The three stigmas of Sam Altman – 05/21/2023 – Ronaldo Lemos

Last week, Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, was in Brazil. He participated in an event at the Museum of Tomorrow organized by the Lemann Foundation and in a meeting organized the day before by ITS Rio.

Sam chose Brazil as the start of a two-month trip in which he will visit different countries to talk about artificial intelligence. The list of destinations does not include China. Sam advocates that artificial intelligence be regulated and calls on the scientific community and states to create international rules on the issue right now. One of the reasons is that he fears that the idea of ​​an “artificial general intelligence” is close at hand, that is, the moment when machines themselves begin to come up with original ideas.
According to Sam, “We’re just one big idea away from that happening.” According to him, “this will be the last great idea to come from humanity”.

Artificial intelligence is not Altman’s only area of ​​expertise. He is also behind Helion, a nuclear fusion company. Next year, the company promises to carry out the definitive test of the technology most coveted by humanity, capable of generating clean, cheap and unlimited energy.

When asked about global warming, Altman says that the problem will be solved in the next ten years because of nuclear fusion. Oil and other fossil fuels will become, for the most part, useless when that happens (hello Petrobras).

The other problem Sam wants to solve is the issue of digital identities. Many people (including this columnist) have been saying for a long time that the issue of digital identities is the “holy grail” of digital services. It would make it possible to revolutionize public services and greatly reduce problems such as “fake news” and the robots that spread them, to the extent that platforms start to demand the real identification of their users. For this, Sam launched a project to collect the iris of all the inhabitants of the planet, who could receive payments for a cryptocurrency called worldcoin for this.

What do these three Sam Altman stigmas, energy, artificial intelligence and digital identities, have in common? Absolutely everything. A global identity linked to a global means of payment could be the basis for the creation of a universal basic income system. Even without going through governments to be implemented. This would allow them to support those who lose their jobs in the coming years due to the rise of artificial intelligence.

The other pillar, energy, also has everything to do with it. Models based on neural networks consume a lot of energy. A clean and inexhaustible source of energy would be the stigma to allow the perpetual and unlimited rise of thinking machines. If successful, the three stigmas could inaugurate a new “technocene” geological era, making the idea of ​​”anthropocene” a very brief transitional period, in which we only opened wings for the machines.

In the conversation I had with Sam, he revealed that he is a huge fan of science fiction. If he were a writer, his books would probably receive awards in the field, such as Hugo and Nebula. Only, rather than books, Sam’s ambition is to turn us, all of us, into characters in his personal narrative. The prize in this regard is uncertain.

Reader
It’s overNeed to have organized databases to train AI
AlreadyTrain AI with huge databases produced by human activities
It’s comingTrain AI with synthetic data, produced by the machines themselves

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