Obligatory reminder that billionaires are not our friends. But also, donating to AI research in 2018 is quite a different matter than if he had done so in recent years. Most people in tech were somewhere between neutral and enthusiastic towards machine learning back then and few foresaw the monster it would become. Doubt he’s as enthusiastic nowadays, considering what it did to Valve’s hardware ambitions.
Wellllllll, I dunno about this take seeing as he’s still very enthusiastic about it as of less than a year ago, with some very… hype-style statements about it.
If you can mentally separate the technology from the capitalist orgy around trying to shoehorn LLMs into every possible thing, he’s not wrong.
The technology has promise, but the reality of what it can be useful for is complete overshadowed by the hype frenzy declaring the end of all knowledge workers and creatives.
LLMs are significantly better at translation than anything we’ve been able to design, for instance. But that’s not flashy, it doesn’t generate seed funding or lure investors so it’s largely not what people think of when they hear “AI”.
Nah, sorry, if Gabe looked at the LLM mess of the last 5+ years and is still pumping it as ‘ermagerd this is technology that rivals the importance of the internet, or computers themselves’ he is cooked on marketing hype.
It’s still crap.
Its most promising commercial application in paid models (coding), is still writing code slower than professional coders, when actually measured in studies.
The only goals it’s hit is makinh a few jerks more wealthy, move that wealth inequality needle more towards the billionaires, and set us up for the next global financial crisis that we’ll all be bailing them out on and suffering global decades long recessions through.
I reckon 2027 it’ll hit, that’s looking like when the money guys will finally be completely out of wiggle room and there will be no more cash for the cash fire.
Obligatory reminder that billionaires are not our friends.
Why does this even come up?
Because a lot of people equate “some are less harmful than others” with “I fucking love this guy and think he’s a harmless saint!”
Altman took the money and then OpenAI abandoned the non-profit structure to become a for-profit entity (2 years ago)
The writing was on the wall for years. I remember memes about Altman in machine learning forums/chatrooms circa 2020, and especially 2021.
Nothing’s changed. Anyone in the space who actually looked at what he was doing, knew. Yet the bulk of the public (and investors) lapped the Tech Bro stuff up.
Aaron Swartz said Altman was a sociopath years before AI was a gleam in anyone’s eye.
The technologies with the worst potential outcomes will always be pioneered by people with no ethical or moral hangups getting in the way.
Which unfortunately are the same techs that will be elevated by our present economic structure, precisely because those traits are what enable them to make (or grift) a shitload of money.
see:
Leaded Fuel and CFCs - the same fuckin guy!? goddamn hope there is a hell
I’ll save you a seat.
gee thanks, what the fuck did I do to you?
No I meant so we can beat up the leaded gas guy
I love how everyone is so desperate to make Gabe to be a terrible person.
It’s crazy for people to take a stance against him considering how much he’s done to protect the hobby from less reputable corps.
God imagine the world we’d live in if he didn’t build modern child gambling with his own two hands
Are you mistaking him for the inventor of Pokémon cards, Richard Garfield, or the inventor of baseball cards, John Baseball?
Said ‘modern’ for a reason, but I guess telling someone they’re wrong is worth ignoring what they say
Pokemon cards aren’t modern? They came out in the US in 1999 and aren’t considered obsolete or old AFAIK.
God your self-righteous
Things to say when you want to make being a piece of shit into a good thing
Said the loser fighting a losing moralistic battle over nothing.
Two weeks later and you’re still crashing out about how I said it’s bad to prey on children and be a parasite
How do you reconcile having such a pathetic submissive personality and wanting to act big and tough on a forum like this?
“Ew morals”
- A piece of shit by definition
He may be a middle man rent seeking on the entire gaming industry, but you can’t hate him because of all those great game series he never finished
I can’t hate him since he broke Windows monopoly in gaming.
And I can’t hate Elon Musk because he promoted electric cars.
I love it when completely unaccountable industry monopolists make decisions for all of society when I agree with them. They’re so cool!
I hate billionaires existing but comparing Gabe to Elon seems pretty disingenuous. Elon has and continues to normalize some pretty horrific things.
So compare them on the axis I explicitly compared them on. I wasn’t obtuse with my point.
Oh no he runs a buisness, grow up.
A ‘business’ that doesn’t produce the thing that makes it profit.
You sound like my landlord
You mean a storefront that enables tons of indie devs to be noticed and actually compete with AAA publishers?
Are you asking because you’re confused what we’re talking about? We’re talking about Steam.
Tell that to every business that sells products they don’t make in house. Go on, I’ll wait.
At that time it was still kind of a research project than a “it’s going to take over everything” hype and FUD machine.
His opinions on AI today seem more enthusiastic than I would be, but well clear of the delusional level of AI-boosters.
2018, the before times.
Insane how true this is.
No wonder 1999 feels like a million years ago.
I was there Gandalf. 1000 years ago. When neo deleated me.
We acting like people in the art community weren’t hyped up over AI until they started generating images. Before chatgpt, it was all about automating coding/it and other jobs that arent considered art. Back then it was all about how everyone could pursue their passions. The only people not excited were all the transportation employees and factory workers that had been told by the general public how excited they were to replace them
As a social scientist, pre Chat GPT NLP was like opening a whole new world of possibilities. We could finally at scale analyze one of the richest sources of behavioural data in an empirical statistically driven manner.
Now, even as I do research with NLP to continue these goals, I can’t bring myself to every defend these tools. If they disappeared tomorrow, we’d lose a tool but we’d prevent so much undue suffering
I mean, I probably would have invested in AI prior to seeing LLMs in action, too, hoping I was funding the cool kind of AI, not this lame shit.
Was this article commissioned by Tim Sweeney?
I forget but wasn’t anthropic mostly made up of former OpenAI engineers after Altman went off the deep end?
Not that it makes them any better, but I’m pretty sure GPT-3 was the nexus point in the current mess we have now, which means they hopped off right after it was internally finished and made their own company.
2018 was a full 2 years before that point, and back then AI was still primarily stuff like OpenCV, Pytorch projects, etc. that were things you could legitimately run on one or two workstation GPUs or even a cheap tensor core addon if you didn’t want to run on CPU.
GPT-2 was released 14 February 2019 so they were actually cool gaming AI opensource research foundation in 2018.
Well aim FPS bro.
