Why the world should say No to Sam Altman

> OpenAI has argued that they literally can’t build what they are building without an exemption from copyright that would crush artists, musicians, writers, and other creators.

This is my favorite thing about what Silicon Valley has become. "But we're disruptors! We can't do what we want to do unless we break all of your laws!"

Have not heard much about Ilya Sutskever since the event. What was his fate upon Altman’s return? Is he diminished at OpenAI?

Climate Change: Energy != climate change. Even if it entirely did, using it as an argument without including the benefits is to put it politely (i dont want to) is very silly. AGI (if possible) will solve climate.

Economic Resources: Again talking about the costs without the benefits is extremely disenginous, especially since this authour believes in ASI

Human Intellectual Capital: Barring some exceptions, IP laws are extremely outdated and wont last for long regardless of whether Sam venture succeeds or not. Also blacksmiths making horseshoes..

Negative Extranalities: This is where having some liberties to go outside of the HN guidelines would be extremely appropriate. Progress comes with risks but the alternative is the end of civilisation. Probably just the west and not humanity since China, Middle East, India etc have not been ...

Every major problem facing humanity can be solved given enough time, intelligence and creativity. If we had a technology than can accelerate these things, it would be illogical and immoral to not bet big on it.

When I say everything I mean everything from cancer, genetic diseases, famine, drought to climate change, poverty, prosperity etc etc. This not some utopian religious claim either. Everything I've listed is solvable, we have the equations and we've already made so much progress that we know it is just a matter of x. Whether x is time, intelligence or creativity. or all of the above..

To sum it up, the author and his kin are clearly driven by quasi collectivist luddite ideology/moral_framework. It is such a shame that HNs guidelines won't allow me to appropriatly describe the author.

This just comes off as a rant that can be summarized as "7 Trillion is a lot".

For reference: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-do...

Let the investors burn their ill-gotten gains on fairy tales. It's the most efficient form of wealth distribution we have available to us in society.

how does this guy manage to get so many upvotes

Does OpenAI even have an edge anymore? I keep hearing about models being competitive with GPT4 and nothing about their fabled "Q*" model so I'm starting to think they've run their course.

Possible fallacies in the post's argument

Slippery Slope: The argument may overstate the direct line from investment in AI to catastrophic outcomes like global financial depression or war over resources.

Appeal to Fear: Highlighting extreme potential risks (e.g., worldwide depression, war over resources) without acknowledging the possible mitigations or the improbability of worst-case scenarios could play on irrational fears.

False Dichotomy: The argument presents the situation as an either/or scenario—investing $7 trillion in AI versus addressing global needs like hunger and education—without considering that investment in technology can also lead to economic growth and solutions for these issues.

Straw Man: The argument might misrepresent Sam Altman's or AI proponents' positions, implying they disregard any potential negative outcomes or alternative uses for the funds, which may not be accurate.

Overgeneralization: Using specific instances of negative outcomes related to AI to argue against a massive investment in AI could ignore the diversity of AI applications and their potential benefits.

In Factorio it would be like modifying the whole system to focus on producing a specific science pack quickly. The UAE would be very kind indeed... Also probably a bluff.

Why is this flagged? You may not agree with Marcus, but this seems like a perfectly appropriate topic of discussion, and not obvious flamebait.

I for one cannot wait for Unity and then Colossus. Seems like Sam wants to skip Unity tbh.

We need to produce and use more energy, not less, not the same amount, more. At the most basic level, our survival depends on it to produce the things we need: food, water, heat, shelter, but beyond that the quality of life and the ability to thrive for every human being on the planet depends on using more energy. We should continue to strive for efficiency as this is equivalent to an increase in production but we should not starve ourselves of it.

Natural resources exist to be utilized. Once again, they provide the necessities and also the comforts that all deserve. If we limit our energy use our ability to extract natural resources will suffer. The resources we can access grow in proportion to the amount of energy we make available. No where is this relationship more direct than in the production of fresh water via desalinization and that alone should be sufficient incentive to utilize more energy. It takes resources and energy to develop more resources and produce more energy, you can't stop it or reverse it, you need to keep moving forward.

Fiat currency by definition is infinite being created by decree.

The rest of the points are increasingly wobbly so I'll leave you with this exchange from the comments on his page:

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Christopher Toth You say that GPT-3 training consumed 700,000 liters of water, as if that is a large amount. With five seconds of research, I found that the global average water footprint for beef is around 15,415 liters of water per kilogram of beef produced, so an average cow costs >4.6 million liters of water. For a single cow. I am disappointed in your inability to contextualize the numbers you use.

Gary Marcus dude the context is that it will be way more for gpt-4, gpt-5 etc, but maybe you were unable to read that far.

Christopher Toth Okay, so can you speculate as to how much more water? Three cows worth? Ten cows worth? A hundred cows worth of water to train GPT-5?

Turns out we kill 900,000 cows every day, so around four trillion liters of water are used for beef production for a single day.

Do you expect GPT-5 to use more than this?

Otherwise why ever would you mention it other than because it looks like a large number to the uninformed?

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How many cows indeed.

He’s known to be a perannual doomer of course he will ask us to say no. That’s how he gets attention

> The costs of extravagance

stopped reading after the "700000 liters of water" piece; just hand-wavy dramatic ignorance all around. yeah man we should absolutely be losing sleep of 1/6th of a cow's worth of water used for training the most advanced AI models on the planet.

Just like with (most) cryptocurrency, it disgusts me how much energy is wasted on such frivolous pursuits like the majority of Generative AI usage.

The world should be fully awake to the incoming (on-going?) climate disaster, but instead we have vast amounts of additional energy demand being created mostly only in pursuit of making rich people richer.

I don't see the reference to where Sam asked for 7T... When was that?