Do we actually know that OpenAI is in serious financial difficulty?

https://danluu.com/zitron/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49526069

Shower thought: I wonder if this whole "OpenAI is in serious financial difficulty" thing is a psyop so people will relax and avoid doing what's necessary to stop them.

> OpenAI is in serious financial difficulty

Is this based on fact or your speculation?

No shit. Just a few months ago the man was shaming companies who have engineers not spending 3x their annual salary on tokens.

Well it's certainly informed, as he has information on behind-the-screnes data we don't have about OpenAI

But certainly it is not unbiased

Keyword is autonomous [0]. Excel isn't.

And I would argue LLMs aren't either. A lot of economically valuable tasks involve manual labor. Can LLMs fix your plumbing?

It would help if OpenAI would define what 'most' means and give some examples.

Remember they said their LLMs are like a phd level brains? It's just hype and bullsh!ttery. Don't get me wrong, genAI is great and really useful, but it's not AGI imo. And there is no consensus what AGI means, so the industry should come up with an agreed definition first.

[0] To me autonomous means self directed, e.g. we humans look at things and then decide which problem or thing to work on. LLMs don't do that. We have to tell them. Yes they might work on a sub task autonomously, but still require human input later on (review), because we can't fully trust its output is correct.

You forgot the “autonomous” part of the definition.

Why would you assume that a pile of linear algebra would want anything at all?

I suppose we would just treat it the same way we currently treat farm animals.

> until there's a legal framework in place

I don't think the American oligarchy even bothers with keeping up appearances anymore, so, good luck with that! (Also, I fully agree with you, and it's especially infuriating as all this was clearly coming from miles away. Next up is privatizing the losses when the unsound financing of it all comes crashing down).

There is no evidence that "sentience" would be related to Intelligence - like calculators do not need it, like more sophisticated problem solvers do not need it.

AGI does not entail "personhood" at all.

Seems like the sort of thing we shouldn't be rushing to develop at all

Buddy, silicon valley is going to ram this down your throat so hard it might even come out your bottom, there is absolutely zero chance anyone is going to be slowing down developing anything if there is a chance it can make more money.

The average 17 year old can barely use a computer nowadays. Their phone? Sure. But an actual computer? Haha

Try to teach an urban 17 year old how to drive a car. It's gonna be hilarious.

>The vast majority of "generally intelligent" 17 year old humans on this planet can be taught to drive a car in 10-20 hours - can any AGI system do that?

"Where can you find another non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced so cheaply by completely unskilled labor?"

—Scott Crossfield, 1954 <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/02/01/computer/>

We have self-driving cars right now.

The average 17 year old is not formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem proofs either? The frontier is spiky, but it's AGI.

I swear at the rate the goal posts are moving we're going to have to start factoring in relativity if we want to know where the hell they actually stand.

NVDA is in bad shape financially? They're making it hand over fist right now.

What on earth are you talking about? Nvidia just had the single best quarter in the history of capitalism.

That's hilarious, considering that by Gary's previous definition of AGI (the one he conveniently forgot about and never brings up again), we already have AGI.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49207797

Well, if Gary Marcus says it's not AGI, chances are it is.

If I showed the technology we have today to Socrates, he would call it magic.

So what? You guys can keep moving the goalposts, until it reaches full human intelligence (and not in a small niche), it is not AGI.

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-cybercab-officially-launch...

Speak of that, I'm kinda surprised not one Full Self-Driving enabled Tesla has ever sneak out of their owner's locked garage to rob a bank or something.

They use it like a marketing term, but it is unnecessary.

I am not aware of a complete operational definition, but it would not be that difficult to build a good tentative one. I have mentioned many different requirements several times.

One non-abstract definition is in the "10 points" here: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/where-will-ai-be-at-the-en...

Edit: "definition" (the 10 points above) that is cannot be that of "AGI", really. AGI just needs to actually implement Intelligence and requires very many features that are not there today. The list from Marcus is about "Artificial Super General Intelligence" - not the same thing.

You can implement a replacement for Intellligence - that is AI;

you can implement Intelligence - that is AGI;

you can implement Intelligence of very high value output: that is "ASGI" (or similar).

AGI: Equity Go Up

We had to use AGI, because the old 'AI' term, which used to mean AGI, was taken over by narrower definitions, and marketing nuttery.

So now we'll need a new acronym.

Nvidia is not a competitor of openai, but a partner

"it already completely outperforms humans in many cases in many areas" and "is prone to draw obviously wrong conclusions from thin air." seem contradictory imo. If the performance is not reliable, how can you confidently state that? Also, "ASI" is "Artificial Super Intelligence". Let's not do an Altman and start redefining terms, please.

> It astounds me

Why. A figure with incentives in making a preposterous statement is reported making it, and the specific facts do not seem to mirror the statement. What is surprising in the reaction.

There are good definitions that justify saying that they had AI soon after the 50's. We would not confuse that with AGI.