> “I can’t believe I even have to talk about these people. That’s how ridiculous it is,” says Timnit Gebru, an electrical engineer and founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute. “They were like some fringe group that nobody took seriously,” she says of how the tech billionaires who talked up AGI were viewed by those who worked in her field. “Everybody sort of laughed at them out of the room. But because of the money, the billions of dollars that were going into it, they started slowly taking over. Fast-forward to now, this conversation about superintelligence is basically mainstream.”> Gebru argues, the conversation ignores what AI like ChatGPT really is: Not a form of intelligence — which, in and of itself, is almost impossible to define — but rather a large language model that simply scrapes the (inherently flawed) internet and predicts the most likely sequence of words. We are made to think that AI is “thinking,” but that’s just marketing, and misleading marketing at that. A machine that doesn’t really think at all can’t teach itself to think better. And it certainly can’t figure out how to alter the habitability of Mars.
> Likewise, though Altman claimed in January that nuclear fusion — potentially an inexhaustible source of energy — was only a few years away, the scientists working to bring it about scoff at that timeline (there’s a joke that it’s been 30 years away for the past 60 years). Crypto continues to have dubious (legal) utility as compared with other forms of currency, but in 2023, it gobbled up as much energy as the entire continent of Australia. In October, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said the solution to the climate crisis was to use more energy: Since we aren’t going to meet our climate goals anyway, we should pump energy into AI that might one day evolve to solve the problem for us. (“Yeah, that’s a quote that he gave in public without, like, a mask over his face or anything,” says Becker. “And he still walks around, unashamed.”) In his first week in office, Trump invited Altman, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to the White House to gleefully announce the building of 20 more AI data centers.
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#TinmitGebru #Broligarchs #SalamiAI #TechBillionaires #TechBillionairePsychology
by #AlexMorris
