this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Their charter: https://openai.com/charter

OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT among other AI products. I try to keep myself out of the loop when it comes to AI because I end up hearing about it anyway so I wasn't aware of this charter.

For the unaware, AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence. It basically means a form of AI that is extremely advanced and general-purpose like human intelligence is. For contrast, ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion (for example) are highly specialised. The former generates text response to text input and the latter generates images in response to text input.

Despite both these AI technologies of today being very impressive (even if their proprietors try to obscure the training and energy cost), the path to achieving AGI is pretty much inconceivable at present. Current AI technologies may have exploratory value in achieving AGI in some far future. But AGI is most likely not going to be built upon currently existing technologies and is going to be a different beast altogether provided it exists in the first place.

Given this, I find it absolutely baffling that OpenAI is talking about AGI like they do. This is the same level of delusion as Elon Musk talking about Mars colonisation. But given that techbros see themselves as the stewards for the next step in civilisational evolution, I guess it should come as no surprise that they eat this shit up uncritically.

I'm not sure what role these generative AIs will play in the near future. I am trying to figure out whether they will primarily be sold to corporations to cut labour cost or to end users to boost productivity. But talking of AGI and AI singularity and far fetched shit like that is a pure marketing stunt.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Does anybody have resources on AGI being a real possibilities beyond just a marketing term and, one day, just a mashup of various different things of AI?

I haven't read anything about AGI that isn't a "tech bro" kind of approach. Also, I don't see how AGI is anything more than a marketing term where, once enough shitty jobs are replaced by it, they'll hail it a success and that's pretty much it.

I want an AI, for example, to analyze the material conditions of a country and plan a Communist revolution for me. Can I have that? Will capitalism produce this for me?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Pls China, give me AI omniscient Lenin.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I want an AI, for example, to analyze the material conditions of a country and plan a Communist revolution for me. Can I have that? Will capitalism produce this for me?

Unironically, I think what's more likely to happen is that once the compute resources become affordable to the average working class people then someone will inevitably start a FOSS project like that. I have the feeling even if some private company manages to make an AI that could be used for things like planning revolution they will probably train it in ways to make it incapable of doing these things.