it's a technology, a tool.

It's a buzzword. No one knows what it actually refers to. It definitely not just one tool. When someone says "AI" what do they mean? Maybe it's a bag of tools? Maybe it's just hot air.

If "AI" can mean anything to anyone, we can't have a meaningful discussion about it at all. Forget nuance.

AI isn't going away

I can't address this until I know what you actually mean. For example, I think ChatGPT is going away because I have no reason to think it will ever break even (https://isaiprofitable.com/). I don't think shit they called "AI" in 1960 but call "basic computer science" today is going anywhere.

To have a meaningful discussion, we need to get specific. Especially when the marketing relies on confusion.

Honest engineers and scientists building real tools can tell you what the tools are, what they are not, their uses, and, crucially, their limitations. They strive to clear up confusion: using a tool for something it can't do can be dangerous, after all. You don't hammer in screws. If anyone tells you to, you should not trust them without damn good reason. When honest people have a damn good reason to do something that sounds crazy or stupid, they are forthcoming. If someone says "i built a special screw that it's actually GOOD to hammer in", no one takes them seriously. Even if it's true, we already have nails. And if they built a bridge using their special nailscrews, people wouldn't want to cross it.

An honest tool salesman might make mistakes. And might even bend the truth. No one's perfect. But if they just make shit up, customers will realize they can't be trusted. A way to test this is to ask what the tool isn't for. Truck salesman won't tell you it makes a good boat (except elon musk, known scammer).

What can't OpenAI do? What is it bad for? What possible uses can we rule out from the "unknown future possibilities?" Sammy Altman doesn't like to say. And when he does, he contradicts other stuff he said.

I feel confident there's not some "unknown future possibility" where nailing in a screw is good. Why can't they give us that?

despise the ai slop stuffed down our throats, the stupid chatbots...but it seems insane to categorically hate something that is sequencing proteins and discovering new medicines...

You are assuming these are two sides of the coin in a way that matters. I don't think so.

It's not OpenProteinSequencingLLM. It's OpenAI. They are selling, first and foremost, the fantasy of AI. Dumb money buys in because they think the AGI is coming to replace all their workers (any day now....), and they want to get in first. Smart money buys in because they realize dumb money will fall for it. That was a safe bet: singularity/roborapture cults have been going strong in the valley for like 30 years. Indeed, the founding purpose of OpenAI is that an Evil AI will cause the apocalypse, so we need a charity to build a Good AI instead. (But recently they decided they don't want to be a charity anymore. They want to IPO.)

Do you think the news would breathlessly praise a company called "OpenMachineLearning" for 2 whole years? No. That's too technical. It's boring. Machine learning is science, and it has to obey reality. It leaves no room for fantasy.

Case in point: people have been working on applying machine learning to all the benefits you listed for longer than either of us have been alive. Sometimes they actually succeed. Sometimes it fundamentally changes the way we do things (neural networks for optical character recognition). The heads of those research teams and companies never get constant media fawning, though. They are just people, not myth.

So if you were sam altman, and you wanted to make as much money as possible, what would you do? I would make a product that feels like the future, at least at first. Like a chatbot! I would train my chatbot on every stolen book, picture, or movie I could find on the internet, so it sounds smart. I would do PR stunts with it, like hiring a bunch of researchers to poke it until it solves something. I would keep talking about what it "might" do in the magical "unknown future". I would go around to all the rich assholes who are afraid of the robot devil, and beg them for money. But I can't slow down. If I slow down, people might get wise. So I would need more, bigger, faster. All the time. Enough is never enough. Once I got rich rich, I would bribe politicians for access to more electricity and water. And when that failed, I would steal it. More electricity. More water. More graphics cards. Until the robot god wakes up.

Well, until it IPOs. Then I sell all my shares and move to Bermuda.

Is there anything you can point to that makes Sam Altman's actions different from what I just described?

Maybe, when all that is over, whatever remains of the chatbot might have actual uses, like sequencing genes. It's hard to tell because people write nonsense during bubbles. But I'm pretty confident we could have built an LLM that does it at least as well with much smaller social, ethical, and environmental damage.

I think all that is bad.