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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

i no longer follow the messianic complex of the people in openAI. They made great tech, indeed. Other people made great tech before them without instant religious level apocalypse proclamations. People in openAI are smart enough to know that post-AGI , their stock options are worthless anyway so they wouldn't stay walled in their secret garden if such a discovery had been made.

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IMO it's always been pure marketing. The wilder apocalypse proclamations, the more powerful and desirable their products seem. Exactly same store with Sam Altman's world tour earlier this year.

This is similar to the saber rattling about facebook being able to track and micro-target you with such effective advertising, it's changing the world!

Except everyone's individual experience seemed to be getting general random garbage ads and the people that paid for the ads found them to be a waste of money.

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Apocalypse proclamations aren't just a thing to throw around. Other people made great tech before indeed, but I hope we're not comparing AGI to the next Iphone. There were times in history where development gave us pause. The atomic bomb for one thing, but also superbacteria/viruses, human genetic modifications and perhaps a few others.

My guess is also in the opposite direction with this stuff: the Q breakthrough being mentioned here is phony in some way (beyond just being PR) and the ‘lack of candour’ referred to in the firing is failing to disclose how it actually worked after demoing it to the board (eg it uses humans in the loop or some other smoke and mirrors)

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