Sam Altman, AI’s biggest star, sure hopes someone figures out how not to destroy humanity

“Sorkin asked Altman: “Do you have any faith that the government, or somebody, is going to figure out how to avoid” the existential threats posed by “superintelligent” AI systems?

“I have faith that researchers will figure out to avoid that,” Altman replied. “I think there’s a set of technical problems that the smartest people in the world are going to work on. And, you know, I’m a little bit too optimistic by nature, but I assume that they’re going to figure that out.”

He goes on to suggest, without elaborating, that perhaps the AI itself will be so smart that it will just figure out how to rein itself in.

Ah, yes. And ExxonMobil will solve the climate crisis…

It’d be nice to hear Altman, or any of his fellow AI boosters, explain what exactly they mean when they say things like, “we’ll figure it out.”

Even AI researchers admit that they still don’t understand precisely how the technology actually works. AI systems are essentially black boxes that pose “an extinction-level threat to the human species,” according to [a report](https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/12/business/artificial-intelligence-ai-report-extinction/index.html) commissioned by the US State Department.”

From all the futuristic billionaires out there, Altman gives me the worst vibes of them all. Even worse than Elon. He seems to have no emotions whatsoever and he doesn’t seem to care in deeply if the humanity gets destroyed by AI.

I even have the feeling that he would enjoy creating ASI, just for his name to be written in the history books and becoming a pivotal name in history. Regardless of what happens to the rest of us. Really creepy stuff IMO…

Edit: grammar

This is like being in boots production business before others got in, and you express your concern about the boots ending up kicking people’s butts, so you really hope for the government to step in and make sure nobody else is allowed to enter this risky industry, as you’re one of the few if not the only person responsible enough to be trusted with boots production.

Its all fear mongering in an effort to force the government to build a moat to protect you from healthy competition.

Seeing the _really_ open text and image generators take off, and overtake the closed ones, makes me very happy.

This guy is a serial manipulator and society should make sure to protect itself from him and others like him.

Sam Altman strikes me as a guy who is just making stuff without ever seriously considering its impact on society. Same shit with Zuckerberg when he basically invented social media as we know it and changed the world forever.

These people are morally empty and way too book smart for anyone’s good.

“You’ve gotta help us doc! We’re tried nothin, and we’re all out of ideas!” – Ned Flanders parents

Sam Altman loves pretending his product is dangerous because it obscures the fact that his company had never actually delivered on any of the promises they’ve made over the last several years.  

There are no automated agents, no perfect translators, no AI developers, no AGI replacing knowledge workers left and right.

It’s just a bloated chatbot that can help mediocre students cheat, create more annoying/persistent spam, make software development categorically worse, and trick gullible people into giving him more money.

The problem is that even the people who are apparently not as slimy as Sam Altman, like Dario Amodei (Anthropic’s CEO), think the same way. He wrote a very long blog post about all the miraculous things that AI will be capable to do in the short and mid term, but when it came to the bad things that AI could potentially do or the job losses that would inevitably be caused by such an advanced AI, all he had to say about that was basically the tech equivalent of “thoughts and prayers”.