If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
The only thing that stands out as a viable point is the energy consumption, everything else is word salad. As long as the average person isn’t being deprived of their energy needs, I see no problem. It’s the early stages, efficiency can come later in all sort of ways.
What interests me is that all this hype paves the way for intelligence that can interact with the physical world — advanced robots.
And as far as ChatGPT is concerned, its usefulness is a mystery only to contrarians and counter-culture types.