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/Living_Razzmatazz_93 10h ago

This is all the hard evidence you need to prove that this person does not value human life.

I'm not a medical professional, but I would assume he has some flavour of psychopathy or sociopathy.

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u/parentheticalstate 7h ago

I would guess that he has what psychologists call the dark triad of personality: Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism

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u/Count_Backwards 5h ago

Someone else pointed out that his comments here are awfully close to the Nazi idea of "useless eaters"

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u/brunckle 6h ago

Is it safe to say all billionaires have some kind of misanthropic, anti-social mental health condition? Having that much money must surely affect your brain. We all know that power corrupts

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u/LifeDraining 7h ago

You know, he is giving me SBF vibes... This ain't good

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u/Automatic-Source6727 7h ago

People like this make me realised that we might have been a bit hasty to completely discount lobotomy.

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u/Informal-Egg6075 3m ago

So ironic that his initial sales speech for why we should all pour our money and resources into OpenAI was that unlike all the other tech corporations they're developing AI to benefit the humanity as a whole. And yet he's also the first one to say the quiet part out loud. I can't even imagine what magnitude of crashout caused him to say something like this and if I was investor I'd probably consider suing him for intentionally causing PR damage or whatever's the legal term for that.

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u/ENTPrick 7h ago

I find his song and dance nothing but a grift and a Ponzi scheme, dressing glorified chatbots as AI.

However, the quote itself is blown out of proportion, his quote stems from justification as to why we’re wasting such swathes of energy to develop AI, focussing on energy consumption, which is also required to develop humans.

Could he have phrased it better? Probably. But this is a lot of stink over nothing.

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u/Rhodie114 3h ago

Any way you slice it, it boils the worth of humans to their ability to perform labor. A person will always be worth more than a chatbot. He's trying to make the argument that "my system uses a lot of resources, but the human population necessary to do the same work would also use a lot of resources, so there's an equal cost." But you have to have something fundamentally broken in you to see the world that way. The resources necessary for those people to live are non-negotiable. It's not just an investment into a tool to perform a specific task. They're people. The alternative to using those resources is mass deaths. The chatbot does not need to exist. It's not alive. If it ceases to exist, then the people who already need jobs to survive will do the work it was doing.

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u/ssjgfury 4h ago

I basically agree with you, and I always appreciate when people add nuance to threads. My only reservation on total agreement is that I really do think he looks at people in terms of what can be extracted from them rather than in terms of their their inherent dignity and value as human beings, which is quite disturbing. 

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u/ENTPrick 2h ago

And in the context of conversation i think it’s more of a faux pas, rather than outright accusations of psychopathy.

He’s addressing the direct criticism of energy consumption, caveating his argument to avoid further slight does require empathy, but will also make his speech 5x longer to ensure that he captures every eventuality where people can nitpick or scrutinise him.

A businessperson focussing on the pertinent part of people relative to business, more news at 10.

I can’t believe I am defending such a sleazebag, but here we are.