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Sam Altman says we are in the singularity (businessinsider.com)
5 points by ColinEberhardt 5 days ago
3 comments

I don’t trust the proclamations of someone whose company’s share price is based on that being true.
Fair, but I do wonder how much share prices will matter if the thing claimed is true.

More from the Tesla/SpaceX perspective, given the former has been propping up prices against the widely ridiculed P/E ratios they have had for years now on the basis of being "AI" rather than cars and the latter is following suit since the IPO was announced.

Like, Musk has de facto control over Tesla, de jure and de facto over SpaceX, Tesla isn't paying out dividends, so what's the upside for shareholders even if Musk succeeds?

I don't know enough about Altman to want to guess if he'd pay out dividends or such, but what happened after he was fired by the OpenAI board does make the question important.

The increases in AI capabilities are impressive, but I imagine the singularity as giving:

* AGI

* Breakthroughs in physics (of the FTL kind, or something equally impressive)

* Unlimited power and food for the earth

GPT-5.6 is not quite there, nor do we see we are getting there, yet.

We are already seeing math problems being solved by AI on a weekly basis now. Maybe at some point a breakthrough in math will cause a breakthrough in physics?

It makes me wonder if the model is the limit here or if it's the harness: e.g. give GPT 5.6 or Fable a team of 20 people that can easily interact with the real world and let it do whatever in order to "make a breakthrough" in physics; do you think it would manage to?

In a very real sense, food was solved by the first two industrial revolutions, which between them supplied enough artificial muscle power to move most of us out of farming, and enough understanding of biology to bring us industrial-scale fertilisers.

We're living through yet another power revolution today, between renewables and batteries (and while I won't count it until it's commercialised, we've gone from fusion being decades away to years away).

FTL… well, like most nerds I've got a soft spot for the Alcubierre drive and the various follow-up papers. But for now, sure, I'd assume by default that any news headline I see about someone making even a sub-light 1 µc version (I guess 1 µc would be sub-sonic, too) to be either an AI hallucination or something like The Onion.

"We are now, like, in the singularity,"

:eye-roll: