Founder Fashion? Pffff. Who needs that when you can be the father of creation, ushering in a new era of humanity?
Welcome to “God mode”.
Sam Altman, the CEO of the AI startup is heading towards a Valuation of $150 billionOpenAI, has always presented AI as the solution to the world’s problems, despite its significant impact on energy resources, carbon emissions and water consumption to cool data centers, at the expense of the progress the world is making in the fight against climate change.
At Altman last messageOpenAI leader delivers incredibly positive update on the state of AI, highlighting its world-changing potential. Far from being a sometimes useful alternative to a Google search or homework help, AI, as Altman presents it, will change the progress of humanity – for the better, naturally.
Through rose-tinted glasses, Altman presents the many ways he believes AI will save the world. But much of what he writes is apparently intended to convince skeptics of the importance of AI and may well have the opposite result: instead of creating new fans, articles like this may well prompting closer scrutiny of whether we are in a “the emperor’s new clothes” situation.
As a commenter with username sharkjacobs on the tech forum Pirate News writes: “I am not at all skeptical about AI, I use LLM all the time and I find them very useful. But this sort of thing makes me very skeptical of the people who make and sell AI.
Let’s review Altman’s promises and judge them to be credible or simply exaggerated:
- AI will help us solve “difficult problems. » Believeable. Will these difficult problems be about something deep, like medical sciencesor something beyond helping engineers complete coding challenges, or helping kids cheat on their homework, or creating strange and perhaps partially stolen art, remains to be seen.
- “We will soon be able to work with AI, which will help us accomplish much more than we could without AI. » Shift in the hype. Yes, using a new tool or technology will help us accomplish more, but will it actually increase efficiency to the point that businesses are willing to pay for it, especially given the state in which it finds itself today? It is still too early to know the answer here.
- “Eventually, we will each be able to have a personal AI team, made up of virtual experts in different fields, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Threshing. First of all, creating “almost everything” we can imagine is not necessarily a good thing – not only because it undermines art and works created by humans, but also because people can imagine certain things. really terrible things. It is also worth asking whether these “virtual experts” would simply sweep away and summarize the ideas of real experts.
- “Our children will have virtual tutors. Believeable. A chatbot assistant may not be better than a 1:1 tutoring session with a real person, but the fact is that many families can’t afford a real thing. But such an important and influential role will need to be carefully defined and rigorously studied.
- “…imagine similar ideas for better health care.” Threshing. Again, a vague promise that AI will improve our health and well-being because it will have “the ability to create any type of software imaginable.”
- “We can share prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s life can be better than today. Threshing! This is where he really goes into God mode.
- The AI will “significantly improve the lives of people everywhere.” Threshing. How? When? To what extent? Whose life? We have many questions here.
- “This could turn out to be the most important fact in the entire story so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); It may take longer, but I am confident we will get there. Hype with a capital H. A tease that AGI (artificial general intelligence) is definitely going to happen, and it’s only a matter of time. However, many Critics of AI say AGI may not happenat least as promised. We might end up with smarter models, but not necessarily capable of the same level of human understanding, skeptics say.
- “…the next step towards prosperity. » Threshing. Like many technological changes, AI in the in the short term, this could lead to job losses before creating new ones. If this were to free people from the drudgery of work, how could they pay their rent or buy food in a capitalist society that demands that work be the cost of living for all but the mega-rich? Much of this rhetoric will be familiar to anyone who has followed the “singularity” type futurists over the years.
- “AI will get better with scale…” Believeable. It makes sense that AI will improve as technology evolves and develops, even if the cost of this scale is not taken into account.
- “…and it will lead to significant improvements in the lives of people everywhere.” » Hold on! Threshing. We’ll need to see the receipts for this one when the time comes. Furthermore, how is “meaningful” measured here? Because the consumer experience with things like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other chatbots today often involves AI hallucinating facts, extracting bad information from scraped websites or regurgitating the the stupidest elements published on Reddit, none of which currently constitute a “significant improvement”. (Of course, we’re not just talking about chatbots in this article, but that’s a point that might go unnoticed by the intended audience!)
- “AI systems will become so good that they will help us create better next-generation systems and achieve scientific advancements at every level. Threshing. AI is already improving things in fields like medicine and science, but we can’t yet measure whether these improvements are incremental or significant. Until AI’s cancer treatments and radiology expertise lead to significantly improved outcomes for ordinary people, this must be classified as hype.
- “If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will become a very limited resource that wars will be fought over and will become primarily a tool for the rich.” Threshing. If we don’t adopt and invest in AI, are wars inevitable? All right? This is why we are building more power plants like the one in Three Mile Island? YOLO!
- “The Dawn of the Intelligence Age.” Threshing. Historians define past eras; For all we know, this could be the “age of resource overconsumption” that ultimately led to our downfall.
- “It won’t be an entirely positive story, but the benefits are so enormous…” First part, credible. Part two, hype.
- “…the future will be so bright that no one will be able to do it justice by trying to write about it now. » So why is Altman trying? We view futility as credible, but luminosity as hype.
- “A defining characteristic of the intelligence age will be massive prosperity. » Threshing. Show us the money. Damn, convince the CIOs of the value of AI first.
- “Although it will happen gradually, stunning triumphs – repairing the climate, establishing a space colony, and discovering all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. » Threshing. So we have to destroy the environment to run AI data centers, but will AI ultimately solve climate change?
- “…we expect that this technology could bring about significant change in labor markets…” Believeable. But don’t sugarcoat this one – this change is coming could be bad in the immediate future.
- “A lot of the work we do today would have seemed like an insignificant waste of time to people a few hundred years ago, but no one looks back and wants to be a streetlight lighter.” Threshing. Why shade the igniters? This actually sounds like a pretty relaxing job? All joking aside, this wrongly equates the arrival of AI with as big an impact as the arrival of electricity, which is more than a little presumptuous.
Altman hype aside, it should be recognized that AI represents a significant platform shift and perhaps the most significant since the advent of mobile technology. (Example: Apple is sell your iPhone 16 based on its AI capabilities, not its hardware.)
AI could potentially bring major changes down the line. But today, it is still legitimate to ask whether the arrival of AI will ultimately prove as important as connecting the world via the Internet, installing a Web-connected computer in every home, and then in everyone’s pocket.
On one side are the true believers who are counting down the days to AGI, and on the other are the skeptics who would like to see more before calling the AI era a utopia – especially if We consider the real costs for the environment, labor, art, and creation.
We are currently at the point in AI development where consumers and businesses are looking to determine how AI will fit into their regular workflows, where AI can improve efficiency, and where it will not. not. In the meantime, most of what has been written about the future of AI can only be speculative.
