Marcus
davekarpfSome guy in The Atlantic is making fun of Sam Altman today.
(It’s me. The guy making fun of Sam Altman in The Atlantic is me.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/
Patrick Johanneson 🚀 🇨🇦@davekarpf Someone had to do it.
Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸@davekarpf I have yet to be convinced that AI is anything but a scam, a grift, a massive invasion of privacy, and a smokescreen for hoovering up billions of dollars from foolish investors. It is not providing value, to the companies or the public, and it is a massive environmental and economic liability through the gigantic infrastructure demands it is creating.
zaicurity@chris @davekarpf you forgot to mention the massive corporate theft of intellectual property.
@zaicurity @chris true. I’ve written about that before. Wanted to anchor this piece to his latest bullshit manifesto, so I left that aside in this one.
@davekarpf @chris sorry, I meant to reply to Chris’ comment and mastodon tagged you as well.
@davekarpf @zaicurity it’s a great piece. Thanks for writing it!
altruios phasma@chris @davekarpf stable diffusion provides me the value of quickly testing out ideas to play around with. The LLM stuff I haven’t had a need for, but the image gen: higher potential usefulness.
It also provided me the impetus to learn to actually draw.✍️ on paper. I contribute that 100% to me playing around with the stable diffusion.
So yeah… there’s that. That’s not everyone’s take though, so I get you.
Why do things have to be useful and not just fun: capitalism! Fuck!
Doug BostromHelpful regrounding synopsis.
"In a few thousand days..." Channeling Leon!
Somebody does the numbers (ht to @dangillmor ):
[The analysis below carries a larger story, namely "this has gone way beyond where something like the SEC should already be a central player." Journalists have done an admirable job of teasing out hard information on finances, but "investors" in OpenAI are at a major disadvantage.]
OpenAI Is A Bad Business
OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after
Ben Evans@davekarpf The best time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word was 2 years ago. The second best time is now.
Alexander Dyas“The project of techno-optimism, for decades now, has been to insist that if we just have faith in technological progress and free the inventors and investors from pesky regulations such as copyright law and deceptive marketing, then the marketplace will work its magic and everyone will be better off.”
Tom Bellin 
@davekarpf I enjoy that the article is broken up with several willfully misleading ads for Google's "AI" product.