This is a weird framing. US life expectancy is lower than other developed countries because of cultural and political reasons, not technological ones. Is nobody supposed to invest in research until the US gets its political and cultural act sorted?
Look, I like hating on Sam Altman as much as the next guy, but political action is not the only route and not for everyone. Technological advance is a fair way to try to improve things.
Do not develop new cancer drugs too, because people in Africa are dying in masses from HIV and Malaria.
Do not invest in sustainable energy solutions because that would benefit only the rich who could afford the costly infrastructure.
Making change through politics is great, but not everyone can do it.
Don't understand all this hate lately. No CEO of any of these big companies cares about me, not even remotely.
OpenAI sped up the democratization of LLMs by atleast a few years, and although that's mostly thanks to their engineers, I'd like to thank Altman as well.
I'm a software engineer and so much of my work has gotten significantly easier because of OpenAI.
> Altman pulled from science fiction stories, he told the journalists he’s not trying to achieve immortality, but rather wants to “give people another 10 years of healthy, vigorous life.”
I get that CEOs don't actually care, but this one promised that the advances in AI was going to help us. Which he had me already fooled with the "Open" part of OpenAI. It honestly gave me hope that AI was going to make a positive difference for the moral good and not for greed, but shrugs it is what it is.
As a software engineer, OpenAI did not help me much. I tried it out but I just went back to using Google and StackOverflow.
I believe you miss the point. Sam Altman's talks can confuse you into believing he is caring, and the article warns you about not trusting to him. If you are such a cynical person that you don't need these warnings, because you assume as an axiom that no one is caring about you, so you are immune to anyone's claims that they care about you, then the article is not for you.
All right look, I don’t think I made the most useful comment.
I didn’t read the whole article, but this I know about Sam. He took his own money and started a UBI experiment to see what happens if you just give people free money.
Anybody who does that… unless it’s just propaganda, I don’t know how you can say anything bad about him.
People hate on these billionaires, and I get it. They are people like us with mistakes.
But I think we become too cynical at times. Yes we are all selfish. But so what. We can learn to work with Sam and be grateful for the good he does anyway… even if he doesn’t care about us! But he is advocating UBI with his own money so I don’t mind him getting rich.
> I don’t know how you can say anything bad about him.
still seems to me as the other extremity. I don't know about Sam Altman well enough to have my own opinion on him, but I employ this rule of thumb: if I don't understand how one can say anything bad about some person, then I'm definitely look at them through pink colored glasses, and it would be better for me to take them off. I can still believe that the person is a great person, but I need to have a full picture.
> We can learn to work with Sam and be grateful for the good he does anyway… even if he doesn’t care about us! But he is advocating UBI with his own money so I don’t mind him getting rich.
I cannot participate in this discussion because I have no opinion about Sam Altman. I see him as a just one more rich guy with plans to reformulate humanity.
I did fall for Musk several years ago, but then I started to read his twitter (while it still was twitter), I started to read people who knew Musk, I did read Liftoff by Eric Berger, and I became skeptical of Musk. Yeah, then I really was confused by the Musk's lack of skill of public speaking, and it took some time to learn that he never prepares to his speeches. I interpret this as a pathetic lack of self-criticism. Then Musk bought Twitter, he jumped into politics, while being extremely naive in politics and social science overall (with his pathetic lack of self-criticism he is probably naive about his naïveté), and... It is funny to compare the picture of Musk I had in my head before I started digging with the picture of Musk I have now.
How Sam Altman is different? From my perspective he looks pretty similar to my old picture of Musk, I know only good things of him, and there are some critics that have nothing substantial to say.
So I cannot participate in this discussion, because I have no opinion about Sam Altman.
Its not about being cynical, rather, not falling for the "assume good intentions" trap. The world has simply too many narcissistic people for that cosy "we are one tribe" mantra from the left to be safe. It isn't.
I'm sorry, it was not my intent. I believe, that people develop from naivety to cynicism and then to a balanced position when they use different heuristics to choose the starting point to analyze a situation: sometimes believing in good intentions sometimes presuming egoism.
I don't want to justify any of that, there are no sense in justifying, either people are cynics, or they are naive, or they moved beyond this simple dichotomy, and it is their choice, they choose what works the best for them.
I can't tell if this is satire, but Worldcoin is idiotic at best and a gift to fascism at worst. Altman should never have been taken seriously again after mentioning it out loud for the first time.
