What a soundbite.
Of course, it’s out of context. But out of context or not, it’s clearer and clearer that Sam Altman is out of touch with what mainstream consumers want.
I’ll repeat this again and again:
We didn’t ask for Ramageddon.
We’ve already seen price rises in Apple devices, a company that maintains such strict control of its supply chain in order to maintain its profit margins:
An already expensive Christmas (because of cost of living) is going to be more expensive for parents because of price rises in gaming:
And we have Sam Altman brazenly saying, “that’s some nice RAM you have sitting there. Would be a shame if I just used that for my data centre. Oh wait. I am. You don’t need that RAM. It’s my RAM now.”
For what? Frontier models that have created an unprecedented cybercrime crisis?
We don’t yet know that North Korea and their use of AI is behind the Binance hack, but the FBI believe they’re the prime suspect, and we know North Korea hackers use these tools in their efforts.
Or to quasi-steal the efforts of mathematicians, and to plunge the entire field into a crisis?1This is an entire essay in its own right that touches on the value of non-deliverables in knowledge work, the importance of question discovery in research, and honestly the philosophy of knowledge itself. Solving maths problems with AI tools has utterly upended the culture of mathematics, and you can’t predict the future of what happens to culture.
We don’t want these tools. We didn’t ask for these tools. Outside of programming and coding2There are still issues with AI programming: skill erosion, lower-quality code causing outages… I try to use it as little as possible., they are a distracting entertainment at best, and an ethical nightmare at worst.3Deepfakes. AI psychosis, which has led to tragic deaths, some involving vulnerable teenagers. A threat to the incentives of copyright. A breach in the social contract of the web. I could go on..
Elizabeth Lopatto says it best: “Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want“.
I prefer my gaming devices in my living room. My laptop on my desk. My phone in my hand. I prefer the RAM that sustains those devices there.
Not in data centres in the cloud. To create products I don’t want or need.
This bubble needs to crash.