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Comment by staticshock | Hacker News Reader

Feels to me like idealism crossing into realism. OpenAI could be the next Google, or the next Facebook, or the next… I don't know, Netflix?

All those companies (and many other large tech companies) have discovered the same arbitrage that older media companies discovered decades ago, which is that we, on the average, are much more willing to pay with attention than with money, even where money would have been the better choice.

Advertising continues to be one of the most powerful business models ever invented, and I don't think that's changing any time soon.

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Altman is an idealist?

I read this as: I know ads are likely if not inevitable but I can’t say that while I’m trying to gain users and inspire trust but I’ll start to float even in this non-denial the justification for the thing I’m ultimately going to do.

Altman wanting to look idealistic and inspiring.

See it as a brand image advertising campaign of the time.

The ideal is "It would be ideal if everyone on the planet voluntarily paid me $20/month"

Most billionaires are idealists when it comes to this one particular ideal.

The opposite of an idealist is a materialist. The opposite of an ideologue is a pragmatist.

In this sense I think Altman is an idealist, he concerns himself primarily with ideas, not so much with material reality.

I think these binary labels are too simple to describe him.

So realistically no agi

By all accounts, we're 2 years away from AGI, every year.

Its like fussion power, except there we half the funding every year instead of doubling it

Fusion power is proven to be possible.

AGI is not.

There is (eventually) no more profit to be made on energy when energy becomes virtually limitless.

There is (still) a lot of profit to be made on half-baked semi-AGI prospects.

It's not like the machines will ever be free, just the fuel. And it's not like the price of energy will go to zero, just be cheaper. To drive down the price of energy you first need to be taking a large slice of a trillion dollar pie.

If fuel or any other form of energy becomes virtually limitless and free, any form of matter will eventually also be kinda limitless and free. Could take longer than humanity will ever last though.

In the 'short' and current term there is still lots of money to be made in fuel indeed, but advancements in fossil free energy could make a real shift.

AGI is 100% possible, even if the current breed of transformer-based models are not it, and even if silicon is not it. There's nothing special about human brains that we won't eventually be able to match (and then exceed) in vitro. We are living proof that intelligence can be built out of matter, and that human-scale intelligence can run on 20 watts. It's not a matter of if, but when.

There is not even an agreed upon definition for intelligence or for AGI.

That's ok, that's when you change the definition of AGI and claim success!

I think your characterisation of this as discovery is a little naive. What you are describing is a part of enshittification and it happens too often to be an accident. Revenue maximisation is always the end goal. Also it's not that the user is willing to pay with attention. There is no alternative. In fact it's the very opposite, more than once now a product has basically been pitched as "pay us to avoid ads" and then once it dominated the market they introduce ads. That's users trying to choose to pay with money over attention and ultimately being unable to do so.

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