Sam Altman wants to convince billions to scan eyes to prove they aren’t bots
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
Watching those two wring their hands over whether GPT is 'conscious' cemented my opinion that this is all just choreographed pantomime and a white tech-upper class quasi cult.
Anything inflating his ideas into personal space is just a land-grab now.
What do you mean? I'm out of the loop, not arguing with you.
- blocks anybody who looks into his past
- styles himself as an expert version of jre while being a terrible interviewer
- is often misinformed about the subjects of his podcasts.
The latter two are opinion. The first two are factual but hard for anyone else to validate.
I tried looking into "misrepresents his affiliation with MIT" and I couldn't figure out what he's misrepresenting. He claims to be a researcher at MIT. The MIT Deep Learning page[0] is all videos from his YouTube channel, including Fridman lecturing at MIT.[1]
What's the misrepresentation?
https://old.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/zaeztd/_/...
If you see his Youtube profile picture it’s pretty obvious he wants to present himself as a lecturer or professor staff, which he is not.
For the latter 2 I’m sure the other comments on this thread are helpful.
I personally didn't find the claims in that reddit thread persuasive, but I understand how others might interpret them differently.
Aside from Taleb, I don't recognize any of the people who claim Fridman blocked them, so for all I know, they tweeted obnoxious stuff at him and then complained about being blocked. Taleb is extremely abrasive, so I can't fault anyone for blocking him.
If it was like Yann LeCun and Andrej Karpathy complaining that Lex blocked them, then I'd question how aggressively Fridman blocks people, but if it's random Twitter accounts that seem to just shitpost all day, why do they have a right to communicate with Fridman?
I'll also direct you to the moderator list of the /r/lexfridman sub. No real people, none of them ever comment, and his subreddit is one of the most [deleted] I have ever experienced. If you look at reveddit, also check the comments. Quite telling. https://www.reveddit.com/v/lexfridman/?localSort=num_comment...
If your response is "maybe he just likes a heavily curated subreddit" then all I can say is keep coming back.
For being so open minded, he sure does have an incredibly tight grip on information control. This is coming from someone that used to think Lex was the cream of the crop.
Just listen to his podcasts. I was podcast hunting the last couple months and came across a recommendation to his podcast. I have no idea about him as a person, his background or his critics; so I was in an unbiased state.
I listened to a few podcasts to realize the dude is toast. He does mumble a lot of "sophisticated" words to sound smart but after 4 or 5 episodes there is nothing of substance that you get from him or his guests. I wondered why he was recommended in the first place but then remember lots of the podcasts in America are JRE style.
The thing I dislike about Lex is that he doesn't really critically interview. If you interview someone, you put your credentials at stake to interview them, and it must be critical IMO. Instead, Lex is more of a marketeer, giving the interviewee room to spout their message via his platform.
I've listened to a lot of his podcasts, I do not recall him mentioning MIT once.
>- blocks anybody who looks into his past
What? You mean in youtube comments? Aren't they supposed to be talking about the video not about whatever his past is? (I have no idea about his past, I just know he did something related to self driving cars at some point)
>- styles himself as an expert version of jre while being a terrible interviewer
He often describes himself as a terrible interviewer (which I disagree with), so I'm not sure how he's "styling himself" as anything
>- is often misinformed about the subjects of his podcasts.
He's an audience stand in who asks questions to the subject matter expert that he has on his podcast. If he already knew everything it would break the format.
He actually used to host his pod at MIT before he moved to Texas to be closer to his true loves, Joe and Elon. Haven't watched him in years since he moved away from tech and more into (mostly right wing) political guests but even then you could count on one hand the interviews he didn't mention Rogan or Musk.
I feel like there must be some other reason you don't like him, because none of your reasons are consistent with reality.
And if you’re using the word pathological please use it right :)
Moreso I’m referring to the LessWrong/Reddit/HN/Twitter internet-lore format which he borrows from and leans into. Many of his questions are deep on the surface but ultimately more about sensationalism (even if that means a bad faith read of the problem).
Also, at times I suspect interviewees pre-negotiate certain things for him to see in a positive manner. Like in this last episode, thanking Sam for open sourcing GPT eval - ignoring that GPT-4’s basic architecture description wasn’t even released; a big “fuck you” to researchers hoping to do any sort of replication or peer review.
Isn't the whole point of an interview to let the interviewee get their point across and clear up any misinformation?
Not sure exactly how that maps to IQ ranges, but worth checking out anyway.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2Dw1c7rxs6DmyK0pMR...
the problem with smart people is that they know that they're smart and so they won't stop talking or driving the conversation.
Joe Rogan, pre pandamic / spotify deal was humble enough and would just invite people and let them talk, it was way more informative and less echo champery style of conversation ... I can't stand listening to this guy.
The 'simulation' argument is actually very persuasive if you look into it. Quoted below from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis:
[Begin quote.]
Bostrom's trilemma argues that one of three unlikely-seeming propositions is almost certainly true:
1. "The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero", or
2. "The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero", or
3. "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one."
The trilemma points out that a technologically mature "posthuman" civilization would have enormous computing power; if even a tiny percentage of them were to run "ancestor simulations" (that is, "high-fidelity" simulations of ancestral life that would be indistinguishable from reality to the simulated ancestor), the total number of simulated ancestors, or "Sims", in the universe (or multiverse, if it exists) would greatly exceed the total number of actual ancestors.
Bostrom goes on to use a type of anthropic reasoning to claim that, if the third proposition is the one of those three that is true, and almost all people live in simulations, then humans are almost certainly living in a simulation.
[End quote.]
* Note I don't care at all about Friedman and have listened to exactly one of his podcasts (Carmack).
I don't mean to bash him too much though, I think it's hard interviewing experts in areas they have spent their whole lives in and not to feel less informed in comparison.
Maybe I need to watch the full thing.
>Sam Altman and Lex Fridman
This thing with white Gentiles and Jews reminds of tennis pros from Scotland. They're described in the English press as Scottish when they lose and British when they win. Likewise, if a member of the tribe does something bad in America it's on whiteness and white supremacy, but if they do something great we suddenly remember that they're Jewish. A conspicuous pattern, and not one that I think is good for relations in the long run.
Lets just say that both of them are AI bros, and are hype men for O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com and Worldcoin and will do anything to push their new AI grift (Worldcoin) into the public via plain scaremongering nonsense such as GPT being 'conscious'.
Where have I heard that before... I think it was another Sam Altman venture. Deja vu here, someone help me out.
Wait, what?
It is something much more bizarre than a pyramid scheme.
This is giving “monopoly” money in exchange for eye scans (under the pretense of preventing bots), and hoping for said monopoly money be become valuable
Worldcoin is another 'Scam Altman' pyramid scheme, waiting to pump and dump on retail using AI scaremongering tactics.
ahem Howey test
Any local financial services or data protection agency should present these guys with a list of very awkward questions like "what are you going to do with this data" and "under what circumstances will these 'coins' have value".
Edit: That said, one of the other commented this: "Eyeballs are usernames not passwords". I think that's ok-ish...
What the device is sending upline is nothing more than a number. That number can be used to identify you (with or without a password) and can and will also be used in all the other (bad) ways that identifying information is used. There is nothing special about capturing it with an orb or scanning your eyeballs. That's techno-mysticism, of which Sam is a big fan.
Why would something that they’re giving away, to presumably everyone on Earth, become worth millions?
If you assume the USD will have an 'emperor wears no clothes' moment at some point, that value would be shifted to another asset.
Seems like that's a key part of the scammy pitch. "Look at how well bitcoin did, now hand over your PII for this shitcoin".
Also the privacy of the users would be compromised, a biometric is unique ID (during the time you are not sick), that means traceability.
All hardware is hackable. Nothing will prevent someone from analyzing the system and creating accounts for the distributed bots.
> How do we prove each person is real? Worldcoin’s solution is cataloging every individual over 18 years old through a privacy-preserving protocol, rewarding each person with cryptocurrency, which in turn will become the new global monetary standard.
Ignoring the contradictory paragraph about protecting privacy, it sounds like promoting a crypto using a captcha -that will harm the user on long term- as an advertising for trying to take control of fake money. Is this morally upright?
> In two investigations, published on back-to-back days in April 2022 by BuzzFeed News and MIT Tech Review, journalists alleged that Worldcoin trials in developing countries were riddled with deceptive promises made both to orb operators and participants. Other allegations included privacy law violations and even corruption.
I am not surprised.
Here's the timestamp of the interview I'm referring to. https://youtu.be/57OU18cogJI?t=1010
Eyeballs are just eyeballs and just like any biometric horrible idea for anything beyond local-access verification.
Am I missing some fundamental reasons why retina scan is better than other authentication techniques?
Compared to a password or an RSA key, I would say that biometrics are even dangerous.
They're just going to sell this data for identification purposes.
So this is a weak attempt to solve the human-machine interface problem. Put all the other creepy stuff aside, scanning a retina would not prove that I'm an individual who is entitled to the 25 tokens. The first thing people would do is to exploit as many people as possible to take their tokens.
The whole exercise of machine scanning a real life object to verify authenticity is useless.
I think the plan sucks but it does try to solve a fundamental problem. The internet is rapidly becoming a boring dystopia sewer partly because the cost of unleashing bots and generated content continues to decrease. Proving that people on the internet are real and who they say they are is tough. Part of what makes this effortless IRL is the threat of jail (fake ID? you'd have to lie to the government) and that a human IRL doesn't scale (you can only be in one place and doing one thing at a time).
You cannot have a town square where it is possible to be anonymous.
In the town square, technically everyone is anonymous until you ask them their name, and even then, no one has to give you the real one. The cops are the only real exception.
The thing that truly bugs me about tech/the Internet is that at some point it was decided that everyone is entitled to intimate information on everyone else for even the most transient silly thing.
I remember seeing the CCC breaking "facial" recognition to unlock a phone by just taking a picture of the owner on a park bench.
"This here is our orb which scans your eyeball for biometric data so our AI company can pay you in something called Worldcoin" isn't tech, that's a whole ass Deus Ex plotline. Only thing missing is Bob Page popping out of nowhere. You better hire the best PR team on available for that one.
I didn't know Altman's pockets were so deep he could feed and house the whole planet. That's going to be a problem. Apart from all the other problems with UBI, of course.
Also, such a system doesn't need any kind of currency attached to it.
He placed a large AI bet and in parallel a Crypto bet… nice strategy.