Sam Altman: I was wrong, AI unlikely to lead to jobs apocalypse(www.reuters.com)
16 pointsby dryadin7 hours ago7 comments
  • sometimelurker4 hours ago
    I don't see any benefit to quoting sama. I'm trying to think of contexts where it would make sense, but you could just look at what OAI's doing for better reliable information.

    It's like quoting musk on his predictions of the future but worse sama's motivates seem more complex than musks. (we know musk wants his companies to seem as valuable as possible so exaggerates things, but sama says stuff "like AI will probably lead to the end of the world… but in the meantime, there'll be great companies." What on earth does a person who says this actually think?)

  • qsxfthnkp23226 hours ago
    Sam is like my last manager.

    The dude changes what he says based on who he’s talking to and then still always manages to do the wrong thing.

    • pixel_popping6 hours ago
      To be fair tho, if you were in the shoes of "How to make the company grow as much as possible, make money as much as possible", ethics aside (because your goal would be just to make as much money as possible and score investments repetitively), we'd probably behave in a similar way.
      • qsxfthnkp23223 hours ago
        True. Money is the root of all evil.
        • tanseydavid2 hours ago
          "The love of Money is the root of all evil."
  • saaaaaam5 hours ago
    'He said he had been using AI to respond to Slack and email messages but had reverted to answering some himself. "I had it reply to messages, saying 'this is Sam's AI' and it was an amazing example to me of we really do care about people," he said. "We really do care about our interactions with people and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon."'

    And yet Zuckerberg is creating an AI version of himself to interact with his employees... So one of these AI titans is presumably wrong.

  • jqpabc1237 hours ago
    I'm delighted to be wrong about this

    Sorry, he's lying --- again.

    Forget what he says and look at what he and others are doing --- the amount of money being spent on AI is truly epic.

    Just 4 companies (Alpabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon) say they plan to spend $725 billion on AI this year.

    If Sam is right now; if AI will not transform the job market, then this level of spending is an absolute waste and the "AI bubble" is actually way bigger than has been feared.

    https://www.statista.com/chart/35046/capital-expenditure-of-...

    • heisgone5 hours ago
      This is the danger of a winner-take-all economy. They have no other but spend insane amount just to remains on top, even if it doesn't make economic sense short and medium term. There is no evidence AI will impact the GDP positively. To make things worse, so far, the use of ressources (electricity, chips) make it inflationary.
      • burnt-resistor5 hours ago
        It all started with political corruption, regulatory and policy capture of government by ever-increasing wealth, and deregulation and tax cuts that shifted incentives away from creating a middle class to creating a tiny cadre of billionaires. Taxing the rich heavily is vital to sustaining civilization, because without it, people are going to be much poorer relatively than they otherwise could've been and so they'll leave or not have kids.
  • Jamesbeam2 hours ago
    I had a rather pleasant conversation with Mike Tyson on a flight a good while ago and asked him, “Mike, how did you deal with all this trash talk before you’re stepping into the ring?” And the man said, “You look at what they do with their hands, not at what they do with their mouths.”

    I will tell you the same. Look at what Altman actually does to make the life of the "replaced because of AI workforce" a good life, not at his mouth.

    Altman is a liar. It’s his profession. He hypes up the product in order to sell it to investors. Of course, he told everyone whose loyalty is to their shareholders and their own bonus payments that you will become exponentially more wealthy after replacing those pesky workers and their hard-fought rights with machines that never complain about working for too long or too hard and that he is selling such soulless Tinmen to the evil Fortune 500 witches at scale if they are interested.

    You can’t trust the man on a single thing he says because his actions don’t line up with the words that leave his mouth. They never did.

    Now he is lying again because he is unfortunately afraid of him and his family getting murdered, and AI can’t solve the problems he created by making the statement that AI will be able to do and replace most of the jobs employers pay humans for.

    And now people actually see this, their friends and family members getting laid off by email, by AI or because of AI and suddenly their lives get exponentially worse instead of better.

    Betting on AI is a losing bet either way. It’s a “dehumanising" technology, controlled by a handful of people at currently zero overall value for humanity itself, because the base of this technology is flawed by design. Hallucinations are not a bug, they are a baked in feature. It’s like building on sand.

    This whole AI displacement of human values and creation won’t go down without a fight, what we see are just the first ripples of human collective anger and unlike in the movies, my bet is on the humans.

    We will just add an "if it uses energy, we can shut it down" to the "if it bleeds, we can kill it".

    • bigbadfeline19 minutes ago
      > AI is a losing bet either way. It’s a “dehumanising" technology, controlled by a handful of people.

      That's not a law of nature, it's a consequence of the current system of laws, and only one of its problems among many others - this is important to understand because removing AI (an impossible task, but let's hallucinate), isn't going to fix the system.

      > at currently zero overall value for humanity itself,

      The value of AI is currently negative - the costs outweigh the benefits, but the reason for it is the rushed and economically reckless deployment. Again, that's not due to how AI has to be it's due to how we do it.

      > This whole AI displacement of human values and creation won’t go down without a fight,

      There are a lot of ways to "fight", the good ones don't involve getting physical or getting mad.

      > what we see are just the first ripples of human collective anger and unlike in the movies, my bet is on the humans.

      Anger is recipe for disasters. AI is here to stay, the cat is out of the bag, there's no way to put it back in, it's basic politics. Fixating on AI, instead of fixing our ways of using AI, is a major blunder.

      The fix isn't as simple as "in the movies", it's outside of the mainstream but that space is a minefield too - there's a lot to learn before good choices can be made.

  • kotaKat6 hours ago
    he's just saying what people want to hear. again.

    he's manipulating people. again.