Katie’s Reviews > Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI > Status Update

This book is going to do me in. Sam Altman - “It feels to me like we just stumbled upon a new fact of nature, or science, or whatever you want to call it. Which is like, we can create, you can - I don’t believe this literally, but it’s like a spiritual point. Intelligence is just this emergent property of matter. And that’s, like, a rule of physics or something.”

These people are exhausting. “Brockman was a whole other story. He had recently admitted to her that he had tried to fire her during the development of GPT 4. She was technically his manager, and used to write Brockman’s performance reviews, but it always created so much drama that she stopped.”

There are indeed many AI technologies… that can accelerate sustainability. But rarely are they ever generative AI technologies. What you need for climate are supervised learning models, or anomaly detection models, or statistical time series models… generative AI has a disproportionately large carbon footprint, with very little in terms of positive stuff for the environment.

In response to Ilya Sutskever’s assertion that large neural networks were (as of 2022) slightly conscious - “in the same way that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta”

“The Washington Post found that while 63% of US food stamp recipients are white, every single generated picture of a person using social services was not. Bloomberg similarly found that women showed up in only 3% of generated images for judges and 7% of images of doctors, despite making up 32% and 39% respectively of those professions in America.”

“What you’re saying is, OpenAI is making a huge gamble that you will successfully reach beneficial AGI to counteract global warming, before the act of doing so might exacerbate it?”
Greg Brockman: “I wouldn’t go too far down that rabbit hole… We are on a ramp of AG progres and I think society is actually getting benefit from it. The day we announced the deal, market cap went up by $10b.”