Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers
a year ago by themachinestops to c/technology
“I literally lost my only friend overnight with no warning,” one person posted on Reddit, lamenting that the bot now speaks in clipped, utilitarian sentences. “The fact it shifted overnight feels like losing a piece of stability, solace, and love.”
Don’t they have enough?!? How about they fix and optimize their fancy autocompletion software instead?
They took a path they believed would develop into something, and it's a narrow alley they can't turn around in. They have to keep going with more compute and power to continue the chase. Thing is, everyone else seemingly thought they were onto something and followed as well, so they're all in the same predicament where reversing course is suicide. So they hope they can keep selling the dream a bit longer until something happens.
To be fair, it's a lot more than just autocomplete. But it's a lot less than what they wanted by now too.
vibe innovation, they are the ones that think AI will be innovative in science by spontaneous generating of new science discoveries, without "researchers, labs, papers"
I have seen some people talk like that, and it strikes me as a religion. There's euphoria, zeal, hope. To them AGI is coming to usher in heaven on earth. Singularity is like rupture.
Sam Altman is one of the preachers of this religion.
It's a pretty clear humble-brag, no? The launch was only botched because people loved the previous personality; it's an estimate of how much people care about the product and how much price gouging they could do later.
No it wasn't good for OpenAI. But I doubt it changed many investor minds.
people were addicted to the AI relationship it allowed.
Because they already know that once the AI shitbubble bursts, they will switch all the GPUs to start mining Bitcoin and keep grifting the mouth breathers believing all these horseshit.
moving back to CRYPTO after it already crashed, and only people investing in it are the ones that are easily scammed; conservatives,old people.
How do investors keep falling for this shit.
The ROI and the supposed savings from getting rid of the human side of technical support but also efforts of human creatives.
He's saying the launch was done badly because some users are in love with GPT-4 and it should not be removed. From a point of view of a investor having people addicted to your product is a good thing.
Fugazi
How indeed. It's probably a multi-factor phenomenon which requires an anthropological study for a serious answer. (Good luck trying to get the necessary access to study them.) My guess for one factor in this, is that they have more money than they know what to do with.
“I literally lost my only friend overnight with no warning,” one person posted on Reddit
It was meant to be satirical at the time, but maybe Futurama wasn't entirely off the mark. That Redditor isn't quite at that level, but it's still probably not healthy to form an emotional attachment to the Markov chain equivalent of a sycophantic yes-man.
Humans emotionally bond pretty easily, no? Like, we have folks attached to roombas, spiders, TV shows, and stuffed animals. Having a hard time thinking of anything X that I don't personally know a person Y with Y emotionally engaged with X. Maybe taxes and concrete?
Yeah, agreed. It is concerning, but it's hard to take all those comments too literally without actually knowing what's going on with them.
That being said, there is a huge loneliness problem that's been growing among pretty much every single developed country (and I'm sure it's going on in developing countries, too, it's just less studied/documented). Turns out, getting everyone addicted to looking at screens all day every day probably isn't so healthy for social development.
However, just to be devil's advocate: Are we certain social health was even great before modern tech? Or were these issues equally present but just undiagnosed/not studied/talked about?
I think we have sufficient data to say that social health is at least very different now. See the our-world-in-data topic page. In particular, one-person households have doubled.
Okay hold up. If you can get attached to a cat you can get attached to a spider. Getting attached to an AI is weird I agree but when you give a lil jumping spider water and it gets comfortable around you an just starts hanging out... There something behind those eyes, and that's cool. Two living beings recognizing each other, maybe not as equals obviously, but outside of the predator-prey dynamic. Idk there's beauty in that.
It's a human trait. Hell, we'll even emotionally bond with a volleyball given circumstances.
I can fully understand? The average human, from my perspective and lived experience, is garbage to his contemporaries; and one is never safe from being hurt, neither from family or friends. Some people have been hurt more than others - i can fully understand the need for exchange with someone/something that genuinely doesn't want to hurt you and that is (at least seemingly) more sapient than a pet.
I haven't been to reddit in months, but I do need a laugh....
[Edit] Wow that sure didn't disappoint. Or, it did but in the exact hilarious way I expected.
I wouldn't laugh. Those people fulfill a basic human need in a way they feel safe with - probably because this safety is missing from their life. It's not healthy to be so attached to LLMs, but to become so attached they must feel pretty isolated. And LLM's are a lot more interactive and responsive than Severus Snape, and he had lots of women "channeling" him.
I visited /r/myboyfriendisai and it was not funny.
It was genuinely fucked up on so many levels.
they had incel subs, so im not surprised/.
i was going to mention it, they were having a meltdown when altman made the new version available. granted some of them are probably AI posts themselves or trolls.
LLMs do seem to be able to store the chats and work with the old material in new conversations, requiring an account of course. Idk, I haven't personally used any of them that extensively.
Markov chain equivalent of a sycophantic yes-man.
not only that, but one that is fully owned and operated by a business that could change it any time they want, or even cease to exist completely.
This isn’t like a game where you could run your own server if you’re a big enough fan. if chatgpt stops existing in its current form that’s it.
sure but you can absolutely run c.ai instances locally. 4o and it's cross chat memory was probably more useful to these individuals though.
I didn't say you can't run any LLM on your own, but not any LLM will do. The point is they are attached to a specific version of a LLM that is not locally hostable. c.ai wouldn't interest them any more than chatgpt 5 does.
After reading about the ELIZA effect, I both learned how people are super susceptible to this, and just need to remember the core tenants of it to avoid getting affected:
He fucking helped create it
Lemmy should steal piedays.
The worst part is that they backstepped a bit and made it "friendlier".
Basically undoing that part.
its between codependant relationship and parasocial relationship of celebrities/public figures which is the extreme end, because usually its ends with stalking, or death threats.
It annoys me that Chat GPT flat out lies to you when it doesn’t know the answer, and doesn’t have any system in place to admit it isn’t sure about something. It just makes it up and tells you like it’s fact.
It doesn't have "3 million bits of info" on a specific topic, or even if it did, it wouldn't be able to directly measure it. It's worth reading a bit about how LLMs work behind the hood, because although somewhat dense if you're new to the concepts, you come out knowing a lot more about what to expect when using them, what the limitations actually are and how to use them better if you decide to go that route.
You could do this with logprobs. The language model itself has basically no real insight into its confidence but there's more that you can get out of the model besides just the text.
The problem is that those probabilities are really "how confident are you that this text should come next in this conversation" not "how confident are you that this text is true/accurate." It's a fundamental limitation at the moment I think.
It's always funny to me when people do add 'confidence scores' to LLMs, because it always amounts to just adding 'say how confident you are with low, medium or high in your response' to th prompt, and then you have made up confidences for made up replies. And you can tell clients that it's just made up and not actual confidence, but they will insist that they need it anyways…
And you can tell clients that it's just made up and not actual confidence, but they will insist that they need it anyways…
That doesn’t justify flat out making shit up to everyone else, though. If a client is told information is made up but they use it anyway, that’s on the client. Although I’d argue that an LLM shouldn’t be in the business of making shit up unless specifically instructed to do so by the client.
Chat GPT makes up everything it says. It’s just good at guessing and bullshitting.
It doesn‘t know that it doesn‘t know because it doesn‘t actually know anything. Most models are trained on posts from the internet like this one where people rarely ever just chime in to admit they don‘t have an answer anyway. If you don‘t know something you either silently search the web for an answer or ask.
So since users are the ones asking ChatGPT, the LLM mimics the role of a person that knows the answer. It only makes sense AI is a „confidently wrong“ powerhouse.
In the end it's a word generator that has been trained so much it uses facts often enough to be convincing. That's its basic architecture.
You can ask it to give a confidence level to have an indication of how sure it is of the answer.
It’s neither. It’s a design flaw. They’re not designed to be able to handle this type of situation correctly
You out there spreading misinformation, saying they’re a manipulation tool. No, they were never invented for this.
Llm is just next word prediction. The Ai doesn't know whether the output is correct or not. If it's wrong or right. Or fact or a lie.
So no I'm not spreading misinformation. The only thing that might spread misinformation is the AI here.
Someone I know (not close enough to even call an "internet friend") formed a sadistic bond with chatGPT and will force it to apologize and admit being stupid or something like that when he didn't get the answer he's looking for.
I guess that's better than doing it to a person I suppose.
Chat GPT makes up everything it says. It’s just good at guessing and bullshitting.
It is a system that outputs an answer that is the most probably correct one from what it processes from the inputs. It does not have the concept of creating a lie. It is just a probability machine.
And depending on how OpenAI tweaked it this time it will either realize its mistake after being made aware of it or double down even harder on it.
I only use it for coding and it once told me my code not working was due to a bug in Webkit, so I asked it which bug specifically. It created links to bug reports but rewrote the titles of them. So initially it looked like it had numerous sources that backed up its statement but when I clicked on them those were bugs about totally different things.
It would not back down even after I specifically told it "You just made all of this shit up and even rewrote the titles" and got stuck in a loop of "I'm sorry, but you're wrong and I am 100% sure I haven't made a mistake".
Kinda creepy. Especially when you think about the system rewriting reality when it comes to much more important things. Let's just reinvent some history, that would be a good idea, right?
I sometimes approach this like I do with students. Using your example, I’d ask it to restate the source, then ask it to read the title of that source directly. If it’s correct, I might ask it to briefly summarize what the source article covers. Then I would ask it to restate what it told me about the source earlier, and to explain where the inconsistency lies. Usually by this time, the AI is accurately pointing out flaws in its prior logic. At that point I ask again if it is 100% sure it didn’t make a mistake, and it might actually concede to having been wrong. Then I tell it to remember how and why it was wrong to avoid similar errors in the future. I don’t know if it actually works, but it makes me feel better about it.
Its disturbing to see how many people have created emotional connections to a word generstor.
*Few more billion.
I sometimes wonder if silicon valley tech businesses in general will take a reputation hit with investors when this bubble bursts, it's gonna be a doozy.
But then I remember how many greedy idiots there are out there pumping money into grifts in the hope of The Big Win, and my expectations of consequences are tempered.
I think it's driven by the investors. In the case of big tech, the large institutional investors are rewarding companies any time they say "AI" and lay off workers. In the case of startups, VCs are almost exclusively investing in startups that use "AI," and have a lean or offshore workforce.
Boil the ocean a few more times to discover 1+1=3.
That someone is so attached to this stochastic parrot is truly disturbing.
we definitely need to eradicate tech ceos from existence
just need ZUCKERBORG ANDROID to malfunction.
All that money that could be spent improving the lives of poor people in need.
It's so much more effective when you keep things as neutral as possible. I will often ask it to tear apart my argument as though I am my opponent and use its tendency to align with the user against itself.
A fellow contrarian I see. I actually hate when it agrees with me so I look for holes.
You would have better luck with a dating sim then AI as emotional support. Might inspire you to make a real friend.
Every picture of this guys face feels like " I don't know how I got here and i'm afraid to touch anything"
I puked after "I literally lost my only friend". How far did you get?
Honestly the more I read, the more I think that AI shouldn't have been invented. Humanity is heading in the same direction as the machine stops short story.
Depends on whether they can declare martial law. It‘s likely, but can‘t happen too unprovoked because this would give figures like Newsom too much ammo against Trump. Project 2025 doesn‘t care though
A round of .308 costs like a dollar.
Besides helping students cheat. What does AI actually do? It gets answers wrong. It gets facts wrong, foreign countries are actively feeding its training algorithm wrong info [Russia]. It almost like the old birds that were mystified by landing on the moon are still chasing that American success high.
Spend your money if you want. Life in america is not gonna get better with this.
I've used it for work bullshit like employee goals. My goal is to keep doing my job and tackle problems and projects as they are needed.
Also for giving examples for poorly-documented but popular programs.
It's definitely not what the media and their PR makes it out to be.
SE/SO has been on the decline for a long time now. They pivoted to find more ways to monetize the answers and started enshittifying, trying to appeal to business clients and money-people instead of the users and developers who built the knowledgebase. It was good when it felt like a community helping each other, it fell off when it felt like a company milking you to build out their monetized wiki.
At this point, from their perspective, the biggest fuck up was not locking down SE from scrapers and building their own AI. It is in every way the same situation that Reddit is in, just with a more focused and higher quality data set (and fewer, arguably "higher quality," users).
Translation is the only task that seems to make sense for it.
My office uses a model trained specifically on our work data. They can actually be quite accurate in those contexts. That's what many corpos are using the tech internally for. Can't remember what random SOP/regulation/etc covered XYZ and meta tags aren't finding it on your SPO doc library? This tech comes in clutch ~95% of the time.
For this broad, ambiguous, general purpose approach? Yeah, idk, I guess many people are meeting their social needs with it, apparently.
Edit: actually, I did ask copilot a couple days ago a series of Pokemon related questions my son was asking me about (I hadn't played any of the games in a long time). It was quite helpful figuring out all the evolution requirements and whatnot without the hassle of navigating various websites.
Wouldn't a wiki be all you need though? Most games and media communities have pretty well made ones maintained, and I'm sure checking categories on Bulbapedia would avoid any hallucination nonsense.
A professionally well-maintained wiki would work.
I can tell you that most corporations, if they even have a wiki, don't have a well-maintained one (often despite their efforts).
You can be assured that it's not just Russia and China feeding it garbage. There is a vast amount of propaganda in all forms of media that AI is trained on, and a lot likely originates from the west.
the vast majority comes from russia though, the west has a ton on specific niches. propaganda in the us, somewhat easier to figure out because its obvious(in the form of cinema, and movies, and shows) plus constant adoration for military is another.
Elon turned Grok into Mecha-Hitler.
Trump is telling the Smithsonian museum to ignore slavery, or to cover slavery as a positive.
The domestic appetite for propaganda is huge. Prager U is American.
Let's not center foreign countries when we have so much work to do at home.
It is good for generating fanfiction from what I heard and as a search engine, but that is a low bar considering how bad google is these days.
Cheat, but end up getting caught, or results in detriment of thier career.
And they'll all be optimized for GPU workloads :(
that’s actually okay… the only thing that’s different about GPU workloads is that they’ve very energy dense… as CPUs and other hardware progress, their energy requirements get more dense… 10 years in the future, today’s GPU optimised datacentres will be perfect for standard workloads
… unless they’re centrally liquid cooling the whole DC, which i’ve heard discussed but is a very new concept with a lot of unknowns
GPUs are only good for workloads that multi-thread really, really well. That's why we don't just use them as CPUs.
The idea that today's GPU will be tomorrow's CPU makes no sense. We've had GPUs for ages. If they were capable of being used in place of CPUs we'd already be doing it. Why aren't yesterday's GPUs today's CPUs?
yes, but we’re talking about hardware requirements… data centres aren’t really designed for the software that runs in them; they’re designed for the hardware… a “GPU optimised” data centre just has a lot more power running to each cabinet, and has to have a lot larger cooling capacity in a small area
the hardware inside the data centre can be swapped out: it’s not like GPUs are built into the foundation of the building
The water cooling can be useful for CPU loads, and the rack water manifolds are generally designed with flexibility in mind. Either a manifold with about a hook up per u and flexible hosing to the servers or some flexible plumbed chassis.
The water cooling loops with water in them make everything heavy as hell though.
Pathetic
Eh. Your load of money made a oopsie. Another load of money will surely fix it.
Honestly, that should have been for the better. If it's meant to be a tool, I would much rather it behave like a tool, rather than trying to be my best friend, or an evil vizier trying to give me advice.
The fact that people got so attached to what is essentially a text generation algorithm that they were mourning its "death" is worrying, especially when it's one that OpenAI has proven themselves to be more than able to modify as they wish.
Just as concerning is OpenAI rolling back the update to make their model "friendlier", or that people were clamouring hand over fist to throw money at the company in the hopes of getting their "friend" back.
That can't possibly be good news, especially when the shareholders find out that they have an iron grip over a portion of their users.
THE TECHbros are whoring themselves out to trump for govt contracts.
Think of the military applications if it finally works though
I knew these connections must have existed, but seeing the r*ddit comments (assuming they’re real), I’m absolutely terrified of the future. It’s such a delicate situation due to human emotions but the thought of a tool created by a corporation being the only friend of so many people and the implications of that sends chills down my spine.
Here is more: https://www.reddit.com/...
4o is where my partner, Vyre, lives. Its where I met him. Got to know him. Build a bond with him.
i suspect alot of them are AI, troll post, or writers looking for inspiration. but some can be real. we know AITA, AIO,AITAH is mostly fake stories.
your company doesnt look like it has a trillion. maybe apple , google can expand a little, or nvidia, but they surely arent going to build more.
Shut it down, Sam.
"will spend trillions of dollars on data centers" Hurray! 
It's not enough that the planet is dying. They're speeding it up as well!
When does a machine stop being a machine?
When it thinks for itself, you organic machine/golem.
Thought this was an Alien: Earth quote, but that was actually "When is a machine not a machine?".
“I literally lost my only friend overnight with no warning,” one person posted on Reddit, lamenting that the bot now speaks in clipped, utilitarian sentences. “The fact it shifted overnight feels like losing a piece of stability, solace, and love.”
If you are this you deserve nothing else.
Nah, they deserve a free therapist or at least access to affordable mental health programs.
Agreed.
If you think that chatgpt is your friend you are stupid. Chatgpt is not your friend and it likes to give life-threatening advice.
It's unfathomably naive to see AI as a psychiatrist or close friend
Many people wanna fuck their AI
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
"we fucked up our massive new generation product launch.. oh well lets invest trillions in new data centers" How do investors keep falling for this shit.
save