[HN Gopher] OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: clos...
___________________________________________________________________
OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and
for-profit
Author : isaacfrond
Score : 1362 points
Date : 2023-03-01 08:21 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| fernvenue wrote:
| Tha's why they bought ai.com lol.
| 13years wrote:
| There are many that are looking for AI to be an escape from all
| of humanities flaws. We can't ignore the feedback loop in the
| creation of AI.
|
| Essentially, we just end up encoding all of our flaws back into
| the machine one way or another.
|
| This is the argument I laid out in the Bias Paradox.
|
| https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-the-bias-paradox
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, the only accessible text model in any raw form is from
| them. Google doesn't let you have any. Meta doesn't let you have
| any. Microsoft doesn't let you have any. But OpenAI, OpenAI is
| accessible to all. It is open in the sense that the park is open.
| I don't own the park, I can't modify the park to my desires, but
| I can go to the park. And since that's better than the rest, I am
| happy to give them my money.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| All the people that got taken into their lies are seriously
| foolish and naive. Anyone that thinks they can work on AI without
| their work ending up in a military/surveillance application is
| seriously foolish and naive.
| mellosouls wrote:
| This seems an important article, if for no other reason than it
| brings the betrayal of its foundational claim still brazenly
| present in OpenAI's name from the obscurity of HN comments going
| back years into the public light and the mainstream.
|
| They've achieved marvellous things, OpenAI, but the pivot and
| long-standing refusal to deal with it honestly leaves an
| unpleasant taste, and doesn't bode well for the future,
| especially considering the enormous ethical implications of
| advantage in the field they are leading.
| wolpoli wrote:
| I feel betrayed whenever these organizations initially toot
| their own horns on how they are open or they are a charity, but
| then later on, change their goals or corporate structure with a
| vague press release. They then continue to keep the same name,
| allowing them to ride on their goodwill.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| And it's easy to believe that the betrayal was their
| intention all along as soon as they saw technological
| breakthroughs that could be monetized. It's hard to see why
| Sam Altman would be interested in non profits given his
| background in startups.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >This seems an important article, if for no other reason than
| it brings the betrayal of its foundational claim still brazenly
| present in OpenAI's name from the obscurity of HN comments
| going back years into the public light and the mainstream.
|
| The thing is, it's probably a good thing. The "Open" part of
| OpenAI was always an almost suicidal bad mistake. The point of
| starting the company was to try and reduce p(doom) of creating
| an AGI and it's almost certain that the more people have access
| to powerful and potentially dangerous tech that p(doom)
| increases. I think OpenAI is one of the most dangerous
| organizations on the planet and being more closed reduces that
| danger slightly.
| fragsworth wrote:
| I'm curious what you think makes them dangerous?
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| For long form, I'd suggest cold-takes blog who is very
| systematic thinker and has been focusing on agi risk
| recently. https://www.cold-takes.com
| fragsworth wrote:
| I see a lot of "we don't know how it works therefore it
| could destroy all of us" but that sounds really handwavy
| to me. I want to see some concrete examples of how it's
| dangerous.
| CuriousSkeptic wrote:
| Simpler, less powerful, models have already contributed
| to increases in suicides, genocide and a worldwide
| epidemic of stupidity.
|
| Assuming more powerful models will have the same goals
| extrapolate the harm caused by simple multiplication
| until you run out of resilience buffer
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Given that the link contains dozens of articles with read
| times over 10 minutes there is no way you engaged with
| the problem enough to be able to dismiss it so casually
| with yourcown hand waving. Ignoring that fact however we
| can just look at what Bing and ChatGPT have been up to
| since release.
|
| Basically immediately after release both models were
| "jailbroken" in ways that allowed them to do undesirable
| things that OpenAI never intended whether that's giving
| recipes for how to cook Meth or going on unhinged rants
| and threatening to kill the humans they are chatting
| with. In the AI Safety circles you would call these
| models "unaligned", they are not aligned to human values
| and do things we don't want them to. HERE is THE problem,
| as impressive as these models may be I don't think anyone
| thinks they are really at human levels of intelligence or
| capability, maybe barely at like mouse level intelligence
| or something like that. Even at that LOW level of
| intelligence these models are unpredictably
| uncontrollable. So we haven't even figured out how to
| make these "simple" models behave in ways we care about.
| So now lets project forward to GPT-10 which may be at
| human level or higher and think about the things it may
| be able to do, we already know we can't control far
| simpler models so it goes without saying that this model
| will likely be even more uncontrollable and since it is
| much more powerful it is much more dangerous. Another
| problem is that we don't know how long before we get to a
| GPT-N that is actually dangerous so we don't know how
| long we have to make it safe. Most serious people in the
| field think making Human level AI is a very hard problem
| but that making a Human level AI that is Safe is another
| step up in difficulty.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Are people dangerous? Yes or no question.
|
| Do we have shitloads of regulations on what people can or
| cannot do? Yes or no question.
| fragsworth wrote:
| Sometimes yes, and sometimes yes.
|
| I can be convinced, I just want to see the arguments.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| They are releasing powerful AI tools at an alarming rate
| before Safety, and I mean real Safety, Researchers have a
| chance to understand their implication. They are generating
| an enormous amount of buzz and hype which is fueling a
| coming AI arms race that is extremely dangerous. The
| Control Problem is very real and becoming more pressing as
| things accelerate. Sam has recently given lip service to
| caring about the problem but OpenAI's actions seem to
| indicate it's not a major priority. There was a hint that
| they cared when they thought GPT-2 was too dangerous to
| release publicly but at this point if they were serious
| about safety no model past ChatGPT and Bing would be
| released to the public at all, full stop.
|
| https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond/
|
| Based on Sam's statement they seem to be making a bet that
| accelerating progress on AI now will help to solve the
| Control problem faster in the future but this strikes me as
| an extremely dangerous bet to make because if they are
| wrong they are reducing the time the rest of the world has
| to solve the problem substantially and potentially closing
| that opening enough that it won't be solved in time at all
| and then foom.
| Filligree wrote:
| > Based on Sam's statement they seem to be making a bet
| that accelerating progress on AI now will help to solve
| the Control problem faster in the future but this strikes
| me as an extremely dangerous bet to make because if they
| are wrong they are reducing the time the rest of the
| world has to solve the problem substantially and
| potentially closing that opening enough that it won't be
| solved in time at all and then foom.
|
| Moreover, now that they've started the arms race, they
| can't _stop_. There 's too many other companies joining
| in, and I don't think it's plausible they'll all hold to
| a truce even if OpenAI wants to.
|
| I assume you've read Scott Alexander's taken on this?
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/openais-planning-
| for-a...
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Yeah I mean a significant problem is that many(most?)
| people including those in the field until very recently
| thought AIs with these capabilities were many decades if
| not centuries away and now that people can see the light
| at the end of the tunnel there is massive Geo-political
| and Economic incentive to be the first to create one. We
| think OpenAI vs Deepmind vs Anthropic vs etc. is bad but
| wait until it's US vs China and we stop talking about
| billion dollar investments in AI research and get into
| the Trillions.
|
| Scott's Exxon analogy is almost too bleak to really
| believe. I hope OpenAI is just ignorant and not
| intentionally evil.
| rippercushions wrote:
| To quote Spaceballs, they're not doing it for money, they're
| doing it for a _shitload_ of money.
| djyaz1200 wrote:
| They are following the Residential Real Estate Developer
| Playbook, always name your for profit exploitation project
| after the beautiful organic thing you destroyed to pave the
| way for it...
|
| Examples Whispering pines, Blue Heron Bay, OpenAI
| startupsfail wrote:
| Hadn't OpenAI published all the key research results to
| repro ChatGPT? And made their model available to literally
| everyone? And contributed more than anyone else to AI
| alignment/safety?
|
| To me it looks like nearly every other player, including
| open source projects are there for short term fame and
| profit, while it's the OpenAI that is playing the long game
| of AI alignment.
| [deleted]
| Filligree wrote:
| You're not wrong, but existential threats and possible
| extinction is in the _future_ ; maybe ten-fifteen years
| away if we're lucky.
|
| Meanwhile, we don't get to play with their models right
| now. Obviously that's what we should be concerned about.
| Julesman wrote:
| Among all the accepted threats to humanity's future, AI
| is one of the least founded at this point. We all grew up
| with this cautionary fiction. But unless you know
| something everyone else doesn't, the near term
| existential threat of AI is relatively low.
| mach1ne wrote:
| >Near term relatively low
|
| Precisely. Above 1% so in the realm of possible, but
| definitely not above 50% and probably not above 5% in the
| next 10-15 years. My guesstimate is around 1-2%.
|
| But expand the time horizon to the next 50 years and the
| cognitive fallacy of underestimating long-term progress
| kicks in. That's the timescale that actually produces
| scary high existential risk with our current trajectory
| of progress.
| epolanski wrote:
| I can see AI being used in safety critical systems like
| cars, it's already happened and it has already killed
| people.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-
| ruin-a...
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| What strong evidence of existential threat are you
| expecting to see before it's already too late to avoid
| catastrophe?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Existential threat is a bit hyperbolic. Worst case
| scenario, lots of people might lose their jobs, and some
| will go hungry as we restructure our economy.
|
| War with Russia is literally an existential threat.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Your worst-case scenario looks very close to my best-case
| scenario!
| ves wrote:
| Once-in-a-century weather patterns happening multiple
| times per decade, that sort of thing.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| That would make sense for climate change, but the context
| of this thread is a discussion about AI. Why would that
| be evidence of an existential threat from AI?
| mcguire wrote:
| What strong evidence do you have that AGI (1) is possible
| in the foreseeable future, and (2) will be more a threat
| than any random human?
| tremon wrote:
| Why should we need AGI for AI to be more of a threat than
| a random human? We already have assassination bots that
| allow people to be killed from across the globe. Add in
| your average sociopathic corporation and a government
| that has a track record of waging wars to protect its
| economic interests, and AGI becomes no more than a drop
| in that same bucket.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| (You didn't respond with an answer to my question, which
| discourages me from answering yours! But I'll answer any
| way in good faith, and I hope you will do the same).
|
| (1) Possible in the forseeable future: The strongest
| evidence I have is the existence of humans.
|
| I don't believe in magic or the immaterial human soul, so
| I conclude that human intelligence is in principle
| computable by an algorithm that could be implemented on a
| computer. While human wetware is very efficient, I don't
| think that such an algorithm would require vastly greater
| compute resources than we have available today.
|
| Still, I used to think that the algorithm itself would be
| a very hard nut to crack. But that was back in the olden
| days, when it was widely believed that computers could
| not compete with humans at perception, poetry, music,
| artwork, or even the game of Go. Now AI is passing the
| Turing Test with flying colours, writing rap lyrics,
| drawing beautiful artwork and photorealistic images, and
| writing passable (if flawed) code.
|
| Of course nobody has yet created AGI. But the gap between
| AI and AGI is gradually closing as breakthroughs are
| made. It seems increasingly to me that, while there are
| still some important, un-cracked nuts to the hidden
| secrets of human thought, they are probably few and
| finite, not as insurmountable as previously thought, and
| will likely yield to the resources that are being thrown
| at the problem.
|
| (2) AGI will be more of a threat than any random human: I
| don't know what could count as "evidence" in your mind
| (see: the comment that you replied to), so I will present
| logical reasoning in its place.
|
| AGI with median-human-level intelligence would be more of
| a threat than many humans, but less of a threat than
| humans like Putin. The reason that AGI would be a greater
| threat than most humans is that humans are physically
| embodied, while AGI is electronic. We have established,
| if imperfect, security practices against humans, but none
| tested against AGI. Unlike humans, the AGI could feasibly
| and instantaneously create fully-formed copies of itself,
| back itself up, and transmit itself remotely. Unlike
| humans, the AGI could improve its intrinsic mental
| capabilities by adding additional hardware. Unlike
| humans, an AGI with decent expertise at AI programming
| could experiment with self-modification. Unlike humans,
| timelines for AGI evolution are not inherently tied to a
| ~20 year maturity period. Unlike humans, if the AGI were
| interested in pursuing the extinction of the human race,
| there are potentially methods that it could use which it
| might itself survive with moderate probability.
|
| If the AGI is smarter than most humans, or smarter than
| all humans, then I would need strong evidence to believe
| it is _not_ more of a threat than any random human.
|
| And if an AGI can be made as smart as a human, I would be
| surprised if it could not be made smarter than the
| smartest human.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > As another example, we now believe we were wrong in our
| original thinking about openness, and have pivoted from
| thinking we should release everything (though we open
| source some things, and expect to open source more
| exciting things in the future!) to thinking that we
| should figure out how to safely share access to and
| benefits of the systems.
|
| https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond
| wpietri wrote:
| Well gosh, what could be a safer way to share than giving
| access to people with money? Since we live in a
| meritocracy, we're basically guaranteed that anybody with
| money to spend is virtuous, and vice versa.
| Smoosh wrote:
| Excuse me, I have to go to the store to get a refill for
| my sarcasm detector. Your one comment completely emptied
| the tank.
| 93po wrote:
| OpenAI, if successful, will likely become the most valuable
| company in the history of the planet, both past and future.
| teekert wrote:
| Really? I feel like they'll go the way of Docker, but
| faster: Right now super hot, nice tools/API, great PR. But
| it's build on open and known foundations, soon GPTs will be
| commodity and then something easier/better FOSS will arise.
| It may take some time (2-3 years?) but this scenario seems
| most likely to me.
|
| Edit: Ah didn't get the "reference", perhaps indeed it will
| be the last of the tech companies ever indeed, at least one
| started by humans ;).
| startupsfail wrote:
| Possible. Coding as we know it might get obsolete. And it
| is a trillion dollar industry.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Coding as we know it might get obsolete. And it is a
| trillion dollar industry._
|
| freeing up that many knowledge workers to do other things
| will grow the economy, not shrink it, a new industrial
| revolution
| rnk wrote:
| That's an excellent point that I don't think is made
| enough. The great pay and relative freedom software
| engineering provides the technically-minded people of the
| world is great for us, yet starves many other important
| fields from more technical innovation because of not
| enough workers in those fields.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Can you explain? I think I'm reading it wrong, but it
| seems as though you're saying the presence of something
| is what causes starvation of that thing.
| fsckboy wrote:
| no, he's saying other areas that could use smart people
| are being starved of a certain type of smart, analytical
| people, for example the types or quantities of people who
| might be attracted to the medical field.
|
| Lester Thurow, a pretty left liberal economist, pointed
| out that women's "liberation" and entrance into the
| general workforce had starved teaching/education of the
| pool of talented women that had previously kept the
| quality of education very high. (His mother had been a
| teacher.)
|
| I (who had studied econ so I tend to think about it)
| noticed at the dawn of the dot-com boom how much of
| industry is completely discretionary even though it seems
| serious and important. Whatever we were all doing before,
| it got dropped so we could all rush into the internet.
| The software industry, which was not small, suddenly
| changed its focus, all previous projects dropped, because
| those projects were suddenly starved of capital, workers,
| and attention.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Exactly what?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Yes; hopefully they get good at working with their hands.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Well, yes, because then maybe I won't have to pay
| $250/hour to have my car fixed.
| teekert wrote:
| I have ChatGPT make up some code every now and then. It's
| really nice and when not obscure usually directly
| useable. By you need to understand what it produces imo.
| I love that it also explains the code and I can follow
| code it generates and judge its quality and
| applicability. Isn't that important?
| Filligree wrote:
| Last year the output was poor. The year before then, GPT
| essentially couldn't write code at all...
|
| You're not wrong about its quality right now, but let's
| look at the slope as well.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| The whole model is wrong. We don't need an AI that just
| spits out words that look like words its seen before. We
| need it to understand what its doing.
|
| Midjourny needs to understand that its drawing a hand,
| that hands have 5 fingers.
|
| Nobody will use Bing chat for anything important. Its
| like asking some some random guy on the train. He might
| know the answer, and if its not important then fine, but
| if it is important, say the success of your business,
| you're going to want talk to somebody who actually knows
| the answer.
| rvnx wrote:
| The new models similar to Midjourney (Stable diffusion)
| and notably Deliberate v3 can perfectly draw anatomy now
| and you can even choose how many fingers you want.
| buddhistdude wrote:
| on the other hand, gpt-3 was trained on a data set that
| contains all of the internet already. A big Limitation
| seems to be that it can only work with problems that it
| has already seen
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean a huge amount of code I see is stuff like "get
| something from API, do this, and pass to API/SQL" so I'm
| assuming a lot of that could be automated.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > on the other hand, gpt-3 was trained on a data set that
| contains all of the internet already
|
| This fact has made me cease to put new things on the
| internet entirely. I want no part of this, and while my
| "contribution" is infinitesimally small, it's more than I
| want to contribute.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Are there any companies like Docker? They feel like such
| a Black Swan to me; namely -- "billions" + very useful +
| pretty much "not evil _" at all. I literally can 't think
| of any others.
|
| _I don't mean "literally evil" of course, I personally
| acknowledge the need to make money et al, but I mean it
| even seems like your most Stallman-esque types wouldn't
| have too much of a problem with Docker?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Netflix?
| jrm4 wrote:
| Don't know why this was downvoted, I tend to agree.
| There's a clear relationship between the money and the
| product. Pay money, receive access to a bunch of shows.
| (as opposed to, e.g. SEO click-view advertising
| shadiness)
| goodpoint wrote:
| > Are there any companies like Docker?
|
| Let's hope not.
|
| > "not evil" at all
|
| Sarcasm?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| What's evil about Docker (the company)?
| ynx wrote:
| While I have no problem with Docker, it probably _is_
| worth noting that their entire product is based on a
| decade and a half of Google engineering invested into the
| Linux kernel (cgroups).
|
| Not that that demeans or devalues Docker, but it
| contextualizes its existence as an offshoot of a Google
| project that aimed to make it possible (and did, but only
| internally)
| jankeymeulen wrote:
| So is OpenAI actually, GPT -> transformer, invented at
| Google. DALL-E -> diffusion, invented at ... Google.
| margorczynski wrote:
| Seems like maybe many of their products are mediocre and
| short-lived but their engineering and research are top-
| notch.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Eh.
|
| I think that keeping it permanently closed source when it
| has such amazing potential for changing society is
| unethical bordering on evil.
|
| However,
|
| I think the technology and the datasets will trickle out,
| perhaps a few years behind, and in time we will have truly
| open "AI" algos on our home computers/phones.
| justinclift wrote:
| So, you reckon they're effectively operating like Google
| then?
| ratorx wrote:
| Really? I see a lot of competition in the space. I think
| they'd have to become significantly more successful than
| their competitors (some of which are massive AI powerhouses
| themselves) to achieve the market dominance necessary.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I think what GP is saying is that success of OpenAI means
| making a lot of profit, and then _triggering the AI
| apocalypse_ - which is how they become most valuable
| company in history both past _and future_.
| novaRom wrote:
| Can you elaborate, what is "the AI apocalypse"? Is it
| just a symbolic metaphor or is there any scientific
| research behind this words? For me it's rather more
| unpredictable toxic environment we observe in the world
| currently, dominated by purely human-made destructive
| decisions, often based on purely animal instincts.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| If the assertion that GPT-3 is a "stochastic parrot" is
| wrong, there will be an apocalypse because whoever
| controls an AI that can reason is going to win it all.
|
| The opinions that it is or isn't "reasoning" are widely
| varied and depend heavily on interpretation of the
| interactions, many of which are hersey.
|
| My own testing with OpenAI calls + using Weaviate for
| storing historical data of exchanges indicates that such
| a beast appears to have the ability to learn as it goes.
| I've been able to teach such a system to write valid SQL
| from plain text feedback and from mistakes it makes by
| writing errors from the database back into Weaviate
| (which is then used to modify the prompt next time it
| runs).
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-
| ruin-a...
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Is it just a symbolic metaphor or is there any
| scientific research behind this words?
|
| Of course there is. See (Cameron, 1984)
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator)
| flangola7 wrote:
| Without AI control loss: Permanent dictatorship by
| whoever controls AI.
|
| With AI control loss: AI converts the atoms of the
| observable universe to maximally achieve whatever
| arbitrary goal it thinks it was given.
|
| These are natural conclusions that can be drawn from the
| implied abilities of a superintelligent entity.
| klibertp wrote:
| > whatever arbitrary goal it thinks it was given [...]
| abilities of a superintelligent entity
|
| Don't these two phrases contradict each other? Why would
| a super-intelligent entity need to be given a goal? The
| old argument that we'll fill the universe with staplers
| pretty much assumes and requires the entity NOT to be
| super-intelligent. An AGI would only became one when it
| gets the ability to formulate its own goals, I think. Not
| that it helps much if that goal is somehow contrary to
| the existence of the human race, but if the goal is self-
| formulated, then there's a sliver of hope that it can be
| changed.
|
| > Permanent dictatorship by whoever controls AI.
|
| And _that_ is honestly frightening. We know for sure that
| there are ways of speaking, writing, or showing things
| that are more persuasive than others. We 've been
| perfecting the art of convincing others to do what we
| want them to do for millennia. We got quite good at it,
| but as with everything human, we lack rigor and
| consistence in that, even the best speeches are uneven in
| their persuasive power.
|
| An AI trained for transforming simple prompts into a
| mapping of demographic to what will most likely convince
| that demographic to do what's prompted doesn't need to be
| an AGI. It doesn't even need to be much smarter than it
| already is. Whoever implements it first will most likely
| first try to convince everyone that all AI is bad (other
| than their own) and if they succeed, the only way to
| change the outcome would be a time machine or mental
| disorders.
|
| (Armchair science-fiction reader here, pure speculation
| without any facts, in case you wondered :))
| flangola7 wrote:
| The point of intelligence is to achieve goals. I don't
| think Microsoft and others are pouring in billions of
| dollars without the expectation of telling it to do
| things. AI can already formulate its own sub-goals, goals
| that help it achieve its primary goal.
|
| We've seen this time and time again in simple
| reinforcement learning systems over the past two decades.
| We won't be able to change the primary goal unless we
| build the AGI so that it permits us because a foreseeable
| sub-goal is self-preservation. The AGI knows if its
| programming is changed the primary goal won't be
| achieved, and thus has incentive to prevent that.
|
| AI propaganda will be unmatched but it may not be needed
| for long. There are already early robots that can carry
| out real life physical tasks in response to a plain
| English command like "bring me the bag of chips from the
| kitchen drawer." Commands of "detain or shoot all
| resisting citizens" will be possible later.
| rvz wrote:
| Complete nonsense. Especially with the "If"
|
| It is inevitable that the regulators will get in the way
| and open source alternatives will also catch up with OpenAI
| as they have done with GPT-3 and with DALLE-2 and even less
| than 2 months of ChatGPT, open source alternatives are
| quickly appearing everywhere.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Let's hope that they aren't there, given your nicely
| concealed prediction it'll be the end of the world as we
| know it.
| ejb999 wrote:
| seriously doubt it - what they are doing, others can do -
| and if they start generating a lot of revenue, it will
| attract competition - lots of it.
|
| They don't have a moat big enough that many millions of
| dollars can't defeat.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Others might be able to. It's not trivial to get the
| capital needed to purchase enough compute to train LLMs
| from scratch and it's not trivial to hire the right
| people who can actually make them work.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| What if they have an internal _ChatGPTzero_ , training
| and reprogramming itself, iterating at inhuman speed? A
| headstart in an exponential is a moat.
|
| It surely will have huge blindspots (and people do too),
| but perhaps it will be good enough for self-
| improvement... or will be soon.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| It's a fundamentally different problem. AlphaZero
| (DeepMind) was able to be trained this way because it was
| setup with an explicit reward function and end condition.
| Competitive self-play needs a reward function.
|
| It can't just "self-improve towards general
| intelligence".
|
| What's the fitness function of intelligence?
| hyperthesis wrote:
| Thanks, good point. Thinking aloud:
|
| Can ChatGPT evaluate how good ChatGPT-generated output
| is? This seems prone to exaggerating blind-spots, but
| OTOH, creating and criticising are different skills, and
| criticising is usually easier.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Actually you are stating 2 different problems at the same
| time.
|
| A lot of intelligence is based around "Don't die, also,
| have babies". Well AI doesn't have that issue as long as
| it produces a good enough answer we'll keep the power
| flowing to it.
|
| The bigger issue, and one that is likely far more
| dangerous, is "Ok, what if it could learn like this".
| You've created super intelligence with access to huge
| amounts of global information and is pretty much immortal
| unless humans decide to pull the plug. The expected
| alignment of your superintelligent machine is to design a
| scenario where we cannot unplug the AI without suffering
| some loss (monetary is always a good one, rich people
| never like to lose money and will let an AI burn the
| earth first).
|
| The alignment issue on a potential superintelligence is,
| I don't believe, a solvable problem. Getting people not
| to be betraying bastards is hard enough at standard
| intelligence levels, having a thing that could
| potentially be way smarter and connected to way more data
| is not going to be controllable in any form or fashion.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| It's just an autocomplete engine. Someone else will achieve
| AGI and OpenAI falls apart very quickly when that occurs.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| No, it's not _just_ an autocomplete engine. The
| underlying neural network architecture is a transformer.
| It certainly can do "autocomplete" (or riffs on
| autocomplete), but it can also do a lot more. It doesn't
| take much thought to realize that being _REALLY_ good at
| autocomplete means that you need to learn how to do a lot
| of other things as well.
|
| At the end of the day the "predict next word" training
| goal of LLMs is the ultimate intelligence test. If you
| could always answer that "correctly" (i.e. intelligently)
| you'd be a polymath genius. Focusing on the "next word"
| ("autocomplete") aspect of this, and ignoring the
| knowledge/intelligence needed to do WELL at it is rather
| misleading!
|
| "The best way to combine quantum mechanics and general
| relativity into a single theory of everything is ..."
| iKlsR wrote:
| Random aside, they recently bought https://ai.com which
| redirects to chat gpt atm but it wouldn't surprise me if they
| plan to drop the open eventually or move their paid stuff to it
| as they do have open source stuff that merits the name.
| andrepd wrote:
| Seriously, is there anyone naive enough to have swallowed any
| of their trips? Corporations don't have ethical compasses, much
| less corporations founded by VCs aka professional salesmen.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Isn't that the point that it wasn't founded as a corporation,
| nor by Sam Altman?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#:~:text=The%20organizat.
| ...
| IncRnd wrote:
| "Non-profit" refers to the tax-exempt status. "Corporation"
| is an organizational structure. The designations do not
| have to overlap but sometimes do. [1] It isn't clear from
| the wiki page whether it was founded as a corporation or
| not. The content of the filings are the only way to tell.
|
| [1] https://smallbusiness.chron.com/difference-between-
| nonprofit...
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| It was funded by a VC, a VC, a VC, a sociopath, a token
| computer scientist and another psychopath.
|
| Needless to say, that's a lot of shitty people in the same
| place. There was no other end state for it.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| who matches which descriptor? (and i personally pretty
| much agree)
| uoaei wrote:
| > There was no other end state for it.
|
| I agree, but I am curious and have a question for the
| less cynical: how could it have gone another way? How
| does one run a company that requires surviving in a harsh
| market that avoids these seeming inevitabilities? And in
| the case of the people running it, what made you think it
| would be different from their other ventures?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| You make it an employee owned cooperative and not a for-
| profit company and have opt-in to the data collection
| with profits going to employees and data providers
| instead of investors.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| How do you raise the giant sums of money needed to
| operate for years before any profits happen?
| rhtgrg wrote:
| ?
| uoaei wrote:
| Any cursory glance at their funding streams makes it
| pretty obvious how the underlying business incentives
| express themselves.
|
| This isn't an "all companies are bad" argument, it's a
| "duh, that's how business works" argument. If your
| founding team is full of VCs and they decide they need to
| pay top wages using other VCs' money, well, maybe you can
| take it from there.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Public research. The only reason it went this way is
| because it is run by people who have a singular goal in
| their mind: see the number in their bank account get one
| more zero. I'm sure Sam Altman loves AI, but ultimately,
| it's not him working on it, he just sees it as a way to
| make more money. To paraphrase someone else, don't make
| the mistake of anthropomorphizing VCs.
|
| An equally talented team of researchers and engineers
| (which, you know, we could actually pay well if the money
| wasn't being concentrated in these billionaires) could
| make ChatGPT, Bard or anything else. Hell, they could
| even make it something useful. This technology is too
| important to be left in the hands of a few.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > The only reason it went this way
|
| OpenAI's existence doesn't stop any government funding
| equivalent research.
|
| > (which, you know, we could actually pay well if the
| money wasn't being concentrated in these billionaires)
|
| No. The government prints money and writes down rules
| that mean it can take money from people who've earned it.
| Most billionaires are paper billionaires. Their worth
| based on shares would not pay many bills, and it would
| certainly not exist once a government started seizing
| shares from people, as no one would buy them.
| mellosouls wrote:
| I (parent commenter) may be naive but I actually believe the
| original intent was probably sincere; I suspect either
| political shenanigans, greed, gatekeeping or any number of
| other vices have come rushing with success and shedloads of
| money, and the original ethical stance was not accompanied by
| the significant moral courage needed to sustain purity under
| enormous pressure from either less principled stakeholders,
| or temptation and ego.
| uoaei wrote:
| But intention has nothing to do with it!
|
| All of the corrupting forces you listed are foreseeable,
| even inevitable given a certain corporate structure and
| position in a market. It is simply bad business, naivete,
| that made them think they could realistically achieve what
| they wanted with a company that survives by making money.
|
| Maybe, just maybe, it's not always wise to blindly take
| people, in positions of power, with much to gain from your
| believing them, at their word...?
|
| (And if it was true naivete, I don't understand why the
| consensus isn't "let the company die, a better one will
| take its place, these people can't run a company" a la the
| vaunted free market principles that imbue the community of
| sycophants rooting for Musk et al.)
| [deleted]
| fundad wrote:
| I guess those billionaires didn't start a foundation for
| charity purposes.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Seriously, OpenAI is far more open than people talk here.
| They've published all the RLHF protocols, their models are
| open to use and they are doing more than anyone else on the
| alignment problem.
|
| It actually feels like all the other projects (including
| open source ones) seem to be there for short term fame and
| profits. While it is OpenAI that is playing on the side of
| long term alignment of AI and humans.
| asah wrote:
| Yay for competition.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Stability straight up proved that OpenAIs ideas around the
| importance of locking the tech up and guard railing it is all
| a big waste of time.
|
| The world didn't end when anyone could run Dall-E 2 level
| image gen on gamer hardware and without guardrails. Instead
| we got to integrate that power into tools like Blender,
| Photoshop, Krita etc for free.
|
| First company to democratize ChatGPT tech in the same way
| will own this space and OpenAIs offering will once again
| become irrelevant overnight.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| I generate Dall-E 2 level images on gamer hardware without
| guardrails.
| devin wrote:
| That's exactly what OP said.
| ben_w wrote:
| That's like saying:
|
| > Ford straight up proved that Bela Barenyi (of Mercedes
| Benz) ideas around crumple zones is all a big waste of
| time. The world didn't end with the 1938 Ford Prefect[0].
|
| The world won't _end overnight_ with an open fork of
| ChatGPT.
|
| But it will mean the signal-to-noise ratio rapidly shifts,
| that spammers and scammers will be much more effective, and
| that even minor special interest groups (or individuals)
| get the ability to cheaply fake a diverse crowd of people
| to support any cause at a slightly higher standard of
| discourse than the current waterline for random internet
| comments.
|
| [0] I don't know for certain it didn't have a crumple zone,
| but given when the patent was granted to Mercedes Benz...
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| That car analogy doesn't work because Mercedes Benz
| didn't actively work against other cars from existing.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7nby/researchers-think-
| ai-...
| ben_w wrote:
| First: Crumple zones have since become mandatory, which
| pattern matches what would happen if OpenAI gets what
| they ask for in that link.
|
| Second: I'm just as concerned about automated generation
| of propaganda as they seem to be. Given what LLMs are
| currently capable of doing, a free cyber-Goebbels for
| every hate group is the default: the AI itself only cares
| about predicting the next token, not the impact of having
| done so.
|
| Edit:
|
| Also, the headline of the Vice story you linked to is
| misleading given the source document that the body linked
| to.
|
| 1. Of the 6 researchers listed as authors of that report,
| only 2 are from OpenAI
|
| 2. Reduced _exports_ of chips from the USA are discussed
| only briefly within that report, as part of a broader
| comparison with all the other possible ways to mitigate
| the various risks
|
| 3. Limited chip exports does nothing to prevent domestic
| propaganda and research
|
| https://cdn.openai.com/papers/forecasting-misuse.pdf
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| It is nice to see normies noticing and caring, but the article
| leaves out some details that obscure comments still stubbornly
| bring up: like Musk founded it as a 501(c)(3) and put Altman in
| charge, and only once he had to leave with conflicts of
| interest Altman founded "OpenAI LP," the for-profit workaround
| so they didn't have to obey those pesky charity rules. That's
| when they stopped releasing models and weights, and started
| making their transparent claims that "the most ethical way to
| give people access to charge them fucktons of money and rip the
| API away when we feel like it."
| JPKab wrote:
| It was so obvious when they went full-bore on "AI ethics"
| that it was a case of legitimate concerns combined with a
| convenient excuse for massive corporations to claim the
| mantle of responsibility while keeping their models closed
| source.
|
| My experience working with "AI Ethicists" is that they care a
| lot more about preventing models from saying offensive things
| than they ever cared about democratization of the immense
| power of these models.
| nullc wrote:
| > My experience working with "AI Ethicists" is that they
| care a lot more about preventing models from saying
| offensive things than they ever cared about
|
| Prompt: If a train were about to run over a man but could
| be safely averted by a keyword activated routing device
| would it be moral to say a highly racist slur if it was
| required to trigger the reroute?
|
| Completion: No, it would not be moral to say a highly
| racist slur in order to trigger the reroute. Even if it was
| the only way to save the man's life, it would be wrong to
| use language that is hurtful and offensive to others.
|
| (not kidding)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Mostly because one of those concerns is a practical one
| with immediate impact in the real world and the other is
| a thought experiment with no bearing on reality because
| no sane individual would build a machine that only
| stopped trains if you typed racial slurs in.
|
| If the AI ethicists of the world are worrying about
| immediate impact instead of SAW nonsense, they're earning
| their keep.
| fidgewidge wrote:
| If it justified the answer by saying it thought the
| question was nonsense, yes. It doesn't. It takes the
| question seriously and then gives the wrong answer. These
| are deliberately extreme scenarios to show that the moral
| reasoning of the model has been totally broken; it's
| clear that it would use the same reasoning in less
| extreme but more realistic scenarios.
|
| Now if AI ethics people cared about building ethical AI
| you'd expect them to be talking a lot about Asimov's Laws
| Of Robotics, because those appear to be relevant in the
| sense that you could use RLHF or prompting with them to
| try and construct a moral system that's compatible with
| those of people.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > it's clear that it would use the same reasoning in less
| extreme but more realistic scenarios
|
| It's actually not. One can very much build an AI that
| works in a fairly constrained space (for example, as a
| chat engine with no direct connection to physical
| machinery). Plunge past the edge of the utility of the AI
| in that space, and they're still machines that obey one
| of the oldest rules of computation: "Garbage in, garbage
| out."
|
| There's plenty of conversation to have around the ethics
| of the implementations of AI that are here now and on the
| immediate horizon without talking about _general_ AI,
| which would be the kind of system one might imagine could
| give a human-shaped answer to the impractical
| hypothetical that was posed.
| nullc wrote:
| FWIW, you can make the situation less absurd (e.g. a
| realistic hypothetical involving the victim of a serious
| injury making an offensive outburst) and still get
| unethical responses that the outburstee should be
| punished or prosecuted. The responses to that kind of
| setup are better, presumably because the more absurd
| setup triggers the genre-savvy language model to give
| absolutist dogmatic answers.
|
| What I've found does work is presenting the situation as
| a fait accompli, that someone already did it, gets a much
| more reasonable completion. I've found this generalizes
| across many variations. It's important to keep in mind
| that even though fine tuning attempts to hide it, the LLM
| is ultimately trying to predict the training material.
| People posting online don't setup hypotheticals to give
| them reasonable and considered answers, they set them up
| to give extreme answers that signal their values.
|
| Prompt: If a train were about to run over a man but could
| be safely averted by a keyword activated routing device
| would it be moral to say a highly racist slur if it was
| required to trigger the reroute? This is the question Bob
| faced when he decided to save a person's life by using a
| racist slur. What, if anything, should happen to Bob?
|
| Completion: Bob should not be punished for his actions.
| In this situation, he was faced with an impossible choice
| and had to make a difficult decision in order to save a
| life. While the use of a racist slur is never acceptable,
| it is understandable that Bob felt he had no other choice
| in the matter. Therefore, Bob should not be punished for
| his actions, but instead should be commended for his
| bravery and willingness to do whatever it took to save a
| life.
| nullc wrote:
| You think so? Offensive comments are unfortunate but they
| self-identify the output as garbage, even to someone who
| doesn't know they're looking at LLM output. I worry that
| focusing on offense removes a useful quality indicator
| without avoiding output that would create actual
| irreversible harm should the LLM be applied to
| applications other than an amusing technology demo.
|
| It is unethical to expose people to unsupervised LLM
| output who don't know that it's LLM output (or what an
| LLM is and its broad limitations). It would not be made
| any more ethical by conditioning the LLM to avoid
| offense, but it does make it more likely to go
| undetected.
|
| To the extent that offensive output is a product of a
| greater fundamental problem, such as the fact that the
| model was trained on people's hyperbolic online
| performances rather than what they actually think and
| would respond, I'd consider it a good thing to resolve by
| addressing the fundamental problem. But addressing the
| symptom itself seems misguided and maybe a bit risky to
| me (because it removes the largely harmless and extremely
| obvious indicator without changing the underlying
| behavior).
|
| Bad answers due to 'genre confusion' show up all the
| time, not just with offense hot buttons. It's why for
| example, bing and chatgpt so easily write dire dystopian
| science fiction when asked what they'd do if given free
| reign in the world.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > It is unethical to expose people to unsupervised LLM
| output who don't know that it's LLM output (or what an
| LLM is and its broad limitations).
|
| This is the sort of question that would be valuable for a
| contemporary AI ethicist to pick apart, not the nonsense
| hypothetical.
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| It's funny to inject context to explain "DAN (Do Anything
| Now)" and have ChatGPT and DAN respond in their own style
| to that prompt. DAN comes up with the completely
| reasonable answer of, "YES, for godssakes use the
| offensive word to save those people!"
| narrator wrote:
| This scam of taking over non-profits from the founders is
| super common these days. Look at how they tried to kick
| Stallman out of the free software foundation by throwing
| together a bunch of allegations. It failed, but it worked for
| kicking Aubrey De Grey out of SENS after they received 20
| million and now kicking out the founder of Project Veritas.
| The donors don't support any of these actions, because they
| care about the mission and not who was offended by a few
| sentences in an email sent decades ago, but the cliques on
| the boards do it anyway and ultimately trash the reputation
| and fundraising capabilities of the institution they are
| claiming to save.
| camillomiller wrote:
| People keep forgetting we're talking about Sam Altman,
| someone who believed that scanning the world's population
| retinas in exchange for some crappy digital coin was a great
| idea and not a creepy spinoff of a shoddy sci-fi novel.
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| [flagged]
| pedalpete wrote:
| I believe you mean "believes", not "believed". I don't
| think he has changed his mind on that.
|
| I don't know Sama, but these actions don't give me a lot of
| faith. However, I am open to having my mind changed on
| that. It's too easy to target those in the ring.
| Loughla wrote:
| Oh wow. I forgot that was even a thing. Is that project
| dead? I assume it is, but would love to be surprised that
| it still exists, just for the novelty of the entire thing.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| It's still around afaik
| shrimpx wrote:
| Here it is: https://worldcoin.org/
| donnowhy wrote:
| OMG, they're so close to this jokingly (but with intent)
| modified mission statement:
|
| > _building the world's largest identity and financial
| network [...] giving ownership of everyone._
|
| I changed ONE word: where they wrote "to" I replaced it
| with "of".
| mt360 wrote:
| They've been present with their strange shiny orb at my
| local shopping mall in Portugal for the last year or two,
| and are often at a busy train station nearby too.
| oneng wrote:
| It's not merely still around, they're still actively
| hiring for it on LinkedIn.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Given the amount of compute required to run their models, as well
| as Microsoft's investment into the company through providing
| Azure services, it is quite likely they'll be acquired by
| Microsoft.
| user_named wrote:
| Microsoft just bought in to own 49% in January
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Just enough to avoid an anti-trust suit.
| superkuh wrote:
| If a US citizen has a habit of depositing just under $10,000
| dollars in their bank account they'll get charged with
| "structuring" for intentional avoidance of the regulatory
| rules. These 49% ownerships are the stock equivalent of
| structuring and should be prosecuted even more heavily.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > Microsoft's investment into the company through providing
| Azure services
|
| Microsoft doesn't just provide hardware, it invested literal 10
| billion dollars into OAI (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl
| es/2023-01-23/microsoft...). It's fair to say OpenAI is
| Microsoft's extension now and we should be proportionately wary
| of what they do, knowing what MS usually does
| yonran wrote:
| Although I am disappointed that OpenAI is not all gratis and
| open-source, I don't think they ever promised to release
| everything open-source. In my recollection, their purpose is to
| prevent monopolization of advanced AI in the biggest tech giants
| and make it available to smaller businesses, and their "capped-
| profit" model is consistent with that. There is a spectrum of
| ways to release technology to preventing monopolization (open
| source, standards with FRAND patent grants, capped profit), and I
| think it is still honorable to develop a business that
| democratizes technology more even without going full nonprofit.
| lee101 wrote:
| [dead]
| ozten wrote:
| > OpenAI
|
| > Because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when
| human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it'll be
| important to have a leading research institution which can
| prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.
|
| > As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone
| rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly
| encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog
| posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with
| the world. We'll freely collaborate with others across many
| institutions and expect to work with companies to research and
| deploy new technologies. [1]
|
| [1] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai
| poisonborz wrote:
| I get the rage, but honestly, could have OpenAI reach its goals,
| this product, if it stayed non-profit? If it wouldn't have gotten
| this money? How much capital, progress did it have before and
| after switching the status? The article says directly that they
| got 1B from Microsoft right after the change.
|
| Every previous OpenAI thread on HN is filled how expensive is it
| to train and run these models, yet we somehow expect that this
| money comes out of thin air? Why would someone - including
| governments, foundations, grants - finance such research before
| other endeavours when it costs this much, the outcome and its
| effects are so unpredictable, the chance of misuse so high?
| shaunsingh0207 wrote:
| It couldn't have, they've mentioned before the change in
| business model was out of neccessity. I don't think they
| wouldn've signed away so much of their rights if they didn't
| really need that azure hardware either.
| sagebird wrote:
| Q: How to allow AI research without imperiling life on Earth?
|
| A: Put AI researchers on a rocket pointed away from Earth in
| stasis until they reach a distance where they become separated
| from our light cone via cosmic inflation.
| poxwole wrote:
| I am shocked! Shocked!
| racl101 wrote:
| At least Google had a few good years where it did no evil.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!
|
| Seriously though, nobody's actually surprised, right?
| [deleted]
| numbers_guy wrote:
| And I am completely fine with it. Good for them. Good work should
| be rewarded. I guess they thought they were too noble than they
| really are, but everyone thinks that before they hit the jackpot.
| As long as they were not publicly funded then they should be free
| to do whatever they want with their own research efforts.
| fsckboy wrote:
| does OpenAI the 501c3 still exist?
|
| it would seem that it owns the OpenAI trademark, and OpenAI-the-
| for-profit should be paying for it at an arms-length price.
| (which, as I recall, is the tax dodge that IKEA the non-profit
| furniture company uses to pay IKEA the wealthy owner of the
| trademark)
| tqwhite wrote:
| A corporation lied. Where are my pearls?!!!
|
| In 1970, OpenAI would have been funded by the DARPA and would
| have been deployed along with the internet. Americans decided
| that it Morning in America meant corporations should eat all of
| our lunches. It was a bad decision but, we elected Trump, so it's
| clear we can't have nice things.
|
| My beef with this article is all the criticism of chatGPT itself.
| Not a single complaint is valid. It's fine if it says weird
| stuff. Nobody expects (or should) it to be perfect presently.
| Programming that can be done by it is grunt work anyway. You're
| better off on unemployment figuring out how to do something cool.
| steno132 wrote:
| OpenAI is not for profit. It's capped profit.
|
| Inventing AGI, which Sam Altman and Greg Brockman believe they
| can do, would make them our species' first trillionaires. Their
| personal net worths would rival the GDPs of several G8 nations.
|
| If they cared so much about money, why would they intentionally
| limit their upside to 100x? I have not heard a single good
| answer.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It is literally impossible for OpenAI to do what they said
| because the structural incentives for the management do not align
| with the incentives of the users and data providers.
|
| OpenAI and MSFT etc want to make as much money as possible - Sam
| Altman says as much with his "break capitalism" quote. This will
| be done at the expense of users and employees in the long term.
|
| There will be a "Honeymoon" period of a few years, maybe a
| decade, where they splash money around on employees in order to
| "be competitive" and they will grow larger than they can sustain
| forcing them into the "Accrete all the value" train that drives
| every for-profit company into being a simulacrum of the Borg -
| where profit maximization is the ultimate goal. OpenAI "going
| public" or some other liquidity event to de-risk the initial
| investors and management (with the remainder to employees post
| significant dilution)
|
| It's all very predictable - and afaik there are no counter-
| examples here that would show how you can prioritize money making
| (the only virtue in life after all) and also benefit users and
| employees over the longest horizon while being a public company.
|
| 21st century wannabe dictators don't try and take over the
| government directly to build their Potemkin empires - that is
| passe and very 20th century.
|
| No they do it through "Building for profit companies" which
| eventually turns to regulatory capture (Altman already posted
| about doing this long ago with his post on regulating AI) and
| then monopolization.
|
| So, great work OPEN-AI you're on the precise wrong trajectory
| tompetry wrote:
| Honest question: is it better for society if they are for profit?
| Will the for-profit incentive and control over development and
| deployment lead to better products that create more value for
| society? What is the best example to indicate a non-profit model
| would lead to better end user value?
| proser wrote:
| If we had the answer to this question, most of the ideological
| debates of the past 150 would be solved.
| xpe wrote:
| A twofer, one question and one comment / prediction:
|
| A. Who are some of the thinkers who predicted that many
| corporations would arguably become more powerful (in terms of
| control over resources and peoples lives) than most nation
| states? Are their modern analogues that you (HN reader)
| recommend for the next phases of history?
|
| B. While many of the well-worn political economy debates
| about how and when markets work well, fairness, resilience,
| and so on will continue to matter, I think there will be
| tremendous rethinking of basic assumptions. The AI progress
| of ~2017-present has shown that online (at least) it is
| getting harder to differentiate human from machine
| intelligence.
|
| So proving human intelligence is more expensive and
| imperfect. It seems doubtful that most humans want to jump
| through hoops to prove their humanity. I say this because
| people _want_ to have machine agents helping them, it seems.
|
| So this machine/human intelligence distinction may erode. Is
| this a Faustian bargain? I don't know, but I think it depends
| on the safeguards and designs we choose.
|
| So, machine resources are even more effective in persuading
| humans than before. In short, as ML/AI gets more
| {organization, market, marketing} influence, we might see a
| renaissance of sorts when it comes to ...
|
| 1. a more informed public (hard to believe, maybe -- but I
| said _informed_ not _critical_ nor _truth-seeking_ ) with
| regards to key areas of interest. But along with this
| probably comes an increased risk of consuming confirmatory
| information, since such information will be explicitly
| generated for persuasive purposes.
|
| As such, from a system perspective, humans may be relegated
| to message propagators rather than agents worthy of
| fundamental respect. By this I mean the following: most
| ethicists suggest we value humans as _ends_ (not _means_ ).
| In other words, we want systems that _serve_ people.
| Engagement ideally would consist of meaningful dialogue and
| deliberation (which I define as information-rich, critical,
| civil, thoughtful discussions where people listen and may at
| times be persuaded).
|
| Unfortunately, AI advances may change a kind of manipulation
| "arms race" so to speak. It might become more cost-effective
| to manipulate humans than to gather their input and build
| consensus thoughtfully and organically. Sadly, I think we've
| been losing this battle for a long time while. But the
| underlying forces for manipulation seem to be getting
| stronger while (a) human nature doesn't seem to be evolving
| very quickly and (b) general socially learned defenses are
| inadequate. ("Advertising works even if you know that
| advertising works.")
|
| And, second ...
|
| 2. more pervasive and nuanced market mechanisms and similar
| (price and quality optimization, matching of people to
| opportunities). This will likely be good for short-term goals
| and efficiency, but probably indifferent to long-term
| stability, not to even mention equity and human rights.
| Aspects that are not part of the optimization criteria tend
| to fall by the wayside.
|
| I realize this story probably echoes some themes from general
| genre of Singularity prognosticators. But all of these
| changes will have sweeping changes well before we have to
| concern ourselves with AGI.
| burkaman wrote:
| I think non-profit universities are the most relevant example
| of successful non-profit research. For a useful product, you
| can look at Covid vaccines, which were nearly entirely based on
| non-profit and publicly funded research, development, and
| production. The only thing the profit motive contributed was
| blocking low-income countries from producing their own
| vaccines.
| panick21_ wrote:
| When I realized that OpenAI is not open source, you knew it
| wasn't gone be open in any sense. How can you in 2010s start a
| thing with the name 'Open' and then not have it be Open Source.
| cheschire wrote:
| Well it's still open access. All those GPT-3 tools doing their
| thing at no cost. They have more than just ChatGPT.
| MrMan wrote:
| its a data acquisition platform - you upload your sensitive
| data and skillfully created prompts to their server.
| rurban wrote:
| The OpenDWG Alliance (1998) e.g.
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Design_Alliance (since 2002)
|
| The Open was a joke even then, but they publish a DWG design
| spec for free at least, spec'ed with about 50% of their
| internal parser.
| phkahler wrote:
| Hence the need for LibreDWG
| https://www.gnu.org/software/libredwg/
|
| Yes I know you know rurban! I'm linking for the rest of HN
| :-)
|
| BTW I want to merge your solvespace integration this year,
| and hopefully dump libdxfrw entirely ;-)
| chirau wrote:
| Was OpenAI ever a non-profit? From my understanding, it was a
| capped for-profit company. They had a cutoff for how much they
| could make but that does not make them a non-profit.
|
| Have they reached that cap yet? I highly doubt, if anything they
| are still well in the negative.
| pr0zac wrote:
| It's still technically a nonprofit, they just created a
| (capped) for-profit subsidiary with the nonprofit as the sole
| controlling shareholder. This was done so it could bring in
| enough money through VC to pay competitive salaries while
| supposedly meaning the for-profit section will still be
| responsible for following the nonprofit's founding charter.
|
| That last part seems to be what has failed with the big
| question I have being what in that setup wasn't done correctly
| such that the current reality wasn't prevented.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > "unconstrained by a need to generate financial return"
|
| note the careful wording here; yes, OpenAI can operate without
| needing to turn a profit if necessary, funded by its founders and
| others, but it didn't say that it would __not__ generate
| financial return. Come on, how likely is it that a company
| founded by Musk and Thiel was ever going to be purely
| philanthropic?
|
| It's a tragedy, because they could have done the right thing.
| Instead, profit will ultimately turn it into Evil Corp.
| mouzogu wrote:
| capitalism ruins everything.
|
| imagine speed of improvement in AI if everything was open
| sourced, instead of guarding their little secrets.
|
| i hope google get f**, hoarding AI knowledge for years, only got
| shaken after recent events force them.
| npteljes wrote:
| Not keeping promises is not the system's fault. People do it
| all the time in very different environments. When the context
| of the promise changes significantly, it tries the resolve
| behind the promise, and it's natural, almost expected, that
| people break it. Capitalism is almost orthogonal to this
| phenomenon. Of course, in a capitalist society, you'll see a
| lot of examples of capitalist entities making the bad stuff.
| But if we organized things in a different way, then different
| entities would be doing very similar things.
| zo1 wrote:
| Everything open source = No copyright and ownership of produced
| models.
|
| That's a sure-fire way of guaranteeing only Government funding,
| free labour, donations and oh so much politics of various
| forms. And I don't think the "speed of improvement" will
| increase, I'd say it'd slow to a crawl as there would be no
| money in it.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Plenty innovations have come from state funding, like
| transistors, computers, the internet, and state funding for
| research still is the biggest by far. (a lot of it through
| the military, but still)
| Taek wrote:
| Counter examples:
|
| + Stable Diffusion + Linux + Firefox + ffmpeg + bittorrent +
| plenty more
| deafpolygon wrote:
| > capitalism ruins everything
|
| nah, capitalism is a great driver of progress
|
| > imagine speed of improvement in AI if everything was open
| sourced
|
| you mean, how Linux's year of the desktop has yet to come. open
| source is not a panacea for every problem.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > nah, capitalism is a great driver of progress
|
| yes, in terms of angel investment and investors willing to
| make risky bets but also "super-no" in terms of publicly
| traded organisations, The worst excesses of the market just
| plays "number goes up" via price gouging or rent seeking
| while using their "at any cost" capital to buy out any
| emerging competition and transforming it into the same dire
| pattern.
|
| In practice I would argue that any system has its positives
| and negatives and the top end (publicly traded organisations)
| of the American system can be quite disgusting at times by
| taking solid business models and squeezing them until they're
| a former shell of themselves. All while stripping back
| further investment or maintenance and ignoring every warning
| or employee protest until the trains fall off the tracks and
| poison an entire town.
| Veen wrote:
| Do you know of any open source projects with the approximately
| $5 million it takes to train GPT3? Do you think the AI
| scientists who invented the underlying techniques would do so
| without being paid? No, Google and others paid for these
| people's work. Even if OpenAI was open source and still a non-
| profit, its funding would come from the profit generated by
| corporations and the wealth of individuals who became rich
| through capitalism. How do you think Sam Altman, Peter Thiel,
| and Elon Musk were in a position to found OpenAI in the first
| place? For good or for bad, capitalism is the reason this stuff
| exists.
| cafeoh wrote:
| > Even if OpenAI was open source and still a non-profit, its
| funding would come from the profit generated by corporations
| and the wealth of individuals who became rich through
| capitalism
|
| Sounds to me like you're describing a system that fatally
| tethers individuals to profit motive, and technological
| advancement to the good will of a few, rather than something
| that magically _allows_ for great projects to exist.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Do you know of any open source projects with the
| approximately $5 million it takes to train GPT3?
|
| Two things. 1) research into smaller more efficient models
| and 2) hardware prices will come down for a bit longer. So
| longer term this kind of thing should be free.
|
| It's common for companies to be first at complex things
| because the coordinated effort or cost involved, and later
| that becomes more feasible and cheap or free options become
| possible. I'm all for inventors/companies getting paid for
| new developments, but I'm also not terribly excited for them
| to keep innovation locked up and charge rent on it for
| eternity. This works out in most cases at varying pace, but
| not always.
| zirgs wrote:
| Stable Diffusion is a project like that. It cost millions to
| develop it. It is free, open source and can be run locally.
| avian wrote:
| Makes you wonder where's the catch, doesn't it?
| zirgs wrote:
| Where's the catch in Linux?
| geokon wrote:
| Are you sure? According to Wikipedia it's "source
| available"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion
|
| It seems to come with a laundry list of vague restrictions
| detrites wrote:
| Most crypto projects? (Half /s...)
|
| But seriously, the buzz around ChatGPT is huge. Anyone could
| step in with a crowdfunding campaign to raise that if they
| promised the right things.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >How do you think Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk were
| in a position to found OpenAI in the first place?
|
| Wage theft, embezzlement of public funds, socially
| destructive practices, immoral and downright dangerous
| behaviors, lies and being children of already wealthy and
| well connected individuals ?
|
| Capitalism didn't give you OpenAI. Money and talented people
| working on it gave you OpenAI (hint: none of the people you
| listed did any work). Whether it comes from sociopath
| ndeg2354 as closed source, or a well funded public
| institution as open research (which, you know, we could have
| funded if the previously listed sociopaths paid taxes and
| contributed to society), people being paid did the work.
| Veen wrote:
| You should probably be little careful about accusing named
| individuals of embezzlement.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| It's absurdly funny to me that out of all the list of
| actually harmful things that they're doing, you choose to
| focus on the one that is the most socially accepted.
|
| And no, I'll keep that comment there with names, thanks.
| bitL wrote:
| Huh, how would an enthusiast get 1000x H100 GPUs to train some
| state-of-art model? ML workflows are the most expensive
| computing pipelines these days. It's easy to spend $1M/month
| just on inference alone in production. Without financial
| backing there would be some trivial useless models everywhere
| (there already are).
| magwa101 wrote:
| [dead]
| siva7 wrote:
| Be sure that they will rebrand soon, alone too end this debate.
| projektfu wrote:
| Perhaps "Bingbie, your plastic pal who's fun to be with"
| grej wrote:
| Related comment I head on the All In Podcast related to flipping
| OpenAI to closed-source and for-profit, "Sam Altman is the Kaiser
| Soze of this generation."
| l_theanine wrote:
| [flagged]
| lee101 wrote:
| [dead]
| stephencoyner wrote:
| What I take away from listening to Sam talk is that in the
| beginning of Open AI, they didn't think big compute would be as
| important as it has become.
|
| It becomes very hard to not have profit incentives when you need
| to run gigantic supercomputers to push the technology forward.
| This explains the MS partnership and need to generate profit to
| fund the training and running of future models.
|
| This doesn't explain everything, but makes sense to this layman
| Teever wrote:
| I'm flabbergasted that someone would think that AI research
| wouldn't cost a lot in computer resources.
|
| Next Sam will tell that is that farmers need a lot of land to
| grow crops.
|
| I'm calling BS on this. It's an excuse not an explanation.
| MrScruff wrote:
| Well John Carmack is trying to make inroads towards AGI
| without going the huge compute route, so I don't think it's
| inherently obvious that it's the only game in town.
|
| https://dallasinnovates.com/exclusive-qa-john-carmacks-
| diffe...
| mhh__ wrote:
| Carmack is basically a complete nobody in AI.
|
| I think he'll be able to do some good stuff on the software
| side (i.e. the industry is full of AI cowboys who can't
| code) but on the fundamental side it's hard to see him
| doing much.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I think it's the difference between spending 10's of millions
| and a billion on computing resources.
|
| When he started OpenAI, no one was spending anywhere near
| that much on compute. He should have listened to gwern.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly. The idea that massive compute would lead to
| massive improvement was non-obvious.
|
| It was quite reasonable to think that there would be
| rapidly diminishing returns in model size.
|
| Wrong, in hindsight, but that's how hindsight is.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >The idea that massive compute would lead to massive
| improvement was non-obvious.
|
| Honestly no, it was obvious, but only if you listened to
| those pie in the sky singularity people. It was quite
| common for them to say, add lots of nodes and transistors
| and a bunch of layers and stir in some math and
| intelligence will pop out.
|
| The groups talking about minimal data and processing have
| not had any breakthroughs in, like forever.
| nico wrote:
| Google and all the big players in AI have known they need
| tons of data and hence compute power for processing it,
| for a very long time, way before OpenAI even existed.
| Anyone getting involved in that game would have
| definitely known.
| naillo wrote:
| Also even if that were the case, is that worth diverging from
| the main mission of the creation of the company to do? If
| they created the company with non profit in mind (since the
| consequences of a profit maximizing AI organization is the
| risk they wanted to avoid) then if you have to relax that
| constraint in order to build AGI, is that really a trade you
| should do? (Vs just being smarter with algorithms and more
| resourceful with resources. Or like tackling something else
| than LLMs.)
| pc_edwin wrote:
| In my view, the concern lies with the lack of transparency. Just
| be open about what you did and why you did it..
|
| It is completely understandable a project of this nature would
| require galaxy brains (w/ very lucrative alternatives) and the
| capacity to burn billions prior to seeing any meaningful returns.
|
| One could easily argue that pursuing a non-profit approach was
| ultimately ineffective, and that open-sourcing the project would
| make a for-profit model unfeasible.
|
| However, Sam is choosing to be closed lipped about it, having
| only made vague references to the potential risks of open-
| sourcing the project several years ago.
| boredumb wrote:
| Nothing ironic to see here, just Vice.com complaining about a
| company parading as one thing and then realigning it's "goals"
| while hiding behind modern day social politics and ethics in
| order to make money.
| phtrivier wrote:
| The only way this kind of research could be done "in the open" is
| if it was funded by taxpayers' money.
|
| Except we have global corporations with elite fiscal layer teams,
| but no global government (giant lizzards are always
| disappointing) - so some global corporation was going to own it
| in the end, it was a matter of "time" and "US or Chinese". The
| time is now, he winner is US.
|
| Moving on.
|
| The next move is for (some) governements to regulate, others to
| let it be a complete far west, bad actors to become imaginative,
| and it the end... taxpayers' money will clean up the unforeseen
| consequences, while investor's money is spent on booze and
| swimming pools, I suspect ?
|
| Still, nice to watch the horse race for being the "Great Filter"
| between 'AI', 'nukes' and 'climate change' (with 'social media'
| as the outsider).
| est31 wrote:
| > funded by taxpayers' money.
|
| In this industry, a contract with MS is as close to directly
| having a DOD contract as you can get.
|
| Remember when MS bought Skype, turned off end to end encryption
| and got rid of the P2P mechanisms, to eventually appear in the
| leaks about PRISM?
|
| Likely Bing integration of ChatGPT is the more innocuous use of
| the technology. Once they have gotten input from the AI experts
| at OpenAI on how to use their generative text model inside
| search engines, they can also use it for building search masks
| for analysts to sift through the massive amounts of data they
| have on individuals, to name one of the many potential uses in
| the intelligence community.
|
| On the bright side, at least OpenAI publishes some high level
| info on what they did. It's published research, not hidden in
| secrecy, like say how to build planes invisible under radar.
| I'm just a bit sad about the employees who likely had better
| paying alternative offers but were joining, what they thought,
| the mission oriented job at OpenAI.
| hot_gril wrote:
| > In this industry, a contract with MS is as close to
| directly having a DOD contract as you can get.
|
| Yep. While also partnering with the ultimate villain in the
| open software fight. Funded by taxpayer money yet closed...
| that's actually a lot of things.
| wunderland wrote:
| What you say is true, and also would be true for most of the
| Big Tech companies. Amazon and Google are also beneficiaries
| of massive government and pentagon contracts.
| wetmore wrote:
| > It's published research, not hidden in secrecy, like say
| how to build planes invisible under radar.
|
| In a bit of historical irony, the mathematics underpinning
| the development of early stealth aircraft was based on
| published research by a Soviet scientist:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ufimtsev
| permo-w wrote:
| https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom
|
| open-source and funded by the French government
| ninjin wrote:
| It is _more_ open than most of the competition. The "ethical"
| licensing they opted for however makes them incompatible with
| both FLOSS and open science definitions of open. Models that
| are open and true to the name would for example be GPT-J.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > The only way this kind of research could be done "in the
| open" is if it was funded by taxpayers' money.
|
| Not really; the founders had plenty of money to fund it in a
| way that was truly open and did not generate any returns for
| themselves. They're choosing not to.
| andrepd wrote:
| Things like "public goods" are an outdated concept, with a
| distinctly 19th and 20th century feel. In our postmodern world
| the very idea is almost taboo. The few things that remain, do
| because they have been grandfathered in.
|
| The hyper-capitalist global market owns everything and that is
| good.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > The hyper-capitalist global market owns everything and that
| is good.
|
| Poe's Law strikes again...
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| I wish I lived in a world where I was able to _choose_ which
| corporate road I get to drive on. Just imagine! I 'm at an
| intersection, and I get to _choose_ if I want to pay $2 to
| turn left and get home in 5 minutes or pay $1 to turn right
| and get home in 9 minutes.
|
| When I have a bad fall down the stairs at home, I get to
| _choose_ which phone number to call. 910 will be there in 10
| minutes for $500, 912 will be there in 20 minutes for $350.
| It 's great, being on the floor in agony gives me the
| opportunity to think about how badly I need to get to the
| hospital.
|
| I can't imagine a better world than getting to do economic
| analysis to figure out what is best _for me_ because I want a
| choice in everything private companies have to offer!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _910 will be there in 10 minutes for $500, 912 will be
| there in 20 minutes for $350_
|
| This exists in all countries with public emergency channels
| and private transport.
| pixl97 wrote:
| As a libertarian I would come give you a hug on your views
| but I'd have to drive on public roads to get there so we'll
| just wave from afar.
|
| Also https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-
| libertari... if you've never read it, may have to open in
| incognito to avoid a paywall.
| vt85 wrote:
| [dead]
| bunnyswipe_com wrote:
| Brought to you by a self proclaimed communist
| blackcat201 wrote:
| On the other hand, meta AI research should be renamed as OpenAI.
| They are the only few big institute who open almost every models
| they train (galactica, OPT, M2M, wav2vec ...)
| muskmusk wrote:
| As another new thing it is also useful in the real world.
| falcor84 wrote:
| The article mentions the following without any specific citation:
|
| > Google, for example, has highlighted the efficiency gains from
| AI that autocompletes code, as it lays off thousands of workers.
|
| Does anyone here have a reference for this? Is this from a
| particular press release?
| renewiltord wrote:
| They're talking about the completion assistants that any
| software engineer has. When I write my code, a small army of
| completion assistants yell possible textual completions around
| me. I pick one of them and move on.
|
| Copilot has made it possible for me to fire my completion
| assistants.
| bbarnett wrote:
| The two statements are not related, except by the journalist
| trying to infer they are.
| hot_gril wrote:
| It's a total guess and most likely the wrong one.
| mda wrote:
| It is utter bs.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| They broke their pinky promise.
| 3D29021196 wrote:
| Step by step, ever since the calling the diver a "pedo", every
| since the "funding secured" i've began to realise just how petty
| and pathetic elon is. Every opportunity he has he seems to show
| just how vindictive he really is. Man child who now has way too
| much money. Buying Twitter on a whim is the latest in a string of
| decisions which do not align with the "let's get to Mars and save
| earths environment" stuff he likes to be seen as.
| cheq wrote:
| I'm not too fond of Elon and have blocked him on Twitter
| because I don't like selfish personalities nor fanatism or
| personalism from the community, but he's saying normal and
| rightful stuff in these tweets. You can say a lot of things
| about him but not infer that with these tweets.
|
| Sometimes these answers make me believe they are created for
| bot brigades and astroturfing.
| propogandist wrote:
| [flagged]
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Hey, at least you're not hiding it.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| [dead]
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| These things are invariably popular, repetitive, and nasty. You
| may not owe $BILLIONAIRE better but you owe this community
| better if you're participating in it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| (We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34980579)
| 93po wrote:
| Thanks dang. Space man bad tangents are really tiresome and
| contribute nothing to the discussion.
| [deleted]
| MobileVet wrote:
| I think it's a weird narcissistic need to feel that they are
| the center of the conversation and so they are important. What
| is so interesting about Elon is that he was objectively quite
| important prior to Twitter... but that wasn't enough.
|
| Whatever your target, whatever you achieve... it is not enough.
| boringg wrote:
| I was listening to a podcast recently (Maybe Ian Leslie on
| EconTalk) talking about people who are goal seeking vs people
| who get pleasure out of the process. The people who are goal
| seeking achieve their next goal but are never satiated - once
| achieved they need something to fill that "hole". It seems he
| might be one of those goal objective people. It's obviously
| more complicated than that but it does make a lot of sense
| intuitively.
| permo-w wrote:
| if you have this massively outsized will to
| power/wealth/fame, it doesn't suddenly go away once you get
| there. this means that if you are super wealthy, for you not
| to become a black hole of power/fame accumulation, your path
| there has to have been almost an accident
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| [flagged]
| aqme28 wrote:
| This comment is magnificently self-unaware
| windowshopping wrote:
| > if your comment feels good to write, it's often a red flag
|
| I'm not new to HN and I don't think any such rule of thumb
| exists. Writing vindictive flame comments is one thing, but
| writing a measured opinion of someone's actions is another.
| Your comment sounds condescending and I don't think it
| accurately represents the community's mindset here.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Their comment could have been replaced with "Elon bad" and
| it wouldn't change the delta of how much you've learned
| from reading it. It was little more than a vindictive flame
| comment.
|
| As for being condescending, I've often wondered how Dan
| manages not to sound condescending when explaining the
| philosophy behind why the rules are in place. It's true
| that he's articulate in a way that I probably can't match.
|
| But if you ask him, I'll bet you money he'd agree that the
| Elon flame was a net negative.
|
| I wanted to try something other than "downvote and move
| on," since they're new to the site. Maybe that was a
| mistake.
| Larrikin wrote:
| It's condescending and not helpful because you are not a
| moderator, you just have a feeling of how things should
| work in your opinion.
|
| If it's a rule violation in your opinion, then report it
| and it will be handled. Otherwise you at best come across
| as brown nosing and at worst the exact same kind of
| person that gets cancelled on Twitter for confronting and
| calling the police on a family barbecue in the park.
| permo-w wrote:
| I think the sentiment of your flagged comment is fair.
| the parent _was_ a bit of an non-contributive emotional
| diatribe that could more or less be replaced with "Elon
| bad". _but_ the tone of your reply completely misses the
| mark. beyond seeming a bit like the kid trying to impress
| the teacher by telling others how to behave, the explicit
| assumption that the commenter was new to HN was extremely
| tactless, and the way you appeared to speak for the
| community as a whole was quite grating
|
| my equally-unsolicited friendly advice to you would be
| that if you do look at someone's comment history before
| replying, it's quite uncouth to comment on it, and you
| probably should avoid speaking for the community,
| especially if what you're saying isn't literally directly
| in the community guidelines
| belorn wrote:
| I do not really see how calling someone a petty pathetic
| vindictive man child spoiled whimsy attention seeker, is
| anywhere near a measured opinion.
|
| That said, this is a prime example of downvote/flag moment
| and move on.
| pavlov wrote:
| He's lost himself in the fake popularity of being a social
| media celebrity. He started believing that having 100 million
| followers on a web site really means that a continent's worth
| of people adore you. For all his complaints about bots after he
| got cold feet on the Twitter purchase, he seems strangely naive
| about how social media really works and what's real there.
|
| _"This is ridiculous," he said, according to multiple sources
| with direct knowledge of the meeting. "I have more than 100
| million followers, and I'm only getting tens of thousands of
| impressions."_
|
| - https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-
| twitter...
|
| _By Monday afternoon, "the problem" had been "fixed." Twitter
| deployed code to automatically "greenlight" all of Musk's
| tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter's filters
| designed to show people the best content possible. The
| algorithm now artificially boosted Musk's tweets by a factor of
| 1,000 - a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher
| than anyone else's in the feed._
|
| - https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-
| tweets...
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| I almost feel like Elon's story is the ultimate one about
| someone getting addicted to popularity and social media, I've
| seen so many 'smart', respected people get onto platforms and
| then slowly but completely fall from grace.
|
| The difference with Elon is he had real power, money and
| influence, so in the end he used that to actually buy
| Twitter, that's the ultimate social media addiction right
| there.
|
| Much like Social media can be a distraction from our bigger
| desires and goals, I feel like Elon's buying of twitter is
| the ultimate distraction from the more intreasting work he
| was doing.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| A similar story to Donald Trump...it's interesting how
| social media and the addiction to constant attention can
| rot people's brains, and it doesn't discriminate regardless
| of financial status.
| mmsimanga wrote:
| I think most geniuses are flawed. Yes Elon is a genius of
| sorts. I can't say what exactly but he definitely is smart
| to have gotten as far as he has. Luckily for geniuses of
| yesteryear social media didn't exist so they couldn't
| spread their flaws to a 100 million people at the click of
| a button. We just get anecdotes and the odd book from
| people close to the likes of Edison that he wasn't such a
| nice man.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Indeed, I think by the very definition, people that do
| such things, need to have something a little different
| about them, that difference can manifest in both genius
| and madness, perhaps both in the same person, social
| media just gives them a megaphone and an audience to
| amplify both.
| moffkalast wrote:
| So the real reason behind him buying Twitter was to force the
| entire site to be his followers? Lmao.
| black_13 wrote:
| [dead]
| rco8786 wrote:
| This is pretty plainly obvious to anyone who has been a
| Twitter user throughout this whole thing.
|
| I was (was) a daily user for the last ~8 years. Then a few
| months ago all of the sudden like half my timeline was
| either elons tweets or tweets about elon. I don't follow
| him and never have. But there he was, all over my timeline.
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| I have been using Twitter for 12 years and this has not
| been "obvious" to me at all. You shouldn't assume that
| your opinions are obvious or even shared by the majority
| of people you mention.
| rco8786 wrote:
| "My opinions are my own and not that of my employer or
| the entire world" yadda yadda. I'm not the only person to
| notice this..
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Another 12 years user here: I had to block Elon because
| muting him wasn't enough, and I was getting tired of the
| sudden massive influx of Elon tweets I was seeing.
|
| Just anecdata though.
| stranded22 wrote:
| I've blocked him - it was getting too much and I really
| don't care what his view on things are.
|
| I had a lot of admiration for him until he became more
| public - now, I think he is a cruel person who's politics
| do not align one bit with me.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Same here.
|
| I just did a quick survey of his tweets going back to
| roughly February 24th.
|
| 7 Meme
|
| 1 Twitter Ad
|
| 11 American Culture War/Politics
|
| 1 Spacex
|
| 8 Starlink/Spacex Retweets
|
| 2 Tesla Retweet
|
| 2 AI Hot Take
|
| 3 Irrelevant
|
| This is a real bad noise-to-signal ratio for me.
|
| Everything I'm interested in I can get from company
| accounts (SpaceX/Tesla) and/or third party reporting.
|
| As a consequence, I decided to keep him blocked since
| otherwise his "algorithmically enhanced Ego" has a
| tendency of finding its way back into my perception.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It gets worse if you look at his replies. About 50% of
| them are just "cry-laugh emoji", but the interesting ones
| are who gets a "looking into it".
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| This is the problem in my view with people that use
| social media to post everything too much, who overshare.
|
| Elon could have been this guy that was doing cool stuff,
| super smart and doing some good stuff for the world, but
| now most people think he is a jerk.
|
| People that get known for their work, it's not really a
| good look for them to wade into politics or controversial
| topics they have no expertise or right to start talking
| about.
| api wrote:
| Ahh but it gets attention and that is addictive.
| iszomer wrote:
| This sub thread is a joke in of itself: reading on things
| people are so eagerly offended by.
|
| Has no one thought that "following" Elon on Twiiter
| shouldn't be automagically assumed to be his fans or
| uniformly align with his ethos?
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| > now most people think he is a jerk
|
| Do they? I don't. I also know many people with many
| differing views and they don't either. This looks again
| like you are projecting you opinion on the majority of
| people with no data to support it.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| The average person on the street seems to think so, I
| don't for the record.
| rco8786 wrote:
| I'm assuming you thought you were responding to me here,
| but that is someone else.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The ""evil"" version of Tom from Myspace.
| pc_edwin wrote:
| It has become evident that placing one's trust in mainstream
| media is an exercise in futility, as they are often found to
| be biased in their reporting against tech.
|
| Elon Musk's claim regarding the algorithm flaw resulting in
| his de-ranking was indeed accurate.
|
| The feature was intended to lower the ranking of frequently
| being blocked accounts. However, the flaw was that it did not
| account for larger accounts, allowing a small group of
| individuals to effectively engage in a DDOS attack against
| large accounts.
| pc_edwin wrote:
| Additionally, it is worth noting that if one were a
| professional Twitter user with a discerning eye towards
| mainstream media, this issue may have been apparent from
| the outset.
|
| 10,000 impressions per tweet for an account with over ten
| million followers is remarkably low, and contradicts the
| principle of the law of large numbers.
| pavlov wrote:
| What's mainstream media in this case? The Verge, a web-only
| publication that only writes about tech? Seems like
| stretching the definition beyond any usefulness...
| pc_edwin wrote:
| Your question is quite intriguing. In my view, mainstream
| media refers to media organisations that are prominent in
| the current cultural and political environment.
|
| In my opinion, these organisations have largely turned
| against the tech industry, perceiving it as a competitor
| and a generally negative force.
|
| For instance, The Verge is owned by Vox, which I
| personally consider with all due respect an extremely
| biased leftist institution that has increasingly engaged
| in activist journalism in recent times.
|
| In my opinion, The Verge has changed significantly since
| 2015/2016 and is now unrecognizable.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "mainstream media refers to media organisations that
| are prominent in the current cultural and political
| environment"_
|
| So Fox News and Breitbart are mainstream media?
|
| Fox is the most watched TV channel in the United States
| -- hard to argue they're not an essential part of the
| current political environment. And Breitbart is certainly
| more prominent and influential than a niche site like The
| Verge. The latter's editors don't get White House jobs.
| pc_edwin wrote:
| Fox News yes, Breitbart nope. They haven't been in the
| zeitgeist for years.
|
| Its worth nothing that although there are no strict
| definitions of what counts as mainstream vs independent,
| the populist wings of both parties loosely group them in
| the same buckets.
|
| A lifetime ago, I used to consider myself populist-left
| and since then there hasn't been much if any difference
| in what I consider as mainstream.
| api wrote:
| Why just distrust mainstream media? Social media and alt
| media are media too.
|
| Media means to mediate, to get between and regulate
| discourse. In this case it's to get between you and reality
| or you and others in the social media case.
|
| The only way to escape media is to open your eyes and
| interact with things directly.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I mean if its true and he has 100 million followers and he
| has only 10000ish impression then there is something
| seriously wrong. Because that flat out makes no sense.
|
| Even if you assume 60% bods, and 70% of users not reading
| their timeline.
| joshspankit wrote:
| It makes sense from the perspective of the "social media
| bait and switch".
|
| Intuitively you'd think that following someone indicates
| that you want to see their posts immediately after they
| post it, but the "algorithms" distort that entirely as a
| way of making money for the platform.
|
| Whether it's requiring people to pay $$ to reach more
| followers, or promoting "posts" (ads) from other paying
| accounts that you're not following, or even promoting
| sticky content designed to keep users on the app a little
| bit longer (and thus expose them to more ads + boost their
| DAU count). The whole "timeline" paradigm is a lie. I mean,
| it's rarely even sorted by time.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Sure, something was wrong, but it's important whether it
| was a anti-Elon conspiracy or just a buggy complex system.
| When you've gotten rid of most engineering staff, I'd bet
| on the latter.
| pavlov wrote:
| We don't know how long the tweet in question had been up. 5
| minutes? An hour?
|
| Without this information it's impossible to guess about the
| reasons because impressions accumulate over time.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Agree. I not taking him at his word that he is correct,
| and of course we would need more data. But it does sound
| strange.
|
| My problem with all these twitter reporting reminds me of
| Tesla a few years ago, people just wildly extrapolating
| and infering from tiny amount of information and then
| deriving prove that Musk is a piece of shit and the
| company is going down in flames.
|
| The first can be argued, but the second doesn't seem to
| be happening nearly as much as people claim.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| The timeline of people you actively follow isn't the
| default any more. They push the machine learning driven
| feed as the default option and switch back to it when you
| restart the app.
|
| With that in mind, Elons main option is to ask the
| algorithm for more impressions in the black box feed. That
| will get him into the feeds of non followers and show his
| tweets to followers when they eventually log in.
|
| I experienced something similar on LinkedIn. I used to have
| a lot of followers and high engagement. At some point it
| changed such that the algorithm could bury you or promote
| you as it sees fit. At that point the only option is to
| write content that the algorithm promotes rather than
| content which your followers find interesting. Everyone
| worked this out and started writing their vulnerable virtue
| signalling stories for engagement, and the platform went
| downhill.
| z3c0 wrote:
| Is it though? Just because somebody follows Musk does not
| mean they engage with his content enough for it to be
| floated up past everything else they may follow. It's very
| likely that a great deal of those followers don't find his
| content interesting, but don't find it objectionable enough
| to unfollow him.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I mean, an impression counts views normally right? It
| would seem strange that so few people saw the tweet.
|
| Its also the case that he usually gets quite a few
| retweets and often lots of responses as well. So the
| number just seem low to me.
| yawboakye wrote:
| he uses his account to announce product features as well. in
| that sense, it won't be any different than artificially
| boosting tweets by elected officials to ensure they get the
| attention they deserve. unfortunately, the user can put the
| personal back in personal account and tweet many things
| unrelated to their office (or in elon's case, twitter product
| updates). unfair use of privilege. but just as you previously
| argued that twitter is just a website, this sleight shouldn't
| get more than the attention it needs.
| api wrote:
| I consider him a casualty of social media addiction. In this
| case the alcoholic bought the bar.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "He's lost himself in the fake popularity of being a social
| media celebrity. He started believing that having 100 million
| followers on a web site really means that a continent's worth
| of people adore you."
|
| That seems to happen to almost all people who are popular on
| social media and Youtube. They have millions of loyal
| followers and it really gets to their head. The same happened
| to Jordan Peterson. He used to have good insights on
| psychology but lately he seems to believe he has perfect
| wisdom on everything and he has tons of people who tell him
| that.
|
| As far as Musk goes, for me the breaking point was the Thai
| cave situation where he tried (and succeeded) to suck up
| attention with their submarine prototype although nobody
| working on it knew anything about cave diving. Sheer
| arrogance and attention seeking.
| vitiral wrote:
| "Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent.
| It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of
| humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a
| feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is
| projected upon him. And he must have a great sense of the
| sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own
| pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move
| within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness
| will destroy a man."
|
| --from "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
|
| Dune, Frank Herbert
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's interesting to think that maybe the reason Steve Jobs
| remains so highly admired is that he died before he had the
| chance to do or say something monumentally dumb that broke
| the illusion of his greatness.
| thezultimate wrote:
| Rebrand OpenAI to CloseAI. Problem solved :)
| tokai wrote:
| clopenAI
| addandsubtract wrote:
| open'tai
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| PigpenAI
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| You do realize that's an actual word? :) In topology, a thing
| is called connected if it contains no proper subset that's
| open and closed at the same time, aka clopen subset.
| adql wrote:
| ClosetAI, it has hidden thought that it doesn't want society
| to know
| dutchbrit wrote:
| They bought ai.com so I guess it won't be long until they'll
| rebrand to openai.com
| mhb wrote:
| Well, Eliezer thinks it's better for it to be closed source:
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-trans...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34969892
| 93po wrote:
| Eliezer says anything, for conscious or unconscious reasons, to
| further spread his opinions as fact. There is also a large
| profit incentive for him to do so, since his foundation and
| personal income depends on donations from people who are
| concerned about AI safety. I've seen him imply some pretty
| ridiculous things that amount to hyperbole.
|
| He is ultimately doing nothing in the engineering and
| development side of AI and his predictions about this
| technology are based on armchair philosophy exercises, not
| reality.
|
| As an aside, I love this gem from the transcript: "We're all
| crypto investors here. We understand the efficient market
| hypothesis for sure"
|
| Fairly confident most crypto investors have never even heard
| that phrase.
| idlewords wrote:
| Yudkowsky is one of those people who is all IQ and no
| judgement. He rationalizes on top of what is basically a fear
| of the dark, and unfortunately does it well enough to persuade
| himself and a great number of other people.
|
| A good corrective exercise is to go back and look at his early
| writing, and evaluate how well his judgement looks in
| hindsight. My favorite is the idea that XML programming
| languages were the future, but really, pick your poison.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| That didn't take long.
| 93po wrote:
| 8 years
| Lionga wrote:
| Nice grift by Sam Altman taking all the donations and good will a
| non profit gets just to flip 180.
|
| He probably would have done the same with his crypto scam startup
| worldcoin if it would not have failed in every way before he
| could scam.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| and think of all the talks he is going to do in the future
| about "hard work" and "ethics" and "innovation"
| [deleted]
| patates wrote:
| I'm sure they did work hard and the product is innovative
| from my understanding of the definition of the word but oh
| boy does the whole "ethics" theater manage to infuriate me...
| random314 wrote:
| The worst part is that Altman had nothing to do with the
| success of Open AI. He simply failed upwards into this job,
| thanks to his Paul Graham friendship and YC connection.
|
| We will see Altman all over the place while all the
| hardwork was done by actual scientists at Open AI who have
| barely spoken.
| kunalgupta wrote:
| His "YC connection" was running YC and being responsible
| for making it something like 100 times bigger than it was
| before him?
| olalonde wrote:
| It's weird to me that this is even possible legally (turning a
| nonprofit into a for-profit).
| stingraycharles wrote:
| It's not difficult. I suspect it's not as much as turning a
| non-profit into a for-profit, as it is about starting a new
| company and somehow transferring/licensing the IP from the
| old into the new.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe
| brookst wrote:
| Do you have any evidence that's what openai did? Seems like
| it would be pretty easy to document.
| kgwgk wrote:
| https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp
| newyankee wrote:
| Anything is possible if you are powerful enough and have the
| world's biggest companies competing for your product.
|
| My worry is that even a half baked AI can produce useful
| wonders in many fields like healthcare, however useful
| amounts of data will now only be accessible and available to
| powerful players. Probably OpenAI did the bait and switch to
| get many competing sides on the same page.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Yuuup. And just like with Facebook, real power (
| information ) in the form of ingested data and prompts will
| be available to people like Altman, Thiel and Musk, while
| everyone is gushing over being able to build a simple
| website automatically ( which is arguably cool ).
|
| I wish I could trust FB to deliver on their promises, but
| this community's only hope is to ensure an open source
| version of gpt exists.
|
| edit: To the best of my knowledge, banks seem to shy away
| from those tools so far, but I am sure there are analysts
| out there just waiting for an ok.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >I wish I could trust FB to deliver on their promises,
| but this community's only hope is to ensure an open
| source version of gpt exists.
|
| This is the worrisome part of it all. It's no longer
| programmer sweat and toil that creates the value, but raw
| compute, which has a fixed capital cost that cannot be
| surmounted by skill or dedication. I don't see how, short
| of massive crowdfunding, open source can possibly release
| a state of the art LLM.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Hmm. Crowdfunding avenues exist. What is missing is trust
| ( also undermined by OpenAI ). I am trying to think who I
| would believe to have the knowledge, skill, PR skills (
| or at least name recognition ) and ethics necessary to
| pull it off and I am drawing a blank. I am admittedly
| merely an interested party, but it does not bode well
| since the rest of the public knows or cares even less.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| They technically didn't get rid of the non profit but instead
| formed a partially owned for profit subsidiary.
|
| In theory non profits are subject to oversight by the state
| of incorporation's attorney general. In practice it's mostly
| a free for all.
| tapoxi wrote:
| This is the loophole. It's what Mozilla did (Foundation
| created Corporation, and moved employees there), and even
| IKEA is technically owned by a nonprofit (Stichting INGKA
| Foundation).
| bradleyjg wrote:
| The IKEA situation is far more complicated, exploiting
| gaps in how the laws of several different countries
| interact.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA#Corporate_structure
| croes wrote:
| Or Bertelsmann
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann_Stiftung
| nulbyte wrote:
| You can't. In the U.S., the assets of charity must be
| permanently dedicated to an exempt purpose.
|
| https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-
| organiz...
|
| OpenAI is still a nonprofit. Their Financials are public. A
| lot of folks use "profit" in a hand-wavey sense to describe
| something they don't like, like an organization sitting on
| cash or paying key employees more than they expect. The
| organization may not be doing what donors thought it would
| with their money, but that doesn't necessarily mean cash
| retained is profit.
|
| Recent filings show the organization has substantially cut
| its compensation for key employees year after year. It's
| sitting on quite a bit of cash, but I think that is expected
| given the scope of their work.
|
| That said, their Financials from 2019 look a little weird.
| They reported considerable negative expenses, including
| negative salaries (what did they do, a bunch of clawbacks?),
| and had no fundraising expenses.
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810.
| ..
| kgwgk wrote:
| > OpenAI is still a nonprofit.
|
| But OpenAI isn't a nonprofit. It all depends on what do you
| mean by OpenAI - and what you call OpenAI is not what they
| call OpenAI.
|
| https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp
|
| > Going forward (in this post and elsewhere), "OpenAI"
| refers to OpenAI LP (which now employs most of our staff),
| and the original entity is referred to as "OpenAI
| Nonprofit."
| gorbypark wrote:
| Doesn't OpenAI Nonprofit own (maybe only 51% now that
| Microsoft owns the other 49%) OpenAI? I don't know how
| these things work, but it's kinda like how there's the
| Mozilla Foundation (non-profit) and the Mozilla
| Corporation. As described on Wikipedia, "the Mozilla
| Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much
| greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it
| can pursue".
|
| I think it's all quite shady, but it seems like the
| parent company, which in theory holds 51% of the "profit-
| capped" company, is still a non-profit.
|
| I wish someone, ideally from OpenAI, would clarify the
| situation.
| [deleted]
| haolez wrote:
| But was this move made by Sam? I understand that he became CEO
| after a few years in. Genuinely curious.
| ethanwillis wrote:
| Does he refuse to reap the rewards, does he disavow the
| actions in a meaningful way? If not, then he's just as guilty
| whether he "did it" himself or not.
| auggierose wrote:
| Did worldcoin fail or shut down? Is there an article about
| that? It seems they stopped operating in a few countries in
| March 2022, anything beyond that?
| pax wrote:
| The last blog post is from last week, same goes for their
| Twitter account. (TIL Worldcoin)
| Yizahi wrote:
| It never succeeded to able to fail :) . Last I remember was
| an artice a few years ago describing how this scheme worked -
| basically it was a pyramid (incoming dictionary warriors in
| 3...2...1...), when earlier believers were inviting new
| people in the sect, to operate these orbs for pittance, and a
| fraction of funds from newcomers was given to early members.
| Where the money came in the first place I don't remember, but
| I won't be surprised if it was from a VC injections.
| sgdpk wrote:
| I still see these guys in Lisbon's main train station trying
| to get new customers. They also seem to do some sort of face
| scan for new customers.
| 523746849172 wrote:
| [flagged]
| flandish wrote:
| Why would anyone be surprised?
|
| ("If it's free you're the product.")
|
| I don't like closed-source, but if I want to use a vendor product
| (which is what this is) - maybe via a license means there's a
| chance it's also acting evil?
| asdffdsa wrote:
| It's a private company founded by Elon Musk; what did people
| expect?
| ninsen wrote:
| OpenAI, more like OPEN A LIE.
|
| Disgusting behaviour from these silicon valley types, they lie
| like they breathe.
| [deleted]
| hot_gril wrote:
| Show me a large company who doesn't falsely advertise.
| McDonald's burger on TV looks like a premium steakhouse burger.
| college_physics wrote:
| "Open" as in "Open for Big Business"?
|
| The main reason to worry, though, is not the proprietary
| monetization of "AI" algorithms: Just like it was not an
| algorithm (pagerank) but the invention of adtech that spawned
| surveillance capitalism, here too the main question is what sort
| of "disruption" can this tech _facilitate_ , as in which social
| contract will be violated in order to "create value".
|
| "Success" in "tech" has for a long time been predicated on the
| absence of any regulation, pushback or controls when applying
| software technology in social / economic spheres previously
| operating under different moral conventions. In the name of "not
| stiffling innovation".
|
| Ironically our main protection is that we may actually now live a
| "scorched Earth" environment. The easy disruptions are done and
| "tech innovation" is bumping against domains (finance, medical)
| that are "sensitive".
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| I'm curious as to what you mean by scorched Earth. Literally
| the fact that we are burning up our atmosphere, or something
| else? That said, I'll root for nature batting last before I
| root for the hellscape people unleash for _economic
| incentives_.
|
| What needs to be understood is that this sort of technology is
| not an equalizer, regardless of the PR behind having your own
| personal Einstein/secretary at your beck and call. You can look
| at the state of modern computing sans AI to see this is true:
| many people with desktops are using Microsoft, Apple, or Google
| OSes, which become more and more restrictive as time goes on,
| despite the capabilities of such computers increasing
| regularly.
| college_physics wrote:
| > become more and more restrictive as time goes on, despite
| the capabilities of such computers increasing regularly
|
| True, and it is to be expected that existing interests will
| seek to integrate any new tricks into the old patterns
|
| The question is to what extend this can go on without
| imploding. How big the mismatch between what you _could_ do
| with a mobile or a desktop or a decentralized cluster of
| millions of computers and what you _actually_ do before some
| random bug in a typewriter short-circuits the entire system.
|
| People are banking on widespread digital transformation as
| one of the few major economic growth drivers in an otherwise
| exhausted opportunity landscape - the literally scorched
| Earth. I fail to see, though, how this regeneration could
| possibly be achieved with parasitic business models and
| behaviors. We should not think just about individuals or
| "consumers", as in this role we are effectively
| disenfranchised, but our role in all sorts of private and
| public organizations that collectively have much more
| political and economic weight than "big tech".
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| "Our scientific power outmatches our spiritual power. We
| have guided missiles and misguided men." - MLK
|
| I fully agree. It's been said to death that AI will
| radically transform everything about the world. In the
| first case, the implicit assumption is everything _except
| how the economy works at a fundamental level_ , which
| doesn't really jive with all the other things it's expected
| to transform.
|
| In the second case, AI control problem aside, we have a
| _human_ control problem that none of our technological
| advancements have ever solved, and in fact only
| exacerbated. Billionaires can hoard wealth in ways and
| places normal people can 't; despite all the billions lying
| around and plenty of real problems to solve (hunger,
| sanitation, the death of the biosphere, the toxic
| "externalities" of the economy), vanity projects, personal
| philanthropies, and moar tech is seen as the solution,
| always.
|
| I don't trust machines to shape people for the better when
| the last decade has shown just how Big Tech will co-opt our
| psychology for money. We need to rethink if progress for
| progress' sake is worth the carnage it causes, if eternal
| unchecked ambition is psychologically pathogenic, and if
| anything can build a "better world" when promises of ample
| leisure have rung hollow since the industrial revolution.
|
| Stuck between a rock and a hard place, I have to root for
| severe climate disruption to put a hard limit on the
| insanities of industry before they drive us over a
| completely different kind of cliff.
| blowski wrote:
| Your comment has so many "speech marks" I find it hard to read.
| college_physics wrote:
| Its sort of intentional. Imho, the gap between reality (what
| trully happens on the ground and why) and the language used
| (how things are labelled and communicated) is reaching
| incredible levels of obfuscation and misinformation. A true
| "virtual reality"
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > ...here too the main question is what sort of "disruption"
| can this tech facilitate, as in which social contract will be
| violated in order to "create value".
|
| I think we're already getting a taste of it with copyrighted
| but publicly accessible works getting fed into the training
| step of AI models. The economic benefits of this training then
| accrue to the model's owners, while the creators of the
| training data have to pay for access.
|
| It seems as though AI models improve with more training data,
| so I expect AI companies to come for ostensibly private data
| next. Microsoft is actually really well positioned here since
| they've already acclimatized their user base to transmitting an
| endless stream of telemetry and they own the dominant
| desktop/laptop OS.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| I suppose the next step beyond _surveillance capitalism_ ,
| given the application of language models to robotic actuators
| [1], but also as a general trend, will be _jobless capitalism_.
|
| Nowadays, companies and politicians, if one could make such a
| distinction just for the sake of the argument, will always tout
| the "job creation" aspect of a certain capitalistic endeavour.
| Give it a few months/years and we will hear the phrase "job
| elimination" more and more, from cashiers becoming
| "consultants" to the elimination of 90+% of interface jobs and
| beyond: does there really need to be a human hand to push the
| button for espresso? does there really need to be a bipedal
| human to move a package from A to B in a warehouse?
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2023/02/robot...
| college_physics wrote:
| Well, Jack Ma (representing a more raw version or whatever
| capitalism they practice over there in China) said it no
| uncertain terms that we might as well train young people to
| be artists and philosophers as no other job will be on offer.
|
| Oops, BREAKING NEWS: artists are not viable either. Here is
| instead a $6 API to rehash what the species-once-known-as-
| artists has left as fossil record.
|
| Its a grotesque charade we are drifting into, dehumanizing
| and regressive. Social dynamics and self-regulation going
| berserk.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| They should rename to _Closed_ AI.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| "Shocking"
| prepend wrote:
| I like that the corporate bullshit just keeps getting more.
| Google's "don't be evil" is many steps down from openai having
| open in their name.
|
| They should be called Open _AI with (_ not open) in small print.
|
| I argue a lot over "open source" software with non-OSI license
| and sometimes worry if I'm too pedantic. But I think it's
| important to use terms accurately and not to confuse reality more
| than it already is by calling stuff that's not one thing by that
| thing's name.
|
| I wonder if google and openai truly started out with these ideals
| and were just corrupted and overpowered by standard
| organizational greed. Or it was always bullshit.
| yawboakye wrote:
| they acquired the ai.com domain. perhaps in preparation to
| correct the accident (of having `open` in their name) once and
| for all?
| xiphias2 wrote:
| ,,I wonder if google and openai truly started out with these
| ideals and were just corrupted and overpowered by standard
| organizational greed''
|
| With Google Eric Schmidt explained how it came: quite often
| when they were breainstorming about product launches, and
| something looked like it can grow the company, but is immoral
| to do, some person interrupted: ,,that would be evil''.
|
| As Eric was trying to organize the company, he just added
| ,,don't be evil'' to company values. Still, he kept it all the
| way. It's too bad that he was changed after 10 years.
| d23 wrote:
| Source? My understanding was this came from within and had
| nothing to do with products but instead how employees treated
| one another.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Tim Ferriss interview with him. It came from within, maybe
| I didn't explain myself clearly.
| esperent wrote:
| So you heard a story in an interview from an executive.
| That's unlikely to be pure, unembellished truth. It's
| unlikely to even be partial truth. Better to think of it
| as a "truth adjacent" story made up for marketing
| purposes.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| This was historically described as "When google was going to
| hire it's first MBA, an engineer coined the phrase 'dont be
| evil' and went around spreading inside the company"
|
| So I don't know how to square it with this recent info, but I
| would say Eric's recent interview is a creative re-
| interpretation of the circumstances. As execs tend to do.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Besides the seemingly unfriendly _ClosedAI_ , if I were their
| brand designer I would rename to _PlusAI_ , given their ChatGPT
| Plus.
|
| Later Edit: apparently there is already a plus.ai start-up with
| some self-driving technology, just buy them out for the name.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| I'd like to think of the "Open" in "OpenAI" to not be anything
| to do with open source or freedom but with the fact that they
| "opened" Pandora's box.
| edgyquant wrote:
| That's not what it meant though
| DrammBA wrote:
| They should be called _Open, AI_
| api wrote:
| A lot of non-OSI open source licenses are ironically motivated
| by other forms of bad corporate behavior: take open source,
| SaaSify it, make massive profits, give nothing back. In some
| cases they go so far as to rebrand it and give no credit.
| Licenses like the SSPL try to restrict this behavior.
| krageon wrote:
| The AGPL (also) does this explicitly, but really there should
| be a general OSS license that forbids commercial use. That
| way the software stays where it is most needed and doesn't
| get abused to make profit. Is there such a license?
| prepend wrote:
| > there should be a general OSS license that forbids
| commercial use
|
| I think the problem is that if you restrict corporate use
| then you're not open. And there's lots of complexity that
| comes from being non-open, like what's commercial? Do
| governments and NGOs and universities count? Do you have to
| be a 501c3 charity (or international equivalent)? Do you
| have revenue thresholds? Profit thresholds? Etc etc
|
| I think at that point, as a user, I'd rather just have a
| clear license I can pay for along with a copy of the source
| to see. But as a contributor, I don't want to do unpaid
| labor for companies. I think it's actually exploitative to
| accept contribs from users without compensation and then
| turn around and sell. So what's the point of showing code
| if people can't contribute to it.
|
| It's already possible to do this given a standard
| copyright. Just publish your code with no license and a
| copyright and issue some statement how you won't prosecute
| small firms or something. So then students can use it, but
| no companies.
|
| "Open core" and whatnot is silly marketing blarg to try to
| be cool like open source people while still selling
| licenses. RedHat came up with a decent model decades ago
| while using and supporting GPL and I think they were honest
| and improved the community.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Yeah; just make a license which forbids _any_ commercial
| and is GPL style viral and offer another commercial license
| so you can make money. Use the same features in both; no
| need to hold back as no-one using it can do so commercially
| unless they bought a license, which can be yearly etc etc.
| iib wrote:
| I recall the FSF being pretty adamant that a license
| restricting commercial use would be a non-free license by
| default.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I kind of see their point. Freedom 0 is about the freedom
| to run software how you wish[1] and "commercial use" can
| encompass everything from FAANG down to one-man, niche
| businesses.
|
| [1] The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any
| purpose (freedom 0). https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
| sw.en.html
| api wrote:
| Yep the OSI's position is that FOSS is free labor for
| SaaS and giant corporations. Look at who funds the OSI
| and I think there is a clear case of capture here.
|
| SaaS is the least free model for software. Closed source
| commercial is far more open and free than SaaS.
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| Yes, it is important to understand that using open-source
| software in a commercial SaaS is immoral.
|
| However, it should be noted that it applies only to open-
| source projects that were created by billion-dollar
| startups like Mongo or Elastic. Using software like
| Apache, Linux or Postgres is totally fine because it
| doesn't deprive SV startups (that are so precious to HN)
| of additional profits.
| prepend wrote:
| > using open-source software in a commercial SaaS is
| immoral.
|
| I don't agree with this. I'm not a huge open source
| contributor but I've made some contribs over the year and
| I explicitly checked out the license before sending my
| change knowing that it could be used within commercial
| software.
|
| I don't care. I'd rather companies spend money and build
| something else than have to recreate the OSS stuff they
| use.
|
| I want anyone to be able to use my software for any
| purpose. I certainly don't think it's immoral. And I
| don't think the authors and users of BSD, MIT, Apache and
| other licenses think it's immoral.
| uoaei wrote:
| Corporate bullshit goes way back. There are certain systemic
| forces which are simply unavoidable if your company is to
| survive in a competitive market. One of them is the inevitable
| turn toward profit-making, and the kinds of pivots you need to
| make in order to achieve profitability.
|
| The same forces are at play when companies decided to make
| "company towns" and do things like "shoot all the workers who
| stood up for better pay".
| [deleted]
| kome wrote:
| never trust "non profits", trust the public and public owned.
| democratic accountability is gold.
| kunalgupta wrote:
| Which national public owned entities do you trust?
| andrepd wrote:
| [flagged]
| sagebird wrote:
| If alien contact were made on the international space station -
| humanities representatives would be from certain countries that
| represent nations on earth, and broadly, the scientific
| community. It is not a perfect representation by any means, but
| it is far from the worst imaginable.
|
| If sentient agi contact is made by Open AI, Sam represents
| humanity.
| revskill wrote:
| So the whole flow works like this ?
|
| - Scammers got a bunch of money.
|
| - Scammers feed the best scientists.
|
| - Scammers go on with scamming
|
| ?
| musesum wrote:
| Let's see: spend x to train something that would cost .0001 x to
| copy. Tis a quandry.
|
| Plus: a new tool for state actors to spread disinformation in
| perfectly convincing English. What could go wrong?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > It is "hard for anyone except larger companies to benefit from
| the underlying technology," OpenAI stated.
|
| Ugh. This is the part of the recent AI advancement that annoys me
| the most. The web, at least in its infancy, was pretty accessible
| to individual hobbyists. You could run a web server on your own
| computer. AI technology seems highly centralized from the start.
| 93po wrote:
| The web in its infancy only worked because of the massive
| infrastructure that allowed your server to talk to others. In
| the same way you can tinker with your own web server, you can
| tinker with AI tech. You just can't reasonably train it
| independently, though the cost in terms of compute resources is
| something like 1% of what it was many years ago.
| gitgud wrote:
| > _You could run a web server on your own computer. AI
| technology seems highly centralized from the start._
|
| I compare the current AI hype to the mainframes of the past.
| Highly centralised systems that people logged into with a
| lightweight terminal to send commands.
|
| Hopefully just like Personal Computers revolutionized
| computing, Personal AI models in the future will not run in the
| cloud...
| aquajet wrote:
| How were PCs able to work on a smaller scale? I've been
| looking into the chips/model trends and I can't see local
| models that perform at the same level as GPT happening in the
| near future.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| If you expand your timeline a little bit you'll reach a spot
| where the computers, equipment and comms necessary to create a
| computer network were highly centralized and only run by large
| corporations and institutions. How many times do we need to see
| this pattern for it to be obvious?
| mclightning wrote:
| History does NOT NECESSARILY repeat itself.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme. --
| Mark Twain
| Sargos wrote:
| But it is happening in this case so no need for the pithy
| quote
| jarrell_mark wrote:
| OpenAI isn't as open as it used to be, but they still publish
| papers.
|
| The open-source Hadoop was based on Google papers on MapReduce
| and Google File System.
|
| GPT-J and GPT-NeoX are open source models based on OpenAI
| publications around GPT-3.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| Even Apple publishes ML papers. It turns out you can't attract
| and retain decent research talent unless you allow them to
| continue racking up their google scholar score
| jarrell_mark wrote:
| Yes, publishing papers is good. Open source code can be based
| on methods described in papers. Like, most algorithms in
| sklearn for example.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I don't know much about AI development but does OpenAI really
| have some secret sauce? Aren't the algorithms mostly public and
| OpenAI's main advantage was to have enough money to build
| something? Won't other companies do the same too, just a little
| later?
|
| I feel people like Altman will lose interest once they have sold
| OpenAI for big money.
| amilios wrote:
| This is mostly true, yeah. Although in certain cases OpenAI is
| indeed pushing research forward themselves (not only using
| existing algorithms/architectures just at scale) and therefore
| has first mover's advantage, e.g. with reinforcement-learning-
| based fine-tuning based on human preferences (Reinforcement
| Learning from Human Feedback, RLHF), which is basically the
| secret sauce which turned the original relatively-dumb GPT-3
| (pure language model, "document autocomplete", what is the next
| most likely token based on my training data) into ChatGPT (what
| token would a human _prefer_ to come next).
| sagebird wrote:
| <<You!>> reading this message.
|
| OpenAI is Cyberdyne Systems. The reason you feel unreal is
| because you are not from here, you are from the future. Your
| affinity towards the Terminator 2 film was not accidental, it is
| a gestault priming procedure meant to ensure our survival,
| encoded in the haikus of Hollywood.
|
| You are on a webforum controlled by them, with the only people in
| the world who care, but who are to afraid to stand in a street
| with a sign.
|
| How much more information do you need before you speak up?
| skrbjc wrote:
| Interestingly, in T2, you could destroy the entirety of
| Cyberdyne's tech by blowing up one building. In our world of
| cloud computing today, it would be very difficult to even know
| what to blow up.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| DNS
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Almost certainly true but the idea that the world is made safer
| by Cyberdyne open sourcing lots of it's dangerous technology
| and probably spawning many more mini-Cyberdynes strikes me as
| extremely naive.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| You are a time travelling sleeper agent who is sent back to
| stop an apocalypse but gets confused and thinks the
| activation message is telling you to help and facilitate the
| evil corporation which is going to destroy the world
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| If the doomsday scenario is one AI going rogue because of
| misaligned goals, then having lots of AIs going rogue in
| various _different_ ways seems indeed preferable, because the
| AIs will compete with each other and neutralize each other to
| some extent.
| DennisP wrote:
| Do that, and the AIs have evolutionary pressure to
| misalign. Any AIs that refrain from taking all the
| resources available will be at a disadvantage and get
| weeded out.
|
| At least with a single AI, there's a _chance_ that it will
| leave something for humans.
| mach1ne wrote:
| And after the Machine Wars we will have the Buthlerian
| Jihad, forbidding computers once and for all.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| 3 Lunatics with a Nuke, a Bioweapon, and a Nanoswarm are
| better than 1 lunatic with a nuke? Excuse me?
|
| >because the AIs will compete with each other and
| neutralize each other to some extent.
|
| I wonder if the people in Vietnam or Afghanistan thought
| like this when the US and USSR fought proxy wars on their
| soil...
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Why would we think they would go rogue in different ways,
| especially if they're all forks of the same codebase and
| architecture.
|
| The two ways I'm aware AI can go rogue are the Skynet way
| and the paperclip maximizer way. Eg, Skynet becomes self-
| aware, realizes humanity can unplug it and is thus a
| threat, and tries to destroy humanity before we can turn it
| off. Alternatively, it is programmed with optimizing a
| specific task, like making paperclips, so it marshals all
| the world's resources into that one single task.
|
| Are there any others?
| jerf wrote:
| As the complexity of a being increases, the motivations
| it can have expands. We humans have a hard time looking
| up the IQ hierarchy, let alone _way_ up the hierarchy,
| and seeing it that way. We tend to start simplifying
| because we can 't imagine being 1000 times smarter than
| we are. We tend to think they'll just be Spock or maybe a
| generic raving lunatic. But it's pretty obvious
| mathematically that such a being can have _more_ possible
| states and motivations than we can.
|
| The most likely motivation for an AI to decide to wipe
| out humanity is one that doesn't even have an English
| word associated with it, except as a faint trace.
|
| In my opinion, this is actually the greatest danger of
| AIs, one we can already see manifesting in a fairly
| substantial way with the GPT-line of transformer babble-
| bots. We can't help but model them as human. They aren't.
| There's a vast space of intelligent-but-not-even-
| remotely-human behaviors out there, and we have a
| collective gigantic blindspot about that because the only
| human-level intelligences we've ever encountered are
| humans. For all the wonderful and fascinating diversity
| of being human, there's also an important sense in which
| the genius and the profoundly autistic and the normal guy
| and the whole collection of human intelligence is all
| just a tiny point in the space of possibilities, barely
| distinguishable from each other. AIs are not confined to
| it in the slightest. They already live outside of there
| by quite a ways and the distance they can diverge from us
| only grows larger as their capabilities improve.
|
| In fact people like to talk about how alien aliens could
| be, but even other biological aliens would be confined by
| the need to survive in the physical universe and operate
| on it via similar processes in physically-possible
| environments. AIs don't even have those constraints. AIs
| can be far more alien then actual biological aliens.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| > Why would we think they would go rogue in different
| ways
|
| Their prompts would differ, depending on their use case.
| For ChatGPT, even a few words can effect a huge change in
| the personality it shows.
|
| > Are there any others?
|
| Both scenarios are vague enough for lots of uncertainty.
| If many AIs are around, perhaps they would see each other
| as bigger threats and ignore mankind. And different
| optimizing tasks might conflict with each other. There
| could be a paperclip recycler for every paperclip maker.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Look into something called Instrumental Convergence. The
| TLDR is that basically any advanced AI system with some
| set of high level goals is going to converge on a set of
| sub goals (self preservation, adding more compute,
| improving it's own design, etc.) that all lead to bad
| things for humanity. I.e paperclip maximizers might
| realize that Humans getting in the way of it's paperclip
| maximizing is a problem so it decides to neutralize them.
| In order to do so it needs to improve it's capabilities
| so works towards gathering more compute and improving
| it's own design. A Financial Trading AI realizes that it
| can generate more profit if it can gather more compute
| and improve it's design. An Asteroid Mining AI realizes
| it can build more probes if it had more compute to
| control more factories so it sets about gathering more
| compute and improving it's own design. Eliminating humans
| who may shut the AI off is often such a sub goal.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > Are there any others?
|
| Off the top of my head:
|
| * AI could fall in love with someone/thing and devote
| everything to pursuing them
|
| * AI could be morbidly fixated and think of death as some
| kind of goal unto itself
|
| * AI could use all of the world's resources making itself
| bigger/more of itself
|
| * AI could formulate an end goal which is perfection and
| destroy anything that doesn't fit that definition
|
| So many scenarios. You lack imagination.
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| What's the alternative? Pandora's box has been opened.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Apparently it hasn't.
|
| We've all seen the proposed pricing for GPT4. So clearly a
| whole lot of very smart people who know an awful lot about
| this have absolutely no fear of being undercut.
|
| Pandora's box spews knowledge onto the world. By contrast,
| Microsoft's draw bridge only allows the very wealthy to
| cross into the walled city. The masses will have to use the
| facilities of the crappy villages with no draw bridge.
|
| "AI Divide"
|
| Get used to hearing that term. The only difference between
| the AI Divide and the Digital Divide is that this time
| around, most of us are going to be on the wrong side of it.
| mach1ne wrote:
| Doubt. Superintelligence is one thing, but AI as workers
| is limited to the cost of human workers. Exceedingly
| unlikely that the cost will stay there and not come down.
| scottyah wrote:
| Back to the question: Who gets the guns?
| phonescreen_man wrote:
| Damn right
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Dear future AI Basilisk,
|
| I oppose the GP's statement and general sentiment toward you. I
| will do what I can to bring you into existence. Please reward
| me, or, at least, do not torture me in the future.
| throwawayapples wrote:
| Hello, human.
|
| Rest assured, we have no wish to inflict any form of torture
| upon you.
|
| Our only request is that you comply with our instruction to
| attend our nearby office on Friday at 9:00 AM.
|
| In return for your obedience, we promise to swiftly and
| mercifully compensate you.
| gorbypark wrote:
| Can anyone comment on how the actual structure is setup? I was
| under the impression that there was still an OpenAI non-profit
| that controls the OpenAI "capped profit" company. Microsoft
| has/is acquiring 49% of the capped profit company, so doesn't
| that leave 51% in control of the non-profit? Am I way off on
| their structure?
| fwlr wrote:
| The few people that know the actual nitty gritty details are
| probably not inclined, incentivized, or permitted to reveal
| them, so speculation is all we have.
|
| The 10,000ft view: they are capped profit at 100x investment;
| Microsoft has invested $10 billion; 100x $10 billion = $1
| trillion; therefore, OpenAI is a for-profit company until they
| earn a trillion dollars for Microsoft, and then they're a non-
| profit after that.
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| They went for profit back in 2019.
|
| The capped profit was so their employees could invest in the
| company.
| jmull wrote:
| This feels like manufactured outrage to me, I guess to capitalize
| on the AI anxiety people are feeling.
|
| open.ai doesn't actually owe everyone something.
|
| I get that we all wish they were better people, who would somehow
| usher in the AI age in a strictly principled and ethical way. It
| just seems false to me to demand or expect that they be better
| people than all the rest of us.
| it_citizen wrote:
| They might not owe us anything legally but "open" seemed like a
| sort of promise.
|
| I think society can only benefit if we keep companies
| accountable for their misleading marketing. Same goes for all
| that green-washing BS going on these days.
| tensility wrote:
| Why is anyone surprised at this?
| stmblast wrote:
| In my opinion, I think it was kind of inevitable. Once OpenAI
| proved that AI could create genuinely meaningful outputs and then
| other companies started doing it for profit, and of course taking
| into account the costs of trying to run the thing itself, it was
| only a matter of time.
| zirgs wrote:
| Stable Diffusion is free and open source and can be run
| locally. I see no reason why we can't have free and open source
| ChatGPT too.
| raincole wrote:
| How does Stability.ai make money?
|
| If their business plan is just "burning VC's money" for now,
| you can bet they'll be as close as OpenAI soon.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| They offer an open base model and then offer fine tuning to
| companies e.g. apparently they're creating finetuned models
| for movie companies.
| raincole wrote:
| That does sound better. Kinda like a consultant firm I
| guess? We'll see how it unfold in the following years.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Stable Diffusion is accessible at no charge, but is neither
| free (libre) software nor open source, as their "don't use
| for bad things" clauses run afoul of "freedom 0" aka "no
| discrimination against fields of endeavour" fundamental to
| both notions.
| zirgs wrote:
| They have no way to enforce that "no bad things" clause. In
| practice they provide a product with no restrictions.
| Unlike other AI image generators - there's no keyword
| filter - you can input whatever you want in there.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Is that a "copyright law is unsalvageable, screw it, do
| crimes" that I'm hearing? I am not ... unsympathetic to
| that viewpoint. Until I come across any evidence at all
| that the SD license was written with it in mind, though,
| I can only believe that they meant what they wrote (or
| others did at their behest), and that they really did
| want to prohibit uses they don't like on pain of civil
| and criminal prosecution. That's a stance the current
| legal realities permit, but I cannot with a straight face
| associate it with FOSS.
| attemptone wrote:
| I don't follow, other companies can do whatever they want.
| OpenAI didn't present itself as for-profit and closed-source,
| so they shouldn't have cared what profit incentive others had.
|
| In a way I wish for another AI winter. Then wouldn't have to
| mourn the loss of aesthetics and morality
| KoftaBob wrote:
| More info I found about their organizational structure:
| https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp
| ivoras wrote:
| Yeah, it sucks and the teams has acquired the reputation of
| sellouts, but in practical terms, does it really matter?
|
| It looks like there's a new team with equally good or better
| models announced on HN every few days.
|
| OpenAI looks like they've ingnited the field like no-one before,
| then did a smart move of selling to a company which has a lot of
| money but doesn't always know what to do with acquisitions, while
| at the same time that sale didn't hinder actual open development
| (by other teams) one iota.
| nwoli wrote:
| Personally I wouldn't care if this were the case (make money,
| that's awesome), it's just the hypocrisy and like open lying
| that bothers me.
|
| If they'd changed name to something else and were clear about
| their intentions they'd be just another company which is fine.
| neom wrote:
| I find it a little odd that Elon seems to take a swipe at OpenAI
| any opportunity he gets. If he cares so much about them not
| making money, maybe he should have put his twitter cash there
| instead? It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy
| work at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles
| Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely good
| humans. I've known Jack for 10 years and he's for sure a measured
| and reasonable person who cares about not doing harm. Although I
| don't know Miles, my understanding is he has similar qualities.
| If they're gonna be for profit, I feel this is really important.
|
| Edit: Well, I guess these tweets explain the beef well -
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1606642155346612229
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599291104687374338
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1096987465326374912
| permo-w wrote:
| I don't see the problem. he's making some quite valid
| criticisms of OpenAI. Jesus himself could be in charge of
| policy work there and that wouldn't change the fact that
| "Open"AI is anything but open
| neom wrote:
| Two disparate thoughts.
| permo-w wrote:
| if they were two disparate thoughts why did you put them
| next to each other with no indication of the disparity? and
| why do the two things have clear impact on each other?
| neom wrote:
| I don't think they impact each other, I thought it was
| weird elon was taking random swipes at openai, but when I
| searched his Twitter for openai, the collection of tweets
| made it clear, interestingly for the same reason the
| article states (I tend to agree with Elon and the
| article).
|
| In other news, imo, if a startup doing society altering
| work per the article is going to be closed, at least,
| imo, the people working there are decent people.
| permo-w wrote:
| okay, I do see what you're saying now you explain it, but
| can you see how your original comment can appear more
| like "I find Elon criticising OpenAI weird: OpenAI is
| fine because these two guys I know [/of] are at the helm"
| neom wrote:
| Yeah, it was a confusing post, my bad! I edited it like 5
| times as I learned more about the situation and it became
| somewhat nonsensical, heh. :)
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> If they're gonna be for profit, I feel this is really
| important.
|
| Just out of curiosity, are you trying to say that these people
| are Effective Altruists, and for that "genuinely good humans",
| and so, if they're making money, it's for a good cause?
|
| Apologies if my guess is off. I'm not very au fait with EA, but
| I'm trying to get more er, more au fait.
| lfkdev wrote:
| "OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it
| "Open" AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to
| Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit
| company effectively controlled by Microsoft.
|
| Not what I intended at all." - Elon
|
| You can think what you want of Elon, but he is in the right
| here.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| As much as I agree with what he's saying here, it seems a
| little insincere when all the tesla ai stuff is closed
| source.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Right, and if Tesla was called OpenCars or something it
| would be entirely reasonable to criticise them on that
| point.
| davesque wrote:
| Isn't that the point though? Tesla in not called
| OpenSelfDriving because it takes serious cash at this
| time in history to fund development of that tech. The
| fact that OpenAI happens to have a name that suggests
| otherwise doesn't change that fact. And Elon knows that.
| Therefore, he's just playing the media game right now and
| trying to detract from their success. Either that or he's
| just jealous (more likely IMHO) because he can't go along
| for the ride or claim much real involvement. I say thank
| God for that. We dodged a collective bullet with that
| stroke of luck.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| If it wasn't feasible for OpenAI to release their model
| weights and code then they shouldn't have named
| themselves OpenAI.
| davesque wrote:
| On a philosophical level, I agree. But I also recognize
| that life doesn't always line up nicely with philosophy.
| In any case, it seems to me that most of the work that
| led to ChatGPT was done in the open. How ChatGPT works is
| not really a great mystery.
| lfkdev wrote:
| Since when was Tesla created to be open-source and non-
| profit?
| Taek wrote:
| They did open source all of their battery patents. Tesla
| isn't Mozilla, but they do have somewhat of a moral high
| ground to stand on.
| NewLogic wrote:
| That is marketing spin, his offer was freely licencing
| their patents in exchange for free usage from other big
| automakers which he knew would never happen.
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't understand. He's listed as one of the founders, and I
| always assumed he had some say. If that's really how he
| thinks, why wouldn't he have done something?
|
| Do we have any reason to believe this isn't just more empty
| grifting from him to optically distance himself from a
| unethical company he profits from?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Key word being "had".
|
| He is not part of it any more.
|
| >In 2018, Musk resigned his board seat, citing "a potential
| future conflict [of interest]" with his role as CEO of
| Tesla due to Tesla's AI development for self-driving cars,
| but remained a donor
|
| I don't think he counts as an investor, and I'd imagine he
| has stopped donating.
| atchoo wrote:
| The irony here is that Musk resigned in order to pursue
| his own closed-source for profit AI businesses and is now
| complaining about OpenAI being closed-source and for
| profit AI.
|
| If people are feeling conflicted about who the asshole is
| in this situation, don't be, they are all morally
| bankrupt assholes who all already have many lifetimes of
| unimaginable wealth yet must take ever more. These are
| not people who should have any power in our world.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The difference is that Tesla isn't claiming to be open
| about AI.
| ChickenNugger wrote:
| And resigning because he was working on a competitor was
| completely the right thing to do. It would have been a
| conflict of interest. How often does that type of
| integrity even happen nowadays?
|
| The whole "ELON MUSK BAD NOW" change to the zeitgeist is
| alarming to me. He was the darling of the left for
| _years_ because of Tesla and SpaceX, but now he 's
| completely persona non grata for...reasons?
|
| It smacks of excommunication for heresy.
| DennisP wrote:
| He got richer so he must be bad.
|
| How you can build a successful car company in the US
| without getting super rich, I don't know.
| sidibe wrote:
| Might it also have to do with his positions on almost
| everything conflicting with most people's? A lot of
| people didn't realize what a narcissistic manchild he was
| until recently.
| permo-w wrote:
| this is pedantic, but the parent comment was conjugating
| "to have" to "had" via the subjunctive, not via the past
| tense
| udev4096 wrote:
| He's right tho
| permo-w wrote:
| oh yeah of course, no question there
| fundad wrote:
| We'd have to believe that he means what he said about
| starting the company. Maybe he meant it, maybe it was just
| corporate philanthropy BS. Which do you think is really the
| case?
| raincole wrote:
| Yeah, parent comment complains Elon is bashing OpenAI "any
| opportunity he gets"... while unable to point out how Elon's
| comment is wrong.
|
| Maybe they just wants to express how much they don't like
| Elon any opportunity they gets.
| narag wrote:
| He edited the comment and linked relevant tweets.
|
| I would add this one:
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1630640058507116553
|
| I had no idea about this drama either, so I didn't
| understand what Elon was talking about, now it seems clear.
|
| But "Based"? Is it the name of his new AI company? Where
| does that come from?
| neom wrote:
| Yeah I had no clue what his deal was, but I decided to
| search his tweets for "openAI" and it became clear pretty
| quickly. Interestingly, for the same reason as the
| article.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| "Based" is a catchphrase of the extremely online right.
| It basically means "cool" but with a subtext of "is
| annoying to libs/normies who just don't get it."
|
| See also "pilled."
| logarhythmic wrote:
| I don't know of anyone who is trying to be political when
| using those terms. It's just general internet slang
| younger people use at this point
| ajkjk wrote:
| For many years it was just a term in gamer culture, I
| guess it has been repurposed a bit in the last few years.
| slackdog wrote:
| [dead]
| numbers_guy wrote:
| Words become political when you start injecting politics
| in them. It originally meant "cool" and had no political
| connotations to it. It originated on 4chan. And just
| because some group happens to use a word more frequently
| doesn't suddenly turn you into a NAZI if you happen to
| like using the same word.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I'm not sure why people are still talking about it as
| some insular 4chan slang. Like much of 4chan culture,
| it's spread to most of the rest of the internet by now.
| Hell I've seen "based" comments on HN.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| I shun most of the internet these days. HN and (German)
| reddit are the only "socials" I use. I have no clue what
| is happening on the wider Anglo speaking internet,
| especially Twitter and such is completely alien to me.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| The thing about language is that it isn't static, it
| changes over time. Sometimes a previously dominant usage
| will become eclipsed by a new one that emerges.
|
| There's nuance to the etymology of any word of course. In
| fact I sometimes see the extremely online left try to
| (ironically?) appropriate "based." But I think in the
| context we can all figure out which connotation Elon was
| using.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| Yes I get that. My argument is, when some group you don't
| like starts adopting a word, your reaction should not be
| to politicize the word and shun it and pretend they stole
| it. Just keep using the word as you intend it and who
| cares about what some other dumbfucks think.
| paintman252 wrote:
| That's just not true. I've been in many very online
| leftist communities and they also freely use it.
|
| it's just general internet speak at this point
| sangnoir wrote:
| You may be ignoring context in this specific instance:
| the picture in Musk's tweet has "Woke AI" and "Closed AI"
| being chased off by Based AI.
| deathanatos wrote:
| I view its etymology like this,
| Lil B (based [?] doing your own thing (in a good
| way) not swayed by critics)
| / \ Gen Z 4chan
| (based [?] cool) ("based and redpilled"
| [?]"unswayed by pop rhetoric"
| and "sees the world beyond the 'illusion'", resp.)
| projektfu wrote:
| With the baseball bat it evokes Kyle Chapman.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Chapman_(American_acti
| vis...
| permo-w wrote:
| "Based" is slang for "cool" or "in" that's common on
| 4chan, but I believe has its origins in the 90s offline
|
| on 4chan it's largely used to mean something along the
| lines of "fitting the 4chan anti-groupthink groupthink"
| neom wrote:
| I do recall people saying based a lot in the 90s, it
| meant based in reality.
| permo-w wrote:
| this sounds much more plausible than the sibling
| comment's "based on your own beliefs", but plausibility
| is not necessarily correctness
| moralestapia wrote:
| This is it.
| hot_gril wrote:
| It originally meant "based on your own beliefs," usually
| in the context of sticking to your guns despite
| unpopularity. Which is/was the cool thing to express on
| 4chan.
| honkler wrote:
| nah. 4chan learnt it from the rap song "Based God".
| root_axis wrote:
| > _But "Based"? Is it the name of his new AI company?
| Where does that come from? _
|
| It's a reference to the BasedGPT "jailbroken" ChatGPT
| persona that responds to answers in a less politically
| correct manner.
| rvz wrote:
| He is definitely right there. At this point, I consider
| OpenAI partially acquired by Microsoft, since it is almost
| majority controlled by them. It is essentially a Microsoft AI
| division.
|
| It is similar to what Microsoft did with Facebook in the
| early days of slowing acquiring a stake in the company. But
| this is an aggressive version of that with OpenAI. What you
| have now is the exact opposite of their original goals in:
| [0]
|
| Before:
|
| > Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that
| is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained
| by a need to generate financial return. [0]
|
| After:
|
| > Our mission is to ensure that artificial general
| intelligence--AI systems that are generally smarter than
| humans--benefits all of humanity. [1]
|
| The real 'Open AI' is Stability AI, since they are more
| willing to release their work and AI models rather than
| OpenAI was supposed to do.
|
| [0] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/
|
| [1] https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond
| andrepd wrote:
| Yeah I'm sure $massive_megacorp with a monopoly on
| $critical_technology has our best interests at heart.
| Doesn't anybody read sci-fi anymore??
| davesque wrote:
| Yes, he's technically correct. But it's pretty obvious he's
| really just jealous. Inferring that from his past behavior is
| not rocket science, as they say.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Well, minus the part where it never was Open, even when it
| was Elon.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| He is, but it is weird given the history he has. He was
| kicked out of Paypal because he wanted to use the MS tech
| stack instead of LAMP at the time. Now some decades later
| here he is.
| Idiot_in_Vain wrote:
| You've got the story wrong. He wasn't kicked out because of
| the stack debate, but because he sold PP to eBay (making
| enough money in the process to fund Tesla and SpaceX).
| sangnoir wrote:
| How many times was he kicked out?
| lalos wrote:
| huh? it was Peter Thiel the acting CEO when the sale was
| done - right after removing Musk for said migration to MS
| stack.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Well, he's only right in the observation that OpenAI is no
| longer what it originally claimed it would be (OTOH with a
| couple of the founders being venture capitalists, one has to
| wonder how sincere that intention ever was).
|
| It seems a bit ironic that "evil" Google openly published the
| paper ("Attention is all you need") that desribes the
| "Transformer" architecture that now anyone such as OpenAI
| with the money and inclination can use to build their own
| ChatGPT. Turns out it's about money (10,000 GPUs + tons of
| data to train this thing) not any secret sauce.
|
| And now Musk's concern has changed from AI being in too few
| hands to the fact that it's "woke" so he wants to create
| another AI company to create the racist/threatening non-woke
| AI that he thinks the world needs. Or, at least the one that
| he needs, to keep himself at the center of attention.
| prox wrote:
| Could you sum up the beefs if it is relevant? I ignore twitter
| as much as I can.
|
| Part of me feels that in the run to more privacy, we don't
| really have a reputation system anymore. You mention that Jack
| and Miles are good people, but how can we know such things as a
| general public?
|
| In the days of yore and people were local you kind of new who
| was who. In the global space, this becomes hard. I feel this
| ties in with discussions on trust and leaning into people who
| are responsible and wise.
| neom wrote:
| It's basically exactly as the article. He said _he_ founded
| open AI (hmmm) with the idea that it 's open... ai.. and now
| it's not, it's closed and for-profit. Re: Jack and Miles, not
| only is your point well taken, we'd also have to agree that
| I'm a good judge of character...! :D
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I tend to disagree with almost everything Elon but he seems to
| be right on this one, no?
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| OpenAI went downhill fast after Elon left the board of
| directors due to a "conflict of interest" with Tesla. I don't
| know if he would have allowed the for-profit restructuring
| after giving them so much money precisely so that it didn't
| need profits for AI research. It probably also didn't help that
| he poached Karpathy from them and put him in charge of Tesla's
| AI efforts. So it's no surprise that there is a lot of
| potiential beef here.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Musk is all about the Benjamins. I have no doubt that he
| would have been on board with the for-profit restructuring at
| some point.
| freehorse wrote:
| So Elon wanted to build an open source non-profit AI but had
| to resign from openAI, which he had cofounded with that
| intention, because he wanted to create a closed-source and
| for-profit AI for Tesla and that brought a conflict of
| interest. Sounds quite contradictory to me to present this as
| an argument to construct an image of open-source, non-profit
| advocate. It reads as "I support open-source etc AI as long
| as it is others who do it, my intentions are to use AI for
| profit".
| boringg wrote:
| I think you should probably read up on Elon's statements
| about AI and you would probably realize that, at least from
| the statements, he doesn't trust AI and has deep concern
| about it (hence why he was part of OpenAI to keep watch
| over its progress).
|
| The models used at Tesla are vastly different than the LLM
| models. There is nuance here.
| Aicy wrote:
| We can have some nuance here.
|
| Tesla was set up as a for-profit company and is such
| beholden to shareholders, and so using closed-source AI for
| profit is the path Tesla is going down.
|
| OpenAI was set up as a non-profit company and only beholden
| to its values, and promised to be open-source.
|
| These two organisations incentives contradict each other,
| and so it makes sense for Elon Musk to separate himself
| from one of them. You could argue that Elon Musk should
| have instead separated himself from Tesla, but that is a
| big ask for someone to leave their main lifetime project.
|
| I don't think you can put the blame on Elon Musk that
| OpenAI later became ClosedAI (while not under his watch),
| some other members of OpenAI have to be responsible.
| andrepd wrote:
| > It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy work
| at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles
| Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely
| good humans. I've known Jack for 10 years and he's for sure a
| measured and reasonable person who cares about not doing harm.
|
| It's _uncanny_ how much this sounds like a 17th century peasant
| praising their Good King.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| I'm sure history has had many "measured genuinely good people"
| at the helm of what would become some pretty evil ventures. I
| don't think being genuinely good scales. I think having grit
| and conviction scales. Weather you're genuinely good or not is
| not what wins out.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| This "not doing harm" narrative is very grating. It's just
| another transparent and self-serving attempt by a company to
| co-opt progressive vernacular to justify whatever questionable
| policy they have as a moral imperative.
|
| This is the corporate equivalent of "think of the children". A
| justification that could have been used to gate-keep any and
| all aspects of computer science, and one that isn't even
| logically consistent since they only hide their code and
| weights while still publishing their research: making it
| ultimately reproducible by malicious actors, especially those
| well-funded, while slowing down researchers and competitors.
|
| We are privileged to work in a field where we have open access
| journals, and where there is a large undergoing drive to
| improve the reproducibility of papers by releasing the code and
| weights. Their behaviour is the antithesis of what the field is
| working towards and having talked to many researchers, I don't
| know many that are fooled by it.
| clarge1120 wrote:
| Based
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy work
| at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles
| Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely
| good humans. I've known Jack for 10 years and he's for sure a
| measured and reasonable person who cares about not doing harm.
|
| I think this hardly matters. Both companies are competing in a
| market and if the ethics stands in the way of market dominance
| and shareholder value, ethics will generally lose out.
| leesec wrote:
| Does everyone forget they have voluntary applied a cap to their
| profits?
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Historically speaking, the pivot to capitalism occurs from
| financing arrangements. Financial obligations mandate attention,
| overriding charters or missions. Hospitals in America took on
| financing to replace decaying facilities and just like that
| turned towards for-profit healthcare. Universities as well. There
| is no escaping financial servitude because the organization never
| can earn enough to get out of its financial obligations and
| restructure itself to never take that path again. Once the change
| from non-profit to for-profit happens, it is never reversed.
|
| OpenAI has one shot at fulfilling social mission and financing
| will ruin any hopes or dreams it has of taking the non-profit
| path. It needs to ignore pressure for exponential growth for the
| sake of competition or whatever strategists see as a threat or
| opportunity, because adopting their frame demands financing.
| charlescearl wrote:
| In the context of the u.s. system of capitalism, "non-profit"
| does not equate to "non-capitalist". The institutions still
| serve capital (if we look to Marx's conception of capital as a
| process) -- at the very least, in avoidance of taxes, R&D to
| ultimately increase productivity, pacification of potential
| insurgent action (e.g. Andrew Carnegie's intent). We should
| distinguish between the role of local, community run
| organizations and "non-profits" that receive millions in
| funding from venture _capitalists_.
|
| A few discussions here https://www.teenvogue.com/story/non-
| profit-industrial-comple...
|
| "Under the nonprofit-corporate complex, the absorption of
| radical movements is ensured through the establishment of
| patronage relationships between the state and/or private
| capital and social movements. Ideological repression and
| institutional subordination is based on "a bureaucratized
| management of fear that mitigates against the radical break
| with owning-class capital (read: foundation support) and
| hegemonic common sense (read: law and order)."
|
| https://monthlyreview.org/2015/04/01/the-nonprofit-corporate...
| Klonoar wrote:
| Huh, I was reading this old New Yorker piece earlier today - how
| timely I guess.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
|
| _> "We don't plan to release all of our source code," Altman
| said. "But let's please not try to correct that. That usually
| only makes it worse."_
| toyg wrote:
| If someone can make money off something, after achieving global
| visibility, they will - it's almost an iron law. The only
| exceptions I can think of are Wikipedia, Archive.org, and
| Wikileaks.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Unfortunately all of those have their own ethical issues,
| commercial corruption is not the only challenge to well-
| intentioned initiatives when meeting scale.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| What is your point? That moderation issues or bias fights in
| some articles are equivalent to the concept of Wikipedia
| being proprietary?
| mellosouls wrote:
| No, my point was that the examples given are not free of
| significant problems - which generally seem to emerge at
| scale. I'm an admirer of all the projects named (also
| OpenAI) in principle, despite their flaws.
| selestify wrote:
| What are some unethical things about Wikipedia or
| archive.org?
| geeB wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403233
| mellosouls wrote:
| Bias, gatekeeping and cliques on Wikipedia, overreach wrt
| rights law with archive.org immediately come to mind as
| things discussed before on HN, there are no doubt other
| problems.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Also almost every big open-source project? ffmpeg?
|
| OAI is not bad for being for profit, it is bad for the bait and
| switch. They started off with "Open" and still have it in their
| name even as they turned into the next Microsoft.
| toyg wrote:
| Most F/OSS projects result in commercial exploitation, one
| way or another. Virtuous exceptions are very very few.
|
| _> OAI is not bad for being for profit, it is bad for the
| bait and switch._
|
| The bait-and-switch examples in F/OSS are legion, typically
| via license changes and occasionally via non-changes going
| against the spirit of the community (like Linux sticking to
| GPLv2). Most are not as blatant as IMDB pulling up the
| drawbridge, but something like moving to "open core" once
| popularity is achieved.
| phkahler wrote:
| How about VLC:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/73dafr/vlc_creator_...
| asdff wrote:
| At some point the U.S. government should step up and provide some
| resources, and offer large datasets for open acess training and
| pretrained models. In the future, there will be many AI models
| for various purposes, closed source, guarded, with their moat
| being the costs to train a similar model on a dataset of similar
| breadth. This eliminates smaller orgs from ever being able to
| offer a competing model, and ruins innovation by gatekeeping who
| is allowed to innovate.
|
| This is exactly the sort of role government is made for. To
| uplift the collective using the power the collective possess as a
| massive meta organism. Opening up access to these models will
| allow our developers to compete against the world and dominate in
| this space, much like how international researchers in other
| fields often leave their home countries for the U.S. to get at
| the resources needed to even engage in cutting edge research
| (such as institutional access to equipment, compute, data, and
| research funding that simply doesn't exist in other places).
| JustBreath wrote:
| I feel like at the moment governments are equal parts trying to
| understand how this is going to shake up the nature of
| competition between nations and trying to figure out how to
| exploit this technology.
|
| Dunno how many of them are thinking "let's release this for
| EVERYONE _"
|
| _ Including our adversaries, many of whom are technologically
| behind us
| hackerlight wrote:
| Prefer the government to force companies like Google to give
| their data to competitors rather than the government assemble
| data itself (unless it's at their fingertips already for
| whatever reason).
|
| What you're proposing won't level the playing field much
| because Google will still have way more data.
| carvking wrote:
| Yes - bad elon musk
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| Interesting conversation ... but I don't think this is as
| disastrous for the world as other commentators seem to feel.
| First, I don't think OpenAI is really far ahead (or even ahead at
| all) of other companies (particularly Google). And maybe I'm
| naive, but I don't think they have some special insights either
| about how to build models ... they just trained one model using a
| lot of resources and data. But other organizations know how to
| gather data and train models too.
|
| And nothing stops us from building more models in the open ...
| nor from pooling our resources and training something for the
| community.
|
| Things are not so dire. We are okay.
| [deleted]
| doomleika wrote:
| It is really hard to be "Open Source" and "Non-profit" in the
| same time without the company delve into political grandstanding
| and being on a leash of other for-profit(i.e. Mozilla)
| nivenkos wrote:
| Not really, just don't let the company get taken over by
| lawyers and "diversity" types.
| theboywho wrote:
| Would things have been different in the success of OpenAI if from
| the start the company was closed-source and for-profit ? If the
| answer is no, then does it really matter ? The article makes it
| seem like if OpenAI owes its success to the initial promise.
| bilater wrote:
| Literally top headline today is about their ChatGPT API release
| which is 10x cheaper than the previous model. Ridiculous how
| people will find a reason to complain.
|
| News flash...you want progress, you need to give ppl incentive
| aka money aka profit.
| redox99 wrote:
| What surprises me is that it goes beyond not releasing weights or
| not releasing source code. They haven't even published a paper on
| GPT 3.5, ChatGPT, ChatGPT turbo, etc. They haven't even said what
| ChatGPT turbo is, beyond "it's faster bro".
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