Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose company has invested billions of dollars in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has had it with the constant hype surrounding AI. During an appearance on podcaster Dwarkesh Patel's show this week, Nadella offered a reality check, arguing that OpenAI's long-established goal of establishing "artificial general intelligence," (AGI) an ill-defined term that roughly denotes the point at which an AI can best humans on an intellectual level, is nonsense. "Us self-claiming some AGI

“The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent,” he added. “Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we’ll be fine as an industry.”

Needless to say, we haven’t seen anything like that yet. OpenAI’s top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail’s pace and requires constant supervision.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    21 hours ago

    If it seems odd for him to suddenly say that all this AI stuff is bullshit, that’s because he didn’t. He said it hasn’t boosted the world economy on the order of the Industrial revolution - yet. There is so much hype around this, and he’s on the line to deliver actual results. So it’s smart for him to take a little air out of the hype ballon. But the article headline is a total misrepresentation of what he said. He said we are still waiting for the hype to become reality, in the form of something obvious and impossible to miss, like the world economy shooting up 10% across the board. That’s very very different from “no value.”

    • Mak'@pawb.socialEnglish
      3·
      16 hours ago

      He said we are still waiting for the hype to become reality, in the form of something obvious and impossible to miss, like the world economy shooting up 10% across the board.

      That’s such an odd turn of phrase. “We’re still waiting for the hype to become a reality…” and “…something obvious and impossible to miss…”

      So, like, do I have to time to go to the bathroom and get a drink, before I sit down and start staring at the empty space, or…?

      Don’t get me wrong. I work with this stuff every day at this point. My job is LLMs and model training pipelines and agentic frameworks. But, there is something… off, about saying the equivalent of “it’ll happen any day now…”

      It may just, but making forward-looking decisions on something that doesn’t exist—may not come to pass—feels like madness.

      • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Again, you’re twisting the words.

        He said “we’re still waiting” and you’ve twisted that into “any day now.” As if still waiting for something to materialize is the same thing as being certain it will.

        Hype always precedes reality. That’s the nature of hype. If someone says hype is nice but we’re still waiting to see it become reality that is not blind faith in the hype. The complete opposite. It’s restraint.

        Anyway. People get some kind of emotional catharsis from hating AI and shitting on CEOs so I think a fair reading of this is just going to go out the window at any opportunity. I won’t spend any more energy trying to contain that.