[sailingparrot]

Sure, you can think a lot of people are too optimistic (and as stated in my previous post I agree with you), but calling them shysters, hucksters, and charlatans implies a hidden motive to lie for personal gains, which isn’t there (again, in the ML research side). No one working on GPT-2 thought it would be such a leap on GPT-1, no one working on GPT-3 knew that that was the scale at which 0 shot would start emerging, no one working on GPT-4 thought it was going to be so good, so let’s just not pretend we now what GPT-5 or 6 scale model will and won’t do. We just don’t know, we all have our guesses but that’s just what it is, a guess. People making a different guess might be wrong ultimately, that doesn’t make them charlatans.

[dekhn]

OK, fair. I will stop saying shysters, hucksters, and charlatans when referring to Hinton (https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/why-neural-net... and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chat...). Perhaps "doomsayer" is the most apt term?

Altman, however, whenever I read what he says, I think falls within the "snake oil salesman" spectrum, although again, that's not precisely the word. A person who intentionally overstates the capabilities (and future capabilities) of a system with the intended goal of personal gain.