I watched a snippet of him on Les Fridmans podcast. Now, granted Fridman has kind of outed himself as a complete hack more recently.
Watching those two wring their hands over whether GPT is 'conscious' cemented my opinion that this is all just choreographed pantomime and a white tech-upper class quasi cult.
Anything inflating his ideas into personal space is just a land-grab now.
This thing with white Gentiles and Jews reminds of tennis pros from Scotland. They're described in the English press as Scottish when they lose and British when they win. Likewise, if a member of the tribe does something bad in America it's on whiteness and white supremacy, but if they do something great we suddenly remember that they're Jewish. A conspicuous pattern, and not one that I think is good for relations in the long run.
Presents himself as a “MIT guy” while he did his bachelors and masters at a no name university his dad works at. Always talks about programming, then when asked to elaborate about his experience with GPT and programming, starts to talk about memes. Blocks even prominent people who criticise his research, yet talks about how open minded he is. Only references the most mainstream material. The list goes on…
I watched his interview with John Carmack and I couldn't stand him. Carmack was super knowledgeable and professional, Friedman looked almost bored and not really interested - also wasn't able to follow up on some of the things Carmack was saying. Just struck me as not the best interviewer for that interview - I'm impressed Carmack decided to sit through the whole thing.
> Watching those two wring their hands over whether GPT is 'conscious' cemented my opinion that this is all just choreographed pantomime and a white tech-upper class quasi cult.
Lets just say that both of them are AI bros, and are hype men for O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com and Worldcoin and will do anything to push their new AI grift (Worldcoin) into the public via plain scaremongering nonsense such as GPT being 'conscious'.
I only watched snippets of that, but I thought Altman was saying reasonable things. I'd expected worse based on the general AI wackiness and the vague knowledge that he had some eyeball/crypto thing going on too.
> Worldcoin’s parent company, Tools for Humanity, insists that the process will someday be fully open-source and run by the nonprofit Worldcoin Foundation.
Where have I heard that before... I think it was another Sam Altman venture. Deja vu here, someone help me out.
> A.I.-powered system for evenly distributing money to the world’s population, a form of universal basic income. (...) When a person is scanned, verified, and onboarded to Worldcoin, they are given 25 proprietary crypto tokens, which are also called Worldcoins. The tokens may carry the promise of future riches, but they’re worthless unless the project launches at scale.
This AI stuff and crypto are a natural match. Anyone paying attention to crypto in the last few years has seen the identity experiments happening, and we're in for a ride if OpenAI taps into this.
> The tokens may carry the promise of future riches
ahem Howey test
Any local financial services or data protection agency should present these guys with a list of very awkward questions like "what are you going to do with this data" and "under what circumstances will these 'coins' have value".
No. Pyramid scheme requires people to bring in new money to pay the earlier people.
This is giving “monopoly” money in exchange for eye scans (under the pretense of preventing bots), and hoping for said monopoly money be become valuable
If you're including the VCs that have already invested in Worldcoin(s) and have lots of pre-allocated tokens between them, hoping that new VC money + retail money with an eventual ICO happening, then yes it is indeed a pyramid scheme.
Worldcoin is another 'Scam Altman' pyramid scheme, waiting to pump and dump on retail using AI scaremongering tactics.
Terrible idea. Any form of biometrics are effectively passwords that can not be changed/rotated. If the data is compromised/leaked even once, it's useless.
Edit: That said, one of the other commented this: "Eyeballs are usernames not passwords". I think that's ok-ish...
Maybe when an LLM finally automates my career out of existence, I can make a comfortable living as a kind of ocular bandit, harvesting people's eyeballs for sweet, sweet, Worldcoin™
If you could collect biometric data from every person on the planet and then deploy a simple authentication tool that uses it, you can collect a slice of every financial and commercial transaction that takes place anywhere. Every bank, every credit card company, every payment processor, every retailer both online and brick and mortar, every B2C company in existence would have to pay you around the clock. Conversely, cross them in any way, and your ability to buy or sell anything would be eliminated instantly.
The real stupidity of this, aside from the horrible privacy implications, is the belief that somehow interacting with this device is proving you're human, as the article describes it. Actually, the human operating the device has decided that you are a human. If that person is verifying your ID, they're probably doing so with regular old real-world documents.
What the device is sending upline is nothing more than a number. That number can be used to identify you (with or without a password) and can and will also be used in all the other (bad) ways that identifying information is used. There is nothing special about capturing it with an orb or scanning your eyeballs. That's techno-mysticism, of which Sam is a big fan.
"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping."
Readit News
Watching those two wring their hands over whether GPT is 'conscious' cemented my opinion that this is all just choreographed pantomime and a white tech-upper class quasi cult.
Anything inflating his ideas into personal space is just a land-grab now.
>Sam Altman and Lex Fridman
This thing with white Gentiles and Jews reminds of tennis pros from Scotland. They're described in the English press as Scottish when they lose and British when they win. Likewise, if a member of the tribe does something bad in America it's on whiteness and white supremacy, but if they do something great we suddenly remember that they're Jewish. A conspicuous pattern, and not one that I think is good for relations in the long run.
What do you mean? I'm out of the loop, not arguing with you.
- blocks anybody who looks into his past
- styles himself as an expert version of jre while being a terrible interviewer
- is often misinformed about the subjects of his podcasts.
Lets just say that both of them are AI bros, and are hype men for O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com and Worldcoin and will do anything to push their new AI grift (Worldcoin) into the public via plain scaremongering nonsense such as GPT being 'conscious'.
Maybe I need to watch the full thing.
Where have I heard that before... I think it was another Sam Altman venture. Deja vu here, someone help me out.
Wait, what?
ahem Howey test
Any local financial services or data protection agency should present these guys with a list of very awkward questions like "what are you going to do with this data" and "under what circumstances will these 'coins' have value".
This is giving “monopoly” money in exchange for eye scans (under the pretense of preventing bots), and hoping for said monopoly money be become valuable
Worldcoin is another 'Scam Altman' pyramid scheme, waiting to pump and dump on retail using AI scaremongering tactics.
It is something much more bizarre than a pyramid scheme.
Edit: That said, one of the other commented this: "Eyeballs are usernames not passwords". I think that's ok-ish...
What the device is sending upline is nothing more than a number. That number can be used to identify you (with or without a password) and can and will also be used in all the other (bad) ways that identifying information is used. There is nothing special about capturing it with an orb or scanning your eyeballs. That's techno-mysticism, of which Sam is a big fan.