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Decoding OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad and Sam Altman’s grandiose blog post
Critics of OpenAI would say it's more empty hype designed to continue placating OpenAI's big-pocketed investors.
While reaction to the ad was mixed — I’ve seen more praise and defense for it than criticism in my feeds — it clearly indicates that OpenAI has arrived as a major force in American culture, and quite obviously seeks to connect to a long lineage of invention, discovery and technological progress that’s taken place here. Google’s co-founders, especially Sergey Brin, have put money towards analogous efforts, and in fact, there were (or are) at one point so many leaders in the tech industry interested in prolonging human life and ending disease that back in 2017, The New Yorker magazine ran a feature article entitled: “ Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever.” — but it aligns neatly with the larger techno-utopian beliefs of some in the industry, which have been helpfully grouped by AGI critics and researchers Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres under the umbrella term TESCREAL, an acronym for “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism,” in their 2023 paper.
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