Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth. This is, after all, the person who once tweeted 'i am a stochastic parrot and so are u', in response to Emily Bender's (entirely incisive and absolutely brilliant) critique of what his large language models are *actually doing*.
E: Wow, I did not like the reactionary great man theory spin this article took there. Don’t think replacing the Altmans with Yarvins would be a big solution there. (At least that is how the NRx people would read this article). Quite a lot of the ‘we need more well read renaissance men’ people turned into hardcore trump supporters (and racists, and sexists and…). (Note this edit is after I already got 45 upvotes).
I’m glad I’m not the only one who picked up on that turn. The implication that what we need is an actual Bismark instead of a wannabe like we keep getting makes sense (I too would prefer if the levers of power were wielded by someone halfway competent who listens to and cares about people around them) but there are also some pretty strong reasons why we went from Bismark and Lincoln to Merkel and Trump, and also some pretty strong reasons why the road there led through Hitler and Wilson.
Along with my comments elsewhere about how the dunce believes their area of hypothetical expertise to be some kind of arcane gift revealed to the worthy, I feel like I should clarify that not only do the current top of dolts not have it but that there is no secret wisdom beyond the ken of normal men. That is a lie told by the powerful to stop you fro tom questioning their position; it’s the “because I’m your Dad and I said so” for adults. Learning things is hard and hard means expensive, so people with wealth and power have more opportunities to study things, but that lack of opportunity is not the same as lacking the ability to understand things and to contribute to a truly democratic process.
reminds me of
(from this review/analysis of the devs series). A pattern annoying common among the LLM AI fans.
E: Wow, I did not like the reactionary great man theory spin this article took there. Don’t think replacing the Altmans with Yarvins would be a big solution there. (At least that is how the NRx people would read this article). Quite a lot of the ‘we need more well read renaissance men’ people turned into hardcore trump supporters (and racists, and sexists and…). (Note this edit is after I already got 45 upvotes).
I’m glad I’m not the only one who picked up on that turn. The implication that what we need is an actual Bismark instead of a wannabe like we keep getting makes sense (I too would prefer if the levers of power were wielded by someone halfway competent who listens to and cares about people around them) but there are also some pretty strong reasons why we went from Bismark and Lincoln to Merkel and Trump, and also some pretty strong reasons why the road there led through Hitler and Wilson.
Along with my comments elsewhere about how the dunce believes their area of hypothetical expertise to be some kind of arcane gift revealed to the worthy, I feel like I should clarify that not only do the current top of dolts not have it but that there is no secret wisdom beyond the ken of normal men. That is a lie told by the powerful to stop you fro tom questioning their position; it’s the “because I’m your Dad and I said so” for adults. Learning things is hard and hard means expensive, so people with wealth and power have more opportunities to study things, but that lack of opportunity is not the same as lacking the ability to understand things and to contribute to a truly democratic process.