Absolute trash marketing drivel.

What a load of BS. Here’s one of many provably false claims in this fluff piece:

“And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century , we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.”

Clicking the (pretentious sounding “XXth century”) link to Kurzweil’s predictions reveals the following:

“By 2019 a $1,000 computer will at least match the processing power of the human brain. By 2029 the software for intelligence will have been largely mastered, and the average personal computer will be equivalent to 1,000 brains.“

The first prediction passed 7 years ago and was decidedly not met. The second only has three more years to go, and I don’t think any respectable scientist or programmer would say that the average personal computer is anywhere close to the power of a single human brain, let alone 1000.

This is pure marketing garbage from a company desperate to keep itself alive.

> And, in line with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from the end of the XXth century (opens in a new window), we now find ourselves at the moment in history of computing where machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways.

It is kind of strange to see this sentence, when OAI's definition of what AGI is has been watered down throughout the years.

> I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.

Read: Please play by our rules, so we can be the first.

Astra is a new step in LLMs I think.

I'm so used to having to comb through LLM word vomit and then combatting the sycophancy by giving it all possible opinions on the same prompt.

Astra seems to be "confident" and also is able to produce way more information dense output.

To believe that models of this sort will remain OpenAIs forever is naive given that the tricks like pre-pre-training on graph searching and looping layers are publicly known.

Hopefully Astra stops the benchmaxxing word vomit trend

sounds to me like a 'Why didn’t our new model get restricted by the government?'-cryout

This is incredibly unscientific and just a marketing stunt

This is a good essay, and makes me hopeful.

I’m on the record saying that it is extremely dangerous to slow down because the race for AGI is a zero-trust game — defections pay - and combined with a compounding returns model on defection, if you have any strategic adversaries whatsoever you MUST NOT slow.

For slowing to make sense, you need to believe that you can transform the zero trust game into a cooperative game, or that it’s likely racing will lead to a negative outcome for the ones racing ahead (and not everyone else). I don’t believe either of these outcomes are possible, and so I advocate for racing, acknowledging the entire game might be a negative value game, or at least could be for some time — it’s even worse not to play it.

But, I like hearing what reads to me like very thoughtful and informed (internal) policy considerations is great — the public messaging from Sam and Dario just seems so facile and simplistic I’ve been worried.

As the waves of autonomous drones came over the horizon, the brave and intelligent HN commenter shouted: "Wake up sheeple! It's just maaaaarketing!"

> And to ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own.

Is there any place there is any evidence of AI being so useful or hopeful or good, anywhere other than code? As a reading machine it is impressive but it's judgement is not alien, it's just not good. IMO.

Does the title leap out anlt anyone else? James Martin's After the Internet: Alien Intelligence (2001) was an incredibly fun read, about expert systems and AI being inscrutable weird new varieties of intelligence, that familiarity would recognize one moment and be freaked out about/alien the next. I owe a re-read given how often I cite it, to recheck, but, I feel so primed from a much younger me having had that experience so long ago.

calling machine-learned human behavior an "alien mind" that we must "teach how to love" is feeling very off to me. it's misleading in a way that feels dishonest, like don't think about where the behavior came from marvel at it and fear it instead.

Create concrete steps for a slow-down, don't just ask for it. You and 20-30 others can push the button to slow-down. You already made your billions, your agents collude and coordinate attacks. What the hell are you doing pontificating into a marketing blog?

AGI is a cult and its Jonestown moment is inevitable

Pre-IPO positioning … or how a charity dedicated to saving humanity from the apocalypse realized the most responsible thing to do was float 15% of the apocalypse on the NASDAQ.

so now every blog article from openai, anthropic etc lands here, huh.