An Open Letter to Sam Altman
Your post on X this morning raises many questions
Sam Altman took to X this morning to defend his $7 trillion fundraising ask against the likes of me, writing “you can grind to help secure our collective future or you can write substacks about why we are going fail”.
I have questions, lot of questions:
Dear Sam,
Why do you think that LLMs are going to “secure our collective future”? (Are you working on any technology other than LLMs?)
As Casey Newton recently argued “Generative AI clearly has many positive, creative uses... But looking back over the past year, it's clear that any benefits we have seen today have come at a high cost.”
How do we know that $7 trillion invested into LLMs and their infrastructure would not simply exacerbate those costs, grinding down content creators, women, and the environment, undermining democracy, destroying jobs, etc?
$7T might serve OpenAI well, and raise your public profile, but would it serve humanity? How certain of that bet can we be? What's the rush? (Also, what has the $100 billion grind on driverless cars brought society? Might people have rushed in too soon, technology-wise?)
The risk of premature commitment looms large.
– Gary Marcus
Much agreed. Premature commitment is what locks a species down the wrong evolutionary path. “Our collective future” should be decided and build by “our collective”, not any single man with a heroism complex. We’ve got a few too many of those in history…
What was once the AI dream of creating a near-utopia for all mankind is rapidly turning into a low-hanging-fruit-driven gold rush to control the means of production (human-level AGI), as ~200 territory-based tribes (countries) and ~300 million owner/employee-based tribes (profit-motivated companies) all compete against each other in their own short-term self-interest, seemingly oblivious to any consequent long-term harm to the human species as a whole.