[davidivadavid]

What bothers me most is that the picture he paints of success itself is some handwavy crap about how it could "create value" or "solve problems" or some other type of abstract nonsense. He has displayed exactly 0 concrete, desirable vision of what succeeding with AI would look like.

That seems to be the curse of Silicon Valley, worshiping abstractions to the point of nonsense. He would probably say that with AGI, we can make people immortal, infinitely intelligent, and so on. These are just potentialities with, again, 0 concrete vision. What would we use that power for? Altman has no idea.

At least Musk has some amount of storytelling about making humanity multiplanetary you may or may not buy into. AI "visionaries" seem to have 0 narrative except rehashed, high-level summaries of sci-fi novels. Is that it?

[efficientsticks]

I agree, listening to the podcast I think the answer is that “yes” that is it: faith in technological progress is the axiom and the conclusion. Joined by other key concepts like compound growth, the thinking isn’t deep and the rest is execution. Treatment of the concept of ‘a-self’ in the podcast was basically just nihilistic weak sauce.

[jasmer]

AI is not an abstraction. It's rational to be hand wavy about future value, it's already materialized. AI is basically an applied reseaarch project, he should be more like a Dean herding researchers and we should take him as that. In a previous era, that's what it would be: a PhD from Berkley in charge of some giant AT&T government funded research Lab thing. He'd be on TV with a suit and tie, they'd be smoking and discussing abstract ideas.