Correct headline and conclusion, wrong rationale. The article’s paywalled, but it links to his personal post on the matter, which I’ll quote later.
He said he was motivated to speak now because recent improvements in A.I. had far surpassed his expectations and because the industry had ignored technology milestones — like A.I.’s escaping the control of its creators or making recipes for bioweapons — that it once said would warrant more caution.
“OMG AI is getting too powerful!” Is the kind of bullshit the media loves to display because it keeps the AI bubble going. It’s totally not a trillion dollar grift, you guys!
If the world takes the right steps AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off.
[AI] can watch the same training video that is used to train human workers and learn from existing data.
The people who need the most time [to prepare for the upheaval] are the ones who have the least—the accounting worker who’s replaced by a bot or the $20-an-hour worker who loses their job to a $10-an-hour robot.
Many Americans I talk to don’t realize how fast dexterous robots are advancing because much of the advanced work is being done in other countries, primarily China.
I’m especially worried about young people, who will enter a workforce with fewer entry-level openings. They understand the challenge because they are the most active users of AI and see both the capabilities and the rate of improvement.
As expected, Bill isn’t worried about excessive energy and water usage of the datacenters, the uselessness of the GPUs once there’s no demand for the compute, the circular economy of nvidia selling its GPUs to companies it is financing directly, the actual cost of tokens and how any AI company can ever be profitable, kids literally destroying their capacity for planning and thought, people falling prey to the sycophant bullshit to the point they can lose grasp on reality.
No, for Bill, the problem is that AI will totally do everything it promises and more, but it’ll happen too fast. He’s selling AI, he’s inflating the AI fear because it also inflates the possibilities, bosses read “job loss” and immediately reach an orgasm. This is the kind of shit that Ed Zitron called out a number of times in his posts
Perhaps ironically, this is one of the few things Bill got right:
AI-enabled fraud, disinformation, deepfakes, and surveillance are the harms that many people will feel most keenly in their everyday lives.
Those are already very real and very present today, and thanks to the power of AI, reaching never before seen numbers of victims. Thanks, Bill! Thanks, Sam Altman, DArio Amodei, Jensen Huang, your efforts have certainly made the world better!
Correct headline and conclusion, wrong rationale. The article’s paywalled, but it links to his personal post on the matter, which I’ll quote later.
“OMG AI is getting too powerful!” Is the kind of bullshit the media loves to display because it keeps the AI bubble going. It’s totally not a trillion dollar grift, you guys!
As expected, Bill isn’t worried about excessive energy and water usage of the datacenters, the uselessness of the GPUs once there’s no demand for the compute, the circular economy of nvidia selling its GPUs to companies it is financing directly, the actual cost of tokens and how any AI company can ever be profitable, kids literally destroying their capacity for planning and thought, people falling prey to the sycophant bullshit to the point they can lose grasp on reality.
No, for Bill, the problem is that AI will totally do everything it promises and more, but it’ll happen too fast. He’s selling AI, he’s inflating the AI fear because it also inflates the possibilities, bosses read “job loss” and immediately reach an orgasm. This is the kind of shit that Ed Zitron called out a number of times in his posts
Perhaps ironically, this is one of the few things Bill got right:
Those are already very real and very present today, and thanks to the power of AI, reaching never before seen numbers of victims. Thanks, Bill! Thanks, Sam Altman, DArio Amodei, Jensen Huang, your efforts have certainly made the world better!
/s