https://www.wired.com/story/what-openai-really-wants/
"The air crackles with an almost Beatlemaniac energy as the star and his
entourage tumble into a waiting Mercedes van. They’ve just ducked out of one
event and are headed to another, then another, where a frenzied mob awaits. As
they careen through the streets of London—the short hop from Holborn to
Bloomsbury—it’s as if they’re surfing one of civilization’s before-and-after
moments. The history-making force personified inside this car has captured the
attention of the world. Everyone wants a piece of it, from the students who’ve
waited in line to the prime minister.
Inside the luxury van, wolfing down a salad, is the neatly coiffed 38-year-old
entrepreneur Sam Altman, cofounder of OpenAI; a PR person; a security
specialist; and me. Altman is unhappily sporting a blue suit with a tieless
pink dress shirt as he whirlwinds through London as part of a monthlong global
jaunt through 25 cities on six continents. As he gobbles his greens—no time for
a sit-down lunch today—he reflects on his meeting the previous night with
French president Emmanuel Macron. Pretty good guy! And very interested in
artificial intelligence.
As was the prime minister of Poland. And the prime minister of Spain.
Riding with Altman, I can almost hear the ringing, ambiguous chord that opens
“A Hard Day’s Night”—introducing the future. Last November, when OpenAI let
loose its monster hit, ChatGPT, it triggered a tech explosion not seen since
the internet burst into our lives. Suddenly the Turing test was history, search
engines were endangered species, and no college essay could ever be trusted. No
job was safe. No scientific problem was immutable.
Altman didn’t do the research, train the neural net, or code the interface of
ChatGPT and its more precocious sibling, GPT-4. But as CEO—and a dreamer/doer
type who’s like a younger version of his cofounder Elon Musk, without the
baggage—one news article after another has used his photo as the visual symbol
of humanity’s new challenge. At least those that haven’t led with an
eye-popping image generated by OpenAI’s visual AI product, Dall-E. He is the
oracle of the moment, the figure that people want to consult first on how AI
might usher in a golden age, or consign humans to irrelevance, or worse."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-abortion-mexico-vaccine-indonesia-conservation-alaska/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
