OpenAI boss Sam Altman wants $7tn. For all our sakes, pray he doesn’t get it::The man behind ChatGPT is wooing the UAE to invest in energy-hungry AI. But if it turns out his tech can’t fix the world, he’s got his escape plan

  • @Mastengwe@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    All AI needs to be shut the fuck down until it can be properly regulated. Making up the rules as we go is just fucking stupid.

  • @SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
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    291 year ago

    If he wants $7tn, he better pay for all the content he stole to do it. Fuck these guys, wanting to become unfathomably rich off other people’s labour.

  • jan teli
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    1 year ago

    Bruh
    I’d be jumping on the ceiling with 700 AUD. The hell is he gonna do with 7000000000000 USD?

  • @fidodo@lemmy.world
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    151 year ago

    The US collects about 5 trillion in revenue a year. This fucker wants a budget on the scale of the biggest revenue of a country on earth. That’s more power than the president has. Fuck this guy. Nobody deserves that much trust.

  • @GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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    1131 year ago

    Wake me up when “ai” makes the amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere trend downward. Generative AI is just a way to burn electricity to take value produced by humans and then replace those same humans, all to line the pockets of the companies that can afford to churn all the data in the world.

    For the handful of genuinely cool and interesting things it can do, the number of extremely awful costs and externalities is like 1000x worse.

  • @LeroyJenkins@lemmy.world
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    521 year ago

    I’m glad perspectives has stopped treating Sam Altman like a tech God. dude is second coming of every FAANG CEO and Elon combined. there’s no way that guy isnt up to no good.

      • @raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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        21 year ago

        oh they absolutely were. just how that shitshow went down with the M$ offers and the decision reversal showed that it was power politics in play to kill reason

      • Echo Dot
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        61 year ago

        The problem is they went about it in a profoundly stupid way. The way they acted made it seem like he done something explicit and then they refused to actually elaborate. We still don’t know what really happened.

  • Wytch
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    2141 year ago

    Tech billionaires trying to solve the world’s problems is a bit like a cancer trying to save its host from organ failure

        • @QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’m not 100% sure what you mean by that, but I’m trying to say that, if Altman is a problem due to his wealth, then the bar to becoming a problem is substantially lower than a billion dollars.

    • @iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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      421 year ago

      they are not trying to solve anything really, they just think they are the next best thing earth has ever seen so they have the right to do everything

      • Orbituary
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        151 year ago

        I’m working with a douchebag billionaire directly right now on a complex project related to the ransomware encryption of a healthcare provider. Because he’s part of the private equity firm and a billionaire, he thinks he knows how to drive the resolution better than I and my team of techs do.

        All he does is drag me into more meetings and force me to get my techs to do shit that’s not conducive to restoring their systems.

        He’s a giant waste of self aggrandized trash.

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    31 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    But then his company, OpenAI, launched ChatGPT, and suddenly he was everywhere – touring the world, giving interviews to gushing journalists, granting audiences to awestruck politicians etc.

    When someone examines a photo and says, ‘Oh, he’s feeling this and this and this,’ all these subtle emotions, I look on with alien intrigue.” Altman’s great strengths, concluded Friend, “are clarity of thought and an intuitive grasp of complex systems.

    Well, as the Register helpfully points out, it’s enough cash “to gobble up Nvidia, TSMC, Broadcom, ASML, Samsung, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and every other chipmaker, designer, intellectual property holder, and equipment vendor of consequence in their entirety – and still have trillions left over”.

    They are ecstatic about AI because finally a technology has arrived that apparently could fix everything – economic growth, healthcare, productivity, education, even the climate crisis.

    Our future, apparently, depends on infinite amounts of what the industry now calls “compute”, and Altman is lauded because only he has had the courage to say out loud how much of it is needed in order to save civilisation.

    Sing it proudThe former US employment secretary, Robert Reich, has written a thoughtful Substack post titled “Why I preach to the choir”.


    The original article contains 847 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @RonSijm@programming.dev
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    21 year ago

    For all our sakes, pray he doesn’t get it

    It doesn’t really go into why not.

    If governments are going to be pouring money into something, I’d prefer it to be in the tech industry.

    Imagine a cold-war / Oppenheimer situation where all the governments are scared that America / Russia / UAE will reach AI supremacy before {{we}} do? Instead of dumping all the moneyz into Lockheed Martin or Raytheon for better pew pew machines - we dump it into better semiconductor machinery, hardware advancements, and other stuff we need for this AI craze.

    In the end we might not have a useful AI, but at least we’ve made progression in other things that are useful

      • @deadcream@sopuli.xyz
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        11 year ago

        There are many uses for AI that governments are interested in. Deepfakes, cheaper and more subtle ways to influence public opinions on the internet (by being able to instantly deploy thousands or millions of fully automated bots that are able to express their “opinions” in a way that is indistinguishable from humans), accurate and automated analysis of public discourse on the large scale, etc. And if you have an edge over other countries then you are able to influence their public opinions and detect (and possible counteract) when they try to influence you.

        AI is very good at analysing human-generated data, as well as generating data that looks human-created. Any entity that deals with (and desires to control) a large number of people (of which governments are prime examples) will find many uses for it.

        • @rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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          81 year ago

          by being able to instantly deploy thousands or millions of fully automated bots that are able to express their “opinions” in a way that is indistinguishable from humans

          “… all I see is blonde, brunette, redhead …”

          Deepfakes, cheaper and more subtle ways to influence public opinions on the internet

          I think these are already widely used.

          accurate and automated analysis of public discourse on the large scale, etc.

          It’s already there, the way the Web seems.

          AI

          It’s not an AI.

          • @deadcream@sopuli.xyz
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            21 year ago

            Yes it’s possible to do this now. However with further advancement of AI or whatever you call it this can be made even more effective and efficient. And any edge over the “enemy” is useful.

      • @RonSijm@programming.dev
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        11 year ago

        What benefits to “AI supremacy” are there?

        I wasn’t saying there was any, I was saying there are benefits to the race towards it.

        In the sense of - If you could pick any subject that world governments would be in a war about - “the first to the moon”, “the first nuclear” or “first hydrogen bomb”, or “the best tank” - or “the fastest stealth air-bomber”

        I think if you picked a “tech war” (AI in this case) - Practically a race of who could build the lowest nm fabs, fastest hardware, and best algorithms - at least you end up with innovations that are useful

    • Avid Amoeba
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      191 year ago

      Why not? Here’s one reason - because the planet is burning from climate change and we need a shit ton more resources for solving it. It’s unlikely that AI would help much with that. Of course the UAE isn’t too interested in the world moving away from fossil fuels.

      • @RonSijm@programming.dev
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        -41 year ago

        Ok, sure. So in a tech race, if energy is a bottleneck - and we’d be pouring $7tn into tech here - don’t you think some of the improvements would be to Power usage effectiveness (PUE) - or a better Compute per Power Ratio?

        • @thejml@lemm.ee
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          101 year ago

          Every time we make tech use 1/2 as much power per unit of work , something comes along to need 3 times as much work. AI, Blockchain, etc.

          • @GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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            61 year ago

            The phenomenon you describe is called Jevons paradox. Absent a law to safeguard the increased efficiency, the waste will follow quickly.

        • Avid Amoeba
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          1 year ago

          There may be PUE. However AI adds significant net new energy expenditure. Even if you get higher efficiency per compute unit, you’re still burning more coal and gas, or using renewable capacity that could be going towards replacing coal and gas. And then in this particular example 7T is a huge amount of capital that could move the needle on so many difficult climate problems like decarbonizing steel, concrete and ag. I think spending that on AI that will likely only accelerate us towards planetary ecosystem destruction is … not great to say it politely. 😂 Climate change is an existential problem for our species. The lack of AI advancement, even the lack of AGI is not. If there was any likely solution to climate change that could come out of AI, I might think differently. However we have all the computation methods needed to analyze and solve what we can about climate change. We just need much more resources in doing those things now.

          Speaking of compute optimization, someone who’s actually built chips just chimed in on the matter.