When that major drama unfolded with him getting booted then re-hired. It was super fucking obvious that it was all about the money, the data, and the salesmanship
He is nothing but a fucking tech-bro. Part Theranos, part Musk, part SBF, part (whatever that pharma asshat was), and all fucking douchebag.
AI is fucking snake oil and an excuse to scrape every bit of data like it's collecting every skin cell dropping off of you.
I'd agree the first part but to say all Ai is snake oil is just untrue and out of touch.
There are a lot of companies that throw "Ai" on literally anything and I can see how that is snake oil.
But real innovative Ai, everything to protein folding to robotics is here to stay, good or bad. It's already too valuable for governments to ignore. And Ai is improving at a rate that I think most are underestimating (faster than Moore's law).
I think part of the difficulty with these discussions is that people mean all sorts of different things by "AI". Much of the current usage is that AI = LLMs, which changes the debate quite a lot
Martin Shkreli is the scumbag's name you're looking for.
From wikipedia: He was convicted of financial crimes for which he was sentenced to seven years in federal prison, being released on parole after roughly six and a half years in 2022, and was fined over 70 million dollars
Really? The guy behind the company called "Open" AI that has contributed the least to the open source AI communities, while constantly making grand claims and telling us we're not ready to see what he's got. We're supposed to stop taking that guys word?
Wow, thanks journalists, what would we do without you.
Which group of people uncritically magnified his voice and others like it for years? Tech journalism builds the legacies of people like Musk, Bankman-Fried and Altman.
People talk a lot about the genericisation of brand names, but the branding of generic terms like this really annoys me.
I'll use the example I first noticed. A few years ago, the Conservative government was under criticism for the minimum wage being well under a living wage. In response, they brought in the National Living Wage, which was an increase to the minimum wage, but still under the actual living wage. However, because of the branding, it makes criticising it for not meeting the actual living wage more difficult, as you have to explain the difference between the two, and as the saying goes, "if you're explaining, you're losing".
not only does he burn through cash, he burns through resources making life worse now for everybody: AI rivals crypto in resource waisting while not contributing at all to any improvements. I fail to see "brighter future" for us through AI as it is energy-intensive, unsustainable endeavor for which we are woefully unprepared both materially (energy efficiency, semiconductor manufacturing/recycling, etc) and psychologically (ethics etc.). Yeah, grand on paper, terrible in reality
What is really annoying is that there are a lot of really good data modeling applications, they are just in research areas. Generative AI is absolutely a waste of resources, but a ton of money and energy is spent on that instead of on the applications that are actually bearing fruit.
Generative AI is definitely useful - it's mighty putty. It fills in gaps and sticks things together wonderfully. It let's you easily do things near impossible before
AI is worse than crypto. Most crypto projects use proof of stake which is way more resource efficient than mining. Also the mining that does happen usually happens where there is excess generation instead of azure datacenters
some crypto learned to be efficient, others did not. We still do have crypto-mining botnets. Crypto remains to be useless to humanity and very profitable for few. Same with AI. Same with stock market. Instead of producing something of value we keep on burning through resources while selected few enjoy bonfire others have to fight to stay alive...
the techbros that think that with sufficiently advanced AI we could solve climate change are so stupid. like, we might not have a perfect solution, but we have ideas on how to start to make things better (less car-centric cities, less meat and animal products, more investment in public transport and solar), and it gets absolutely ignored. why would it be different when an AI gives the solution? unless they want the "eat fat-free food and you will be thin" solution to climate change, in which we change absolutely nothing of our current situation but it is magically ecological
There was a (fiction) book I was called "all the birds in the sky". I really liked it. Highly recommend.
One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that's like "the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project". And I'm just screaming at the book "use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey".
There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they're difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.
... but, I mean, come OOON... he looks like a reanimated Madame Tussaud's sculpture. Like someone said, "Give me a Wish.com Mark Zuckerberg... but not so vivacious this time." And he's the CEO of an AI-related company.
I don't trust any of these types. If you haven't noticed by now morally decent people are never in charge of a any large organization. The type of personality suited to claw their way to the top usually lack any real moral compass that doesn't advance their pursuit of power.
Ironically, your link is broken on Voyager because it doesn’t treat anything before the https as a link. It just leads straight to the normal pay walled site.
You need to embed the link for it to actually work. And even then, it may not work on this comment because it’ll try to route to my home instance due to having a Lemmy.world link for my image.
but for now, his approach is textbook Silicon Valley mythmaking
The difference is that in this case it is not hype—it is reality. It’s not a myth, it is happening right now. We are chugging inevitably down the track to the most dramatic discovery in human history. And Altman’s views on solving the climate crisis, disease, nuclear fusion… they are all within reach. If anything we need to increase our speed to get us there ASAP.
I would like to be able to listen to someone who is at the top of their game since it's most likely them who know the most. If they are the CEO of a company about the thing, that would make sense. I've seen plenty of enthusiasts start their own company because they had a lot of knowledge on the subject. Who do i look for the best information about the tech of tomorrow if not the people who are making it?
Everyone in open source AI has been calling him a snake ever since llama1 came out. If you want a more authoritative source, look to the CEO of huggingface, oldschool AI researchers and such.
Yann LeCun would probably be a better source. He does actual research (unlike Altman), and I've never seen him over-hype or fear monger (unlike Altman).