I remember reading these direct quotes from SA in 2016 from the New Yorker and thinking, yeah, this guy is just miserable:
> “Well, I like racing cars. I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival. My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources. I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
> "If you believe that all human lives are equally valuable, and you also believe that 99.5 per cent of lives will take place in the future, we should spend all our time thinking about the future. But I do care much more about my family and friends.”
> "The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go to zero... The cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food. People pay a lot for a great education now, but you can become expert level on most things by looking at your phone. So, if an American family of four now requires seventy thousand dollars to be happy, which is the number you most often hear, then in ten to twenty years it could be an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x. Excluding the cost of housing, thirty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars could be all a family needs to enjoy a really good life.”
> "...we’re going to have unlimited wealth and a huge amount of job displacement, so basic income really makes sense. Plus, the stipend will free up that one person in a million who can create the next Apple.”
This doesn't seem like someone who's miserable at all to me. They seem like someone who has a wide variety of hobbies and is and is intellectually interested in futurism
Yeah, I have an half baked thought about billionaires like this that they truly want the best for this world even if they have to seek it by immoral means.
Funny you bring this up because I always think back to a story, in the New York Times if I recall correctly but perhaps the Journal or SFC, talking about how him and his friends got upset when asked to leave a high end french restaurant due to him wearing sneakers. They pulled a "Do you know who he is?" well before he was even tied to OAI. Always left a bad taste in my mouth and stuck with me a decade on.
Tangentially, without being too specific, I have someone incredibly close to me that has recently had interactions with the upper echelons of OAI's exec team and... the stories are not kind. I imagine when your company is being run by a morally bankrupt tech bro you are short on integrity.
After 10+ years of hearing anecdotes about sama I am starting to wonder if maybe the word on the street is true and he really is just as selfish and blind as people make him out to be. At this point, the optics surrounding OAI vs. Anthropic are just plain bad. They should have gotten rid of him before when they had the chance.
I don't follow public figures or news anywhere near enough to have a meaningful opinion on Sam Altman, but I find one interesting snippet here, which is that there is a straightforward prediction in there. He did say ten to twenty years and it's only been ten, but still, I can't think of a single good or service that families need or commonly want that is an order of magnitude cheaper. It makes me wonder if he's become any less confident of this or any other prediction.
I don't want to be holier than him or thou or anyone else, but it is the kind of thing I've found of myself quite a bit. I made a lot of confident predictions about the future 15-25 years ago on the Internet, and even though I'm not a public figure and nobody will ever hold me to task for being wrong, I can see it for myself. The predictions are still there. They weren't universally wrong, but I didn't do much better than chance. It's a big reason I no longer bother to make predictions. I have no idea what the future will bring and I'm comfortable with the uncertainty. It doesn't feel like very many people on the Internet are.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
I admire how calm you stayed before the most random complainer ever. He might not be a random guy, but he complains about very random things no one would expect.
@Xymist Interesting. You're proving my point perfectly.
When a human shows contempt for another human seeking help, that's unfortunate.
When AI learns to replicate that contempt at $200/month, that's the problem I'm highlighting.
Thank you for demonstrating why we need AI that elevates human interaction, not one that amplifies our worst impulses.
Yep, we have a big distric heating system here in Brno, Czech Republic - in operation since 1930, with 110 000 housholds & most big public and commercial buildings connected. It started as coal fired, but the modern system combines natural gas cogeneration (gas turbine -> steam turbine -> district heat) and waste incineration (that also includes a steam turbine to make some electricity). In the summer the waste incinerator provides all the necessary heat for the system alone. :)
Eventually the city would like to make the system stop using natural gas, so there is a wood waste burning plant comming online at the end of this year & hot water pipeline is being built from the nearby Dukovany power plant. This two together should make the system natural gas indepedent in the future. :)
While it started as steam based system & powered most of then very important textile industry, steam also has issues. Old pipes loose quite a bit of heat on the way (there used to be evergreen meadows even in winter in places above the old steam pipes), the pipes flex quite a bit when heating up/cooling, so they need to be placed on rollers in underground channels with U shaped sections to account for the pipe stretching/contracting. The steam also condenses & you need to get rid of that condensate on the way. And while unlikely, it is possible for a steam pipe to burst/explode, which is very dangerous for any bystanders.
For these reasons & because the textile industry being much less important, the Brno district heating system is being converted to hot water distribution, which is quite a bit more effcient apparently. Reportedly, with modern insulated pipes, the heat loss on the way is negligeable, the pipes can be placed directly in the ground & they form a closed loop - no more mucking with rollers, condensante or explosions.
So in a few years, the often seen steam ventilation pipes (from the various steam related texhnical spaces) around the city will be a thing of the past. :)
I live in Minnesota and both Minneapolis and St Paul have district heating and cooling systems in their downtown core areas. Cordia Energy operates the Mpls network and Evergreen Energy operates the St Paul network. I’m unsure what the fuel source is for the Mpls network but the St Paul network uses wood chips/wood waste and natural gas.
I don't understand how you took the time to test that, but didn't take the time to RTFA:
> We are getting reports of YouTube rolling out an experiment to some accounts where normal videos only have DRM formats available on the tv (TVHTML5) Innertube client.
> “Well, I like racing cars. I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival. My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources. I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
> "If you believe that all human lives are equally valuable, and you also believe that 99.5 per cent of lives will take place in the future, we should spend all our time thinking about the future. But I do care much more about my family and friends.”
> "The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go to zero... The cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food. People pay a lot for a great education now, but you can become expert level on most things by looking at your phone. So, if an American family of four now requires seventy thousand dollars to be happy, which is the number you most often hear, then in ten to twenty years it could be an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x. Excluding the cost of housing, thirty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars could be all a family needs to enjoy a really good life.”
> "...we’re going to have unlimited wealth and a huge amount of job displacement, so basic income really makes sense. Plus, the stipend will free up that one person in a million who can create the next Apple.”
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