Sam Altman says future of AI depends on energy breakthrough

He’s like Elon at this point, before the Ketamine haze. Everything he says is directed at padding the narrative of one of his investments or to misdirect regulators and the public.

We should not be surprised if misdirection products (in the style of Hyperloop) are released. They already did once with their “chatgpt detection” they knew from the start wouldn’t work.

It’s easy to see if you keep track of his atttributable speech that he tells every audience something different (the same thing he got accused off in the whole coup at OAI last month). His narrative changes moment to moment and is often self contradictory. And why wouldn’t he.

People think that public record would make such an approach fail but we’ve seen over and over again from Elon to Others that it doesn’t work that way.

Legend / Cult means people select what they want to hear and the rapid fire coverage of press and influencer regurgitated vomit on LinkedIn and X prevent people from connecting the dots. No press organization calls out the bullshit (same as Googles inane Gemini CoT32 handwaving). Nobody has the big picture and there is no accountability.

He and his companies are so invested in that stuff, no sane person should take anything he says at face value.

It’s big techs public policy playbook. You claim or adapt a breakthrough (Meta: Metaverse) for example and exploit the glacial speed and erosion of governments and public research (who have to rely on private sector information as a result) to position yourself as the only credible party to talk to. Moving AI funding research into corporate labs in the 2010s has really made this approach extremely fertile.

Press has been disarmed too, they are too starved and broken to call out the bullshit - see techcrunch publishing almost daily claims of companies without editorial about their AI exploits that anyone with a bit of understanding can see for the bullshit they are.

Throw in some legend building and wave around some cash and you get to plow the field ahead of you with your desired narrative.

See: AI doomerism to influence EU regulation which went to back burner the moment it was passed. The months before he travelled to every government in the world to personally impress the need to regulate in a way that protects his interests.

He’s not even a master manipulator. He’s just a manipulator with a lot of money and a self made success narrative. That’s enough, especially in America, to rise all the way to the top - as we know.

A tacit admission that it is currently too energy intensive to be sustainable.

Isn’t this literally the plot of the Matrix, that AI needed energy sources so it harvested humans for that reason? And kept us in the matrix so we’d think we’re still living our lives?

That movie keeps giving!