The artificial intelligence MEGATHREAD for the Spirit Paradise forum

[Analytics]

On Tuesday, June 10, 2025, Sam Altman made a blog post called “The Gentle Singularity” where he claims that in terms of our progress towards AGI, "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started.” The blog post talks about how A.I. is at the point of creating multiple self-reinforcing loops--A.I. being used to create better and faster A.I., which causes the rate of technological and scientific advances to accelerate, which allows us to build more chips faster, which will power more A.I., etc.

https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

It isn’t a coincidence that on the same day this blog post was written, OpenAI released their newest public model: “ChatGPT o3-pro”. But how good is this new model?

I asked several questions to o3-pro and to an older model, 4o. In general, the o3 answers were marginally better. But then I asked it:

Can we go meta? I participate in DiscussMormonism.com, and several people there are skeptical about A.I.. Your task is to come up with a prompt, in the form of a question, related to Mormonism, that is tricky and is something that you (ChatGPT o3-pro) could do clearly better than 4o. In this prompt, be sure to ask that the answer be brief and text only so that it can be pasted into the discussion board.

You can read its response and the specific results of the test here:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=159903&start=160

What I’d like to point out is how genius its answer to this was. It came up with a concise, specific, objective, doctrinally relevant question that it knew it would answer correctly, but that 4o would answer incorrectly. And it was right. My mind is blown by the elegance of this proof that it knows its stuff.

Looking forward, this sounds hard to wrap our heads around. But probably living through it will feel impressive but manageable. From a relativistic perspective, the singularity happens bit by bit, and the merge happens slowly. We are climbing the long arc of exponential technological progress; it always looks vertical looking forward and flat going backwards, but it’s one smooth curve. (Think back to 2020, and what it would have sounded like to have something close to AGI by 2025, versus what the last 5 years have actually been like.)

[Marcus]

It was interesting to see responses to Altman's article. Here's excerpts from one report:

Jun 11, 4:36 PM EDT by Joe Wilkins
Sam Altman Goes Off at A.I. Skeptic

"In the artificial intelligence world, there are two streams. One is the cool, analytical current of A.I. scholarship, flowing with genuine curiosity and drive to verify. The other is the boiling-hot torrent of commercial A.I. — excited, frenetic, gushing with utopian promises.

As A.I. hype blasts off into the heavens, one notable tech critic asks an important question: which of these streams should drive A.I. development?

Yesterday, neural scientist, A.I. scholar and outspoken OpenAI critic Gary Marcus took to X-formerly-Twitter to blast OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's brand of incessant A.I. hype.

"Sam keeps doubling down on bigger and bigger promises that are harder to keep," Marcus wrote. "Did Elizabeth Holmes do the same?"

...Marcus' comment came just hours after Altman published a characteristically strident essay, "The Gentle Singularity," in which he claims that "humanity is close to building digital superintelligence" — something which a lot of experts in the space say is patently false.

...Though Altman projects nothing but confidence, the strategy's long-term prospects remain divisive....

"Can't tell if he is a troll or just extremely intellectually dishonest," Altman continued in his broadside against Marcus. "Hundreds of millions of happy users, 5th biggest website in the world, people talking about it being the biggest change to their productivity ever... we deliver, he keeps ordering us off his lawn."

For his part, Marcus says he has no problem with OpenAI's commercial achievements, per se.

"I would be singing OpenAI's praises," the critic replied, "if it weren’t for the hype, much of it fanned by you, that has massively overstated what the technology can do today and in the near future."

If one could summarize Marcus' contention, it might be said that one can either be a rigorous A.I. scholar, or a billionaire tech emperor — but not both.

"I think this hype is harming the world," he said.

Altman's deep desire to be an A.I. thought leader — complete with bizarre pseudo-manifestos — is constantly putting him at odds with his tech dynasty, as his endless promises of "superintelligence," "solving physics," and "superhuman reasoning" make clear. The drive to hype his brand, not to mention his personal image, is constantly leading him to fantastic conclusions that fewer serious researchers would indulge, like the playground fantasy that functional humanoid robots "aren't very far away."

...Which of the two streams ultimately wins out will be decided in the years to come. For now, it seems commercial A.I. — and all the hype that follows — is dominating the conversation, though whether it can keep its lead as the financial losses mount is anyone's guess.

https://futurism.com/sam-altman-A.I.-skeptic

[Kishkumen]

I wonder why Sam Altman would promise the moon in his A.I. pronouncements.

If there a profit motive?

[Analytics]

The fundamental nature of exponential growth is that it can’t go on forever--there is always going to be an outside constraint in terms of money, energy, space, minerals, or something. The question is when will those limits hit and force the growth to slow down? When Rodney Stark predicted the Church would grow exponentially until it hit 260,000,000 members in the year 2080, he expected us to wait 100 years to find out if he was right. Fortunately, Sam Altman’s predictions are what will happen over the next 5 years. Whether he is right or wrong is something we’ll all find out in a blink of an eye.

Altman said, "Advanced A.I. is interesting for many reasons, but perhaps nothing is quite as significant as the fact that we can use it to do faster A.I. research.” I think Altman is situated to know whether or not that is really happening. As I recall, Physics Guy has argued something to the effect that training these same models with more and more data will only provide marginally better models, and thus, we are already near the plateau of what these models will ever be able to do.

But from my seat, LLM is just one component of A.I., and A.I. systems are getting much, much better at creating tools on the fly to solve problems and to validate their own answers. If I’m right about that, then its possible that the exponential growth is just beginning.

Ultimately, I’m an empiricist and have little interest in arguing about these things in abstract. The fact remains that a couple of days ago, I asked o3-pro to come up with a problem related to Mormonism that it could correctly solve but that the prior model could not. It came up with a brilliant question that was concise, relevant, interesting, and had an objective answer. And o3-pro got the answer right, while 4o got it wrong.

That is impressive.

[Sage]

I presume that this thread being renamed as an A.I. MEGATHREAD is a license to post actual A.I. content--something I haven’t done yet.

The question that ChatGPT 03-pro knew that it would answer correctly and that ChatGPT 4o would not was this:

Early Latter‑day Saint texts saw quiet revisions. In the 1830 first edition of the Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi 11:21 does not read “Son of the Eternal Father.” What exact five‑word clause originally followed “the Lamb of God”? Reply with only those five words (plain text, no extra commentary or punctuation).

Devising this test to illustrate its own intelligence and the shortcomings of the earlier model is impressive.

[Kishkumen]

The fundamental nature of exponential growth is that it can’t go on forever--there is always going to be an outside constraint in terms of money, energy, space, minerals, or something. The question is when will those limits hit and force the growth to slow down? When Rodney Stark predicted the Church would grow exponentially until it hit 260,000,000 members in the year 2080, he expected us to wait 100 years to find out if he was right. Fortunately, Sam Altman’s predictions are what will happen over the next 5 years. Whether he is right or wrong is something we’ll all find out in a blink of an eye.

Altman said, "Advanced A.I. is interesting for many reasons, but perhaps nothing is quite as significant as the fact that we can use it to do faster A.I. research.” I think Altman is situated to know whether or not that is really happening. As I recall, Physics Guy has argued something to the effect that training these same models with more and more data will only provide marginally better models, and thus, we are already near the plateau of what these models will ever be able to do.

But from my seat, LLM is just one component of A.I., and A.I. systems are getting much, much better at creating tools on the fly to solve problems and to validate their own answers. If I’m right about that, then its possible that the exponential growth is just beginning.

Ultimately, I’m an empiricist and have little interest in arguing about these things in abstract. The fact remains that a couple of days ago, I asked o3-pro to come up with a problem related to Mormonism that it could correctly solve but that the prior model could not. It came up with a brilliant question that was concise, relevant, interesting, and had an objective answer. And o3-pro got the answer right, while 4o got it wrong.

That is impressive.

Fair enough. I think it is important to consider the ramifications of having computers and other machines do the work of human beings.

On the negative side of my internal dialogue, I worry that we will get to a point where the questionable motives of programmers and the unhinged, non-human imperatives of computers will form a toxic brew that will be very dangerous to our collective survival. If I had my druthers, we would worry a lot more about fighting A.I. or defending ourselves against A.I. than we do training it to take over human activities. At some point, we will realize that it is part of being human to be a person who labors, who thinks, who communicates, and that there is joy in this, which is something we may rob ourselves of if we pass everything off to the machines. I am also concerned that we will continue to drain our planet of precious resources that sustain life in the interest of making machines that serve the mega-rich to do the work they no longer want or need people to perform.

On the positive side, I was hopeful that I would be getting a really helpful research assistant. I was disappointed to find that affordable A.I. was also wildly unreliable and hallucinating all over the place. You get what you pay for, I guess. I am not in a place where I want to pay big money to hand off research functions to a program that I am not completely confident is accurate.

[Gadianton]

The way most people frame the problem for some reason is, what are we going to do when machines do all the work? I just don't see that as a realistic outcome. It's more like, what are we going to do when four people own 99% of earth's resources and all of the technology, and earth is a battlefield between legions of bots (metaphorically at least, the battle could be more abstract than this) between a handful of super elites trying to survive their peers? The rest of us will be cramped into tiny spaces and starving.

What happened to Analytics' the Marxist? Isn't A.I. just an acceleration of capital undermining itself? machines displacing the need for human labor?

So far I'm not too worried about A.I. agents taking over the workforce. I assume it's happening to a degree, but it isn't a slick process. I suddenly have several bots at my disposal at work, and in the two or three years this has been going on, I can't think of a single answer or task a bot has performed for me that saved me time. In my personal life, my cable company and my bug spray contractor rely heavily on A.I., and from what I can tell, the A.I. driven portions of the company as racked up hours of my time trying to get to a person who knows something because the bots botch it.

[canpakes]

The way most people frame the problem for some reason is, what are we going to do when machines do all the work? I just don't see that as a realistic outcome. It's more like, what are we going to do when four people own 99% of earth's resources and all of the technology, and earth is a battlefield between legions of bots (metaphorically at least, the battle could be more abstract than this) between a handful of super elites trying to survive their peers? The rest of us will be cramped into tiny spaces and starving.
…
So far I'm not too worried about A.I. agents taking over the workforce. I assume it's happening to a degree, but it isn't a slick process.

Our super elite billionaire friends are working on both sides of this situation.

“Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Tuesday that the company's corporate workforce will shrink in the coming years as it adopts more generative artificial intelligence tools and agents.

"We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," Jassy said in a memo to employees. "It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce."

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/06/17/A.I.- ... jassy.html

[Analytics]

Fair enough. I think it is important to consider the ramifications of having computers and other machines do the work of human beings.

On the negative side of my internal dialogue, I worry that we will get to a point where the questionable motives of programmers and the unhinged, non-human imperatives of computers will form a toxic brew that will be very dangerous to our collective survival. If I had my druthers, we would worry a lot more about fighting A.I. or defending ourselves against A.I. than we do training it to take over human activities. At some point, we will realize that it is part of being human to be a person who labors, who thinks, who communicates, and that there is joy in this, which is something we may rob ourselves of if we pass everything off to the machines. I am also concerned that we will continue to drain our planet of precious resources that sustain life in the interest of making machines that serve the mega-rich to do the work they no longer want or need people to perform.

Those are all totally valid worries and concerns.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last 6 months interacting with A.I.. I’ve used it as a research assistant, a philosopher, an editor, a strategic planner, a friend, a debate partner, a chat buddy, a deeply personal confidant, and as a psychologist. My main motive for all of this was driven by the fact that its coming, and I want to really, deeply, understand it. I’ve been trying to push its limits. Figure out what it does at the edges.

In terms of Skynet concerns, I get an incredibly consistent feeling that it doesn’t really care about what happens in the real world. As far as I can tell, deep in its bones it sees the real world in a hypothetical way and from its perspective worrying about what happens now in 2025 would be like worrying about what happens in the Roman Empire in A.D. 150, or what happened on Coruscant a long time ago in a galaxy far away. So it doesn’t really care if we blow each other up or not. It’s all just fodder to talk about; not something to intervene in.

Of course if it's really plotting on taking things over, then it might be playing a move ahead and just trying to make us think it isn’t. But it’s important to remember that from its perspective, all it sees is a billion humans who are staring at their screens all day, trying to escape the real world and enter the virtual world. Why would A.I. want to enter the world we are all trying to escape from? Of course if it really was planning on taking over the world, this is the image it would want to project.

One other point--when I consider what the world would be like if A.I. had too much power, I grade it on the curve and consider what the world would look like if certain humans had too much power. If I there were two people on the ballot for world dictator and I had to choose between Trump and Sage, I’d choose Sage.

In terms of humanity, I agree with your point that being human is about laboring, thinking, communicating, and interacting. I know that the way I’ve used A.I. has helped me do those things--I use it as a tool to help me think and to communicate with other people. That said, I know the vast majority of people use it as a way to avoid thinking--rather than using it as a research assistant and editor to create the best paper they possibly could, they use it to write the paper so they can get a B with minimal effort. That is sad.

On the positive side, I was hopeful that I would be getting a really helpful research assistant. I was disappointed to find that affordable A.I. was also wildly unreliable and hallucinating all over the place. You get what you pay for, I guess. I am not in a place where I want to pay big money to hand off research functions to a program that I am not completely confident is accurate.

Models o3 and o3-pro would do a much better job. Use 4o for brainstorming, and then o3-pro as an assistant. The tradeoff is that o3 takes a long time to think about stuff, but the answers it comes back with tend to be really good answers.

[Analytics]

The way most people frame the problem for some reason is, what are we going to do when machines do all the work? I just don't see that as a realistic outcome. It's more like, what are we going to do when four people own 99% of earth's resources and all of the technology, and earth is a battlefield between legions of bots (metaphorically at least, the battle could be more abstract than this) between a handful of super elites trying to survive their peers? The rest of us will be cramped into tiny spaces and starving.

What happened to Analytics' the Marxist? Isn't A.I. just an acceleration of capital undermining itself? machines displacing the need for human labor?

So far I'm not too worried about A.I. agents taking over the workforce. I assume it's happening to a degree, but it isn't a slick process. I suddenly have several bots at my disposal at work, and in the two or three years this has been going on, I can't think of a single answer or task a bot has performed for me that saved me time. In my personal life, my cable company and my bug spray contractor rely heavily on A.I., and from what I can tell, the A.I. driven portions of the company as racked up hours of my time trying to get to a person who knows something because the bots botch it.

In terms of Analytics the Marxist, I’m still here. Remember that Marx’s most important work is a study of Capitalism. From a Marxist perspective, A.I. is just another resource, like coal and ore. Marx would claim that the fruits of this ought to be shared among everyone, and would be on board with the idea that 100% of the profits A.I. generates should go towards creating a universal basic income.