Then why did Altman even bother to make this very public statement?
Smart people are allowed to make mistakes.
Honestly, that anyone thinks he has “ulterior motives” here is hilarious to me. Every day I think more and more that we can no longer think critically on the internet.
"don't bother competing with me. i have already won."
- On Tyranny: https://bookshop.org/p/books/on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-from-...
- The Road to Unfreedom: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-road-to-unfreedom-russia-eu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We ban accounts that keep posting like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35608465
This isn't about some dumb grudge.
Ok, cool.
It's not like an accusation of hypocrisy is automatically wrong, or anything.
It really confuses me why you think such a mundane political statement is a reddit thing. Especially if you think the rent free thing isn't reddity, in which case you're not drawing with a super broad brush in a way I could at least understand.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35606550.
I personally can see why someone could arrive at that position. As you’ve pointed out, taking Sam Altman at face value can involve suppositions about how much he values his credibility, how much stock OpenAI competitors put in his public statements, and the mindsets people in general have when reading what he writes.
I don't find this implausible, but it folds slightly to Ockham's razor when you consider that this is the exact type of statement that would be employed to obfuscate a major breakthrough.
It just makes me crook my eyebrow and look to more credible sources.
Secondly, all the competitors of OpenAI can plainly assess the truth or validity of Altman's statements. There are many companies working in tandem on things at the OpenAI scale of models, and they can independently assess the usefulness of continually growing models. They aren't going to take this statement at face value and change their strategy based on a single statement by OpenAI's CEO.
Thirdly, I think people aren't really reading what Altman actually said very closely. He doesn't say that larger models aren't useful at all, but that the next sea change in AI won't be models which are orders of magnitude bigger, but rather a different approach to existing problem sets. Which is an entirely reasonable prediction to make, even if it doesn't turn out to be true.
All in all, "his word is basically worthless" seems much to harsh an assessment here.