What OpenAI really wants is to "Change Everything"

[vtqhtr413]

Content source

https://www.wired.com/story/what-openai-really-wants/

THE AIR CRACKLES with an almost Beatlemaniac energy as the star and his entourage tumble into a waiting Mercedes van. They’ve just ducked out of one event and are headed to another, then another, where a frenzied mob awaits. As they careen through the streets of London—the short hop from Holborn to Bloomsbury—it’s as if they’re surfing one of civilization’s before-and-after moments. The history-making force personified inside this car has captured the attention of the world. Everyone wants a piece of it, from the students who’ve waited in line to the prime minister.

Inside the luxury van, wolfing down a salad, is the neatly coiffed 38-year-old entrepreneur Sam Altman, cofounder of OpenAI; a PR person; a security specialist; and me. Altman is unhappily sporting a blue suit with a tieless pink dress shirt as he whirlwinds through London as part of a monthlong global jaunt through 25 cities on six continents. As he gobbles his greens—no time for a sit-down lunch today—he reflects on his meeting the previous night with French president Emmanuel Macron. Pretty good guy! And very interested in artificial intelligence. As was the prime minister of Poland. And the prime minister of Spain.

Riding with Altman, I can almost hear the ringing, ambiguous chord that opens “A Hard Day’s Night”—introducing the future. Last November, when OpenAI let loose its monster hit, ChatGPT, it triggered a tech explosion not seen since the internet burst into our lives. Suddenly the Turing test was history, search engines were endangered species, and no college essay could ever be trusted. No job was safe. No scientific problem was immutable.

Altman didn’t do the research, train the neural net, or code the interface of ChatGPT and its more precocious sibling, GPT-4. But as CEO—and a dreamer/doer type who’s like a younger version of his cofounder Elon Musk, without the baggage—one news article after another has used his photo as the visual symbol of humanity’s new challenge. At least those that haven’t led with an eye-popping image generated by OpenAI’s visual AI product, Dall-E. He is the oracle of the moment, the figure that people want to consult first on how AI might usher in a golden age, or consign humans to irrelevance, or worse. Altman’s van whisks him to four appearances that sunny day in May. The first is

 

[SumTingWong]

To take our jobs

 

[CyberDevil]

To take our jobs

As a person who writes large educational and research projects, I can say that ChatGPT has improved my work, but it definitely won't take it over in the foreseeable future. Now I write programs in a formal language instead of writing constructs myself, I ask ChatGPT to write a block of code, describing the exact algorithm. However, it is still not capable of writing complex programs, projects, or even simple modules entirely. And I don't think it will be able to in the near future. It doesn't even pose as much of a threat to copywriters as people make it out to be, because ChatGPT's texts require significant adaptation. By default they are too "sterile," if you know what I mean. Overall, I simply adore ChatGPT as the best thing that has appeared in my life in recent years. But I agree that it can increase employee efficiency, so in places where multiple people were needed before, one person can now handle the job. Therefore, it can definitely lead to some job reductions.

 

[cartaphilus]

To take our jobs

If South Park has taught me anything it's that the faster we get back into the pile the quicker this will be solved. Into the pile everyone we are going back to the pile!

On a serious note I can't wait for some newly pinned on Lt to dump classified text onto openAI. The systems are air gapped but I wouldn't put it passed some youngling.

 

[vtqhtr413]

ChatGPT went down on Wednesday morning — and the timing of its outage couldn't have been more unfortunate. While OpenAI's world-beating chatbot suffered its second major outage in as many weeks, big tech executives were convening in Washington to plead their case to lawmakers over the future of AI. Among several notable figures in attendance was Sam Altman, CEO of the AI startup — who probably hoped to put on a better face amidst increased scrutiny over ChatGPT's falling user traffic for the past several months.

According to OpenAI's status page, the issue, described as "elevated error rates and increased latency," was being investigated starting at around 9am EST. Then, about an hour later, an update acknowledged an "outage for most conversations with ChatGPT." It would take nearly two hours since the troubleshooting began before the incident was declared "resolved" — a hefty length of time for any site to go down, nevermind with Congress looking to you as an industry leader.

In Washington, Altman was joined by other industry titans including tech hyphenate Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The meeting, known as the AI Insight Forum, was chiefly organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. "We all share the same incentives of getting this right," Altman said after the closed-door meeting, as quoted by The New York Times.

We'll have to wait and see how sincere he's being this time around. Altman has once before stressed the urgent need to regulate AI to lawmakers — only to turn around and throw a tantrum over the EU doing just that.

ChatGPT Goes Down Right as Sam Altman Defends It in Washington

This was yet another notable outage that ChatGPT has suffered in the past several weeks as user traffic falls.

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