Sam Altman: Guys, we’re in the Singularity now
The Singularity is the Rapture in Silicon Valley’s totally-not-religion. The AI improves itself, getting smarter and smarter, until it achieves super-intelligence! And then it turns us all into paperclips. Or everything works out well. Have you been naughty or nice? The Basilisk is watching! Sam…
The Singularity is the Rapture in Silicon Valley’s totally-not-religion. The AI improves itself, getting smarter and smarter, until it achieves super-intelligence! And then it turns us all into paperclips. Or everything works out well. Have you been naughty or nice? The Basilisk is watching! Sam Altman from OpenAI is not a true believer in AI doomsday. Dario Amodei from Anthropic sort of is — though Amodei’s still building bigger and bigger chatbots and trying to tell us the fancy autocomplete is evil! Sam does use the Singularity and AI doomsday stuff as marketing tropes. Like in his interview with the Relentless podcast on Saturday. In which Sam reveals … the Singularity is here! Now! [YouTube] The thing that drives me the most is this is the most interesting important thing I can imagine doing, and we are now, like, in the Singularity, like this is the moment. For the last 10 years, this was like a kind of far off dream at best. It seemed very improbable, and now we’re like actually in the moment that we used to, like, talk about at the lunch table in a very not serious way. The thing that drives me is, I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world. I’m excited to get to work on that. I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying. I’m going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens.But the main thing of what’s different than 10 years ago is we’re actually in it, like, this is the real, I think it is both true that it is all one crazy exponential and any one moment is not the tipping point, and also that we are somehow in another one of those decisive periods where the curve can go one way or another, like it was when we started 10 years ago. So going through that splurge — we’re in the Singularity, whatever that means. Sam doesn’t go into that. But it’s going to be great! The “other companies” who forecast doom means Anthropic. Also, it’s happening now, and it’s going to happen, but it might not happen, and you can’t tell when it happens. You’ll get better and more coherent predictions from a 1-900 telephone psychic. So it’s the singularity now. But somehow, we’re all working harder and harder for less. When are the robots going to take over the drudgery, not just the art? Sam says: never! Technology for a long time has been promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure. It has gone in that direction. I think people do have more time for leisure than they had at many previous points in history, and a higher quality of life in many ways. But somehow, we never get the promise of the four-hour work week at mass scale in society. And I don’t expect AI to change that. Sam got “four hour work week” there from tech bro Tim Ferriss’ get-rich scheme book “The 4-Hour Work Week” from 2007. The get-rich scheme is: become a drop shipper. Ferriss knows the Silicon Valley crowd, he’s their good friend. That’s why that phrase popped into Sam’s head. Somehow, your place in the new AI world order is to keep working your job. Is this the billionaires who take everything selling us a line? No, Sam clarifies after that it’s the dignity of labour! You feel fulfilled barely making rent. If you actually want leisure time, don’t look to tech bros. You have weekends because unions fought for them. It wasn’t these guys giving them to you. I would not look to the guys who will do anything not to be regulated or pay taxes if you want to improve conditions. This Singularity talk is marketing for the IPO Sam needs to run before OpenAI runs out of money. Remember that amazing and totally not orchestrated OpenAI “hack” of HuggingFace? It wasn’t that OpenAI are incompetent at keeping a hacking tool off the public internet or that HuggingFace are incompetent at coding their systems. It’s the singularity! Number Five is alive! Altman is not talking up the Singularity or the fabulous AI future of working till you drop because things are going well for him. This is naked desperation. OpenAI is still haemorrhaging money. Sam needs the IPO to keep the music playing just that little bit longer. Meanwhile, the stock market is having another AI conniption this week — this time it’s the chip and memory companies. Investors think the data centres are hot air and won’t be able to pay their contracted bills to the chip makers. [Guardian] This one will probably correct back later this week. But everyone’s feeling shaky. Fitch Ratings considers the AI bubble the greatest global credit risk for the second half of 2026: [Fitch] The combination of revenue uncertainty and the extent to which capital markets and economies have become intertwined with AI have created a vulnerability for credit in the event of a re-evaluation of long-run returns potential. Very short-term spikes in market volatility for individual equities and tech-heavy stock indices have already occurred, but a larger, more protracted correction could have wider market, macro and credit effects depending on its scale, duration and contagion. If there’s a singularity here, it’s that OpenAI is a black hole that all the money falls into. And you’ll never see it again. Video — Podcast It’s pledge week at Pivot to AI! If Pivot brightens your day, please do put $5 into the Patreon. Tell your friends!Source: Pivot to AI — Published — Category: Business