The company responsible for ChatGPT, OpenAI, fired its CEO, Sam Altman, over the weekend, reportedly over his desire to aggressively push AI in the marketplace, while the board of directors wished to move more cautiously. This morning, Microsoft is reported to have hired Altman to run their AI effort; Microsoft is reported to be OpenAI’s biggest backer.
I suspect we’re not seeing some inevitable historical current, but rather just another serpentine sign of greed.
ANYWAYS … the only real reason I’m posting this is that CNN added a picture of Altman, which struck me as being so ridiculously manipulative that it set my teeth on edge.
Ah, the picture of a man selflessly gazing towards a bright future of inanity for humanity for which he’ll sacrifice himself, now isn’t it? No doubt I sound bitter, but that would require the erasure of my dreams by his actions, and that has not happened; in fact, I’m simply waiting to be amazed by a humanity that has proven to be credulous about, well, what this morning I shall call a party trick, if I’m to believe the popular summaries of the technology involved.
That is certainly unfair to the AI researchers involved, and I duly apologize, but the only magic going on here is the immense amount of computer power being made available to the project. And, certainly, many will fairly proclaim it a boon to mankind as a sort of pre-digestive of whatever its data source has been fed to it. For many scientific and academic disciplines, the sheer amount of research published on a monthly basis really requires a mechanical and cheap way to organize new material for perusal by the humans involved.
But those efforts already existed prior to ChatGPT. I find it hard to get excited by the descriptions of ChatGPT. (I was rebuffed the first day it was available, and never returned to it. Not being an AI researcher myself, I do not feel abusive.)
