More than three years ago, this editor sat down with Sam Altman for a small event in San Francisco soon after he’d left his role ...
...as the president of Y Combinator to become CEO of the AI company he co-founded in 2015 with Elon Musk and others, OpenAI.
Altman said, for example, that the opportunity with artificial general intelligence — machine intelligence that can solve problems as well as a human — is so great that if OpenAI managed to crack ...
...it, the outfit could “maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe.” He said that the company was “going to have to not release research” because it was so powerful.
Asked if OpenAI was guilty of fear-mongering — Musk has repeatedly called all organizations developing AI to be regulated — Altman ...
...talked about dangers of not thinking about “societal consequences” when “you’re building something on an exponential curve.”
Indeed, though heavy users insist it’s not so smart, the ChatGPT model that OpenAI made available to the general public last week is so ...
...capable of answering questions like a person that professionals across a range of industries are trying to process the implications.
Educators, for example, wonder how they’ll be able to distinguish original writing from the algorithmically generated essays they are bound to receive — and that can evade anti-plagiarism software.
He’s an economist, venture capitalist and MIT fellow who calls himself a “frustrated normal with a penchant for thinking about risks and unintended consequences in complex systems.” But he is among those who are suddenly worried about our collective future, tweeting ...
...yesterday: “[S]hame on OpenAI for launching this pocket nuclear bomb without restrictions into an unprepared society.” Wrote Kedrosky, “I obviously feel ChatGPT (and its ilk) should be withdrawn immediately. And, if ever re-introduced, only with tight restrictions.”
We talked with him yesterday about some of his concerns, and why he thinks OpenAI is driving what he believes is the “most disruptive change the U.S. economy has seen in 100 years,” and not in a good way.
That could be software engineering, high school essays, legal documents. All of them are easily eaten by this voracious beast and spit back out again without compensation to whatever was used for training it.
It does feel like it could eat up the world. But people carped that he didn’t know what he’s talking about.
And I think there’s the potential for a [massive] lawsuit and settlement eventually with respect to the consequences of the services, which, you know, ...
...will probably take too long and not help enough people, but I don’t see how we don’t end up in [this place] with respect to these technologies.
But the lesson of the last five years in particular has been these changes can take a long time. What no one anticipated was that someone would organize all the angry people and elect Donald Trump.
The purpose of writing an essay is to prove that you can think, so this short circuits the process and defeats the purpose. ...
...More stuff must be done orally, and what does that mean? We paid people to stay home, and they came up with QAnon.