[idlewords]

There is too much easy money sloshing around Silicon Valley. The normal mechanisms for allocating it to sane, productive use (market forces) don't work, because it's in too few hands. So instead we get our version of a planned economy run by people who scared themselves with scifi.

[areoform]

I respectfully disagree. I realize whom I’m disagreeing with, but you’re wrong, there might be an asset bubble in the Valley, but these long term bets aren’t the result of “easy money.” They’re the result of smart money chasing long-term results in a world where research is being increasingly privatized and de-corporatized.

Open AI is not that much different from the research driven labs of the past like the MIT AI Lab, Project MAC, The Mother of All Demos, and yes, XEROX PARC and Bell Labs. The difference is that instead of a combination of government and large corporate money funding open ended applied and fundamental research; we have private investors doing the same.

The Valley is now one giant lab for the giant corporate parents to gobble up so that they take fewer extreme risks on their own dime. What works will work and it will be absorbed by FAANG. What doesn’t is discarded. While there are a few runaway hits, most companies like Deep Mind are absorbed by the large corporations as needed. When they can’t absorb them readily, they invest in them, like Google Venture’s investment into Uber and other unicorns. The net result is a diffused and confused environment where the future has moved from shiny office parks to local juice bars and coffee shops.

FWIW, I am for sama’s bet. And it’s not an easy sell at all. I think, it might be the hardest of all sells and the oldest amongst them. A bet in the future being better than today. I, personally, would pony up capital (to a limit) for the same.

[tntn]

In my mind, OpenAI is different from the other labs you mention because their goal is to harness the power of their own god. Bell Labs, for most of its history, was tasked with improving the Bell System, so anything that was remotely related to the system was fair game. Maybe these things seem "not much different" to you, but they seem dramatically different to me.

I'm not really that convinced anyone is substantially closer to artificial general intelligence that anyone was in the 50s or 60s, and I think it's fun to imagine what Bell Labs might have achieved if they decided to focus all of their efforts on creating artificial general intelligence. Not much, I would think.

> a bet in the future being better than today

No, it's a bet that openai will create general intelligence and make a profit off of it in some timeframe such that it doesn't make more sense to get your 100x returns through ordinary means. OpenAI can achieve this without the "future being better than today," and conversely the future can be better than today without OpenAI achieving this.

[AlexCoventry]

> I'm not really that convinced anyone is substantially closer to artificial general intelligence that anyone was in the 50s or 60s

Well, Douglas Hofstadter said back in the 80s that we'd first have to get a computer to know what the letters "A" and "I" are, and we've certainly achieved that.

[jacquesm]

It's akin to asking for investment because you intend to build a god.

[vzcx]

Perhaps they will make some advances in pragmatic machine learning, AI techniques, and perhaps cluster/super computing that could be useful and marketable. They have a silly telos, but their path towards it might generate some productive side-effects.

[vzcx]

Shall we quietly let them burn their money at the altar of the Basilisk? Or perhaps encourage them, so as to put it into more hands?