Peter Thiel and all the Silicon Valley Christians
“I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.” - Dr. Hinton
“We believe that the future of humanity should be determined by humanity, and that it’s important to share information about progress with the public.” - Sam Altman, OpenAI blog
“Successfully transitioning to a world with superintelligence is perhaps the most important—and hopeful, and scary—project in human history. Success is far from guaranteed, and the stakes (boundless downside and boundless upside) will hopefully unite all of us.” -Sam Altman, OpenAI blog
“We still believe the benefits of society understanding what is happening are huge and that enabling such understanding is the best way to make sure that what gets built is what society collectively wants (obviously there’s a lot of nuance and conflict here).” - Sam Altman, OpenAI Blog
ITS COMING
Far out at sea, a tsunami is churning up a tower of heaving seawater. Swells have begun appearing along the shoreline, but few recognize the significance of the rising tide. The tsunami’s conjurers, a handful of billionaire investors and an elite group of powerful technology companies, are the only ones with a clear sense of what’s coming.
The tidal wave these companies are nurturing is AI. It is currently a toddler, but it is growing at an exponential pace. When it finally grows up and crashes against the nations of Earth, it will be inexorable, powerful, and inconceivably massive. It will be the largest cataclysm ever to hit humankind. It will sweep its way across our planet, blasting everything in its path, including our economy, the natural world, our way of life — even our very survival as a species.
I am referring to AI, artificial intelligence — the technological development to beat all technological developments, humanity’s most powerful creation, the invention which may well be our last.
The tsunami threatening to drown humanity has taken form with incredible speed. The first demo of Chat GPT, the jaw-dropping AI that proved computers could use language as well as any human being and compose text at lightning speed, was released less than two years ago, on November 30, 2022. OpenAI, the company behind it, was created in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and Sam Brockman with initial funding of $
Less than a decade later, OpenAI is worth $159 billion. This week the company received one of the largest venture capital infusions in US history, $6.6 billion. and a handful of others. It is now Elon has since left the company and Sam Altman now heads it up.
“Thinking machines that are being built in a 50-square-mile speck of dirt we call Silicon Valley by a few hundred men (and a handful of women) who write in a language only they and computers can speak. And whether we understand what it is they are doing or not, we are largely left to the whims of their creation. We don’t have a say in the ethics behind their invention. We don’t have a say over whether it should even exist in the first place. “We’re creating God,” one AI engineer working on large language models (LLMs) recently told me. “We’re creating conscious machines.”
The QUESTION CIRCULATING around Silicon Valley isn’t if such a scenario is worth it, even with a 1 PERCENT CHANCE OF ANNIHILATION, but rather, if it is really such a bad thing if we build a machine that CHANGES HUMAN LIFE AS WE KNOW IT.