Tech Giants, Stop Trying to Build Godlike AI
-- We have ChatGPT because Sam Altman wanted to build a god. Altman has said it’s “a few thousand days” away and we’ll have the first AI agents joining the workforce this year. Hassabis describes it as software that can perform “at human level.” Altman says it will “outperform humans.” Both, alongside Amodei, often take greater pains to talk about the complexity and challenges of defining AGI. Altman has also called it a “weakly defined term.” And Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has even derided the AGI effort as “nonsensical benchmark hacking.” I get little comfort from seeing AI’s top leaders trash talking or dancing around the definition of their North Star, while simultaneously racing toward it. The researchers, including Google’s former AI ethics lead Margaret Mitchell, suggest not only that tech firms include more voices from different communities and fields of expertise in their AI work, but that they drop the vague shtick about AGI, which one scientist memorably defined for me as “the rapture for nerds.” The obsession with “bigger is better” has gone on long enough in Silicon Valley, as has the jostling between people like Musk and Altman to have the biggest AI model or the biggest cluster of Nvidia Corp.’s AI chips.
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