Is Altman's return to OpenAI a loss for humanity?
"Meet the old new boss. Same as the old boss." These are the ending lines of a song by The Who, written by Pete Townshend, titled We Won’t Get Fooled Again. The song is in many ways emblematic of what we have seen at OpenAI over the last few days.
The back-and-forth will go down in legend. But what we have really seen is probably the death of any form of artificial intelligence (AI) as a force for good. Let me explain: OpenAI was first a non-profit research lab whose mission was to safely develop AI that was at a human level or beyond, often called artificial general intelligence or AGI (with ‘singularity’ defined as the point at which AI goes beyond human intelligence).
The emphasis was on safety to avoid what Yuval Noah Hariri once warned of in the Financial Times: “Once big data knows me better than I know myself, authority will shift from humans to algorithms." (on.ft.com/49WXB1a) OpenAI found a very productive route in large language models (LLMs) that generate surprisingly good text via a chatbot that sounds remarkably like a human, but what is more striking is that the bot has access to virtually the entire information storehouse that is the internet. This development has come to be known as ‘Generative AI.’ However, Generative AI is extraordinarily inefficient. Poring through 175 zettabytes of data, the entire web in 2022, is a Herculean task.
And this store is growing at warp speed. A zettabyte is equal to 1,000 exabytes, and an exabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes. To put one zettabyte in perspective, consider this: It would take 2,535 years to stream one zettabyte to your device, even if the device had access to some of the fastest commercial networks available today, which are at about 100Gbps (Gigabits per
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