[mcpar-land]

> As AI gets smarter, access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right.

My product is going to be the fundamental driver of the economy. Even a human right!

> Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.

How?

> We are particularly excited to build a lot of this in the US; right now, other countries are building things like chips fabs and new energy production much faster than we are, and we want to help turn that tide.

There's the appeal to the current administration.

> Over the next couple of months, we’ll be talking about some of our plans and the partners we are working with to make this a reality. Later this year, we’ll talk about how we are financing it

Beyond parody.

[toddmorey]

Not a word or whisper about environmental impact, either. I mean at least do some hand waving or something. I feel like a habitable planet is a fundamental right.

[listic]

Not to defend what Altman is saying, but is OpenAI actually using or going to use that much power? This Reuters source the US power budget will be 4,187 TWh in 2025: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-use-reach-r...

[pera]

The US is the second most energy-hungry country on Earth (the first one being China, a country that accounts for almost 30% of the global manufacturing output), so I think it's better to compare it against the rest of the world:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electri...

Every country bellow the top 40 has a consumption lower than 87.6 TWh per year, that includes developed countries like Finland and Belgium, so yes, 10 gigawatts is a lot of power.

[heeton]

Adding 10GW of power as they plan, is 87TWh. 2%.

That’s huge. The hope is that this can drive renewables or nuclear rollout, but not sure that hope is realistic.

[ryanmerket]

Altman is an investor in OKLO. I'm expecting an announcement with companies like that where they can federal dollars to speed up R&D.

[mainecoder]

No worries once we have AGI we will ask it how to make up for all the emissions and solve climate change ...

[supjeff]

AGI answer: "Individual people must change their habits"

[antisthenes]

Maybe it'll be "There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer".

[sensanaty]

Duh, you just ask the magical AI "how fix global warming" and it fixes global warming, same way it'll cure cancer magically.

[davidw]

Maybe the other countries aren't rounding up engineers working on opening factories and detaining them in inhumane conditions.

[j_timberlake]

You skipped any attempt to prove his statements wrong, this is just reddit-level sneering with zero discussion material.

[ahmedtd]

Sam Altman skipped any attempt to prove his own statements right, so...

[j_timberlake]

So be better than him..?

[johneth]

It's not worth anyone's time to meticulously fact check known (and I'm being kind here) 'exaggerator' Sam Altman, because by the time you're done, he's already spread 10 more 'exaggerations'.

[rooftopzen]

Sam Altman has been a joke for awhile now, heard only his investors defend him for their next round increase - is that who you are?

[hackable_sand]

There's nothing to seriously discuss here.

When people have access to food and shelter as human rights then we can entertain nonsense.

[thrance]

Stop thinking and give them money.

But for real, the leap from GPT4 to GPT5 was nowhere near as impressive as from GTP3 to GPT4. They'll have to do a lot more to give any weight to their usual marketing ultra-hype.

[MattDamonSpace]

The jump from GPT4 through o3 to GPT5 was very impressive

[bronco21016]

Agreed. Their naming conventions in a way really broke the perception of progress. GPT-4 to o3 or GPT-5 is truly impressive. The leap from GPT-4o to GPT-5 is less impressive but GPT-4o is generally recognized as GPT-4.

All that being said, it does seem like OpenAI and Anthropic are on a quest for more dollars by promoting fantasy futures where there is not a clear path from A to B, at least to those of us on the outside.

[Workaccount2]

I think people have a lot of rosy glasses and fondness for those early days, combined with general usability benchmarks being mostly saturated now. GPT-3.5 would say Dallas was the capital of USA, but GPT-4 got it every time!

GPT-4 launched with 8k context. It hallucinated regularly. It was slow. One-shotting code was unheard of, you had to iterate and iterate. It fell over even doing basic math problems.

GPT-5 thinking on the other hand is so capable that the average person wouldn't be able to really test it's abilities. It's really only experts operating in their domain who can find it's stumbling blocks.

I think because we have seen these constant incremental updates that it creates a staircase with small steps, but if you really reflect and look back, you'll see the actual capability gap from 3.5 to 4 compared to 4 to 5 is way way smaller. This is echoed in benchmarks too, GPT-5 is solving problems so wildly beyond what GPT-4 was capable of.

[heyitsguay]

What problems?

[Tubelord]

Yes, this post ironically makes me more bearish

[drooby]

No offense but your comment is basically HN parody. OpenAI created AI tech decades ahead of estimates. And they just signed a 100B deal with Nvidea. They are actually doing the things that are astonishing.

Every engineer I see in coffee shops uses AI. All my coworkers use AI. I use AI. AI nearly solved protein folding. It is beginning to unlock personalized medicine. AI absolutely will be a fundamental driver of the economy in the future.

Being skeptical is still reasonable.. but flippant dismissal of legitimately amazing accomplishments is peak HN top comment.

[mcpar-land]

> OpenAI created AI tech decades ahead of estimates. And they just signed a 100B deal with Nvidea.

Definitely don't look into the financial details of that deal with Nvidia!

> Every engineer I see in coffee shops uses AI. All my coworkers use AI. I use AI.

Okay

> AI nearly solved protein folding.

FAH predates OpenAI by fifteen years and ChatGPT 3 by twenty. Do not fall for Altman's conflation of LLMs with every other form of machine learning he and OpenAI had nothing to do with!

[riku_iki]

> Definitely don't look into the financial details of that deal with Nvidia!

could you elaborate about what do you mean?..

[remus]

I don't think there's any criticism of the (remarkable) things which have been achieved so far, more the breathless hype about how AI is going to solve all our current and future problems if we just keep shovelling money and energy in. Predicting the future is hard, and I don't think Sam is particularly better at knowing what's going to happen in ten years time than anyone else.