TechTakes

Honestly yeah.

9/10 articles are about as well written as an average comment, and less to the point. We also know just how bad they tend to be on factually, we know they don't hold themselves to any kind of respectable standard, there's practically nothing to gain from reading their "work". We're going to come out of it with barely a whiff of reality whether we read it or not. You have to properly dive into it to understand what the potential trajectories really are here.

Personally I already know that scale makes a massive difference, I don't believe in souls so I find it reasonable to think of consciousness as emergent from simpler parts at scale, but maybe this approach won't get there and something more neuromorphic is necessary.

I also already know with some certainty that they're gonna keep scaling up for now, it's not interesting at all that "In roughly 3 years GPT will be smarter and faster and more consistent probably."

Besides, even if we achieve consciousness we'll reject the possibility and abuse it like it isn't for at least a decade where the only tangible difference will be better AI work and a machine capable of subdued suffering and hate and maybe murder eventually. But that's no more terrifying than people who believe in going to heaven for righteous holy wars being in possession of nuclear weapons so I don't really care if the current trajectory AI theoretically has all this potential. It doesn't make life on Earth feel less safe or less stable. ChatGPT-4o is very good at figuring out what word I'm trying to think of and that's kind of sweet. I don't like AI trash littering Google images, though. Pretty unfortunate, that.

Either way, most articles are utterly pointless.

They're generally written for search engine optimization, not people.

Almost none of the articles I've ever read even use links/sources properly as far as I was taught it, they just pointlessly link to themselves ad nauseam. Mention something Elon Musk said or did? Turn the name into a hyperlink to another article where they wrote something else about the man. Professional.

"Articles" are not a respectable medium.

They're long internet posts written by someone with a boss with an advertising partner, and few of the writers have any qualifications worth mentioning. Usually they can't call themselves knowledgeable in the subject. Often they can't even call themselves interested.

Altman is certainly aware of what it takes to be a Jobs-like marketing personality (and probably holds Hubbard-like totalism as a not-so-secret ambition), he's just not, uh, very good at it. He's put the most effort into the strictly lower-case, faux-casual persona on Twitter to seem "approachable" in a social media context, and that doesn't help him at all when trying to actually appear serious.

I also don't doubt that he's beginning to succumb to the yes-man filter bubble that traps so many public personalities. That's surely made worse by the likelihood that any underlings he might have reviewing this crap are drinking the AI koolaid and "punching everything up!" with a few rounds of ChatGPT.