iPod developer Nest Labs founder and investor Tony Fadell attacked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday during a lively interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco. Commenting on the long history of AI development prior to the LLM epidemic and understanding the serious issues surrounding LLM hallucinations, he said: Not Sam Altman, okay? ”
The comment drew surprised “oohs” from the shocked crowd, amid a handful of applause.
Mr. Fadel was on a roll throughout the interview, touching on topics ranging from what kind of “holes” can create great products to what's wrong with LLMs today.
While he acknowledged that the LLM was “better in certain respects,” he explained that there were still serious concerns that needed to be addressed.
“The LLM is trying to make science fiction a reality, so it's trying to be this 'common' thing,” he says. “[LLMs are] Know-it-alls…I hate know-it-alls. ”
Instead, Fadell suggested using AI agents that are trained on specific things and are more transparent about errors and hallucinations. That way, people will be able to learn everything about AI before “hiring” it for the specific job at hand.
“I'm hiring them to educate, I'm hiring them to be my co-pilot with me, or I'm hiring them to replace me,” he explained. “I want to know what this is,” he said, adding that the government should be involved in enforcing such transparency.
Otherwise, he said, companies using AI will be risking their reputations for “haphazard technology.”
“Right now we're all adopting this, but we don't know what problems it will cause,” Fadel noted. He also noted that there was a recent report that 90% of doctors who used ChatGPT to complete patient reports had hallucinations. “They can kill people,” he continued. “We're using this, but we don't even know how it works.”
(Fadel appears to be referring to a recent report that researchers at the University of Michigan studying AI transcription found an excessive number of hallucinations, which could be dangerous in medical settings.) be.)
This was followed by a comment about Altman, who shared with the audience that he has been working on AI technology for many years. For example, Nest used AI in its thermostat in 2011.
“We couldn't talk about AI. We couldn't talk about machine learning,” Fadel said. ”