Is ChatGPT about to Exit-Scam?
Wen AGI? Wen Moon?
A few years ago, I spent 12 months running a YouTube channel on cryptocurrency. In the end, I gave it up because my heart wasn’t really in it. And because I saw the level of hype-driven repetitive behaviour and flat-out scamming going on.
But I found the platforms and the tokens fascinating. Never before in human history had it been possible for someone with a laptop to create their own currency in an afternoon, sign-up a few influencers to hype it like crazy (paying them in the new token which they would cause to attain value) and cash out a week later a multi-millionaire.
Needless to mention, the business attracted those who, let’s say, lacked integrity.
Being a therapist, I actually found the whole process of selling the latest coin to a market of predominantly young men quite fascinating. The buyers seemed transfixed by the possibility of becoming a millionaire without having to work for it and willingly dropped all critical judgment at the altar of FOMO.
It was all about getting the token price to rise, and creating liquidity, such that at the right moment you, the token’s maker and your influencer buddies, could cash out into Bitcoin or US dollars. The losers were the legions who had invested in the coin, driven by meme-fuelled FOMO. The term “exit-scam” came to be common parlance for the final disappearance of the coin and its maker.
Discord and Telegram channels for new coins were a must. And these would be quickly filled with young hopefuls, convinced that this coin would be the one. By 2018, the whole process of attracting people in, giving them stories and memes of insane profits, pumping and dumping, cashing out and exit-scamming, had become entirely automated. Coin-creating players would have ten coins running at a time. Influencers were all paid off in token and alerted as to when to sell their free holdings, whilst the rest watched the ship go down unable to sell as market liquidity vapourized.
Around this time, certain simple memetic sayings had become so ubiquitous, on the Discord and Telegram channels, that they came to symbolise both the hope and the despair of the latest coin’s followers. The two I remember most were…
Wen moon? (When will this coin rise to an all-time high?)
Wen lambo? (When will I make enough money to buy a Lamborghini?)
These days it is easy to place crypto in the category of “scam” in our mind and AI development in an entirely different category. Which I think is fair enough. But when I see on Twitter the endless interrogations of AI makers as to when they will have an AI that has human-like intelligence - AGI - my mind can’t help but conjure up the following meme…
wen AGI?
Because so much of the hype now surrounding AI to me resembles the hype that surrounds the latest dodgy crypto projects.
Enter ChatGPT. Which, assuming you don’t live on the moon, you probably have heard of and have fiddled around with by now. It looks impressive. You ask it a question and it often comes up with a stunningly accurate answer. It certainly impressed me like crazy when I first gave it a go.
Using ChatGPT for the first time, I think it would be entirely reasonable to think something along the lines of, “Wow, AGI must be just around the corner!”
A month or so since its launch, the real picture with ChatGPT becomes clearer. It is very good at making itself look like it is close to AGI - human-like intelligence. Indeed, the CEO of the company that developed it, Sam Altman, has admitted as much…
This week it was announced that Microsoft may put $10 billion into the project, in return for a huge stake in it.
This causes my suspicious mind to wonder whether OpenAI, ChatGPT’s creator, simply developed something that could vaguely resemble AGI, which they could hype like crazy and then sell to the highest bidder?
Will Sam exit-scam with the billions? We shall see.
.... when the machine can see into the picture of your heart , that is wen moon . I recently had an experience that is not actually off topic , it was dichotomous to this , where I was logistically step by step doing something , going somewhere , making a decision , and then , later , after swimming at my club and hot tubbing and finally shower , in the shower , I realized that what I had engaged in was for a reason that had NOTHING to do with what I thought . I thought about this through the night and in the morning , realized that our heart has a PICTURE , but the reasons for that picture are not really logical , or even possibly ever able to be understood . Sure , I used spell check to discover that dichotemous was dichotomous , like hippopotamus ... but , the thoughts , the math , the correct spelling , does not match the laughter in the end .
Reckon Microsoft will be wise to exiting tech CEOs.
Think AI helpful now. Helps me write code. AGI assistance will make me into Superman just as computers, Internet, smartphones did. It's v exciting. Another block in creating new era, along with crypto, mRNA vaccines, homeworking, etc.