Sam Altman Is Dangerously Brain-Dead

Was that a hint of dystopian despotic transhumanism?

Photo by Cassi Josh on Unsplash

Something strange happens when grifters and schemers gain power. They get too comfortable and either forget to keep up their machinations or no longer believe they are necessary. Cracks begin to show in their ruse, allowing us to see behind the mask and witness their true intentions. Well, it seems tech bros are now firmly rooted in this phase of their Machiavellian arc, as Sam Altman has just perfectly demonstrated. Altman is known for consistently spewing some of the most brain-dead AI propaganda out there, but he recently turned this up to eleven and exposed his utterly rotten core ideology. The question is, can we collectively recognise this giant red flag and do something about it?

What am I talking about? Well, during a recent interview, Altman complained like a petulant child about the “unfair” comparisons made between AI and human efficiencies. He said, “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. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

Now, on face value, that might seem like an innocent analogy to reframe the current heinous state of AI. But here is the thing: not only is his comparison here totally invalid, but it is also widely dehumanising because it ignores the value of human intelligence and heavily implies Altman’s broader philosophy is deeply anti-human and insanely dictatorial.

Invalid Comparison

Altman’s comparison is deeply misleading. It implies that an AI and a human are equally capable, that AI is a more energy-efficient learner, and, broadly, that AI is more efficient per task. Because none of those statements are true, the basis for the comparison — and the justification for his silly AI — is totally false. But even if this were true, this comparison still devalues the human experience, human rights, and human life, which renders it invalid. We will cross that ethical bridge in a minute, but for now, let’s sort out the technical issues.

Let’s start with the fact that humans are still way more capable than AI. I could pull up a variety of studies to prove my point here, but the most apt is this one by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and Scale AI. This study aimed to figure out how useful AI was in the real world, so they gave six leading AI models proper freelance work and measured their rate of success. They discovered that even the very best models could only complete 2.5% of the jobs. That is a 97.5% failure rate!

For Altman’s comparison to even be remotely valid, human workers and AI need to have comparable capabilities. But in the real world, AI is still light-years away from being even marginally comparable to humans.

And this gap isn’t going to close any time soon. A recent large-scale survey of AI researchers found that 76% of them believe that current AI technology cannot be scaled up to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In other words, for AI to have comparable cognitive abilities to a human would require totally new approaches and technology, not just scaling up the current tech, as the AI industry is doing today. Altman should know this, given that a recent OpenAI research paperfound that increasing computing power or training data can’t decrease “AI hallucinations” and that they have no viable method to do so. Because hallucinations are just errors in the AI and are the primary cause of the substantial failure rates found by the likes of CAIS, this essentially means that shoving more resources into the AI sausage machine, as Altman is trying to do, won’t make them any better, let alone get close to AGI.

But, for argument’s sake, let’s agree that AI is just as capable as humans. Well, we are still more efficient on a per-task basis and at learning. In fact, we are astonishingly more efficient!

The human brain runs on just 12 watts of power, which is less than most LED lightbulbs. This means that over the 20-year period it takes a human to grow up and ‘get smart’, it consumes roughly 2,102 kWh of energy. For some sense of scale, that is slightly more energy than an average EV uses in a year (roughly 8,000 miles per year at 3.8 miles per kWh).

The older, much smaller, and less capable ChatGPT-3 consumed an estimated 1287 MWh during training. This means a human brain uses just 0.16% of the energy to “grow up” as it takes to train an outdated AI. To put that into perspective, the energy used to train ChatGPT-3 is enough to drive our EV nearly five million miles, and it would take 612 years of average use to cover that distance. Here is the kicker, though: ChatGPT-5 is estimated to consume exponentially more energy during training, given that it is a substantially larger model.

Why is there such a huge disparity? Well, we humans are incredibly efficient at learning. As AI pioneer Yann LeCun pointed out, it takes a 17-year-old just 10 to 20 hours to learn to drive safely. Yet despite being fed billions of miles’ worth of training data and using huge support systems (such as GPS, 3D maps, lidar, etc.), AI still fails to drive as reliably or safely as humans (read more here). Quite simply, humans learn at lightspeed compared to AI.

But we are also more efficient at the per-task level, whether the task is small or large.

Foundamental observed that a trained human 3D modeller can create about 1,000 polygons per hour and use roughly 96 Wh of energy doing so. As such, it takes a human 13 kWh to model a single-family home, but current AI would consume some 11.4 MWh to do the same job. That means the human 3D modeller is 875 times more energy efficient!

Likewise, NYU research has found that current AI models consume between 24 and 36 Wh of power to write a page of text (500 to 750 words). But a human writes at a rate of 40–60 words per minute, with error correction and editing taken into account. So, even slow writers only take 20 minutes to write a page, which means a human brain uses at most 4 Wh to write a page (based on the brain’s 12 watts of power draw). In other words, even for this incredibly simple task, a human is six to nine times more efficient! This efficiency is made even more impressive when you take into account that a page of AI-generated text will almost always need heavy editing by a human to be usable.

Sam Altman is either a complete moron who doesn’t understand a thing about AI, or he is a trillion-dollar grifter trying to deceive us all. I will let you decide which.

The Underlying Philosophy

So, technically, we know that Altman is off-the-scale wrong. But what about ethically?

After all, he is comparing AI’s resource use to the resources that people require to survive, without considering the value of human experience, human rights, or human existence in general. This wildly dehumanising omission not only flattens our value as sentient, growing beings to our energy use, but it also insinuates that AI deserves the limited resources we need to survive and thrive because it is apparently more energy efficient (even though it isn’t).

This ideology is a weirdly twisted version of transhumanism that has been brewing in Silicon Valley for decades. Rather than aspiring to transcend biological limitations, it has been perverted into a form of digital eugenics used to legitimise authoritarian power and diminish the value of human experience, allowing rampant and brutal exploitation of the masses while concentrating power and wealth in a technocratic elite. It is a version of transhumanism that enables billionaires to ignore biological and societal constraints to extract all the value they can, including the intrinsic fundamental value of being a human, from the rest of humanity.

Altman is heavily implying that his AI has a stronger claim to resources than humans do. He is implying that people must suffer to enable the machine he controls to grow. He is implying that humans with wants, needs, dreams, love, creativity, a place in society, family, friends, loved ones, children, joy, sadness, hate, and every other messy component of humanity are an obstacle for his machine to overcome and extract, not work with or enhance.

And it isn’t just Altman spewing this kind of twisted philosophy. Remember when Peter Thiel took an age to decide whether humanity should carry on in the face of AI? This is a movement that stemmed from the cyber-anarcho-capitalists of the ’90s, and sadly, it seems almost every tech CEO is now a member to some level.

These are the thought patterns of oligarchs and authoritarians who have no respect for humanity and who want to desecrate it for their own shallow gain. They are using technology to dehumanise us so that they can dominate us. I don’t know if you have ever read a history book, but it is fair to say that this philosophy is not only deeply broken, but also a clear dead end that will always lead to failure, death and destruction if not swiftly and permanently eradicated like the cancer it is.

Summary

This is why interviews like this are total bullshit. Altman’s horrific understanding of AI and obviously harmful philosophy aren’t even questioned, let alone explored or held to account. He was simply allowed to broadcast to the world, which the media brainlessly platformed. He then let his mask slip and waved a gargantuan red flag, warning us all of his intentions. These tech bros are dehumanising the very people the system is meant to serve, all so they can hoard more resources, wealth, and power. Yet it is only the disparate independent voices that are decrying just how broken and dangerous this mentality is.

When this all inevitably comes crumbling down, we will say there were warning signs. We have all the evidence we need to take decisive action. The question is, will we take this action in time? Will investors realise that ethics are an important business fundamental and elect to pull the plug? Will democratic governments finally grow a spine and realise they are meant to serve the people, not these overpaid knobheads? Will the people revolting against AI hit a critical mass? I don’t know; I just hope something is done before these dangerous, delusional morons lead us down a path of no return.

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