Unfortunately there is essentially a loose federation of quasi-religious "cults" that have emerged around the topic of AI. For an otherwise mostly secular group of people, the lure of reinventing Abrahamic religion in their own image was inescapable. I feel like most sensible people took the off ramp by the time Roko's Basilisk popped up, but as we saw with the Zizians that's not always the case.
So there's this thread of taking two assumptions at face value I see a lot here and elsewhere:
1. What we call "AI" now is actually some kind of AI, and the rest is just scaling up.
2. It's inevitable that AGI would conform to sci-fi tropes.
Meanwhile we've been watching BILLIONS spent on data centers, power for data centers, water for data centers... all of that going in one end, and LLM's coming out the other.
As long as the future AI overlord requires enough power and water to run a city, and the best it can manage amounts to a fun show, I'll keep my alarmism in check.
But Altman, man he really know his audience, and he's going to sell sell sell, to an audience that's been primed on fiction and religion to believe in him like some kind of blank-faced prophet.
So there's this thread of taking two assumptions at face value I see a lot here and elsewhere:
1. What we call "AI" now is actually some kind of AI, and the rest is just scaling up.
2. It's inevitable that AGI would conform to sci-fi tropes.
Meanwhile we've been watching BILLIONS spent on data centers, power for data centers, water for data centers... all of that going in one end, and LLM's coming out the other.
As long as the future AI overlord requires enough power and water to run a city, and the best it can manage amounts to a fun show, I'll keep my alarmism in check.
But Altman, man he really know his audience, and he's going to sell sell sell, to an audience that's been primed on fiction and religion to believe in him like some kind of blank-faced prophet.