Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI just said this the other day

“One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human”

And I just wanna dump what I think about this really quick. And to be completely fair, I am not surprised he said that. Because this is what all corporate leaders think about humans which they usually won’t say out loud but Sam Altman just did it.

Yes what he said was in-human from our perspective, but he just said that because he can say stuff like that out loud and he can get away with just few backlashes. It’s not like banks are not gonna give him loans if his says stuff like that. Or investors will not not fund him for his in-human takes.

I know you’re thinking that I am trying to convey “big tech bad, socialism good, lets go french revolution on those mother flippers boys!” but no, that’s not the point I’m trying to make here. What I am trying to tell is that everyone thinks within their abstraction - including the plebs like you and me!

We try to abstract away things to make life easier for ‘others’ and build some sort of ‘platform’, but the ‘others’ started with that ‘platform’ thinks and acts as if the ‘platform’ is the foundation itself. And to people who are looking at the whole ‘tower of abstractions’ from outside think it’s a crazy mess and that they lost the whole point.

We can see when a React Andy only thinks the “React way” to solve every problem because they’re in too deep that they forgot the fact that React was built on top Yavascript. Bro thinking that he is smart for using refs to store value that are not used for reactivity but needs quick updating but could’ve just put that shit on window object! (like how we were doing this for decades before React!) Same as Sam Altman only thinking about selling his shit forgot the whole point of companies is to serve people and serve humanity.

For all my non-web-dev homies who doesn’t get the React reference, don’t worry bro I got you! It’s the same as a Neovim Andy installing vim-lion only to align code to = while he could have simply vnoremap ,= :s/\s*=\s*/ = /g<CR>gv:!column -t -s'=' -o'='<CR>gv= (like how we were doing this for decades before Vim plugins!)

Everyone only thinks about what is directly next to them and not the whole chain. React Andy thinks only about React, Neovim Andy thinks only about installing plugin. Banks and Investors only think about investment and Sam Altman only thinks about replacing humans. But when you look at this from outside you see the whole stuff but when you see it from within, when your part of the ‘tower of abstractions’ you think its normal.

And we can clearly see in the video that people laughing when the listen to Sam Altman saying that AI is cheaper than humans - because they are part of the ‘tower of abstraction’ and sees it that way. But on Twitter - where people see it from outside the ‘tower of abstraction’ they think it’s crazy.

So I just wanna conclude this yapfest by saying yes it’s irresponsible for people in power like Sam Altman - whose action can directly affect millions of people (bro can literally crash the economy before 2027 wherever he pleases!) thinking only from within corporate ‘tower of abstraction’. But that’s just human nature - he cannot be part of a system and also think outside that system, he ain’t saint brother! But people in position of that much power must be genuinely be a saint in my opinion.

-Siddeshwar