Tante (via Mastodon):

Reporting on Sam Altman blog posts without the addendum that he needs to keep the narrative of “AGI soon” going for his house of cards to hold is irresponsible. (Acknowledging that most of the things he said about AI were just false would also help.)

I fully agree.

I was talking with a colleague recently and when I expressed some skepticism that AGI was right around the corner, their response was to ask me if I had seen some LinkedIn post where the Nvidia CEO was talking about AGI being right around the corner. “What do you think of that?” my colleague asked, in all seriousness.

When I told them that it is in the Nvidia CEO’s interest to have us all convinced that AGI is right around the corner because then we will all keep buying huge piles of expensive GPUs from his company, and that all of these sorts of claims should be evaluated first through that lens, my colleague was taken aback. It was not that they disagreed at me or was mad about my answer. Rather, they had not even considered that possibility.

This person is not a fool; they are good at his job and I enjoy working with them. Even so, all they are seeing is this constant marketing hype, and they are buying all of it because it is coming from exactly the sort of tech leaders they have been habituated by business media and culture to trust.

I try to keep this in mind whenever I here someone going on about this stuff.