Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose company has invested billions of dollars in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has had it with the constant hype surrounding AI. During an appearance on podcaster Dwarkesh Patel's show this week, Nadella offered a reality check, arguing that OpenAI's long-established goal of establishing "artificial general intelligence," (AGI) an ill-defined term that roughly denotes the point at which an AI can best humans on an intellectual level, is nonsense. "Us self-claiming some AGI
i think it’s a framing issue, and AI development is catching a lot of flak for the general failures of our current socio-economic hierarchy. also people having been shouting “super intelligence or bust” for decades now. i just keep watching it get better much more quickly than most people’s estimates, and understand the implications of it. i do appreciate discouraging idiot business people from shunting AI into everything that doesn’t need it, because buzzword or they can use it to exploit something. some likely just used it as an excuse to fire people, but again, that’s not actually the AI’s fault. that is this shitty system. i guess my issue is people keep framing this as “AI bad” instead of “corpos bad”
if the loom was never invented, we would still live in an oppressive society sliding towards fascism. people tend to miss the forest for the trees when looking at tech tools politically. also people are blind to the environment, which is often more important than the thing itself. and the loom is still useful.
compression and polysemy growing your dimensions of understanding in a high dimensional environment, which is also changing shape, comprehension growing with the erasure of your blindspots. collective intelligence (and how diversity helps cover more blindspots) predictive processing (and how we should embrace lack of confidence, but understand the strength of proper weighting for predictions, even when a single blindspot can shift the entire landscape, making no framework flawless or perfectly reliable.) and understanding how everything we know is just the best map of the territory we’ve figured out so far. if you want to know judge how subtle but in our face blindspots can be, look up how to test your literal blindspot, you just need 30 seconds a paper with two small dots to see how blind we are to our blindspots. etc.
more than fighting the new tools we can use, we need to claim them, and the rest of the world, away from those who ensure that all tools will only exist to exploit us.
am i shouting to the void? wasting the breath of my digits? will humanity ever learn to stop acting like dumb angry monkeys?
Seems unlikely.
As to your broader point about the tools themselves not being bad, the root problem remains capitalism, or “a few people have unaccountable power over many”