Re:Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off wit...
by nater5000 on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @01:07PM
(#50369297)
>Had LLMs first been presented as a "better IntelliSense", where rather than auto-completing function names, your editor can now suggest implementations, very few people would have been upset.
You make it sound like this was a feasible option. This technology would exist regardless of how any one company decides to frame it. If OpenAI decided to go with a more conservative approach rather than just throwing ChatGPT out for the masses, then all it would take is for one person to realize they didn't take full advantage of this technology to just make their own ChatGPT.
>The issue would have been, for the AI bosses, that this takes time and doesn't create trillion dollar companies. It only creates companies that they'd actually have to run, long term, and that's boring.
You can criticize the current tech leaders all you want, but what you're describing is a fundamental dynamic of capitalism. You must choose the most profitable option, otherwise you have chosen the wrong option. If the current tech billionaires all vanished just as ChatGPT was released, they'd be quickly and easily replaced with roughly equivalent individuals who would effectively operate the same exact way. That's true because they're operating based on the mostly deterministic policy of profit maximization. They don't really get a say in it; they must follow the path towards maximizing expected future returns, otherwise they'll get canned by the investors who are seeking maximized expected future returns.
None of this relieves them of their personal ethical responsibilities either. I'm just pointing out that your comment might as well be describing an alternate reality where everyone lives peacefully with each other and nobody goes without what society can afford to offer them. It's equally as unrealistic.
You make it sound like this was a feasible option. This technology would exist regardless of how any one company decides to frame it. If OpenAI decided to go with a more conservative approach rather than just throwing ChatGPT out for the masses, then all it would take is for one person to realize they didn't take full advantage of this technology to just make their own ChatGPT.
>The issue would have been, for the AI bosses, that this takes time and doesn't create trillion dollar companies. It only creates companies that they'd actually have to run, long term, and that's boring.
You can criticize the current tech leaders all you want, but what you're describing is a fundamental dynamic of capitalism. You must choose the most profitable option, otherwise you have chosen the wrong option. If the current tech billionaires all vanished just as ChatGPT was released, they'd be quickly and easily replaced with roughly equivalent individuals who would effectively operate the same exact way. That's true because they're operating based on the mostly deterministic policy of profit maximization. They don't really get a say in it; they must follow the path towards maximizing expected future returns, otherwise they'll get canned by the investors who are seeking maximized expected future returns.
None of this relieves them of their personal ethical responsibilities either. I'm just pointing out that your comment might as well be describing an alternate reality where everyone lives peacefully with each other and nobody goes without what society can afford to offer them. It's equally as unrealistic.