Human Existence Is Just as Wasteful as AI Data Centers, Sam Altman Suggests (decrypt.co)

94 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112633

16 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108221

He speaks for himself.

Sam is best satirized word-for-word

Assuming his brain consumed the usual 20W, throughout his lifetime Einstein's grey matter would have gotten through about 4.6 billion Joules. Some napkin maths tells me ChatGPT consumes that much in about 2.8 milliseconds.

I don't think we're there yet.

Some things sound very clever in your head until you say them aloud.

It would be funnier if ww3 wasn't about to happen with this logic

Call human existence "wasteful" is the epitome of hubris and incredibly dehumanizing. Shows what's on the mind of many Silicon Valley exec types.

This man is not right, and I don't mean only this opinion, something's seriously off.

I agree that people like him are just waste.

I didn't know AI can already take care of my grandma, cook meals, wash, clean-up, fix my car... ;) ;)

I’m thinking less and less about this guy. Gemini is good enough or better than ChatGPT for general purpose use. Codex is slow and rarely outperforms Claude code for my software work. How many billions or trillions is he in the hole again?

Sometimes when I read things like this I despair - AI could be game changing, targetting complex issues around health, genetics etc. Instead its deployed mainly in the continued transfer of wealth from the ordinary man to the billionaire classes. We're ripe for a 'French' style revolution.

What does he think, how wasteful a human existence is that promotes AI data centers?

This would imply that AI data centers are somehow separate, and not just a further increment to the wastefulness of human existence, which is obvious nonsense.

He really goes out of his way to seem like a hack - you'd think he could get some coaching from his synthetic buddy or whatever.

Sam Altmans existence is especially wasteful; for the wealth of his investors.

Can you smell the desperation of these grifters? Whataboutism on a hilarious scale

Remember when he said he couldn't imagine raising a human child without AI?

Why are we still pretending this man is anything but a middle-distance gazing charlatan selling snake oil?

I'm not the best at communicating to say the least, but even me I know how not to be insane

Sooner or later we would have to face the fact that Sam Altman is a deeply peculiar human being and that his personal values, core motivations, goals and ideas are not exactly healthy pro-social ones.

Indeed, we should REALLY start to try to understand the concrete potential implications of the fact that people like Altman and Thiel may not have our best interests in their minds viz. the incredible power they control.