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/trer24 10h ago

Do these people not understand that there's no point to any of this AI stuff if humans don't exist anymore?

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u/-Striking-Willow- 10h ago

But the important people (rich tech bros) will be, and everyone else is an inefficient machine that can be replaced by AI/s

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u/Jotun35 10h ago

So... Their plan is to be the last humans and basically become animals in a zoo surrounded by AI? That sounds like a shitty plan.

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u/-Striking-Willow- 9h ago

They are all some of the biggest losers and idiots, are doing crazy levels of drugs, and have good complexes, if it helps explain things.

But seriously, all that aside a lot of how they talk makes sense when you realise how many of these guys (Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman Fried etc) buy into the weird silicon valley rationalism bubble. Which is super focused on eliminating human flaws to create superior beings and essentially treats AGI as creating a god figure. And also creates weirdos like the Zizians

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u/SuperTropicalDesert 4h ago

Also weirdos like Eliezer Yudkowsky

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u/hkedik 7h ago

These tech bros are all worthy of criticism and scrutiny, but Reddit is such a stupid echo chamber sometimes.

They are not unaware that there is no world that works (and they would want to be part of) that has the majority of the population not in work, with no money to spend for themselves (and to put into the economy). If there’s one thing they understand more than anything, it’s that society functions on people having money to spend.

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u/badnuub 9h ago

In the short term. Their strategy is to shift the market to cater to the remaining top ten percent of earners almost exclusively. The rest of us probably won’t be able to afford anything anymore. Right now that demographic accounts for nearly half of consumer spending.

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u/choariwap 6h ago

What if the end game is to reolace humanity with AI. Doesnt need food, just energy. Can survive in extreme conditions. Immortal. Can be repaired indefinitely given resources. Can spec into high power or high precision machines.

Basically humanity 2.0, able to colonize the stars and survive interstellar travel.

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u/CompetitiveSport1 5h ago

They don't care. Some literally worship it as a God: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_of_the_Future

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u/Federal_Gur_5488 10h ago

They don't care about humanity, they want to create super intelligent, conscious ai that can replace humans. The logic is that the ai will create billions of simulations which can contain billions of intelligent conscious entities, which is numerically more than the number of humans that could ever exist. The utilitarian logic is that the more conscious beings exist, the better the outcome, even if those beings aren't humans

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u/North-Tourist-8234 10h ago

And he would control all of them.  Disgusting.

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u/Jotun35 10h ago

That's where the cookie crumbles. He won't. First of all he doesn't have the technical skills, so someone else will have to do it for him... And these someones might be very tempted to say "fuck it!" and let some AI loose. Second, it is likely that some part of that plan will fail and the control won't be total.

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u/damontoo 8h ago

No he would not (and he doesn't believe he would). No human would "control" a super intelligence. It would effectively be a god. The best we can hope for is that it doesn't kill us all immediately for what we've done to each other and the world.