect of increasing the revenues.

Sam Allan has to be a promoter and true believer. It is his job to do that and he does have new tech that didn’t exist before and it is game changing.

The issue is more that the company is hemorrhaging talent, and doesn’t have a competitive moat.

But luckily this doesn’t affect most of us, rather it will only possibly harm his investors if it doesn’t work out.

If he continues to have access to resources and can hire well and the core tech can progress to new heights, he will likely be okay.

>Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become

Is kind of a boring way of looking at things. I mean we have fairly good chatbots and image generators now but it's where the future is going that's the interesting bit.

Lumping AI in with dot coms and crypto seems a bit silly. It's a different category of thing.

(By the way Sam being shifty or not techy or not seems kind of incidental to it all.)

I’ll never understand how so many smart people haven’t realize that the biggest “hallucination” produced by AI was this Sam Altman.

I wonder how many governments and A-listers are investing heavily in the rapid development of commodity AI video that is indistinguishable from real video. Does it seem paranoid?

They would at least be more believable if they blast claims that a certain video must be fake, especially with how absurd and shocking it is.

Journalists smell blood in the water. When times were looking better they gave him uncritical praise.

It’s really sad to see all the personal attacks and cynicism that has no basis in reality. OpenAI has an amazing product and was first to market with something game changing for billions of people. Calling him a fraud and scammer is super ridiculous

Can't stop something you never started.

It's funny we coach people not to ascribe human characteristics to LLMS..

But we seem equally capable of denying the very human characteristics in our would be overlords.

Which warlord will we canonize next?

Our economy runs on market makers AI, Blockchain, whether they are what they seem in the long run is beside the point. They're sole purpose is to generate economic activity. Nobody really cares if they pan out.

Will Human ego, greed, selfishness lead to our destruction? (AI or not)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35364833

I mean, in general, if you’re taking CEOs at their word, and particularly CEOs of tech companies at their word, you’re gonna have a bad time. Tech companies, and their CEOs, predict all manner of grandiose nonsense all the time. Very little of it comes to pass, but through the miracle of cognitive biases some people do end up filtering out the stuff that doesn’t happen and declaring them visionary.

I appreciate everything that OpenAI has done, the science of modeling and the expertise in productization.

But, but, but… their drama, or Altman’s drama is now too much for me, personally.

With a lot of reluctance I just stopped doing the $20/month subscription. The advanced voice mode is lots of fun to demo to people, and o1 models are cool, but I am fine just using multiple models for chat on Abacus.AI and Meta, an excellent service, and paid for APIs from Google, Mistral, Groq, and OpenAI (and of course local models).

I hope I don’t sound petty, but I just wanted to reduce their paid subscriber numbers by -1.

that ship sailed a long time ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41744167

Open AI’s AGI is like Tesla’s completely automated self driving.

So close, yet so far. And, both help the respective CEOs in hyping the respective companies.

Distorting the old Chinese proverb, “The best time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word was the first time he opened his mouth. The second best time is now”. We’ve known he’s a scammer for a long time.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

He just needs a paltry trillion dollars to make this AI thing happen. Stop being so short sighted.

sama is best match with today's LLM because of the "scaling law" like Zuckerberg described. Everyone is burning cash to race to the end, but the billion dollar question is, what is the end for transformer based LLM? Is there an end at all?

I keep thinking about Sam Altman’s March ’23 interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast—this was after GPT-4’s release and before he was ousted as CEO. Two things he said really stuck with me:

First, he mentioned wishing he was more into AI. While I appreciate the honesty, it was pretty off-putting. Here’s the CEO of a company building arguably the most consequential technology of our time, and he’s expressing apathy? That bugs me. Sure, having a dispassionate leader might have its advantages, but overall, his lack of enthusiasm left a bad taste in my mouth. Why IS he the CEO then?

Second, he talked about going on a “world tour” to meet ChatGPT users and get their feedback. He actually mentioned meeting them in pubs, etc. That just sounded like complete BS. It felt like politician-level insincerity—I highly doubt he’s spoken with any end-users in a meaningful way.

And one more thing: Altman being a well-known ‘prepper’ doesn’t sit well with me. No offense to preppers, but it gives me the impression he’s not entirely invested in civilization’s long-term prospects. Fine for a private citizen, but not exactly reassuring for the guy leading an organization that could accelerate its collapse.

Sam blinks furiously when he's not telling the truth.

Sam Altman is the modern version of a snake oil salesman

At the expense of irking many, I'd like to add Musk to the list if someone didn't already.

From robotics, neurology, transport to everything in between - not a word should be taken as is.

You all just sit back and not pick at every word he says, just sit calmly and let him cook. And he’s been cooking

Thank you. I’ll take a look. The Atlantic link I’m referring to is the actual HN article link of the OP, not of the GP.

>It feels like he’s hedging against the very future his company might be shaping.

I dont think the prepping can really be taken as evidence anything nefarious. Prepping simply means someone thinks there is a risk with hedging against, even if they are strongly opposed to that outcome.

I think you see many of the rich prepping because they can, but It says little about their desire for catastrophic events.

Prepping for a hurricane doesn't mean you want it to destroy your neighborhood.

Every tech CEO (and honestly almost every wealthy person) is doing the same thing. You're mistaking correlation for causation.

Wouldn't you prefer someone fearful of the apocalypse and who takes it seriously running such a company over someone who is ambivalent or doesn't consider it a risk?

TSMC has stopped way earlier.

Did I ever? :')

While I do not have much sympathy for Altman, the article is very low quality and contains zero analysis

Yeah, maybe on the surface chatbots turned out to be chatbots. But you have to be a poor journalist to stop your investigation of the issue at that and conclude AI is no big deal. Nuance, anyone?

Someone took that grifter at his word ever? Haha! Wait you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder. Hahahaha

I feel like the time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word was probably when he was shilling for an eyeball-scanning cryptocurrency...

But apparently as a society we like handing multi-billion dollar investments to folks with a proven track record of (not actually shipping) complete bullshit.

He seems like any other tech “evangelical” to me.

> Altman expects that his technology will fix the climate, help humankind establish space colonies, and discover all of physics.

Yes. We've been through this again and again. Technology does not follow potential. It follows incentive. (Also, “all of physics”? Wtf is he smoking?)

> It’s much more pleasant fantasizing about a benevolent future AI, one that fixes the problems wrought by climate change, than dwelling upon the phenomenal energy and water consumption of actually existing AI today.

I mean, everything good in life uses energy, that’s not AIs fault per se. However, we should absolutely evaluate tech anchored in the present, not the future. Especially with something we understand so poorly like emergent properties of AI. Even when there’s an expectation of rapid changes, the present is a much better proxy than yet-another sociopath with a god-complex whose job is to be a hype-man. Everyone’s predictions are garbage. At least the present is real.

I mean, there is a reason the board tried their best to exorcise Sam Altman him from the company. OpenAI could be the next Loopt.

While I agree anyone taking sam Altman at his word is and always was a fool, this opinion piece by a journalism major at a journalism school giving his jaded view of technology is the tired trope that is obsessed with the fact reality in the present is always reality in the present. The fact I drive a car that’s largely - if not entirely - autonomous in highly complex situations, is fueled by electricity alone, using a super computer to play music from an almost complete back catalog of everything released at my voices command, on my way to my final cancer treatment for a cancer that ten years ago was almost always fatal, while above me constellations of satellites cooperate via lasers to provide global high speed wireless internet being deployed by dozens upon dozens of private rocket launches as we prepare the final stretch towards interplanetary spaceships, over which computers can converse in true natural language with clear human voices with natural intonation…. Well. Sorry, I don’t have to listen to Sam Altman to see we live in a magical era of science fiction.

The most laughable part of the article is where they point at the fact that in the past TWO YEARS we haven’t gone from “OMG we’ve achieved near perfect NLP” to “Deep thought tell us the answer to life the universe and everything” as some sort of huge failure is patently absurd. If you took Altman at his word on that one, you probably also scanned your eye ball for fake money. The truth though is that the rate of change in the products his company is making is still breath taking - the text to speech tech in the latest advanced voice release (recognizing it’s not actually text to speech but something profoundly cooler, but that’s lost on journalism majors teaching journalism majors like the author) puts to shame the last 30 years of TTS. This alone would have been enough to have a fairly significant enterprise selling IVR and other software.

When did we go from enthralled by the rate of progress to bored that it’s not fast enough? That what we dream and what we achieve aren’t always 1:1 but that’s still amazing? I get that when we put down the devices and switch off the noise we are still bags of mostly water, our back hurts, we aren’t as popular as we wish we were, our hair is receding, maybe we need invisiline but flossing that tooth every day is easier and cheaper, and all the other shit that makes life much less glamorous than they sold us in the dot com boom, or nanotech, etc, as they call out in the article.

But the dot com boom did succeed. When I started at early Netscape no one used the internet. We spun the stories of the future this article bemoans to our advantage. And it was messier than the stories in the end. But now -everyone- uses the internet for everything. Nanotechnology permeates industry, science, tech, and our every day life. But the thing about amazing tech that sounds so dazzling when it’s new is -it blends into the background- if it truly is that amazingly useful. That’s not a problem with the vision of the future. It’s the fact that the present will never stop being the present and will never feel like some illusory gauzy vision you thought it might be. But you still use dot coms (this journalism major assessment of tech was published on a dot com and we are responding on a dot com) and still live in a world powered by nanotechnology, and AI promised in TWO YEARS is still mind boggling to anyone who is thinking clearly about what the goal posts for NLP and AI were five years ago.

The time to stop taking him seriously was when he started his "fear AI, give me the monopoly" campaign.

I’m just expecting a Microsoft acquisition and Altman exits and moves on to his next grift.

Better headline : It's too late to stop taking Sam Altman at his word

See same with Elon Musk.

Money turns genius to smooth brained egomaniacal idiots. See same with Steve Jobs

Same needs to happen to Elon Musk

tl;dr author complains that Sam's predictions of the future of AI are inflated (but doesn't offer any of his own), and complains that AI tools that surprised us last year look mundane now.

The article is written to appeal to people who want to feel clever casually slagging off and dismissing tech.

> it appears to have plateaued. GPT-4 now looks less like the precursor to a superintelligence and more like … well, any other chatbot.

What a pathetic observation. Does the author not recall how bad chatbots were pre-LLMs?

What LLMs can do blows my mind daily. There might be some insufferable hype atm, but gees, the math and engineering behind LLMs is incredible, and it's not done yet - they're still improving from more compute alone, not even factoring in architecture discoveries and innovations!

Since it's paywalled, I assume we are discussing the title (as usual). It implies that there was the time when [we] took him at his word. Uh, ok, maybe. But what does it matter? "We" aren't the people at VCs who fund it, I suppose? So, what does it matter if "we" take him at his word? Hell, even if it suddenly went public, it still wouldn't mean much if we trust the guy or not, because we could buy shares for the same reason we buy crypto or TSLA shares.

As a matter of fact, I suspect the author of the article actually belongs to gullible minority who ever took Altman at his word, and now is telling everyone what they already knew. But so what? What are we even discussing? Nobody calls to remove their OpenAI (or, in fact, Anthropic, or whatever) account, as long as we find it useful for something, I suppose. It just makes no difference at all if that writer or his readers take Altman at his word, their opinions have no real effect on the situation, it seems. They are merely observers.

according to the book "The Sociopath Next Door", approximately 1 in 25 Americans is a "sociopath" who "does not feel shame, guilt, or remorse, and can do anything at all without what "normal" people think of as an internal voice labeling things as "right" or "wrong". It makes sense to me that sociopaths would be over-represented among C-level executives and "high performers" in every field.

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-sociopat...

> 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.

/s

I generally don't take anyone other than Leon at his word. \s

well the good news is all that stuff comes with an expiration date, after which we will know if this is our new destiny or yet another cloud of smoke.

This is a good reminder:

> 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

In 2024, ChatGPT is a weird toy, my barber demands paper cash only (no bitcoin or credit cards or any of that phone nonsense, this is Silicon Valley), I have to stand in line at USPS and DMV with mindless paper-shuffling human robots, marveling at humiliating stupidity of manual jobs, robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always. Let's check again in a "coupe of thousand days" i guess!

I'm surprised nobody noticed the elephant in the room, the fact that ChatGPT has a very hard woke slant. That said, -o1 has gotten a lot better but it's not as uncensored and unbiased as GPT-3 was when it was first released. For a while GPT-4 was very clearly biased for the left and U.S. Democrats particularly.

Now keep in mind that this is going to be the default option for a lot of forums and social media for automated moderation. Reddit is already using it a lot and now a lot of the front page is clearly feedback farming for OpenAI. What I'm getting at is we're moving towards a future where only a certain type of dialog will be allowed on most social media and Sam Altman and his sponsors get to decide what that looks like.

Any person that thinks “automating human thought” is good for humanity is evil.

I can't imagine taking The Atlantic seriously on anything. My word. You aren't actually supposed to read the endless ragebait.

Contrary to the Atlantic's almost always intentionally misleading framing, the "dot com boom" did in fact go on to print trillions later and it is still printing them. After what was an ultimately marginal if account clearing dip for many.

I say that as someone who would be deemed to be an Ai pessimist, by many.

But its wildly early to declare anything to be "what it is" and only that, in terms of ultimate benefit. Just like it was and is wild to declare the dot com boom to be over.

This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles.

I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.

Yes, really. It's okay to not know anything about how the global economy works or its history: each decade defining the next. But it isn't okay to twist that ignorance to become focus on a scapegoat of convenience. Led by The Atlantic's wager on what you don't know, their hatreds, and their mission to distract.

You might argue that faith, in its various manifestations, is the root of all economic distortions and malaises. That being said, no, I don’t think that a subset of evangelical Christianity caused or meaningfully contributed to the 2009 crash, since there are abundant facts and analyses to the contrary. To believe otherwise would be, ironically, an act of faith.

So are you saying there are a lot of journalists that never studied, or did they just never pay attention in class?

Because articles that actually do that are few and far between.

The weird distribution was something I experienced when I last visited California in 2018 and couldn't use my card in most places, despite having been to Kenya a few years before that and seeing M-Pesa all over the place.

You’re injecting that “ie” — Wikipedia doesn’t say it as such.

They’re describing collating and you’re describing evaluating.

While I broadly agree that AI metrics have a "lies, damn lies, and statistics" problem that makes it hard to even agree how competent they are, if someone says "robotaxi" then I have no reason to expect they mean anything more nor less than "a taxi with no human driver".

I would be shocked if we're really 50 years away from that level of AI. 50 years is a long time in computing — late 70s computers were still using punched tape:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Punch_Verifica...

> I have complained for years that Waymo's statisticians are comparing their cars to all human drivers when they should be comparing it to lawful human drivers whose vehicles are well-maintained. Tesla FSD proves that self-driving companies will respond to consumer demand for vehicles that speed and run red lights.

Really? Waymo's statisticians are the ones you are complaining about?

Tesla's statisticians have been lying for years, as has Musk when they cite "number of miles driven by FSD in the very small subset of conditions where it is available, and not turned off or unavailable because of where you are, the weather, or any other variable" versus "all drivers, all conditions, all locations, all times" to try to say FSD is safer.

Luck and money.

> achieved great things for themselves and humanity

For themselves? Absolutely.

For humanity? Perhaps we have wildly different ideas of what is good for humanity.

>The journalist’s job is to describe what actually is happening, and to provide enough context for readers to understand it.

The former is a journalist's job, the latter is the reader's concern and not the journalist.

One of the reasons I consider journalism a cancer upon humanity is because journalists can't just write down "it is 35 degrees celsius today at 2pm", but rather "you won't believe how hot it is".

Just journal down what the hell happens literally and plainly, we as readers can and should figure out the rest. NTFS doesn't interject opinions and clickbait into its journal, and neither should proper journalists.

You're lazily mixing metaphors here. This is the problem in all such discussions, it often gets reduced to some combination of hand waving and hype training. "AGI" means different things to everyone, okay? Then it's a meaningless term. It's like saying hey with a quantum computer of enormous size, we could simulate molecular interactions at a level impossible with current technology. I would love for us to be able to do that- but where is the evidence it is even possible?

> a human brain definitely counts as "general intelligence", that implemented in silicon is enough to get basically all the things promised by AGI: if that's done at the 20 watts per brain that biology manages, then all of humanity can be simulated within the power envelope of the USA electrical grid… three times over.

So far the only thing that has been proven is we can get low entropy from all the low entropy we've published on the internet. Will it get to a point where models can give us more low entropy than what is present in the training data? Categorically: no.

Dictionary similarity is not how people get their job descriptions. If you want to just pick a similar word from the dictionary, why are journalists sharing this stuff? Journals are typically private, after all. If someone read your journal, you might be annoyed, right?

Or, from your definition, apparently:

> the part of a rotating shaft, axle, roll, or spindle that turns in a bearing

I don’t think these journalists rotate much at all!

A better definition is one of… journalism.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/journalism

journalism, the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through such print and electronic media as […]

That said, I don’t think an argument from definition is all that good anyway. These definitions are descriptive, not prescriptive. Journalism is a profession, they do what they do for the public good. If you think that it would be better for the field of journalism to produce a contextless log of events, defend that idea in and of itself, rather than leaning on some definition.

Why favor a definition of “journalist” that approximately nobody else uses? It seems like it would just make it hard to communicate.

>they are professionally and legally bound to state nothing but the scientific journal at hand

In America, just about every meteorologist editorializes the weather to a degree. There's nothing scientific about telling me "it's a great night for baseball" (great for the fans? Pitchers? Hitters?) or "don't wash your car just yet" but I will never stop hearing those. I don't, and the public doesn't seem to think that infringes on journalistic standards, because the information is still presented. Maybe this is different than what you mean -- if you're talking about a situation where journalists intentionally created the full context and pushed the information to the side, obviously that is undesirable.

I will add that weather as a "news product" actually gains quite a fair bit from presenter opinion, and news is a product above all.

If that's what you meant, then I agree with you.

What's the quote? "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t".

Even though it doesn't need to be a single human doing all of it, our brains as existence proofs of the physical possibility, not of our own understanding.

Unless I'm mistaken, you've added these two paragraphs since my last comment:

> Whatever quantity Q of entropy in the training data, the total output will be more Q all accounted for. That's true for humans and machines. No shape of possible AGI will give us any output with less Q than the combination of inputs had. The dream that a machine will solve all problems that humanity can't hinges on negating that, which goes against thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics applies to closed systems, which the earth in isolation isn't.

This is why the source material for Shakespeare didn't already exist on Earth in the Cretaceous.

It's also why we've solved loads of problems we used to have, like bubonic plague and long distance communication.

> As it stands, the planet cannot cope with all the entropy we're spreading around.

We're many orders of magnitude away from entropic limits. Global warming is due to the impact on how much more sunlight keeps bouncing around inside the atmosphere, not the direct thermal effect of our power plants.

> It will eventually collapse civilization/the ecosystem, whatever buckles first, from the excess entropy. Because global warming, poverty, or ignorance is just entropy. Disorder. Things not being just so as we need them to be.

Entropy isn't everyday disorder, it's a specific relationship of microstates and macrostates, and you can't usefully infer things when you switch uses.

Poverty is much reduced compared to the historical condition. So is ignorance: we have to specialise these days because there's too much knowledge for any one human to learn.

Entropic collapse is indeed inevitable, but that inevitably is on the scale of 10^18 years or more with only engineering challenges rather than novel scientific breakthroughs (the latter would plausibly increase that to 10^106 if someone can figure out how to use Hawking radiation, but I don't want to divert into why I think that's more than merely an engineering challenge).

> Whatever you mean, it took 13 billion years and the whole universe as far as we can tell to create the 20 watt human intelligence brain.

It's grossly unreasonable to include the entire history of the universe given the Earth only formed about 4 billion years ago; and given that evolution wasn't even aiming for intelligence, even starting from our common ancestors being small rodents 65 million years ago is wildly overstating the effort required — even the evolution of primates is too far back without intentional selective breeding.

> You're positing a way to create human intelligence-like in a bottle, that's the same as speculating about the shape of a reality where we have FTL travel or teleportation or whatever else you fancy.

FTL may well well be impossible.

If you seriously think human intelligence is impossible, then you also think you don't exist: You, yourself, are a human like intelligence in a bottle. The bottle being your skull.

> This can give us great automation, but it won't solve physics, global warming, poverty or give us human intelligence in a chip.

AI has already been in widesprad use in physics for a while now, well before the current zeitgeist of LLMs.

There's a Y Combinator startup: "Charge Robotics is building robots that automate the most labor-intensive parts of solar construction".

Poverty has many causes, some of which are already being reduced or resolved by existing systems — and that's been the case since one of the ancestor companies of IBM, Tabulating Machine Company, was doing punched cards for the US census.

As for human intelligence on a chip? Well, (1) it's been quite a long time since humans were capable of designing the circuits manually, given the feature size is now at the level where quantum mechanics must be accounted for or you get surprise tunnelling between gates; and (2) one of the things being automated is feature segmentation and labelling of neural micrographs, i.e. literally brain scanning: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32619485/

Yes, I am saying that AGI is impossible.

AGI is either human intelligence behind the curtains or a pie in the sky.

> If it hinged on that, then you would actually be saying it's impossible

"impossible with the approach OpenAI is using" != "impossible"

Actually, the sources we had (everything scraped from the internet) turns out to be pretty bad.

Imagine not going to school and instead learning everything from random blog posts or reddit comments. You could do it if you read a lot, but it's clearly suboptimal.

That's why OpenAI, and probably every other serious AI company, is investing huge amounts in generating (proprietary) datasets.

Any thoughts on synthetic data?

To avoid disappointment, just think of the mass news media as a (shitty) LLM. It may occasionally produce an article that on the surface seems to be decently thought out, but it's only because the author accidentally picked a particularly good source to regurgitate. Ultimately, they just type some plausible sentences without knowing or caring about the quality.

If Sam claimed we'll fix climate with the help of AI, he is either a liar or a fool.

Our problem isn't technology, it's humans.

Unless he suggests mass indoctrination per AI AI won't fix anything.

And this seems to be mostly positive feedback.

He knows as well as anyone about the 5 year hueristic (length too long to be meaningful), so he's trying to say "over 5 years", but still hold onto the sense of "meaningful estimate". My sense about Sam is that he trusts his PR instinct to be usefully manipulative enough that he doesn't think he has to plan it carefully in order for his statements to be maximally opaquely manipulative. (He speaks cleverly and manipulatively without a lot of effort.)

Barring societal collapse, I don't see a scenario in which extra energy isn't used up and as long as it's sold at market prices the government investments should be fine.

I'm not a believer in general intelligence myself, all we have are a small pile of specific intelligences. But if it does exists then it would be godlike to us. I can't guess at the motivations of somebody who would want to bootstrap a god, but I doubt that Altman is so strapped for cash that his primary motivator is coming up with something to sell.

My comment doesn't negate your point. I'm emphasizing the business side beyond the moral considerations. If anything, we've seen that brands which contributed to unhealthy habits, like the rise of fast food and sugary drinks, still hold immense value in the market. User loyalty may be fleeting, but businesses can still thrive by leveraging brand strength and market presence, regardless of the moral implications.

I mentioned ads as just one potential avenue for monetization. My main point is that OpenAI's current market position and strong brand awareness are the real differentiators. They're in a unique spot where they have the user's attention, which offers a range of monetization options beyond just ads. The challenge for them will be to balance monetization with maintaining the user experience that made them successful in the first place.

Also, don't forget the recent Apple partnership [1], a very strong signal of their strategic positioning. Aligning with Apple reinforces their credibility and opens up even more opportunities for innovation and expansion, beyond just monetizing through ads. I just searched through this thread, and it seems the Apple partnership isn't being recognized as a significant achievement under Sam Altman's tenure as CEO, which is surprising given its importance.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40328927

> For these models today, if we measure the amount of energy expended for training and inference how do humans compare?

My best guess is 120,000 times more for training GPT-4 (based on claim it cost $63 million and that was all electricity at $0.15/kWh and looking only at the human brain and not the whole body).

But also, 4o mini would then be a killowatt hour for a million tokens at inference time, by the same assumptions that's 50 hours or just over one working week of brain energy consumption. A million tokens over 50 hours is 5.5 tokens per second, which sounds about what I expect a human brain to do, but caveat that with me not being a cognitive scientist and what we think we're thinking isn't necessarily what we're actually thinking.

I did a similar calculation a few weeks ago:

Humans consume about 100W average power (2000 kcal to watt hours/24 hours). So 8 billion people consume ~800 GW. Call it 1 TW. Average world electric power generation is 28000 TWh / (24*365 hours) ~3 TW.

If the universe is material, then we already know with 10-billion percent certainty that some arrangement of matter causes qualia. All we have to do is figure out what arrangements do that.

Ironically, we understand consciousness perfectly. It is literally the only thing we know — conscious experience. We just don’t know, yet, how to replicate it outside of biological reproduction.

And importantly it's also a question that would need an answer if the alignment should be with "individual groups" rather than "humanity".

It won't do Sam Altman and friends any good if they are the richest corpses after an unaligned AI goes rogue.

So it would be in their were egoistical self interest to make sure it doesn't.

Yes thats a better way to say it

Actually, his blog is correctly capitalized. Although, you would think he could hire a proper editor, since the em-dashes are not formatted correctly. Baby steps.

Agreed. These liquidity events are a way to retain and reward early employees while allowing the founders to recover their personal finances and buckle down for the growth phase.

> In a world context where the largest companies are more likely to stay private than IPO

Which world is this?

    Amazon founded in 1994
    1997 listed at $400m
    Google founded in 1998 
    2004 listed at $23bn
    Spotify founded in 2006
    2018 listed at $27bn
    Airbnb founded in 2008
    2020 listed at $47bn
    Epic games founded in 1991
    2022 unlisted value $32bn
    Space Exploration founded in 2002
    2022 unlisted value $125bn
    ByteDance founded in 2012
    2022 unlisted value $360bn

Power purchase agreements are what renewables developers use to obtain financing for construction. The contract is collateral. Worst case, the developer might need to be prepared to find a substitute offtaker for the power if a PPA with a gen AI offtaker goes bust (if brought up by whomever is underwriting the financing, if there are debt covenants, etc).

I absolutely support AI companies signing as many PPAs for low carbon energy even if they implode in the future. The PV panels, wind turbines, and potentially stationary storage will already be deployed at that point.

https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/financing-n...

To be clear, Altman invested $375 million in Helion Energy's 2021 funding round. Helion Energy a for-profit fusion energy company of which he is the chairman.

How? He did not have a large exit to give him a bankroll to invest. Unless you mean from whatever YC shares he received as President, which seems unlikely. Even if he was paid ~25 million in equity per year, did YC shares increase 10x in that time?

My understanding is Altman joined the Three Comma Club only this year not years ago.

Yes, he has made lots of investments over the years as head of YC but not every investment was successful. This was discussed on BBC's podcast 'Good Billionaire Bad Billionaire' recently.

He also got weird facial plastic surgery and looks like a wanted mobster now.

Only if someone can make money from it. If the people who have it can't do that (or won't) then it won't happen. E.g. there's no private industry for nuclear bombs selling to any bidder in the world. But anything else you just need to let people make companies and that'll get it out there, in a thousand shades of value to match all the possible demands.

Most of what gets invented either 1. relies on its scarcity to extract value or 2. if it's not naturally scarce, it gets locked behind patents, copyrights, cartels, regulations, and license agreements between corporations, in order to keep the means of its production out of the hands of common people. Without that scarcity and ability to profit from it, it wouldn't be invented.

Yes, basically this phenomenon: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y

I appreciate this, that is why I said, "LLMs and other models". Knowing the probability relations between words, tokens, or concepts/though vectors is important, and can be supplemented by smaller embedded special purpose models/inference engines and domain knowledge in those areas.

As I said, it is overhyped in some areas and underhyped in others.

GitHub, especially filtered by starred repos, is a pretty high quality dataset.

> Progress on benchmarks continues to improve (see GPT-o1).

thats not evidence of a step change.

> The big guys are building synthetic training sets

Yes, that helps to pre-train models, but its not a replacement for real data.

> not worried about running out of data.

they totally are. The more data, the more expensive it is to train. Exponentially more expensive.

> o1 shows that you can also throw more inference compute

I suspect that its not actually just compute, its changes to training and model design.

> Sam Altman has explicitly said the next model will be an even bigger jump than between 3 and 4.

You say unironically on an article stating that Sam Altman cannot be taken at his word in a string of comments about him hyping up the next thing so he can exit strongly on the backs of the next greater fool. But seriously, I’m sure GPT-5 will be the greatest leap in history (OpenAI equity holder here).

Or maybe both

A bubble doesn't necessarily imply no underlying worth. The dot-com bubble hit legendary proportions, and the same underlying technology (the Internet) now underpins the whole civilization. There is clearly something there, but a bubble has inflated the expectations beyond reason, and the deflation will not be kind on any player still left playing (in the sense of AI winter), not even the actually-valuable companies that found profitable niches.

A CEO that is the CEO of a publicly traded company who has over-leveraged their position and is now locked into chasing growth even if the company they're running suffers has a fiduciary duty to lie. There are plenty of CEOs not in this position.

I'm not talking about Altman in particular, I'm just annoyed with this constant spam on HN about how we all need to turn a blind eye to snake oil salesman because "that's just how it's supposed to be for a startup."

For a forum that complains about how money ruins everything, from the Unity scandal to OSS projects being sponsored and "tainted" by "evil companies," it's shocking to see how often golden boy executives are excused. I wish people had this energy for the much smaller companies trying to be profitable by raising subscriptions once in the 20 years they've been running, but instead they are treated like they burned a church. It truly is an elitist system.

Energy isnt a common. It costs.

Also the tragedy of the commons is based on a number of flawed assumptions on how commons work.

SBF was convicted for fraud, crossing legal and ethical lines that Sam Altman has not. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Alternatively, it might make capital available to other things.

It's at least theoretically possible that all the liquidity and leverage in the top of the market could tire itself of chasing the next tulip mania.

For instance, $6 Billion could have gone into climate tech instead of ElizaX.

My problem with these dumb hype cycles is all the other stuff that gets starved in their wake.

I'm not sure about the decency of it.

I remember all the articles praising the facade of a super-genius. It's a stark contrast to today.

People write about his trouble or his latest outburst like they would a neighborh's troubled kid. There's very little decency in watching people sink like that.

What's left after reality reassesserts itself, after the distortion field is gone? Mostly slow decline. Never to reach that high again.

The difference between Tesla and Nikola is that some false claims matter more than others: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-ele...

Given Altman seems to be extremely vague about exact timelines and mainly gives vibes, he's probably doing fine. Especially as half the stuff he says is, essentially, to lower expectations rather than to raise them.

Video data is still very much untapped and likely to unlock a step function worth of data. Current image-language models are trained mostly on {image, caption} pairs with a bit of extra fine tuning

Nobody close the the edge of this tech seems to believe that this is true, and the 4o release suggests synthetic approaches work well.

SpaceX hasn’t tried to go public , arguably being private has helped them ability to raise a lot of money from investors is key to their successes.

Their kind of product development [1] needs a long term thinking which public markets will not not support well

[1] ignore all the mars noise, just consider reusable i.e. cheap rockets and starlink

It’s never just about the company’s numbers, but the financial environment. When interest rates come down enough to tempt investors out of the money market, you’re likely to see a new wave of IPOs.

> It saddens me how easily someone with money and influence can elevate themselves to a quasi religious figure.

If so many people wouldn't fall for claims without any proof, religions themselves would not exist.

> In reality, this vision you speak of is more like the blind leading the blind.

If you want to call it suckering suckers into parting with their money that works too.

It’s not all that different from crypto.

Progress depends on irrational people though. Even if 50 companies fail for every one that succeeds, that’s progress.

All knowledge is incomplete and partial, which is another way of saying "wrong", therefore all "vision" is hallucination. This discussion would not be happening without hallucinators with a crowd sharing their delusion. Humanity generally doesn't find the actual truth sufficiently engaging to accomplish much beyond the needs of immediate survival.

Both, depending on the use case. Unfortunately Claude is better in almost every regard than ChatGPT but fo coding so far. So you would not notice improvements if you test it only for code. Where it shines is understanding complex things and ideas in long text, and the context window is AFAIK 2x than ChatGPT.

The 5th circuit's loose attitude about deception is why all Elon's Xs live in Texas, or will soon.

It's not trivial. "Mere puffery" has netted Tesla about $1B in FSD revenue.

Elons lies are way different. He mostly is just optimistic about time frames. Since Sam Altman and ChatGPT became mainstream the narrative is about the literal end of the world and OpenAI, and their influencer army, has made doomerism their entire marketing strategy.

GP? What happened to the good old "OP"?

This feels like a “fixed mindset” about energy, i.e. the way we generate and allocate energy today can not change. Of all the “wasteful” things we do with energy AI is not the top of my (very subjective) list of things to shut down.

Oh, sorry I wasn't clear, I was referring to the advanced (speech-to-speech) voice mode, which for me is the highlight of this "omni" thing, rather than to the "strength" of the model.

Much better than 4o, in my experience. I've stopped using 4o almost completely, except for cases where I need good tooling more than I need good performance (PoCs and the like).

Oh dear me. I can't argue with you if this satisfies you.

Maybe the fact that they actually did dissolve the safety team formerly led by Ilya Sutskever in the aftermath of Altman's coup [0]? I'm genuinely unsure what part of this you're questioning.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-17/openai-di...

I think you are missing my point. Microsoft signed a 20-year agreement with Constellation to restart TMI Unit 1. Do you think Constellation would make the same agreement with Open AI? The risk is completely different.

That is certainly true. But the market began searching in earnest for "really competent X" in this field only about 2 years ago. Before that, it was a decidedly opt-in affair..

Their marketing hyperbole has cheapened much of the language around AI, so naturally it excites someone who writes like the disciple of the techno-prophets

" High-intelligence AGI is the last human invention" What? I could certainly see all kinds of entertaining arguments for this, but to write it so matter of fact was cringe inducing.

There are plenty of examples of good things being unavailable due to market manipulation and corrupt government.

But I don't know of anything nearly as extreme as destroying an entire invention. Those tend to stick around.

The closest real-life thing (and probably what a lot of believers in this particular conspiracy theory are drawing on directly) is probably the Phoebus lightbulb cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

It’s rather hard to imagine even something like that (and it’s pretty limited in scope compared to the grand conspiracy above) working today, though; the EC would definitely stomp on it, and even the sleepy FTC would probably bestir itself for something so blatant.

You're asking for historical examples of great inventions that were hidden from history. I only know of those great inventions that I've hidden...

There are a number of counterexamples though. Henry Ford, etc.

I think your biographical testimony more confirms than refutes my suspicions.

You think "smart" implies a low chance of world-epochal AI breakthroughs that would ruin your "slow-and-steady path to retirement". You think OpenAI has "no moat". You think it's wise to satisfice – taking a "decent" paycheck – rather than shoot-for-the-moon (and beyond it, control of the 'lightcone').

That's closer to the "short-term exit" mindset – get a good-enough payout, in mundane dollars, while you can – that you're alleging in Altman than what I'm seeing in his statements & behaviors. Yes, someone with your beliefs would in fact be trying to pump OpenAI's short-term hype for a timely exit and an even-more-cushy retirement.

But Altman's already a billionaire with any creature comfort he'd want, for the rest of his life, plus at least one "doomsday bunker" (per a 2016 'New Yorker' profile).

For at least 10 years, he's been consistently expressing a desire to advance, and control, breakthroughs in AI, AGI, and ASI that could – in a true believers' worldview – wipe away as obsolete all his prior billions – as well as the "slow-and-steady path[s] to retirement" pursued by others.

He knows as an insider and contributor OpenAI's actual lead over others – who have tended to approximately-reach OpenAI's capabilities a year or more later.

That you rate as OpenAI's "big news this week" their "Artifacts" end-user feature, rather than everything else announced & rolled out, plus OpenAI's gigantic leads in funds raised and revenue run-rate, suggests a particular world-view.

I would suggest that you are over-focused on the kind of small-stakes products/markets/ambitions that are highly-legible to a "software engineer comfortably drawing a decent-but-not-FAANG paycheck at an established company" – but such considerations are barely afterthoughts in the game of power & legacy that Altman is now playing.

Even if you were right in his intentions, can you outline the scenario where Sam is able to make an exit?

I don't see how it could happen at current valuation. Who would want to pay $150 bil. for an OpenAI, where Sam is no longer part of it?

See "AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y

Dead end. You cannot create information out of nothing.

If OpenAI sent out an email today informing me that to maintain access to the current 4o model I will have to pay $1000 a year, and that it would go up another $500 next year... it would still be well worth it to me.

An LLM is not going to go skynet. It's not smart enough and can't take initiative.

An AGI however could. Once it reaches IQs of more than say 500 it would become very hard to control it.

And it still won't produce the type of articles he produces. Because at the very least he is capable of writing new articles from something the LLM doesn't have: his brain.

Seriously. This is just the parrot thing again. The fact that AI proponents confuse the form of words with authorial intent is mindbending to me.

Wouldn't have confused Magritte, I think.

The thing is, you can be economical. You don't need a GPT-4 quality model for everything. Some things are just low value where a 3.5 model would do just fine.

I never use the $20 plan but I access everything via API and i spend a couple of dollars per month.

Although lately I have a home server that can do llama 3.1 8b uncensored and that actually works amazingly well.

If we’re talking about inference costs alone (minimal new training) I think it would cover it. I started doing usage-based pricing through openrouter instead of paying monthly subscriptions, and my modest LLM use costs me about $3/month. Unless you think that the API rates are also priced below cost.

Power means making things and providing services that people want, that make their lives better. Which is a good thing. We need more power, not less.

If this was their most important moat for you, what is their moat now that it is gone?

The person you replied to suggests that the analogy of a 3d printer building a part does not hold, as LLM-based coding systems are able to both "print" some code, and decide where and when to do so.

I tend to agree with them. What people seem to miss about LLM coding systems, IMO:

a) deciding on the capabilities of an LLM to code after a brief browser session with 4o/claude is comparable to waking up a coder in the middle of the night, and having them recite the perfect code right then and there. So a lot of people interact with it that way, decide it's meh, and write it off.

b) most people haven't tinkered with with systems that incorporate more of the tools human developers use day to day. They'd be surprised of what even small, local models can do.

c) LLMs seem perfectly capable to always add another layer of abstraction on top of whatever "thing" they get good at. Good at summaries? Cool, now abstract that for memory. Good at q/a? Cool, now abstract that over document parsing for search. Good at coding? Cool, now abstract that over software architecture.

d) Most people haven't seen any RL-based coding systems yet. That's fun.

----

Now, of course the article is perfectly reasonable, and we shouldn't take what any CEO says at face value. But I think the pessimism, especially in coding, is also misplaced, and will ultimately be proven wrong.

  Bob: "Oh, of course it didn't work for you, you just need to use an ANA (amazing new acronym) model"
  Alice: "Oh, that's great, where can I see how ANA works? How do I use it?"
  ** Bob has left the chat **

WTF? Look at a word processor today, and then one from 1999, and tell me again how technology always keeps improving dramatically.

The standard electrical wall sockets that you use have not really changed since WW2. For load bearing elements in buildings, we don't have anything substantially better today than 100 years ago. There is a huge list of technological items where we've polished out almost every last wrinkle and a 1% gain once a decade is hailed as miraculous.

Oh this is great! Currently I don't incorporate web search into the UI I use, will give OpenWebUI a try.

> It is possible that some hypothetical super intelligent future AI will do something very clever like hide in a coding assistant and then distribute bits of itself around the planet in the source code of all of our stoplights and medical equipment.

That was part of the plot of person of interest. A really interesting show, it started as a basic "monster of the week" show but near the end it became a much more interesting plot.

Although most of the human characters were extremely one-dimensional. Especially Jim Caviezel's who was just a grumpy super soldier in every episode. It was kinda funny because they called him "the man in the suit" in the series and there was indeed little else to identify his character. The others were hardly better :(

But the AI storyline I found very interesting.

The stock market is objectively quite stupid. I'm not sure what you're trying to imply with this.

It’s analogous to the automobile. People do still walk, bike, and ride horses, but the vast majority of productive land transportation is done by automobile. Same thing with electronic communication vs. written correspondence. New tech largely supplants old tech. In this case, the old tech is human ingenuity and inventiveness.

I don’t think this is a controversial take. Many people take issue with the premise that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. I’m just pointing out the logical conclusion of that scenario.

Elizabeth Holmes would like a referral to lawyer who could make that case.

That’s not what happened to Theranos and Elisabeth Holmes

I'm sorry but if you're calling RL "ANA (amazing new acronym)" you're out of your depth on this one.

You articulate this position well. I've tried to convey something similar and it's tough to find the words to explain to people. I really like this phrase:

"Words are words. Writers are writers. Writers are not words."

I'm very bullish on AI/LLMs but I think we do need to have a better shared understanding of what they are and what they aren't. I think there's a lot of confusion around this.

I don’t think people outside of tech hearing about OpenAI more than Claude is really indicative of much. Ask those same people how much they use an LLM and it’s often rare-to-never.

Also, in what way has OpenAI become the Kleenex of the LLM space? Anthropic, Google, Facebook have no gpts, nobody “gpts” something, nobody uses that companies “gpt”.

I would say perhaps OpenAI has become the Napster, MySpace, or Facebook of the LLM space. Time will tell how long they keep that title

Yeah... I think it's GPT.

I just sampled my family and nobody could name an LLM that wasn't GPT. In this very small, obviously anecdotal scenario, GPT == LLM.

They seemed vaguely aware that there are other options; my wife asked if I meant Bing.

Meanwhile, I have literally never heard the words "ask Claude" out loud. I promise to come back and confirm if/when that ever changes.

> Do you have any points that aren’t about the people you disagree with?

Yes...

> Argue the facts.

What?

> What are the limits that prevent progress on the dimension of replicating human intelligence?

I don't work in that field, but as a layman I'd wager the lack of clear technical understanding of what animal intelligence actually is, let alone how it works is the biggest limitation.

A 12 year old that doesn’t sleep, eat, or forget, learns anything within seconds, can replicate and work together with fast as light communication and no data loss when doing so. Arrives out of the womb knowing everything the internet knows. Can work on one problem until it gets it right. Doesn’t get stale or old. Only had emotion if it’s useful. Can do math and simulate. Doesn’t get bored. Can theoretically improve its own design and run experiments with aforementioned focus, simulation ability, etc.

What could you do at 12, with half of these advantages? Choose any of them, then give yourself infinite time to use them.

> AGI doesn’t mean smarter than the best humans.

Technically no, but practically...

12 year old limitations are: A. gets tired, needs sleep B. I/O limited by muscles

Probably there are more, but if 12 year old could talk directly to electric circuits and would not need sleep or even a break, then that 12 year old would be leaps and bounds above the best human in his field of interest.

(Well motivation to finish the task is needed though)

For an intelligence to be "General" there would have to be no type of intelligence that it did not have access to (even if its capabilities in that domain were limited). The idea that that's what humans have strikes me as the same kind of thinking that led us to believe that earth was in the center of the universe. Surely there are ways of thinking that we have no concept of.

General intelligence would be like an impulsive 12 year old boy who could see 6 spatial dimensions and regarded us as cartoons for only sticking to 3.

If it's stuck at 12 year old level intelligence then it's not generally intelligent. 12 years can learn to think like 13 year olds and so on.

All it would want to do is talk about Minecraft and the funny memes they saw.

What stops it getting more intelegent? That's litterally its primary aim. Its only limit as to how quickly it does that is hardware capacity, and I'd be shocked if it didn't somehow theorise to itself that it can and should expand its knowledge in any way possible.

This is great insight. Science fiction does a great job inspiring technology research, but we forget that real-world accomplishments can be much humbler and still astonishing all the same.

I'm a bit tired of the hype surrounding LLMs, but all the same for very mundane and humbler tasks that require some intelligence modern LLMs manage to surprise me on a daily basis.

But it rarely accomplishes more than what a small collection of humans with some level of expertise can achieve, when asked.

I don't think using set notation is really helping your case here but (I think?) I agree.

We may not be able to fully define Consciousness, but we can observe it in humans and develop falsifiable hypotheses, of which there are several.

Take a look at this paper: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/mtgn7

If you’re reaching for nukes and asteroids then I think you just want to argue. Have a nice day.

1. Search engine replacement. I'm using it for many queries I asked Google before. I still use Google, but less often.

2. To break procrastination loops. For example I often can't name a particular variable, because I can see few alternatives and I don't like all of them. Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT and often proceed with his opinion.

3. Navigating less known technologies. For example my Python knowledge is limited and I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it. ChatGPT is just perfect for that kind of tasks, because I know what I want to get, I just miss some syntax nuances and I can quickly check the result. Another example is jq, it's very useful tool, but its syntax is arcane and I can't remember it even after years of occasional tinkering with it. ChatGPT builds jq programs like a super-human, I just show example JSON and what I want to get.

4. Not ChatGPT, but I think Copilot is based on GPT4, and I use Copilot very often as a smart autocomplete. I didn't really adopt it as a code writing tool, I'm very strict at code I produce, but it still helps a lot with repetitive fragments. Things I had to spend 10-20 minutes before, construction regexps or using editor macroses, I can now do with Copilot in 10-20 seconds. For languages like Golang where I must write `if err != nil` after every line, it also helps not to become crazy.

May be I didn't formulate my thoughts properly. It's not anything irreplaceable and I didn't become 10x programmer. But those tools are very nice and absolutely worth every penny I paid for it. It's like Intellij Idea. I can write Java in notepad.exe, but I'm happy to pay $100/year to Jetbrains and write Java in Idea.

I’ve got a local llama 3.2 3B running on my macOS. I can query it for recipes, autocomplete obvious code (this is the only thing GitHub Copilot was useful for). And answer simple questions when provided with a little bit of context.

All with much lower latency than an HTTP request to a random place, knowing that my data can’t be used to trading anything, and it’s free.

It’s absolutely insane this is the real world now.

I can't even summarize how much GPT4x has helped me teach myself engineering skills over the past two years. It can help me accomplish highly specific and nuanced things in CAD, plan interactions between component parts (which it helped me decide) on PCBs that it helps me to lay out, figure out how to optimize everything from switching regulators to preparing for EM certification.

And I could say this about just about every domain of my life. I've trained myself to ask it about everything that poses a question or a challenge, from creating recipes to caring for my indoor Japanese maple tree to preparing for difficult conversations and negotiations.

The idea of "just" using it to compose emails or search for things seems frustrating to me, even reading about it. It's actually very hard for me to capture all of this in a way that doesn't sound like I'm insulting the folks who aren't there yet.

I'm not blindly accepting everything it says. I am highly technical and I think competent enough to understand when I need to push back against obvious or likely hallucinations. I would never hand its plans to a contractor and say "build this". It's more like having an extra, incredibly intuitive person who just happens to contain the sum of most human knowledge at the table, for $20 a month.

I honestly don't understand how the folks reading HN don't intuitively and passionately lean into that. It's a freaking superpower.

I agree that learning syntactic nuances is not that useful, but it's something that comes naturally from contact with the language.

Rereading your comment I think I got the wrong impression from it. You said:

>> I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it

And I focused more on "I don't want to spend time to better learn it" than on "I don't really use it often". I also don't use Python often and I have to look up its syntax, same with e.g. R. I guess in that case it makes sense to not spend too much time learning the ins and outs of a language. On the other hand, Python is a staple, like Java was back in the day, and Perl and so on. It's useful, like speaking English. I don't think I would ever feel comfortable saying "I don't want to learn" it; or anything else.

If we ever find each other IRL, I suspect that we will be fast friends.

A tip of my hat to you, sir/ma'am.

Just to clarify, I didn't say anything about the OP's "ability to learn". I know nothing about that and can't tell anything about it from their comment. I also didn't say anything about how our brain works, or about "the tendrils of ML overlords".

If you want to have a debate, I'm all for it, but if you're going to go around imagining things that I may have said in another timeline then I don't see what's the point of that.

Yes. I generally like to know how stuff works and why.

You did not answer the question