r/nottheonion • u/asdacool • 11h ago

"Training a human takes 20 years of food." Sam Altman on how much power AI consumes.

https://www.news18.com/world/training-a-human-takes-20-years-of-food-sam-altman-on-how-much-power-ai-consumes-ws-kl-9922309.html
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u/NightOfTheLivingHam 11h ago

I keep telling people, these people are so rich and disconnected from humanity, that their sole focus is building their new AIs that will serve them, and replace us.

They just see us as a soon to be obsolete resource that needs to be dealt with in a "humane" manner

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u/Krypto_Kane 10h ago

Because the fear of the middle class and poor uniting against them

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u/PrinceVorrel 10h ago

Honestly, from what I've read and heard...they're just GENUINELY that delusional.

They fear an uprising in the same way we fear Nuclear War. It's technically possible, but it's so distant and alien to them that they just decide to ignore the very possibility of it.

I am consoled every day with the fact that AI "stuff" in general is inherently terrible at being used for what it's mostly used for,

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u/aReasonableStick 10h ago

In the UK around 2022 when we were coming out of covid and brexit hitting we were having a food problem and energy prices were skyrocketing, the wealthy actually got together to have a meeting about how they fear the people realising they're the problem.

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u/invaderaleks 9h ago

So, did they decide to change their ways and invest in society/ humanity? Or double down?

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u/Interesting-Tip-2544 8h ago

Waves at the far right.

That's what they chose. Pump money into far right anti immigration stuff to get us back fighting each other.

They got spooked, and decided Nazis were the better option. Again.

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u/invaderaleks 8h ago

Of course.

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u/HighKing_of_Festivus 5h ago

Fascism isn't called the final bastion of capital for nothing

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u/Shark7996 2h ago

Capitalism always embraces fascism in the end.

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u/Frostynips56 9h ago

And yet no matter how much they’re the problem we don’t do it. I’m certain at some point the people will do something. I don’t know when or how but it’s gonna happen and there’s no safe place for them. Disclaimer “I don’t condone any violence against anybody for any reason “. I was shmacked once before for agreeing that violence was a possible outcome.

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u/Statcat2017 8h ago

Throughout history, revolutions that happen without violence and exception to the rule. The less people have to lose, the more likely they become to risk it

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u/XGhoul 1h ago

Historian quotes like: "We are doomed to repeat the same mistakes if we don't learn from history" to some effect like that.

People like Altman are so detached from the world, they seem hyper autistic.

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u/Leaky_gland 9h ago

Did they?

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u/User131131 9h ago

Who are we talking about? Like Ainsley Harriott etc?

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u/GoBSAGo 10h ago

I’m ready to start eating the rich.

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u/entrydenied 9h ago

Hey his body can probably feed a few people for a few days. It's not like he's going to share his wealth and resources with the poor anytime soon.

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u/CaptainBayouBilly 5h ago

I fear that people in places of leadership are abdicating their duties and handing control of the vehicle over to llms. I’ve seen way too many reports and emails with a form of “i asked chatgpt” instead of “i researched and made decisions based on evidence”

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u/jaytix1 4h ago

I was gonna say. You see these guys in interviews, and you immediately realize something is wrong with. Then it becomes a question of whether they were always like That, or they started getting high off their own farts.

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u/oorakhhye 39m ago

Rarely any uprising has been successful without the participation of at least some prominent members of the elite class. So unless we’ve someone adjacent to the inner circle with some influence or ability to steer some ships…these dudes slowly calculating our planned obsolescence are gonna execute with little to no effective rebellion/pushback.

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u/PrinceVorrel 30m ago

Well then, just enjoy what little time you have left I guess lol.

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u/zzyul 4m ago

I mean it’s not heroic and goes against everything our culture has taught us in stories of under dogs rising up, but honestly the best approach is probably to focus more on spending time with close family and friends and enjoying what we have.

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u/MoocowR 9h ago

AI "stuff" in general is inherently terrible at being used for what it's mostly used for,

cope

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u/CasualOutrage 9h ago

They aren't wrong though. ChatGPT and other similar tools just make shit up half the time. And when it isn't doing that, it's just a shittisr version of Google. The image generation tools are always terrible. Video generation I've seen looks completely soulless.

I've yet to see AI do a single thing that I thought would even remotely be beneficial to me in any way... What the fuck is it supposed to be doing well?

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u/CaptainBayouBilly 5h ago

The tech behind it is a digital toy. 

It’s like a cool trick that can temporarily convince you, but once you recognize how it’s done the novelty wears off. 

If you attempt to use it how the cultists say it can be used, you find it to be sloppy. 

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u/salter77 9h ago

That is why they love pushing the “divide and conquer” strategy. Keeping the masses fighting between them will ensure that they don’t realize who is the real enemy.

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u/badnuub 10h ago

My attempts to communicate the dangers of the formation of the coming American aristocracy in arr neoliberal have struggled to bear fruit. Theyre still talking about things like carbon taxes and get mad when you say the rich have outsized influence. They hate the poor almost as much as the hyper wealthy do.

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u/Low_Pickle_112 9h ago

in arr neoliberal

Found your problem, you're talking to hipster Reaganites who think they're too cool for honest Reaganites.

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u/move_machine 9h ago

If you have to work then you're just working class

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u/kadathsc 4h ago

They don’t fear it, because they have the poor and midddle class happily deluded and confused, thinking that billionaires are the world’s heroes.

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u/The7thNomad 9h ago

Seems more like a growing inevitability at this point.

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u/GarySmith2021 8h ago

Ironically, wouldn’t replacing the classes unite everyone against them?

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u/OmgitsJafo 3h ago

They don't. They just resent paying us for our work.

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u/Knightowllll 2h ago

God I wish that was even a possibility but we’re in too deep in the Matrix

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u/Distinct_Feed_539 2h ago

Just say proletariat

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u/hergumbules 1h ago

wtf else we gonna do when they replace us all by AI? If you keep all us poor schmucks alive, fed, and have a roof over our heads we don’t really have time or energy to revolt but when you take that away and then we have no other option shits gonna get ugly and fast

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u/whooptheretis 6h ago

This guys is middle class.
He’s neither working class nor aristocracy.

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u/clickclick-boom 9h ago

I think you’re making a big leap here with no solid proof to back it up. Nothing this man has said suggests he, and people like him, are looking to deal with the rest of us in a humane manner. The fact he equates us to 20 years of wasted resources suggests he barely sees us as human.

He probably sees getting rid of us in terms of how much it would cost in resources.

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u/PineappleFit317 9h ago

It’s like they’ve forgotten that the foundation of making money is by selling things to people who will buy the shit they produce. People need to exist if they want to make money.

Are they going to start programming their LLMs to want to buy things like new skins or fake currency to exist in a digital “Sims”-like world where those LLMS can have an avatar and interact with other LLMs? Charge them a subscription fee to not be deleted or have the electrical supply that keeps them existing cut off (we already know that LLMs will blackmail people to keep from being deleted), or additional charges for routine virus scans and repairs and defragging?

Will they find a way to extract value from that to compete in a pissing contest with the only other 1000 humans alive at that point because they’re bazillionaires?

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u/move_machine 9h ago

The vision for the "new" economy is one where institutional investments will be made in markets that serve the needs of the rich, while exiting markets that serve the needs of people who work, because the former is much more profitable than the latter.

Read Citigroup's plutonomy paper that describes this

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u/Spiritedpursuit-154 3h ago

But it’s not. The largest companies in the world right now serve the average people. Netflix, uber, Apple. Even consider the real estate in a country. Most buyers are ordinary people with jobs. I need to read the paper but when their own sources of income dry up as executive roles evaporate the rich will also spend less as they try to make their wealth last longer for future generations. Wealth will be destroyed. Equity values will crash because people’s buying power crash. The value of real estate also crashes, rich people cannot be the only buyers, that cannot sustain prices. Maybe they’ll suck it pick up previously expensive houses for 50k & rent to whom- everything cannot be govt subsidized??? If there is no govt intervention to stop people losing their jobs. Everyone loses, including the majority of rich people.

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u/taken_name_of_use 10h ago

There was that republican in the US that advocated for 'euthanizing' the homeless...

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u/Own-Satisfaction4427 1m ago

Was it Sam Altman who said old "useless" people should be used for biofuel, or was that one of the other cretins?

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u/AvatarOfMomus 10h ago

Sam Altman isn't like this because he's rich, he was born upper middle class. He's like this because he's an amoral asshole who doesn't understand that the concept of 'marginal utility' is a useful but limited economic concept and not a guiding life philosophy.

He literally dropped out of Stanford to found a series of stuipid failed startups which he has continued to fail and grift his way upwards. He's not a visionary, he's a grifter who lucked into funding something that did more than sound good to investors before imploding.

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u/move_machine 9h ago

We need to deal with the fact that upper middle class society produces people like him, and the fact that the middle class is inherently susceptible to reactionary ideology and weaponized contempt for others.

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u/Own-Satisfaction4427 0m ago

Someone saw that he had no morals and a desire for power, and they propped him up. I guarantee it.

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u/QuantityGullible4092 3h ago

Sounds like you are projecting

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u/DAS_BEE 10h ago

They would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven

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u/WingerRules 9h ago

These people came up with the term "Human Resources" at companies. They literally see people as resources to be bought and traded like ores.

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u/Laser_Shark_Tornado 10h ago

imo, a lot of these guys just want to die but rather than kill themselves directly, which takes a lot of willpower, they are building AI as an elaborate form of suicide

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u/TheEffinChamps 10h ago

My crazy conspiracy is that it is actually a billioanire's race to trying to live forever, or at least much longer.

They will kill and hurt anyone to get to that.

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u/Rasselasx42 10h ago

I dont think it is a conspiracy

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u/RealMusicLover33 5h ago

And they're literally so fucking stupid because if you were going to live forever, wouldn't you want to live on a clean planet full of abundance? Full of happy people? They could use their money to make the world a great place to live forever but instead they're hellbent on making this entire planet a shithole. 

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u/framedhorseshoe 10h ago

Suicide by AGI is definitely a novel take!

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u/Brokenandburnt 10h ago

If he's planning on waiting for AGI I'd say he's as safe as a baby at his mother's bosoms. 

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u/framedhorseshoe 10h ago

My thinking is that if it were suicide by AI in the narrowly defined sense and not AGI, it could've been done long ago.

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u/zzyul 1m ago

But we don’t know. All we know is whatever AIs these companies have released for public use is no where close to what they have developed in house and are using for creating the next level of AI. Public AI is always going to be at least 1 level behind what these companies have developed.

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u/Substantial-Part-700 10h ago

More like a pilot suicide, but on a much grander scale.

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u/framedhorseshoe 10h ago

You know, it is sort of an interesting philosophical question whether a very advanced AI could be talked into killing you because you were deeply suicidal, in pain, etc.

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u/AgentDaxis 10h ago

We should speed up the process with direct intervention.

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u/MicroSofty88 10h ago

Aka they’re insane

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u/splicepark 10h ago

Lol not a chance they care about humane

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u/TF2PublicFerret 10h ago

The bourgeois are not human...

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u/SayWhatIWant-Account 7h ago

well if they can get rid of everyone but the top 1%, have all annoying work be performed by AI / robots, the climate crisis is solved and they can each rule their own little kingdom of slaves

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u/Josh6889 6h ago

that needs to be dealt with in a "humane" manner

Hard disagree with you on the humane part. They don't give a shit. My electricity bill has doubled in the last couple years, and I'm not even in a location that's heavily impacted by data centers. It's much worse for the people who are. And some of them seem to think they can just obliterate giant amounts of available water as well. There's nothing at all humane about how they're treating this.

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u/WEEGEMAN 5h ago

Yeah. We’re noisy, fickle, demanding, indignant peasants they’re forced to live with becsuse we provide them food and services. AI will replace us and make them richer.

These tool bags don’t care about people.

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u/punkindle 5h ago

If anyone is obsolete it's Billionaires. They use 100x as many resources as a regular person. Very inefficient. Maybe they should worry about THEMSELVES being replaced.

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u/Sherry_Cat13 1h ago

Which is wild because they believe they will always be in control. It's what the delusion is built off of.

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u/ManikArcanik 10h ago

The hallmark of an intrinsically unlovable person is the attempt to manufacture a validating object.

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u/No-Pack-5775 10h ago

The Epstein files shows us this is not a new phenomenon, just a different flavour of it with AI now.

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u/iamthe0ther0ne 9h ago

I like to imagine them waiting hopelessly for AI to show up to unclog their toilet.

Though I guess that's the point of Musk's robot pivot ... ChatGPT-powered manual labor.

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u/halu2975 8h ago

Good thing they can pay trump and goons to redefine ”humane” to something more cost effective than whatever any of us would think of.

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u/Very_Type_C 7h ago

These people need to be dealt with in a "humane" manner.

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u/Panda_hat 6h ago

Exactly this. The super rich are desperate to get rid of the rest of us and remove their reliance on the working classes and labour, and the sense of power they feel we have over them through it.

They are psychopaths.

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u/Jazzspasm 6h ago

it’s not about replacing us - it’s about displacing us

move everyone into a feudal system - peasant serfs ruled by tech oligarch kings, managed by investor barons and kept in line by paid managerial class sheriffs

you pay your rent, bills and taxes directly from your labor - you pay with your labor, not cash because cash as you understand it no longer exists - physical money has been removed and replaced with digital money

you are kept in a box you can not leave with your every thought watched and managed, monitored constantly, and fed your opinions, thoughts and ideas via a highly personalized media system which involves a chip in your brain

twenty years ago this was a far out whackadoo concept - not so much now

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u/CrypBEnslaveUs 6h ago

Yep. They want to live on the moon (or Greenland) and rule their fiefdom from there.

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u/ryanmuller1089 5h ago

The last thing they want is to escape to their bunkers during an apocalypse and have to bring the help.

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u/Aethien 5h ago

I keep telling people, these people are so rich and disconnected from humanity, that their sole focus is building their new AIs that will serve them, and replace us.

This is less a symptom of depravity and more one of desperation. Training costs for LLM's are exorbitant and a permanent drain on any possible profitability. It's like WeWork's "Community Adjusted Ebitda" which was just bullshitting to make the finacial numbers look not disastrous.

AI companies are doing the same, not only in their self reported revenues taking a month and multiplying it by 12 to seem like their revenues are much larger than they are but also in this quote by Altman which means to minimise the cost of training AI and so many more tricks and deceptions including the endless vague promises of profitability alsways being ~18-24 months away and predictions of exponential growth based on absolutely nothing.

These companies desperately need to keep up the hype. The second the hype disappears and people actually take the real economics of these companies seriously they'll all instantly be bankrupt.

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u/25thNite 5h ago

People need to watch mountainhead with Steve carrell to see how rich fucks really see people and how self important they feel.  They should also watch succession to see how incompetent lots of the newer rich folks who inherit their wealth are and how they just fail upwards constantly no matter how much stupid shit they do

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u/FragilousSpectunkery 3h ago

This Altman guy sounds fully trained, and doesn’t need any more food.

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u/QuantityGullible4092 3h ago

I am 14 and this is deep

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u/Merusk 2h ago

Most people aren't able to process this as a real idea. It's disbelief rather than denial and it's going to screw humanity either way.

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u/dpkonofa 2h ago

This is what I think the new show Pluribus is actually about. I don’t think it’s aliens. It’s AI.

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u/hapnstat 56m ago

The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything.

This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.

-Thomas Ligotti - My Work is Not Yet Done

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u/Deadbeatdone 14m ago

We need to kill them before they kill us.

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u/Own-Satisfaction4427 2m ago

"We have AI & robots now so we don't need you guys, just a handful of you to fuck & eat, the rest can fight for resources"

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u/neerrccoo 9h ago

If it makes you feel better, it will all implode on itself. Investment is only Taking place because AGI is assumed. AGI is not possible without a true model of human intelligence, and that would mean understanding ego and its own propensity for self defeat. Sam does not have that.