Absolutely. Look at how Sam Altman speaks.

If you've taken a couple of lectures about AI, you've probably been taught not to anthropomorphize your own algorithms, especially given how the masses think of AI (in terms of Skynet, Cortana, "Her", Ex Machina, etc). It encourages people to mistake the capabilities of the models and ascribe to them all of the traits of AI they've seen in TV and movies.

Sam has ignored that advice, and exploited the hype that can be generated by doing so. He even tried to mimic the product in "Her", down to the voice [0]. The old board said his "outright lying" made it impossible to trust him [1]. That behavior raises eyebrows, even if he's got a legitimate product.

[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-4o-chatgpt-artificial...

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166713/openai-helen-ton...

>The problem is, they are hugely incentivised to hype to raise funding.

Hype is extremely normal. Everyone with a business gets the chance to hype for the purpose of funding. That alone isn't going to get several of the biggest tech giants in the world to pour billions.

Satya just said, "he has his 80 billion ready". Is Microsoft an "AI foundation company" ? Is Google ? Is Meta ?

The point is the old saying - "Put your money where your mouth is". People can say all sorts of things but what they choose to spend their money on says a whole lot.

And I'm not saying this means the investment is guaranteed to be worth it.

The newest US president announced this within the 48 hours of assuming office. Hype alone couldn't set such a big wheel in motion.

NFTs couldn't pass the Turing test, something I didn't expect to witness in my lifetime.

The two are qualitatively different.

It's identical energy. A significant number of people are attaching their hopes and dreams to a piece of technology while deluding themselves about the technical limitations of that technology. It's all rooted in greed. Relatively few are in it to push humanity forward, most are just trying to "get theirs."

Well Crypto had nowhere near the uptake [0] and investment (even leaving this announcement aside, several of the biggest tech giants are pouring billions into this).

At any rate, I'm not saying this means that all this investment is guaranteed to pay off.

[0] With 300 million weekly active users/1 billion messages per day and #8 in visits worldwide the last few months just 2 years after release, ChatGPT is the software product with the fastest adoption ever.

Yeah people don't rush to say "don't waste money on this dead end" but think about it for a moment.

A 500B dollar investment doesn't just fall into one's lap. It's not your run of the mill funding round. No, this is something you very actively work towards that your funders must be really damn convinced is worth the gamble. No one sane is going to look at what they genuinely believe to be a dead end and try to garner up Manhattan Project scales of investment. Careers have been nuked for far less.

I'm not a cryptographer, nor am I good with math (actually I suck badly; consider yourself warned...), but am I curious about how threatened password hashes should feel if the 'AI juggernauts' suddenly fancy themselves playing on the red team, so I quickly did some (likely poor) back-of-the-napkin calculations.

'Well known' password notwithstanding, let's use the following as a password:

correct-horse-battery-staple

This password is 28 characters long, and whilst it could be stronger with uppercase letters, numbers, and special characters, it still shirtfronts a respectable ~1,397,958,111 decillion (1.39 × 10^42) combinations for an unsuspecting AI-turned-hashcat cluster to crack. Let's say this password was protected by SHA2-256 (assuming no cryptographic weaknesses exist (I haven't checked, purely for academic purposes)), and that at least 50% of hashes would need to be tested before 'success' flourishes (lets try to make things a bit exciting...).

I looked up a random benchmark for hashcat, and found an average of 20 gigahashs/second (GH/s) for a single RTX 4090.

If we throw 100 RTX 4090s at this hashed password, assuming a uniform 20 GH/s (combined firepower of 2,000 GH/s) and absolutely perfect running conditions, it would take at least eleven-nonillion-fifty octillion (1.105 x 10^31) years to crack. Earth will be long gone by the time that rolls around.

Turning up the heat (perhaps literally) by throwing 1,000,000 RTX 4090s at this hashed password, assuming the same conditions, doesn't help much (in terms of Earth's lifespan): two-octillion-two-hundred-ten septillion (2.21 x 10^27) years.

Using some recommended password specifications from NIST - 15 characters comprised of upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and special characters - lets try:

dXIl5p*Vn6Gt#BH

Despite the higher complexity, this password only just eeks out a paltry ~ 41 sextillion (4.11 × 10^22) possible combinations. Throwing 100 RTX 4090s at this password would, rather worryingly, only take around three hundred twenty-six billion seven hundred thirteen million two hundred seventeen thousand (326,713,217,000) years to have a 50% chance of success. My calculator didn't even turn my answer into a scientific number!

More alarming still, is when 1,000,000 RTX 4090s get sic'ed on the shorter hashed password: around thirty-two million six hundred seventy-one thousand (32,671,000) years to knock down half of this hashed password's strength.

I read a report that suggested Microsoft aimed to have 1.8 million GPUs by the end of 2024. We'll probably be safe for at least the next six months or so. All bets are off after that.

All I dream about is the tital wave of cheap high-performance GPUs flooding the market when the AI bubble bursts, so I can finally run Farcry at 25 frames per second for less than a grand.

You have hit on something that really bothers me about recent AGI discourse. It’s common to claim that “all” researchers agree that AGI is imminent, and yet when you dive into these claims “all” is a subset of researchers that excludes everyone in academia, people like Yann, and others.

So the statement becomes tautological “all researchers who believe that AGI is imminent believe that AGI is imminent”.

And of course, OpenAI and the other labs don’t perform actual science any longer (if science requires some sort of public sharing of information), so they win every disagreement by claiming that if you could only see what they have behind closed doors, you’d become a true believer.

I'm inclined to agree with Yann about true AGI, but he works at Meta and they seem to think current LLM's are sufficiently useful to be dumping preposterous amounts of money at them as well.

It may be a distinction thats not worth making if the current approach is good enough to completely transform society and make infinite money

It's obviously not taken to mean literally everybody.

Whatever LeCun says and really even he has said "AGI is possible in 5 to 10 years" as recently as 2 months ago (so if that's the 'skeptic' opinion, you can only imagine what a lot of people are thinking), Meta has and is pouring a whole lot of money into LLM development. "Put your money where your mouth is" as they say. People can say all sorts of things but what they choose to focus their money on tells a whole lot.

Who says they will stick to autoregressive LLMs?

My take on this is that, despite an ever-increasingly connected world, you still need an assistant like this to remain available at all times your device is. If I can’t rely on it when my signal is weak, or the network/service is down/saturated, its way of working itself into people’s core routines is minimal. So either the model runs locally, in which case I’d argue OpenAI have no moat, or they uncover some secret sauce they’re able to keep contained to their research labs and data centres that’s simply that much better than the rest, in perpetuity, and is so good people are willing to undergo the massive switching costs and tolerate the situations in which the service they’ve come to be so dependent on isn’t available to them. Let’s also not discount the fact that Apple are one of the largest manufacturers globally of smartphones, and that getting up to speed in the myriad industries required to compete with them, even when contracting out much of that work, is hard.

I still fail to see who desire that, how it benefits humanity, or why we need to invest 500b to get to this

Sorry, you live in a different world, google glasses were aggressively lame, the ray bans only slightly less so.

But pulling out your phone to talk to it like a friend...

Very insightful take on agents interacting with agents thanks for sharing.

Re H.E.R phone - I see people already trying to build this type of product, one example: https://www.aphoneafriend.com

How would this be a Ponzi scheme? Who are the leaf nodes ending up holding the bag?