Comment by phillryu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phillryu | Hacker News Reader

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When I compare the two Elon was (lucky?) to at least have a string of vision-fueled ventures that became a thing. What is Sam's history of visions? Loopt? Is Y Combinator considered in a new golden era after he took over? Did Worldcoin make any sense at all?

I'm honestly hoping I'm entirely ignorant of his substance and would feel better if someone here can explain there's more to him than that… I would feel better knowing that what could be history's most disruptive tech is being led by someone with some vision for it, beyond the apocalypse that he described in 2016 that he tries not to think about too much:

"The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

I'm with you, listening to his interview with Ezra Klein gave me the impression that he doesn't actually think that deeply about the possible impact of AI. He says it worries him, but then he seems to wave those worries away with really simplistic solutions that don't seem very tenable.

The main question about OpenAI is this: can you have any better structure to create singularity that will happen anyways (Some people don't like the word AGI, so I just definine it by machines having wastly more intellectual power than humans).

Would it be better if Google, Tesla or Microsoft / Apple / CCP or any other for profit company did it?

What bothers me most is that the picture he paints of success itself is some handwavy crap about how it could "create value" or "solve problems" or some other type of abstract nonsense. He has displayed exactly 0 concrete, desirable vision of what succeeding with AI would look like.

That seems to be the curse of Silicon Valley, worshiping abstractions to the point of nonsense. He would probably say that with AGI, we can make people immortal, infinitely intelligent, and so on. These are just potentialities with, again, 0 concrete vision. What would we use that power for? Altman has no idea.

At least Musk has some amount of storytelling about making humanity multiplanetary you may or may not buy into. AI "visionaries" seem to have 0 narrative except rehashed, high-level summaries of sci-fi novels. Is that it?

I agree, listening to the podcast I think the answer is that “yes” that is it: faith in technological progress is the axiom and the conclusion. Joined by other key concepts like compound growth, the thinking isn’t deep and the rest is execution. Treatment of the concept of ‘a-self’ in the podcast was basically just nihilistic weak sauce.

AI is not an abstraction. It's rational to be hand wavy about future value, it's already materialized. AI is basically an applied reseaarch project, he should be more like a Dean herding researchers and we should take him as that. In a previous era, that's what it would be: a PhD from Berkley in charge of some giant AT&T government funded research Lab thing. He'd be on TV with a suit and tie, they'd be smoking and discussing abstract ideas.

Are you really insinuating that Elon was simply “lucky” when it came to disrupting and transforming two gargantuan and highly complex industries at the same time?

I think my main point was more that despite what you (not you personally, anyone reading) think of Elon, at least he has this track record of visionary companies and Sam does not.

Personally my take on Elon is something like this – he found a vacuum in the industry of smart engineers who want to work on something truly ambitious, the kind of people who feel most SV startups are bullshit. And as a sci-fi nerd he came in with money and pitched several sci-fi ambitious project ideas/visions that attracted these engineers etc. to make them happen. And I think he was rewarded for this. You could tally that as another vision that he had that was onto something.

well, you're definitely correct in that one of his superpowers is attracting some of the best talent to work for him (at least that was the case when he started Tesla and SpaceX). But you're completely overlooking his ridiculous work ethic (100+ hours per week for years on end), plus his own elite engineering chops (he was the chief engineer at SpaceX), and there are interviews of rocket engineers that worked for him stating that if you weren't on top of your game, Elon would call you out on it, even citing specific sections and page numbers of rocket science books on the fly mid-conversation. It's not just money he brought to the table.

I'm not talking about the reality of Sam and Elon. I'm putting my ear to the ground and observing the way the media is (and will) portray them.

I wish that "actual reality" was all that mattered and not such low-knowledge "optics", but sadly we don't live in that world.

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