OpenAI's Altman Says the Use of AI is 'Non-Negotiable' (cnbc.com) 88
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries, comparing rejecting it to refusing electricity a century ago and predicting it will unleash an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship. "The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country, is too high to ignore," he said. His comments were made during a fireside chat with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. CNBC reports: Altman thinks the public won't be talking as much about AI a decade from now -- it'll be expected everywhere. "A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful," he said.
Altman referenced the adoption of electricity multiple times in his comments and drew a line between that and AI. "I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we're not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we're not going to have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago," he said.
Altman called cybersecurity one of the biggest challenges to navigate in the age of AI and one that leaders shouldn't sidestep. "I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently," he said. Altman said that falling short in cyber defense and other areas "could set this technology back a great deal." You can watch a recording of the chat on YouTube.
Altman referenced the adoption of electricity multiple times in his comments and drew a line between that and AI. "I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we're not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we're not going to have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago," he said.
Altman called cybersecurity one of the biggest challenges to navigate in the age of AI and one that leaders shouldn't sidestep. "I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently," he said. Altman said that falling short in cyber defense and other areas "could set this technology back a great deal." You can watch a recording of the chat on YouTube.
Totally unbiased statement (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Totally unbiased statement (Score:4, Insightful)
For real, why is this news, it's a press release. It's like asking the owner of Kunkleman Chevrolet [youtube.com] if we should all buy new cars and which brand is the best.
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It's like that "interview" that shill CEO of Flock gave.
That is leading to Flock being banned by a growing number of states, counties and municipalitles.
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We can only hope, but I predict it ain't gonna happen. Sadly.
Currently reading How AI Thinks by Nigel Toon. Some interesting bits and it's going quickly, but not seeing anything much to recommend in it. The intersection of "experts on AI" and "people who write well" remains small, though it may become more difficult to tell if they use AI to help write? I think it's only the deepest experts who can really explain things clearly, whereas AI is mostly focused on sounding deep with hallucinatory seasonings a
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If there's one thing about the new crop of CEO's it's that they all really think they are cooler and more insightful then they actually are.
He may be wealthy beyond my wildest dreams but the best way to convince someone Peter Thiel shouldn't ever be near the levers of state power is to show them an interview with Peter Thiel.
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New crop? CEOs haven't always thought they were cooler/more insifghtful?
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True but I my thinking is the older ones weren't putting themselves out there so much, I think they also knew it better to stay behind the scenes and let your professionals do the talking. Particularly before the 1980s when the CEO wasn't simply the head executive but became a magical person with fairy powers.
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It's news because of what was said.
And, here I sit with only my cellphone being capable of doing voice commands (and, that's a Galaxy S9). Everything else is _not_ AI-capable or connected.
I'm fine with calling ma (if I don't just go over there) to find out how to cook something or sew something. I can start a fire in a pile of leaves and build a shelter in winter. I can fix your ICE engine car usually (especially carbureted stuff).
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"Rupert Murdoch says watching Fox News is 'Non-Negotiable'"
Do we really need a Slashdot story on every single fucking mention of AI anywhere in the universe?? Nowadays it's less 'news for nerds' and more recycling the same thin talking points so zealots on both sides can just argue as much as possible and inevitably end up insulting rsilvergun along with a history of all their posts.
Re: Totally unbiased statement (Score:2)
This is what happens when crypto bros take something over. Enshittification is fundamentally inevitable.
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Do not use that word, it's just more grift.
Re: Totally unbiased statement (Score:2)
What, crypto? Good point, I should call it cryptocurrency to differentiate
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Indeed. LLMs could have been a smaller, but respectable improvement of some things. Instead they will cause a world economic crisis, waste mountains of precious resources, drive developers into burnout, help cyber criminals, etc. Ad nauseam. And all because some rich assholes must get even richer.
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Do we really need a Slashdot story on every single fucking mention of AI anywhere in the universe??
Well, it is a welcome change from the constant crypto scam stories [slashdot.org] /. has been pushing, but it is par for the course of /. always pushing whatever scam they've invested in....
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Re: Totally unbiased statement (Score:3)
I hope you're wrong because otherwise we're all fucked. Yes, you too, and only a very short time after the rest of us
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That person is not smart enough to understand this. Morons doing it to themselves is unfortunately a recurring topic with the human race.
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Hey, rsilvergun
Good to see you on a different username.
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Maybe 2 years ago... The other models are catching up. Claude, Grok, Gemini, Deepseek, Perplexity, Meta.ai etc,
ChatGPT could die tomorrow and would anyone care, honestly.
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There's nothing "snake oil" about AI, but equally it is not the second coming of Christ. There is however no doubt that AI is a tool that can be used in useful ways in a variety of situations, and I suspect in this case Altman is right saying every country will adopt its use for something.
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Definitely a biased statement. But that doesn't make AI "snake oil."
AI is capable of doing real work. And each month the tools get better, making that work higher quality work.
After writing code professionally for 38 years in 28 languages, I no longer want to write my own code. AI does it so much more quickly, and does a good job too. Yes, it makes mistakes, all the time. But even with the mistakes, it saves me a *ton* of time, letting me focus on building what I want to build, instead of quirky syntax of w
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"Use my product or else." - Oligarch
Same Altman: Snake Oil Salesman (Score:2)
A snake oil salesman informs us all that ignoring his snake oil is the wrong move. Shocking. I mean, I'm really surprised by this turn of events.
In all sincerity, the vision of AI as something people appreciate *COULD* be achieved, if they spent as much time trying to make it something people would enjoy using, rather than having it shoved at us from every direction while it's half-baked and spewing confident nonsense at us more often than not.
Re:Same Altman: Snake Oil Salesman (Score:5, Insightful)
There will always be improvements, but AI is fundamentally more sociopathic than the worst human on the planet. That will not change because sociopaths control it.
Will AI be "worth the price" when deaths are part of the price? It's coming.
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You remember that old "AI-targeted bombs, missiles and drones" thing?
That's us, it is.
These people think technology can make them gods, and they don't plan to keep us around.
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You remember that old "AI-targeted bombs, missiles and drones" thing?
That's us, it is.
These people think technology can make them gods, and they don't plan to keep us around.
Ultimately, I think that's the thing they don't realize we see. They spent a decade telling C-suite folks that they can run their businesses without employees if they just invest heavily in AI, and now, when people are starting to push back, hard in some cases, the salesfolks, the evangelicals, or as I used to call them, the AI prophets, like Altman, are ramping up the prophecies to hysteric levels. Embrace us or face apocalypse doesn't exactly hit solidly when the message so far has also been that there's
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Death is something we expect based on the utility something provides. We don't accept death from a baby's toy laced with asbestos because there's very very limited utility, it's easily substituted with anything else.
On the flip side we very much do accept an insanely high fatality rate for the use of motor vehicles, as the utility they provide in terms of mobility is fundamental to our society.
I suspect we'll tolerate a significant amount of death in the name of AI, god knows we accept it for social media a
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"Snake oil" is a term for products that don't work. AI does in fact _work_. Sure, it's still immature as a product, and it has issues, as any new technology does. But it's not _fake_.
"Non-negotiable" (Score:3, Interesting)
Man knows he's cooked after pissing away billions on a hepped-up ELIZA that nobody but him and a handful of morons at hn want.
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ETAOIN SHRDLU
For countries? (Score:3)
I'm personal not interested in AI which is a subscription. For me it needs to be local and running on my own hardware, which is not what Altman and co wants.
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How does a country even use AI? People use AI
It's almost like countries have governments which are made up of people. Well mostly. I'm not sure there's any real people in the White House, but most other countries have their governments staffed by people.
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To expand on my point it is very much negotiable what AI is used where. At the government level if that government is
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Yes but "Sam Altman said AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries", not "Sam Altman said AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for use in countries".
English is not math. Every reasonable person reading those two sentences interpret them the same way in the context of the discussion.
The choice to make use of AI is down to individuals, not countries.
Countries when used in this context are the implied policy of individuals. E.g. America is a piece of shit on the world stage. That doesn't mean the mountains and lakes have changed, everyone reading this sentence understands that we're talking about policies of the governing people.
To expand on my point it is very much negotiable what AI is used where.
So your point is one no one was making? No one said they had to use USA's AI. This was a comme
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Did you know that countries create...software? Crazy, right? Yeah and most of it is outdated and clunky. But they do create software, lots of it. That's just one thing governments use AI to do.
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I guess I was kind of pissed at Altman's statement "AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries" as if he was implying the people in the country didn't have a say in the matter.
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A country is not a chunk of land, it's a political entity made up of people. Countries *claim* chunks of land, but the land is not the essence of the country. Boundaries change, moving that land from one country to another. The land didn't change, just the political boundaries.
It's part of the future (Score:4, Insightful)
But you're probably not in this future.
Just focusing on brute forcing with bigger and bigger and bigger datacenters will just lead china to invest 1/100 of the budget in people actually researching and winning the "AI race" not by having the best model, but the best use for it.
1/10 of the money being used to make more data centers or to strip books for some extra scrap of data, invested in people coming up with ideas would help a lot more.
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The best models will look nothing like the models of today, how long that takes is hard to predict. AI companies are in a race to grab as much wealth as they can, not to finish developing AIs that are useful and responsible. "Responsibility" as applied to AI is responsibility to investors.
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Investing in "people coming up with ideas". What does that mean, exactly? And do you mean "people coming up with non-AI ideas"? Why can't AI be part of the ideas people come up with?
Decisions... decisions... (Score:1)
Hey Sam (Score:2)
Not everything needs electricity either.
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Not everything needs electricity either.
Good thing too as, unfortunately, data centers will probably need all the electricity - and water.
In future news: Classes in "How to be Amish" become very popular.
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To be Amish still requires land, there won't be any of that either. Billionaires own everything, your job is to die and there's an AI for that.
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Or at least a booth: Quick and painless or slow and horrible? [youtube.com] :-)
Know what else is 'non-negotiable'? (Score:2, Insightful)
a #bulletThroughTheHead of Sam Altman.
What a fucking arrogant prick.
AI is mandatory, vaccines are optional (Score:5, Insightful)
We're screwed.
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It's good that vaccines are optional because they're not always made by those who have your best interests in mind. They see you as less than human, and are just as psychopathic as Sam Altman, and worse is that this goes into your bloodstream and is not a screen you can turn off and walk away from. If only more people knew how bad things really are.
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Pretty accurate conveyance of what most slashdotters are these days. It's not like it was back in the day...
Re: AI is mandatory, vaccines are optional (Score:2)
Lolol you think smart people talk to you
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The reason that vaccines are real science is that outcomes can be reliably predicted. For prescription medicine the cost effectiveness and possible negative results are closely monitored and very well understood. That's
He is correct. (Score:3)
But he is also a cunt, so let's hope it's not his AI, but an open system, owned and controlled by everyone.
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Co-ops work well for utilities, what greater utilities for a co-op than AI?
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Unlikely. The first wave of smarter people is already moving away from it again.
So was the metaverse (Score:2)
The metaverse was touted as inevitable too...
And where is the metaverse now?
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Nobody considered the metaverse inevitable. That's false equivalency.
The truth is that AI is inseparable from business, at this point. It's just like "cloud": an irritating buzzword with a lot of trumped up buzz, but a meaningful and appreciated advancement which isn't going away.
The neophytes just haven't caught up, yet.
Cybersecurity (Score:3)
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So you're acknowledging that cowboys who slap things into a production system are the problem?
Got it.
I take it you haven't used AI at all recently. It's absolutely amazing how many people haven't even got a clue how AI works and give it a false equivalency of a stackoverflow copypasta bot. Sorry, no. It hasn't been that bad for at least a year.
Sure you had to say people a century ago... (Score:2)
... that rejecting electricity was non negotiable. Sure they rejected it like is happening with generative AI on big collectives. Right?
if it is not negotiable... (Score:2)
...then the people should own it. Non-negotiable services are utilities, Sam Altman needs to be cut out of utilities, with prejudice.
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/thread
He forgot to mention (Score:2)
using AI is better than sex!
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Helpful? (Score:3)
"where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful"
Helpful? For whom?
"I see you are running low on ice cream. I've ordered 6 more gallons in your next grocery delivery."
"I see you enjoy looking at porn. I've subscribed you to 6 new porn newsletters."
"I see you read articles about issue X. Since candidate agrees with you are issue X, I've submitted your ballot in favor of that candidate."
In what universe are any of these sorts of actions 'helpful'?
Things that never happened for $100 Alex (Score:2)
Some municipalities were slower than others to roll it out, for example many had plumbed gas lines already and the early days of electricity were seen as a luxury when they already invested in lighting, so rather they adopted it eventually but not right away. However it was also at the time proven with a clearly useful application (light) replacing an existing application (gas-powered lanterns) where people already had
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Your conjecture is actually incorrect. The Ottoman Empire rejected electricity early on, out of fear of fire hazards (not an unreasonable fear), and also because government officials had contracts with gas companies that would be worth less if electricity took off. https://journals.sagepub.com/d... [sagepub.com] We do see some of both of those kinds of things happening today with AI.
We're waiting (Score:2)
OK, so show us these really smart AI things. When I have to describe in 3 different ways to the AI bot that the Amazon order is wrong, and something a human would have picked up instantly....that does not sound 'really smart' to me.
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Yes, but . . . (Score:2)
I think so, too, but not at all in the way Altman thinks it's going to happen.
We've already figured out that you can make smaller simpler models that get like 80% of the benefit for like just a few percent of the resources. Like I've got an AI running on my old 2011 computer, no graphics card, that is mostly as good as the Bing AI or whatever, just kinda slow.
Point is, there is a good chance a lot of people will be using AI for the things it is good for (mostly I use it for programming questions and simi
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So he's saying they're screwed? (Score:2)
Because that's what it sounds like he's saying.
His death (Score:2)
Scammer asshole says stupid crap (Score:2)
To promote his scam. Seriously.
In actual reality, LLM use can give you some smaller advantages but also comes with huge risks and high costs. That is not what a tech looks like that you really have to use.
It's been 4 years! Where's the entrepreneurship?? (Score:3)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries, comparing rejecting it to refusing electricity a century ago and predicting it will unleash an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship.
You've been out for 4 years! Where is all the entrepreneurship? Where are all the startups leveraging AI to take over existing non-AI industries? There were several major startups revolutionizing non-computing segments of the business world 4 years after the introduction of commercial internet (1999)...as well as the iPhone (2011). All I hear about are pick and shovel vendors making money off FOMO. Every business who invests in AI is unsure if it's saving them money.
To date, I can say AI has accomplished the following:
1. Given AI-is-my-religion zealots a cool toy to play with and dream about a future whenever this shit starts actually working
2. Made money for a half dozen players in a circular economy ponzi scheme
3. Been used to AI-wash layoffs without any evidence and suppress wages, masking big tech's challenges with rising interest rates.
4. Made the cost of devices we want and actually use skyrocket.
AI has made the future pretty bleak, personally. It doesn't work and is causing a RAMpocalypse...and if it ever actually does, it will cause a white-collar-jobpocalypse and massive social unrest. However, don't take my word for it.
After 4 years, Steve Jobs didn't have to go on press tours to convince people of the utility of an iPhone. No one had to sell the internet as a useful thing in 1999. The fact that Sam Altman has to sell his ware so hard shows even he's not confident about his product. We've all used ChatGPT Sam...We know what it is. We weren't impressed enough to pay for your massive investment to build it.
If you're not 'saved', you're the problem (Score:2)
If everybody has AI calculating answers for them, has AI as a slave labourer, what exactly will they be buying from other people? That's before we get into the reality that corporations will invest millions into creating an AI/slave work-force long before the 'entrepreneurs' own an AI, and stop paying the real humans. What will all those unemployed humans be buying?
Notice he's not talking about the unemployed humans, or the criminals using AI to pretend they're your bank, your tax collector, your health
Maybe sam altman needs to go fuck himself (Score:2)