How do you convince the world that your ideas and business might ultimately be worth $7 trillion dollars? Partly by getting some great results, part

The Sam Altman Playbook - by Gary Marcus - Marcus on AI

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2024-05-05 23:30:03

How do you convince the world that your ideas and business might ultimately be worth $7 trillion dollars? Partly by getting some great results, partly by speculating about unlimited potential, and partly by downplaying and ignoring inconvenient truths.

Sam Altman is on a tour to raise money and raise valuations, and he’s plying these moves day after day, in a city after city, at some of top universities in the world. Aside from a minor upgrade to GPT-4, he doesn’t have a newly released product, so he is selling vision and promise.

Let’s start with the promises. A few days ago at Stanford, Sam promised that AGI will be worth it, no matter how much it costs:

At the same talk at Stanford, Altman grandoisely asserted, with no qualification, that “we’re making AGI”, without touching on the possibility that current approaches might not get us there — despite (a) the enormous known problems with reliability, reasoning, planning and hallucinations and (b) the fact that the entire field, despite being massively well-capitalized, has struggled for over year (and in fact for decades) to solve any of these problems.

Whether GenAI proves to be AGI is very much still up for grabs, and on any reasonable account we have a long way to go. But you would never know that, listening to claims like Sam’s. (He also of course didn’t get into whether it would be OpenAI that would get to AGI, or someone else, or in what decade.)