OpenAI ignored the ‘have a problem to solve’ rule, says president Greg Brockman

Given the computer power required behind ChatGPT isn't that unlikely at this point? Aren't they one of the few games in town with both the software and required hardware?

Some problems are likely to be too big for AGI to solve, many others would be bottlenecked by the same thing that bottlenecks human intelligence - real world evidence/experimentation.

The idea that somehow the right answer is hidden in preexisting data and that a sufficiently complex algorithm would be able to find it is amusing and quit likely wrong.

Also there’s a fantastic BBC docuseries called “Connections” by James Burke that makes the case that nothing in tech could have happened sooner or later than it did, and that each progression was an inevitable next step from the previous. It has interesting implications.

I suppose this is half of the truth. The way I see it, it's a feedback loop: people develop technology for reasons, technology ends up transforming societies well beyond predictions or intentions of the inventors, which leads to new problems requiring new technologies, ... rinse repeat.

My current belief is that something I heard labeled as "technological determinism" holds at the high level: culture is primarily driven by economic incentives, like water flowing down and around a landscape; development of technology is one of the primary ways this landscape changes. Technology and economics are in tight feedback loop. Culture just follows, perhaps occasionally influencing the economics/technology feedback loop.

I'm not holding that belief strongly. It's just that so far, I've seen plenty of evidence for it - i.e. social transformations that were inevitable given the economical and technological landscape, and human nature - while I can't think of a single case of social progress that was independent of the economics, and solely conditioned on critical mass of people making an ethics-driven decision.