Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. Be afraid

LLMs have benefits, but it's a real negative that you can no longer be sure if you are communicating with a human on the internet or reading something which was written by a human.

It seems like public keys and web of trust are the future in terms of knowing that there is a human on the other end of the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party

But, I don't know what happens when a cloud of LLMs get their own public keys signed by some humans.

LLMs are already a commodity product. They’re going to be a feature of cloud providers not a standalone business.

The only real technological edge that OpenAI has right now (at least that I know of) is Sora. There are already some very good open source LLMs and the SoTA for image generation has always been Stable Diffusion. I don't think that Sora's some miraculous piece of technology that nobody else can replicate, so I doubt that OpenAI will be the absolute best in AI for long.

Oh cool, did he make Sonnet 3.5?

OpenAI has first-mover advantage, but hardly a monopoly on the technology or the people behind AI. In fact, I think we’ve already hit peak Altman, and his star will be diminishing from here on.

These titles never do it for me. I like the concept of sketching out how much power sam has, but he's not going to be "powerful" and you shouldn't be afraid either. No point in being afraid of something you have no control over

> Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. Be afraid

He shall take care to not have the same fate like the other Sam.

Be afraid! Reading our article might save you.

When a newspaper commands you to "be afraid", you know they're full of bullshit. Real reporting presents you with facts and analysis and lets you decide how to feel about it.

Gary Marcus is having his moment in the sun, but the title tells all. “Be afraid” is just stripped down click-bait.

“Isn’t entirely candid” is the smoking gun of this article, which is frankly an absurd standard in today’s political environment, anti-tech media, and just the general hunger for an axe to grind 24/7 online. While I agree with Marcus’ critique on the vibe of the Senate hearing, it is a very strange pillar for proving Sam is “the man you should most fear on earth.”

Arguing that AGI hype/fears were caused by propaganda from Sam/OpenAI is recasting recent history. The entire media & cultural zeitgeist went nuts for a couple quarters when chatGPT went viral. Those fears have been around for a long time. A leap in perceived progress made them the Luddite topic of the day.

It doesn’t seem that hard to read the tea leaves here. If OpenAI could release GPT 5 like they released 3.5, they would. OpenAI’s greatest threat is that a genuine escalation in the publicly known capabilities of AI could exacerbate political push back and kill it. Involving government partners, in or adjacent, slows things down. Big surprise.

We can make regulation without claiming to be AI experts, ex: we can make deep fakes illegal where harm aligns with existing law, which many jurisdictions have already done. When AI regulation gets insane & dangerous is when people think they can invent levers to pull (like policing training data) that will supposedly ensure compliance. We all know what safety really means - a filter layer on interactions with the LLM. There is no fundamental solution to AI safety or regulation that OpenAI is abandoning here.

Marcus ends with his real starting line - he just doesn’t believe in GenAI. Fair enough. But building a massive ad hominem attack with a hand wavy “and some how Sam is still there” ignores the reality that OpenAI’s board now has some of the most trusted & trust-worthy people in tech on it. Sam’s level of accountability is higher, not lower.

The timing of this article is after the significant work OpenAI has done to re-affirm commitment to AI safety. Marcus here, and everywhere, deliberately ignores the mounting evidence that AI’s value is growing.

Which makes this entire campaign feel timed. Marcus’ is calling that the sky is falling right now. why so urgent? The investments have been made, the public markets are off the exuberant irrationalism, the major players are plowing generational levels of engineering into the quest.

Isn’t this what we should be proud of? The willingness to drive innovation forward without knowing for sure how the road will go?

Expecting giant technological leaps to deliver on massive value in a few quarters is for Wall Street. It has no place in science, innovation, or policy.

Aaah the usual weekly dose of fearmongering against OpenAI and Sam :3 /s

These reporters know there are CEO’s that sell things like water, food, and energy to huge portions of the population right? Open AI is a blip.