TechTakes

Clamuel did another podcast. I don't want to waste my time watching it, but I want to sneer at some choice quotes from news articles breathlessly reporting this stuff as gospel 1, 2

"We are now, like, in the singularity"

Is the singularity in the room with us right now? Even the people on X the Everything (Including CSAM) App aren't so convinced.

Altman said on the podcast that just a decade ago, the so-called singularity still felt like a distant and improbable dream — something he and his colleagues would discuss casually over lunch.

"Now we're actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way," he said. "I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world."

Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome, now that the singularity is here? Oh wait, he's speaking in the future tense again, never mind. Force of habit.

It's also funny how he talks about how positive things are gonna be immediately after the super scary hack done on Hugging Face (really due to incompetence on both sides). Oh no, the AI is gonna kill us all! It's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.

Later in the podcast, Altman criticizes AI leaders who have repeatedly warned that AI is dangerous. He didn't name Anthropic, his primary competition, but its CEO, Dario Amodei, is well-known for making dire predictions about the future in his calls for greater attention to safety.

"I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying," Altman said. "I'm going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens."

At least Clammy realizes that all the doom trolling about how AI will replace and destroy all humans turns out, surprisingly, to lead to overwhelming negative public opinion. But this statement truly reassures me that Scammy has good intentions about AI safety. He will make sure this is pushed against and is not what happens. He wouldn't want another super scary, dangerous hack that just so conveniently turns out to be excellent marketing.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says one of his biggest concerns about AI isn't whether it becomes too powerful in and of itself, but that a single company could control that power.

Yeah, it would be really bad for Anthropic to control all the power of AI. It would be a disaster to hand everything over to Anthropic.

"Every time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety, it's been a long-term net loss," Altman said. "We are going to put this in the hands of people. We're going to empower them. We are going to let society express its ideas and use this technology in the way they want."

Society is expressing its ideas about AI, all right. But I feel like they aren't what he has in mind.

Altman, meanwhile, said preventing such power from becoming overly concentrated has long been central to his vision for AI, even as his company continues to keep its own models closed.

"For so long now, I have felt focused on this singular goal of abundant intelligence and a belief that incredible human prosperity will come from that, as long as we don't have a weird power concentration and kind of a new authoritarianism," he said.

Well, we seem to have a weird power concentration and "kind of" a new authoritarianism, but I don't see any abundant intelligence or incredible human prosperity.

Lots more sneers on the Better Offline subreddit.