Sama says "build for GPT-5 and AGI Now; GPT-5 in 2024, AGI in 2025"
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Sama is another one. He is part of some sort of success story, makes a bunch of radical 4d chess type claims, so you can’t discount everything he says, however, even if what he says is true, how do you “build for AGI”? The dude sounds legit bonkers, but again, he has some type of cred because his team delivered a working product. It almost feels like this is a common play adopted by a lot of tech elites. It’s not a coincidence.
“If you find yourself part of some success story, any success, use it to your advantage. Use your ‘cred’ to drive a lot of hype and cash out, using all the cash you accumulate hire hard working people, have them deliver something which in turn keeps you looking ‘credible’, make more outlandish claims, gain more funding, rinse wash repeat”
I feel Jeff Bezos is an example of someone who doesn’t do this. Seems like a practical guy who works really hard and avoids (mostly) making silly claims.
Obviously must work, otherwise they would not have done it
I can’t help fall back to Musk. So much of his success is due to not only his own hard work, but plenty of others, yet he is absolutely wonderful at marketing it like it’s his own and we should hang off everything he says.
Even when he does credit his team, it’s brief and then it’s straight back to the hype show.
Of course I’m not suggesting the dude is a complete fraud, he is part of some brilliant things, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t taking advantage of it.
I mean it is a smart way of operating and it totally works. I just don’t think it’s honest.
Sam Altman seems to operate by the exact same playbook, I’d say he is a novice player compared to Elon though.
If you have good intuition on what the needs of the people are, even on things that do not exist yet, you can design your product or service accordly. You could also choose the right people for the job.
People like Steve Jobs or Elon are great at understanding markets. i.e Steve knew that people would be using their smartphones on they pockets and that having scratch resistant screens was essential while the rest didn't care. I had a PocketPC and TabletPC and Microsoft cared so much and invested billions in things that few people care while being against most user real needs.
They are visionaries that have to imagine a future that does not exist yet. The kind of people that can do that, like Elon or Sam usually can see the future as real as it already exist and can be overoptimistic as for them it is obvious that something is going to happen as for them the future is as real as the present.
Elon saved Tesla from bankruptcy choosing a pathway to mass fabrication of EVs. The original Tesla vision was exclusivity and using Lotus car frames.
What separates Elon for everybody else is that he risks his own money on what he believes in, not someone else's like Sam. He is a risk taker like nobody. This is what I hear from people that know him personally.
In the case of Altman, I feel the way he communicates in this sort of secretive, somewhat threatening way (I’m about to unleash my super secret AGI published by my fake nonprofit org, regulate the completion at once) is sociopathic. It’s quite unique to him. I recall Steve Jobs being visionary, I heard stories of him being a perfectionist, but I don’t recall him using the same sociopathic playbook I described. Think of the contrast in behavior between Altman and say, Carl Sagan, the contrast is so stark to me. Between Elon musk and Eric Weinstein.
Anyway my original point wasn't focused on the people, just that I think they’ve workouted out how to perfectly game our attention economy to their advantage. I don’t hate them for it per se. I just think it’s dishonest and distracting. I'm not even sure they know they're doing it, but they just do it because it works.
Yeah, this is the key part, because a lot of the specific claims do fall over once interrogated (self-driving when?), but usually he is delivering something.
Holmes, while nearly as inspirational in the 'marketing' sham they all do, didn't have enough of a product, so she's in jail.
People like 'ilya' who understand the tech deeply are hidden and lose out to these 'musk' type folks, like sama.
Could be that he’s dreaming too big about AGI, but I know several people building GPT4 based products that will obviously be replaced by the next small advancement in GPT.
Maybe Sam is just trying to push people to think (and fund) a bit longer term ideas that won’t have so much backlash when they’re replaced by native GPT functionality improvements every few months. This will also create less churn in the app store and for users.
you realize that Sam doesn’t own equity in OpenAI, and Elon lives far below his means, right?
do you really think they’re trying to play the game to “cash out?”
Meanwhile I’m a robotics engineer and I need systems that can understand large amounts of data in real time and I doubt their 2025 “AGI” will be able to intelligently process LIDAR data. Such narrow systems are hardly general in my eyes, even if they are very compelling chat bots.
We had to rename AI to AGI now when we have 'AI'.
OpenAI follow their own definition of AGI, and it's "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". [0] Whether that includes jobs that require robotics is an open question.
We’ve just never seen a universal multimodal learner (all modalities) or a system with its own goals and motivations that can learn on its own without massive datasets (meaning things without datasets are hard for it to learn, so how does it for example learn how to do PCB design or CAD modeling), so they’re talking about such a leap it’s hard to fathom. I mean hell take PCB design for example. That’s actually on the computer but there’s no big dataset in existence that actually explains PCB design in a way a system would understand, so approaches that rely on a dataset for training simply can’t begin to solve that task.
And if you can’t even do that economically valuable task on the computer then I don’t believe you have AGI.
I am quite sure that they’re cooking up some fascinating stuff but I doubt they are going to have a system that can do machine design or PCB design just to name a few important and extremely economically valuable tasks.
Don't create parasocial relationships to them like some desperate pawn.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230308110003/https://www.nytim...
So far I haven't even seen any particularly useful or compelling definitions of AGI; it's usually handwavy, incredibly vague, or defined in terms of something else which just shifts the problem around.
The general sentiment I've gotten from following a bunch of AI researchers on Twitter is that we're still multiple key insights away from being able to build AGI. So either Sam knows something we don't or he's hoping to we get lucky in the next 2 years.
I hope he's wrong and we actually get AGI by 2024.
I think it’s as good a definition for a major milestone in AI development as any.
Thus, he concludes that AGI is already here (it is similarly general purpose) but in the early days.
I find his view pragmatic and helpful. https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
Tasks claim is a little stretched, too. For example, simple arithmetic. Does model actually do arithmetic or does it do text generation and the right answer just happens to be the most likely next token? Can we reliably tell one from the other to claim that model actually perform tasks other than just text generation?
As an analogy, think of the first steam engines. They were replacing horses so why not measure their primary function in units of horse power? We had a somewhat rigorous physical framework for work and power but it probably wasn't well understood by the target audience to be useful.
While we don't seem to have a scientifically rigorous definition of intelligence we still can have a somewhat useful discussions about utility in reference to another familiar instance of intelligence.
This is by design.
I think this is why he is the CEO, he is a master of deception, half truths, decoys and promises.
You never know what he knows so bad fucking luck, that’s his attitude. Even if he isn’t lying , he is communicating in a non-friendly, secretive and manipulative way which is toxic.
AGI, something better than humans at pretty much ahy tasks would have some radical implications for society. Him throwing this around loosely is irresponsible and shows a lack of respect or empathy on many fronts. If OpenAI are trying to develop it, fine, but just so some maturity as well.
This is clearly not backed up by how long it took to do ChatGPT and now a massive leap to AGI ???.
Occam's razor would imply that he is simply encouraging future YC batches to build products on top of OAI products, with "AGI" being some sort of multi modal GPT.
"Sama" did not say that. The quoted part from Sama seems to be
> @sama suggested ppl build w/ the mindset GPT-5 and AGI will be achieved "relatively soon";"
The (not Sama) person who wrote the tweet added their own question
> Expect @OpenAI #GPT5 in 2024 and #AGI in 2025?
This sounds more real.
That's said, I do believe that GTP-5 will be out in a year, but re:AGI is a such a bold prediction.
I realised that in 2020 I would have assumed that an AI car autopilot would have no hope with conflicting logical constraints such this, reading English traffic signs, etc...
Now? In early 2024? There are multi-modal AIs that can read arbitrary road signs, understand the text (in practically any language), and follow the logic to a correct conclusion.
Would I trust GPT-4V to control my car? No, the technology just isn't ready yet.
However, it's clearly possible now, whereas very recently it seemed impossible.
Currently, Tesla autopilot is a complex mix of multiple models, a bunch of C++ code, and more. It's "traditional software" with bits of AI in it.
I suspect that within just a few years, a pure AI model could be trained directly on video collected from the Tesla fleet, in much the same way that GPT was trained with text from the Internet and books. Sprinkle in a pre-trained GPT-5 level LLM for reading and logic, and ta-da, you have a generally intelligent driver agent that can understand spoken instructions, can read road signs, receive traffic alerts over 5G, and react appropriately. It would have learned from billions of hours of driving and a million accidents. Just like GPT, it'll have a wider range of experience than any human, prepared for any eventuality that actually occurs on roads.
We know that we can make a bigger reusable rocket, it’s just a matter of working out the details. We have no idea if FTL is even possible, let alone how.
I feel like AI is at the same point: technology demonstrators have proven that there is a way forward, now we just need oodles of computer power to make it happen.
Chat bots that can answer complex English questions used to be pure science fiction just a year ago!
GPT-4 can handle many human tasks with the right configuration.
There might be multiple ways to improve things like reasoning. Larger, more efficient and better curated datasets. Or maybe there is a way to embed some kind of TorchOpt stuff inside the models. Baking in batches of tree of thought. Micro development environments or logic programming tightly integrated with inference. Etc.
Also, the emphasis on more animal-like abilities than LeCun is focusing on could start to pay off within a couple of years.
Given a conservative interpretation of "AGI", I take what Altman said at face value. They need to have ambitious goals because of the rate of progress, level of competition, high stakes, and very high level talent.
For me, the most basic level of "AGI" is: I can provide a human instruction and the intelligence will iteratively work through a known problem space with known tools until it reaches a satisfactory outcome, or realizes it is unable to complete the task with an explanation regarding why.
How this outcome is achieved is not really relevant to me. The effect on the business is all that really matters.
The LLM doesn't seem like the important part anymore. We figured out a pretty damn good hammer. It bangs those nails in clean pretty much one swing every time. We need to stop focusing on the hammer and begin focusing on the framing.
What this does however suggest they have something that will make substantial improvement in next GPT, and something to further improve on the one after.
What may likely to happen is that GPT-6 ( In 2026 or later rather than 2025 ) will be good enough for lots of thing, as we further refine it and improve on it for another 1 or 2 iteration. This whole process in the next 5 - 6 years will unlock a lot of value in other industry. Enough to fuel another 10 years of investment cycle.
I still dont believe we will reach AGI by 2030 though.
The existance of multiple centers of decision on latest LLMs surprised me. I'd venture to guess either locality nodes will evolve or will need to be made happen to reduce the necessary bandwidth for LLM.
By a jump of logic, I'd also venture to guess that will need to make it happen before we reach AGI.
Additionally, physiological nodes will also need to happen before we have human-like AGI.
Either way, just making things up here. Not a professional.
Another aspect is that Altman doesn’t say any specific dates, even years. Two big step ups in two years seem like a little too fast.
Would it be worth building anything? AGI will be able to build it far cheaper, and in any case, who's going to use a travel-booking website or whatever, if they can just tell an AGI to 'book me a holiday', etc.
The only thing that makes sense is a lunge for patents, trademarks, etc, ie ownership.
You could eat the cost temporarily knowing when GPT 5 arrives you'll be able to cut down on that significantly.
Or you build a simpler product that gets a foot in the door in organizations knowing that you'll have an additional value proposition that's enabled by an incremental improvement in capabilities.
>Sama says "build for GPT-5 and AGI Now; GPT-5 in 2024, AGI in 2025"
is basically bollocks. He didn't say that.