[HN Gopher] The Contradictions of Sam Altman
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The Contradictions of Sam Altman
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 161 points
Date : 2023-03-31 19:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| tdsone3 wrote:
| https://archive.is/YTOeD
| antirez wrote:
| I believe you can't, at the same time, accuse OpenAI of
| benefitting of ideas mostly invented elsewhere, and also claim
| that they are in a predominant position. It does not make any
| sense, and they are not naturally positioned for a monopoly. Just
| other companies have to move their asses.
| tomlue wrote:
| I'm a fan of OpenAI, but this is nonsense. All of human
| existence is mostly other people's ideas. Among a ridiculously
| huge list of other things, OpenAI benefits from the mountains
| of labor that made scalable neural networks possible.
|
| Have they had their own good ideas? Definitely. Are they
| benefitting of ideas mostly invented elsewhere? Also
| Definitely, just like everybody else.
| antirez wrote:
| I don't think you understood me. I'm with you, but given that
| often OpenAI is accused of using public ideas for profit,
| this, in turn, means they are obviously not in a dominant
| position. So far they are just better than the others.
| version_five wrote:
| I'm not really a fan of openAI, but I think we're seeing the
| classic mistake of confusing product with technology. Steve
| Jobs / Apple didn't anything you'd call new ideas either
| (obvious cliche but so is the criticism). It's execution and
| design once the tech reaches a certain level
| poopypoopington wrote:
| I've heard Altman (on the Lex Friedman podcast) and Sundar
| Pichai (on the Hard Fork podcast) say things to this
| degree. The thing that OpenAI really managed to crack was
| building a great product in ChatGPT and finding a good
| product market fit for LLMs.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| What's the product market fit for LLMs, and how does
| OpenAI fill it?
| fooster wrote:
| How much money is openai making from chatgpt premium now?
| How much revenue are they they making from the api?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Well sure, but there still aren't any other LLMs at the
| level of GPT3/3.5 let alone GPT-4. GPT3.5 just using the
| API returns fantastic results even without the ChatGPT
| interface (which isn't terribly hard to replicate, and
| others have using the API).
|
| There are dozens if not hundreds of companies that
| could've done something profound like ChatGPT if they had
| full access to GPT3/3.5. And honestly, OpenAI stumbled a
| lot with ChatGPT losing history access, showing other
| users' history... but that doesn't matter much as the
| underlying technology is so profound. I think this really
| is a case of the under-the-hood capability (GPT3/3.5/4)
| mattering more than productization and execution.
|
| (Now I think there are not a ton of companies that could
| do what Microsoft is trying to do by expanding GPT4 to
| power office productivity... that is a separate thing and
| probably only about 3 companies could do that, at best:
| Microsoft, Apple, and Google... and theoretically Meta
| but their lack of follow through with making Metaverse
| useful makes me doubt it.)
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| Hm, I wonder how much of the API's performance is related
| to training/finetuning done by OpenAI planned towards the
| ChatGPT product. I think the RLHF is partly product
| design and partly engineering.
| vitehozonage wrote:
| Rather than execution or design perhaps this time it was
| mainly about being unethical enough to sell out to
| investors and unflinchingly gather enough data in one place
| by carelessly ignoring copyright, authors' desires, privacy
| regulations, etc.
| brookst wrote:
| It's a good comparison. And once again tech enthusiasts are
| confused and outraged that the product people are getting
| credit for tech they didn't invent. Once again missing the
| forest that people buy products, not tech.
| simonh wrote:
| There's an awful lot of judgement, engineering and
| technique that goes into a really well thought out
| product. It's often deeply underestimated, and culture
| makes a huge difference in execution. Bing/Sydney came
| out after ChatGPT, based on exactly the same tech, but
| was hot garbage.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| It's interesting to see the ad implementation, I recall
| some predictions that Microsoft would be particularly apt
| at finding a way to integrate advertising organically.
| Instead it just seems to have made the bot more stupid
| because sponsored products are forced into its
| recommendations.
|
| I've gone back to just using the GPT API, unless I
| absolutely need to search the internet or information
| after 2021 for some reason.
| brookst wrote:
| I don't know, my family talks almost daily about how
| amazing bing chat is. The Sydney eta was kind of crazy,
| but the core product seems to be doing well.
|
| It is definitely solving a different problem than chatgpt
| though, and maybe a less inspiring problem. Chatgpt is
| like an open world game where you can do anything; Bing
| chat is just a point solution for the vicious spiral of
| SEO and Google's profit motive that rendered search
| results and web pages so useless.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| Bing/Sydney is better than ChatGPT. It had serious bugs
| in beta testing
| simonh wrote:
| It's a dramatically worse chat bot, but being able to
| search the internet does give it an additional useful
| capability, while limiting it to five interactions papers
| over its psychotic tendencies.
| tomlue wrote:
| mostly agree. Though I wouldn't underestimate the tech and
| engineering work behind OpenAI. That microsoft partnership
| is no joke.
| wslh wrote:
| > OpenAI benefits from the mountains of labor ...
|
| Can't you say the same about Google? Google lives from the
| labor of others.
|
| Not entering into the debate if this is ethically or not just
| saying that OpenAI is not much different. When photo services
| such as Google Photos recognize the Eiffer Tower in Paris
| they are using images from others.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| There have been many examples of companies inventing new
| technology, then failing to take it to market until a
| competitor copied the ideas. The classic example is Apple and
| Xerox PARC. The criticism in this case is that while icons and
| GUIs are obviously harmless (so it's good we got them out of
| the lab!), maybe AI is the kind of tech we should have let
| researchers play with for a while longer, before we started an
| arms race that puts it in everyone's house.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| OpenAI acts like they are some underdog startup for PR purposes
| while actually having access to effectively unlimited resources
| due to their relationship with Microsoft, which rubs people the
| wrong way
|
| Plenty of other companies had released GPT powered chat bots
| like ChatGPT, they just couldn't offer it for free because they
| didn't have a sweetheart deal with Microsoft for unlimited
| GPUs. Google did drop the ball though, they were afraid of
| reputation risk. Google should have used DeepMind or another
| spinoff to release their internal chatbot months ago
| simonh wrote:
| I think you're missing how much of a profound difference the
| intensive RLHF training OpenAI did makes in ChatGPT.
| Microsoft's Sydney seems to also be GPT 3.5 based, came out
| after ChatGPT, and it was an utter dumpster fire on launch in
| comparison.
|
| Meanwhile nobody has even caught up to ChatGPT yet, not even
| Microsoft whose resources are the secret sauce you think is
| the game changer, and now 4.0 is out and even more massively
| moved the ball forward.
| jamaliki wrote:
| No, actually. Microsoft's Sydney is GPT 4 [1].
|
| 1 - https://blogs.bing.com/search/march_2023/Confirmed-the-
| new-B...
| nomel wrote:
| > to release their internal chatbot months ago
|
| I'm not sure that would have been wise. Bard clearly isn't
| ready.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Yeah but if they released earlier that fact wouldn't have
| been so embarassing.
|
| As it was, they intially just claimed that releasing a
| competitor was irresponsible, then they eventually did it
| anyway (badly).
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| I'm not sure why that doesn't make sense.
|
| In a winner takes all market, where the product is highly
| complex, which is likely the case for any product developed
| since the advent of computers, if not before, the predominant
| position will almost certainly be taken by somebody, and since
| it's a highly complex product, it's likely no one entity
| thought of and/or implemented even close to a majority of the
| ideas needed to make it work.
|
| In fact, it's likely to be a random winner amongst 10-20
| entities who implemented some of the ideas, and another
| potentially larger number of entities who implemented equally
| good, or even better, ideas, which happened to fail for reasons
| that couldn't have been known in advance.
| curiousllama wrote:
| > In a winner takes all market
|
| Just because Search was winner take all, doesn't mean AI will
| be. What network effects or economies of scale are
| unachievable by competitors? Besides, Alpaca showed you can
| replicate ChatGPT on the cheap once its built - what's
| stopping others from succeeding?
| tyfon wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think this will be a corporate thing but a
| private decentralized thing.
|
| It's probably the worst fear of the likes of google etc, a
| 100% local "search engine" / knowledge center that does not
| even require the internet.
|
| I've been running the 65B model for a bit. With the correct
| prompt engineering you get very good results even without
| any fine tuning. I can run stable diffusion etc fine too
| locally. If anything will let us break free from the
| corporate, it is this.
| ftxbro wrote:
| > I believe you can't, at the same time, accuse OpenAI of
| benefitting of ideas mostly invented elsewhere, and also claim
| that they are in a predominant position.
|
| There used to be a team at Google called Google Brain and they
| all left to go to OpenAI after the employee protests against
| taking military AI contracts in 2018. Now Microsoft has those
| contracts and funneled $10B to OpenAI from the CIA. OK that's a
| little bit of exaggeration but not so much; I guess not _all_
| employees left, and Google Brain still technically exists. Also
| some of the brain employees went to other startups not only
| OpenAI.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't have $10 billion from the CIA. They're
| splitting military cloud contracts with Amazon and other
| startups, but it's just the same thing as corporate contracts
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >funneled $10B to OpenAI from the CIA
|
| Without some evidence to support it, this really sounds like
| a conspiracy theory.
| beebmam wrote:
| Many of those employees have changed their minds about
| military contracts in this new cold war era.
| cowl wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken their opposition was on principle not
| whether it was needed or not. So the fact that we are in a
| new cold war era does not change that Equation. The
| principle is still the same. The only way for this "change
| of mind" is if their opposition was due to "it's not needed
| because US has no rivals". Or what most probably happened,
| they realised that if they want to keep workign on this
| field there is no escape from those kind of implications
| and They don't have the big bad wolf Google to blame
| anymore.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| And then Russia invades Ukraine and people change their
| minds about what is important, and what is possible.
| cowl wrote:
| But that's my point. If their opposition was not on
| principle but based on the naive Idea that "we will live
| in peace and harmony", I really am afraid what other
| naive principles are in the bases of their work and what
| safeguards are being set in place for the AIs.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| There is a such thing as being principled and then
| finding out you were naive.
| mistermann wrote:
| There is also the substantial effectiveness of
| propaganda, and the fact that it is essentially
| impossible to know if one's beliefs/"facts" have been
| conditioned by it.
|
| That most discussions on such matters typically devolve
| rapidly into the regurgitation of unsound memes doesn't
| help matters much either.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Sure, but it is equally likely that your old perspective
| was the result of propaganda and your new one is a
| rational adjustment in the face of new information. Or
| that both are propaganda, I suppose.
| cowl wrote:
| ofcourse but then you still must have some principles and
| be as loud about how naive you were as you were when you
| were protesting the thing in the first place.
| josephg wrote:
| Why must you be loud about changing your mind? Why not
| just quietly realise you were wrong, have conversations
| with friends about it and move on? That's what I'd do.
|
| My life is a story. I'm under no obligation to share.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| Not the op but the quotes from John Maynard etc made me
| think... if I listen to your original thesis and you
| convince me (maybe you have some authority) and I go on
| believing you, is it not harmful to me if you realize
| your error and don't inform me? Boss: "why did you do X?"
| Me: "But sir you told me doing X was good!" Or to put it
| differently, if you spread the wrong word then don't
| equally spread the correction then the sum of your
| influence is negative.
| pen2l wrote:
| When I was a young person, I used to deride writings like
| 1984 on the ground that the scenarios and stories presented
| to carry the message were too far-fetched.
|
| Reading your comment has set off an epiphany, I think I get
| it now, there probably exists some higher-up person who is
| thinking in these terms: we must always be in a state of
| war, for if we are, the populace will want to be ready and
| willing to fund the instruments of war. And we always
| _want_ to be ready for war, because if ever we are not, we
| lose our capability to win a potential future war. We must
| even contribute our efforts to build these instruments of
| war. War is constant. War is peace.
| HyperSane wrote:
| The more powerful your military is the less likely you
| will need to use it to defend yourself.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| America! What is in your military now, eventually ends up
| in the hands of the civilian police.
|
| *and other countries are following. Fucking, sadly.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| What the hell are they going to do with an M1 Abrams?
|
| Having said that, I dread to see what the NYPD manage to
| achieve with an F-35B.
| [deleted]
| m3kw9 wrote:
| OpenAI getting rich now everyone wants a piece and everyone
| fighting over it like a billion dollar inheretence fight. In a
| round about way, if GPT5 is nearly as advertised, watch the govt
| swoop in under national security guise
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Undoubtedly OpenAI already has some very close ties and/or
| contracts with the DoD.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Any evidence for this, or are you just assuming that it's the
| case?
| roflyear wrote:
| To me it overstates what is achieved. This isn't AGI.
| Unsure how much the government would care about this.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| > if GPT5 is nearly as advertised, watch the govt swoop in
| under national security guise
|
| Re: GPT5, are there any .. reasonable/credible sources of
| information on the subject? I've become deaf from all the
| speculation and while i am very curious, i'm unsure if anything
| substantiated has actually come out. Especially when
| considering speculation from Sam himself.
| blihp wrote:
| There's barely any credible information about GPT4 (i.e.
| OpenAI hasn't said very much about what's going on behind the
| curtain) and there's absolutely none re: any releases beyond
| that.
| zarzavat wrote:
| It's unlikely to be any time soon. Despite productization by
| OpenAI, LLMs are still an active area of research. Research
| is unpredictable. It may take years to gather enough
| fundamental results to make a GPT-5 core model that is
| substantially better than GPT-4. Or a key idea could be
| discovered tomorrow.
|
| Moreover, previous advances in GPTs have come from data
| scaling: throwing more data at the training process. But data
| corpus sizes have started to peak - there is only so much
| high quality data in the world, and model sizes have reached
| the limits of what is sensible at inference time.
|
| What OpenAI can do while they are waiting is more of the easy
| stuff, for example more multimodality: integrating DALL-e
| with GPT-4, adding audio support, etc. They can also optimize
| the model to make it run faster.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I keep keep hearing people claim we are at the end of
| corpus scaling, but that seems totally unfounded. Where has
| it been proven you can't running the training set through
| in multiple epochs in randomized order? Who's to say you
| can't collect all the non-English corpus and have the
| performance transfer to English? Who's to say you can't run
| the whole damn thing backwards and still have it learn
| something?
| SamPatt wrote:
| There are diminishing returns from compute time but it
| looks like even though they are diminishing there's still a
| fair bit on the table.
|
| Though my guess is that GPT-5 will be the last model which
| gains significantly from just adding more compute to the
| current transformer architecture.
|
| Who the hell knows what comes next though?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| You are missing the scaling on context size.
| ftxbro wrote:
| They've already swooped in.
|
| I mean the conspiracy argument would be that the $10B isn't a
| normal investment. It's a special government project investment
| facilitated by OpenAI board member and former clandestine CIA
| operative and cybersecurity executive Will Hurd through his
| role on the board of trustees of In-Q-Tel the investment arm of
| the CIA. It's funneled through Microsoft instead of through
| Google in part because of Google's No-Military-AI pledge in
| 2018 demanded by its employees, after which Microsoft took over
| its military contracts including project Maven. The new special
| government project, the Sydney project, is the most urgent and
| ambitious since the project to develop nuclear weapons in the
| mid twentieth century.
|
| Of course I don't necessarily believe any of that but it can be
| fun to think about.
| koboll wrote:
| Wait holy shit this is at least partially true though?
| https://openai.com/blog/will-hurd-joins
| nirushiv wrote:
| Please stop spreading FUD and unsubstantiated rumours all
| over this thread
| paganel wrote:
| Why wouldn't the US Government invest billions of dollars
| in a technology that it sees as essential? What's FUD-y
| about that? Most of our industry itself is the result of
| the US Government's past investments for military-related
| purposes.
|
| Later edit: Also, article from 2016 [1]
|
| > There's more to the Allen & Co annual Sun Valley mogul
| gathering than talk about potential media deals: The
| industry's corporate elite spent this morning listening to
| a panel about advances in artificial intelligence,
| following sessions yesterday dealing with education,
| biotech and gene splicing, and the status of Middle East.
|
| > Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen led the AI session
| with LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman and Y Combinator's Sam Altman.
| The main themes: AI will affect lots of businesses, and
| it's coming quickly.
|
| > Yesterday's sessions included one with former CIA
| director George Tenant who spoke about the Middle East and
| terrorism with New York Police Department Deputy
| Commissioner of Intelligence & Counter-terrorism John
| Miller and a former chief of Israeli intelligence agency
| Mossad.
|
| So, yes, all the intelligence agencies are pretty involved
| in this AI thing, they'd be stupid not to be.
|
| [1] https://deadline.com/2016/07/sun-valley-moguls-
| artificial-in...
| ftxbro wrote:
| Now seven years later Will Hurd and George Tenet are
| currently the managing director and chairman respectively
| of Allen & Co! More facts worth considering are in the
| mysterious hacker news comment from the other day:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366484
| [deleted]
| kneel wrote:
| It would be irresponsible for intelligence agencies NOT to
| involve themselves in AI. LLMs have the capabilities to
| catalyze economic shockwaves on the same magnitude of the
| internet itself.
|
| Notice how OpenAI is open to many Western friendly
| countries but not certain competitive challengers?
| https://platform.openai.com/docs/supported-countries
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| Out of the BRICS, Brazil, India, and South Africa are
| there. Russia and China aren't, but that's not really an
| issue of "competitive challengers" so much as
| dictatorships who are invading or threatening to invade
| democracies
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Realise that America has invaded plenty of countries,
| overthrown leaders, been a huge driver of claimed change
| and oil industries, basically done whatever it wants and
| continues to do so, pretty much based on being able to
| print as much money,as it likes and if you don't like
| that, you'll face the full force of the military
| industrial complex.
|
| Look at Snowden and Assange. They tried to show us what's
| behind the curtain and their lives were wrecked.
|
| The rhetoric on here about Russia and China = "bad guys",
| no questions asked is overly simplistic. Putin is clearly
| in the wrong here. But what creates a person like that? I
| believe we are somewhat responsible for it.
|
| People cite possible atrocities of Xinjiang, but what
| about Iraq and Siria, North Korea, Vietnam whole entire
| countries destroyed. Incredible loss of life.
|
| American attitudes are a huge source of division in the
| world. Yes so are China and Russias.
|
| We cannot only see one side of a story anymore, it's just
| too dangerous. As we have more powerful weapons and we
| do, we have to, absolutely have to learn to understand
| each other and work through diplomacy with a more open
| mind and peaceful outcomes which are beneficial for all.
|
| No I'm not advocating for dictators, but you cannot
| pretend that Americans invasions have been always
| positive or for good intention, or that American
| interests are always aligned with the rest of the worlds.
|
| The arms races need to stop. Very quickly.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Is it not enormously more likely that Microsoft decided to
| invest a small amount (to them) in a technology which is
| clearly core to their future business plans?
| xenospn wrote:
| Who has time to come with this stuff?!
| poopypoopington wrote:
| ChatGPT
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Most of it seems to come from /r/conspiracy, which
| unsurprisingly has a lot of overlap with another subreddit
| that starts with /r/cons*
| the_doctah wrote:
| I'd love to go through all the things Liberals labeled a
| conspiracy in the last 5 years that actually became true,
| but I don't have that kind of time today
| slickdork wrote:
| I'd settle for three examples with sources.
| pjohri wrote:
| Well at least one: in the year 2000, I used to work for
| Verizon and a picture from one of the local networks hubs
| was circulated showing a bunch of thick cables tapping
| into the network and alleging that the government was
| listening to all calls Americans made. People made a lot
| of fun of that photo until Snowden brought the details to
| light.
| [deleted]
| mongol wrote:
| How did he become so rich? His Wikipedia page does not have much
| details on this.
| [deleted]
| ftxbro wrote:
| Paul Graham is his Les Wexner.
|
| "Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, had just finished his
| sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt is probably the
| most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam
| Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of
| meeting him, I remember thinking 'Ah, so this is what Bill
| Gates must have been like when he was 19.'"
|
| "Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer
| to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I
| ask "What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or
| ambition I ask "What would Sama do?"
|
| What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the
| elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people
| think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick
| winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few
| people with such force of will that they're going to get
| whatever they want."
| version_five wrote:
| If anyone has read "Wild Sheep Chase" by Haruki Murukami,
| there was the idea of being possessed by the sheep which
| turned one into a forceful business man. I have only met a
| couple people like this, but as in the quote it's immediately
| obvious, and you see why they are where they are.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| In my opinion, this book is his most underrated book. It's
| very funny, highly recommend!
| bmitc wrote:
| I feel I'd take every word of that with a massive grain of
| salt. It reeks of cult of personality.
| dilap wrote:
| I did take it with a huge grain of salt (and an eye-roll)
| reading it years ago. However, given where sama and OpenAI
| are today, perhaps pg was right all along!
| jasmer wrote:
| Loopt was a failure. Political skills. It's a stream of PR,
| not anything operationally applied, or performant.
| pbw wrote:
| I don't have the source, it was a video interview, but Sam said
| he has personally invested in around 400 startups. And it says
| here he employs "a couple of dozen people" to manage his
| investment and homes. At that scale I think you yourself
| basically are a venture capital firm.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| You are just describing a rich person, not how he became
| rich.
| elorant wrote:
| Those 400 startups are gradual investments. They didn't all
| happen overnight. If you have really early access to some
| very promising startups you don't need a shitton of money
| to invest in them.
| naillo wrote:
| I'd imagine he got to invest early in a lot of successful YC
| companies during his time there.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Parents were rich, sent their child to Stanford and used their
| connections to let him build connections to other rich people,
| founded a shitty startup in the middle of a period where any
| rich kid making a social media company would get bought out for
| dozens of millions, rest is history.
|
| He's always been rich.
| 876978095789789 wrote:
| On Loopt's questionable acquisition:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3684357
| 876978095789789 wrote:
| He was in the first batch of YC startups with a feature phone
| location-aware app called Loopt. Once smartphones came along,
| it became largely obsolete, and started to become irrelevant,
| but still got acquired under questionable circumstances anyway,
| enough for Altman to get rich:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3684357
|
| From there he became a VC and ultimately president of YC.
| 876978095789789 wrote:
| I'm not sure if I should elaborate further, but in the last
| years of Loopt, it actually devolved into a hook-up app
| servicing the gay community, basically Grindr before Grindr:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385178
|
| I guess he was ahead of his time, in a way? Still, I've never
| forgotten that this silly "success" was the first big exit of
| the most touted YC founder, ever.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think that's just being ahead of your time, no
| qualification needed.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Should we also talk about the contradictions of WSJ?
|
| The only way to never contradict yourself is to never say
| anything.
|
| Now, is AI the right work area to "move fast and break things"?
| no.
| molodec wrote:
| Altman "hadn't been to a grocery store in four or five years". He
| is so out of touch with real world, people needs and desires, and
| fantasies about the future world based on the assumption that
| most people want to be free "to pursue more creative work." I
| think most people don't actually dream about pursuing creative
| work. Being absolutely "free" of work doesn't make one more
| creative. Real problems and constraints force people to come up
| with creative solutions.
| leobg wrote:
| The contradiction I noticed during his Lex interview was him
| talking about being attacked by Elon Musk. He said it reminded
| him of how Elon once said he felt when the Apollo astronauts
| lobbied against SpaceX. Elon said it made him sad. Those guys
| were his heroes. And that the wish they would come visit and look
| at the work SpaceX was doing. I found that comparison by Altman
| disingenuous. First, he didn't seem so much sad as he seemed
| angry. At one point in the interview, he said that he thought
| about some day attacking back. That's not at all how Elon had
| felt about those astronauts. And second, why doesn't Altman just
| invite Elon and show him the work they are doing? Wouldn't take
| more than a phone call.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is
| the job of the government. The ultimate effect of virtue wanking
| CEOs and corporate governance is to deceive people into thinking
| democracy is something that can be achieved by for profit
| organizations and that they can forsake the formal binding of
| collective interest through law.
|
| It's nice if people are nice but it is not a bulwark of the
| collective good. It is a temporary social convenience. The higher
| that niceness exists in the social order, the greater its
| contemporary benefit but also, the more it masks the
| vulnerability of that social benefit.
|
| It matters if Sam Altman is Ghandi or Genghis Khan in a concrete
| way but you, as a citizen must act as if it doesn't matter.
|
| If AI poses a danger to the social good, no amount of good guy
| CEOs will protect us. The only thing that will is organization
| and direct action.
| erlend_sh wrote:
| The market should absolutely be looking after the collective
| interest. That's what the we the collective created the market
| for in the first place!
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| The market will follow its inceotives. You shape those
| incentives with laws. If you want a market that allows people
| to take risks, you do that by inventing the limit liability
| corporation not by telling people to be nice and to not
| pursue their debts unto their debtors' personal property. If
| you want a market that discourages monopoly you do that by
| regulating combination not by writing articles about how
| "good businessmen" don't act anticompetitively.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That's completely misguided. Consumers purchase from companies
| they like.
|
| Why do you think companies are all woke and virtue signalling?
| Because they interpreted the vocal woke minority as the voice
| of the country and they want to capture that market.
|
| Corporations will absolutely try to do go in order to maximise
| their profit.
|
| And this is ignoring private charities which get more done than
| any government has ever done.
|
| Collective interest is a nice concept but the government, like
| all large organizations, is not capable of moving in any
| direction. Whatever you need done, chances are someone's cousin
| will get a job, the job will be done poorly and the taxpayers
| will pay more in taxes to fix the problem again and again and
| again.
|
| A government can't fail and it's therefore inefficient.
| runarberg wrote:
| Your post ignores the existence of democracies. Governments
| fail all the time. In a democracy failures of government will
| often yield a total collapse and complete replacement. If a
| failure is spectacular enough, these failure often come with
| constitutional reforms or even revolutions.
|
| In addition, democratic governments (and even many autocratic
| governments) have some levels of distribution of power. Your
| small municipal government may very well end up being
| absorbed into you neighboring municipality because it is more
| efficient. Maybe an intermediate judicial step is introduced
| at a county, or even country level.
|
| Governments do try, and often succeed into making your
| freedom and your interaction with society at large as
| efficient as possible, while trying to maximize your
| happiness. (Although I'll admit way to often democratic
| governments do act in a way that maximized the profits of the
| wealthy class more then your happiness).
| clarkmoody wrote:
| The third way is to build AI technology that empowers the
| individual against state and corporate power alike. Democracy
| got us here. It cannot get us out.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| Who do you imagine has the majority of compute power?
| maxbond wrote:
| That's not a stable equilibrium. Blogs gave individuals
| asymmetric control over disseminating information - it didn't
| last. If you don't create institutions and power structures
| that cement and defend some ability of individuals, it will
| decay as that power is usurped by whatever institutions and
| power structures benefit from doing so.
| rhcom2 wrote:
| > AI technology that empowers the individual against state
| and corporate power alike
|
| What does this even mean though? Seems like hand waving that
| "AI" is just going to fix everything.
| bredren wrote:
| It's much easier to imagine progressed applications powered
| by recent AI that would provide outsized civic weaponry.
|
| Identification of unusual circumstances or anomalous public
| records seem ripe.
|
| But more straight forward and customized advice on how to
| proceed on any front--super wikihow--makes anyone more
| powerful.
|
| Today, complicated solutions can sometimes to require
| extensive deep research and distillation of material.
|
| So much so that DIY folks can seem like wizards to those
| who only know of turn key solutions and answers.
|
| At the risk of causing a draft from further hand waving: a
| bigger tent can mean a higher likelihood of a special
| person or group of folks emerging.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _The third way is to build AI technology that empowers the
| individual against state and corporate power alike_
|
| Ha, I'm OK with that as long as I get to pick the individual!
|
| I mean, an AGI under the control of some individual could
| indeed make them more powerful than a corporation or even a
| state but whether increases average individual freedom is
| another question.
| felix318 wrote:
| Such techno-utopianism... political power belongs to people
| who control the guns. There is no way around it.
| smoldesu wrote:
| So long as you buy your inferencing hardware from another
| private party, I'd wager you're helpless against both state
| and corporate power.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| Given that we don't have such AI technology at present, would
| it not be prudent for us to assume that it may not be
| available imminently and plan for how we can address the
| problem without it?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| It's all about risk and rewards, nobody who owns openai is
| going say let's pause. It also never stopped the country that
| first invented nuclear bomb, sure they could paus and then
| Russia would have done it and would have it first, and then
| said "thanks for pausing"
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| I don't know why people think nukes are a good example here.
| Nukes were outright birthed within the government within that
| government at its height of intervention into the market, at
| the height of its reach into the daily lives of every
| American, at the height of American civic engagement.
|
| Policy makers spent a huge amount of time creating a
| framework for them. Specifically there was a huge debate
| about whether they should be under the direct control of the
| military. The careful decision to place them in civilian
| control under the Department of Energy is probably part of
| the reason they haven't been unleashed since.
| bennysonething wrote:
| Though we do vote with our wallets too.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| How great then that some wallets are millions of times larger
| than others.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| Yes, but for your own immediate benefit. People, in general,
| are just not trained to think long term and "for the greater
| good".
| josephg wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| I agree government is useful and needed sometimes. But laws are
| slow, blunt instruments. Governments can't micromanage every
| decision companies make. And if they tried, they would hobble
| the companies involved.
|
| The government moves slowly. When AGI is invented (and I'm
| increasingly convinced it'll happen in the next decade or two),
| what comes next will not be decided by a creaky federal
| government full of old people who don't understand the
| technology. The immediate implications will be decided by Sam
| Altman and his team. I hope on behalf of us all that they're up
| to the challenge.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| They'll be decided by AI, not by governments, corporations,
| or individuals.
|
| There's still a kind of wilful blindness about AI really
| means. Essentially _it 's a machine that can mimic human
| behaviours more convincingly than humans can._
|
| This seems like a paradox, but it really isn't. It's the
| inevitable end point of automatons like Eliza, chess, go, and
| LLMs.
|
| Once you have a machine that can automate and mimic social,
| political, cultural, and personal interactions, that's it -
| that's the political singularity.
|
| And that's true even the machine isn't completely reliable
| and bug free.
|
| Because neither are humans. In fact humans seem predisposed
| to follow flawed sociopathic charismatic leaders, as long as
| they trigger the right kinds of emotional reactions.
|
| Automate that, and you have a serious problem.
|
| And of course you don't need sentience or intent for this.
| Emergent programmed automated behaviour will do the job just
| fine.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| > And if they tried, they would hobble the companies
| involved.
|
| Well, yeah, that's the point of regulation: to limit
| corporate behavior. There are plenty of other highly-
| regulated industries in the US; why shouldn't AI be one of
| them?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| >The immediate implications will be decided by Sam Altman and
| his team. I hope on behalf of us all that they're up to the
| challenge.
|
| Will they really be determined by OpenAI? So far what Altman
| has accomplished with OpenAI is to push a lot of existing
| research tech out into the open world (with improvements, of
| course.) This has in turn forced the hands of the original
| developers at Google and Meta to push their own research out
| into the open world and further step up their internal
| efforts. And that in turn creates fierce pressure on OpenAI
| to move even faster, and take even fewer precautions.
|
| Metaphorically, there was a huge pile of rocks perched at the
| top of a hill. Altman's push got the rocks rolling, but
| there's really no guarantee that anyone will have much say in
| where they end up.
| whiddershins wrote:
| The problem is that I don't believe we have any organization in
| government currently staffed and active that I trust to take
| any action that will benefit the public at large.
|
| The problem space is too confusing, and the people making
| decisions are too incompetent. It's a huge skills and knowledge
| gap.
|
| And that's without factoring in corruption and bad intentions.
| merlinoa wrote:
| This is socialist nonsense. The government won't protect
| anything outside of their interests[0]. Free markets are good
| and necessary for human flourishing[1].
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-
| Reserv... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Human-Action-Ludwig-Von-
| Mises/dp/1614...
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Stop asking the market to look after collective interest.
| This is the job of the government.
|
| One of the main roles of government is to step in where markets
| fail.
| nateabele wrote:
| > _One of the main roles of government is to step in where
| markets fail._
|
| Because that's worked out great so far?
|
| In every case I can think of, the government (usually because
| it's already captured) only ever serves to further exacerbate
| the issue.
| liketochill wrote:
| Has a government never prevented a merger that would have
| created a monopoly?
| mafuy wrote:
| Seriously? You can't think of how it was useful that the
| government mandated that factory door must remain open to
| help prevent human deaths in case of a fire? You can't
| think of the advantages of governmental food and medicine
| safety obligations?
| whiddershins wrote:
| The government has had some wins, and it would be naive
| to say they haven't.
|
| They have also had many catastrophic failures.
|
| It's unclear whether in the end regulations trend towards
| net benefit, but it does seem likely that the more
| nebulous a problem, the harder it is for government to
| get it right. Or anyone, for that matter. But especially
| government because the feedback loop is so slow and bad.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| That's literally my point. When you want behavior that is
| contrary to market incentive you need laws not guilt ridden
| editorials.
| hackerlight wrote:
| > This is the job of the government. The ultimate effect of
| virtue wanking CEOs and corporate governance is to deceive
| people into thinking democracy is something that can be
| achieved by for profit organizations
|
| Sam Altman says the opposite of what you're insinuating, if by
| "virtue wanking CEO deceiving people" you are referring to the
| subject of the article, Sam Altman. He says he wants a global
| regulatory framework enacted by government and decided upon
| democratically.
| yafbum wrote:
| I agree that it's the government's role but I think you can
| look a bit beyond the law itself, which is often hard to get
| right, especially in very fresh new domains. Some nice
| behaviors can be induced by mere fear of government
| intervention and fear of future laws, and I think we're seeing
| some of that now.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| This is a really cynical take.
|
| CEOs and companies can, and should, act ethically. Not just
| because it's the "right thing to do", but because it's the best
| way to guarantee the integrity of the brand in the long term.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| I feel I made it clear in my post that indivual integrity
| matters and has real consequences. But you as a citizen have
| 1 no way of validating a CEOs real intentions and 2 no
| recourse when that CEO fails to live up to those intentions.
| If you only fight for the protections you want once you need
| them, you will be at a serious disadvantage to win them.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I'm not sure you could ever say that a company can act
| ethically. People within the company may act ethically, but
| the company itself is just a legal entity that represents a
| group of people. The company has no consideration of ethics
| to act ethically.
|
| A company that is composed of 100% ethical actors may one day
| have all their employees quit and replaced with 100%
| unethical actors. Yet the fundamental things that make the
| company _that company_ would not have changed.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| If unelected CEOs have more power than the democratically
| elected government, we aren't in a democracy. That's the
| problem.
| jcz_nz wrote:
| CEO's and companies can act ethically while that aligns with
| the interest of the shareholders. Reality is that at some
| point, this becomes impossible even for those with the best
| intentions. "Do no evil" rings any bells?
| sbarre wrote:
| History proves that we have way more CEOs and companies
| acting out of self-interest, against the common good, than
| otherwise.
|
| So yeah, they _should_ , but they don't.
| LapsangGuzzler wrote:
| > CEOs and companies can, and should, act ethically.
|
| I can and should always drive the speed limit. But that
| doesn't mean I do, which is why highway patrol exists, to
| keep people in check. "Should" is such a worthless word when
| it comes to these discussions because if you believe that an
| executive needs to act a certain way but you don't believe it
| enough that some sort of check is placed on them, then you
| must not believe in importance of their good behavior that
| strongly.
| dantheman wrote:
| In general governments have done far more harm to individuals
| than anyone in the market. The job of the government is to
| protect your individual rights not the collective interest.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| I refer you to Thomas Midgley Jr.
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| I don't know that this is true.
|
| At very least they both share immense responsibility for
| causing individual harm. Sure the government may start a war,
| but that war can't happen without bombs and bullets, and in
| America at least those factories aren't run by the
| government. There is an intermediate step oftentimes, but I
| don't think that necessarily disconnects companies from
| responsibility.
|
| If you work at a guided bomb factory you may not be the
| person dropping it, but you are responsible for the
| destruction it causes in a small way.
|
| Also, if global warming kills us all then it is likely that
| the oil companies bear some responsibility for it right?
|
| Government sucks - I agree with that statement, but we
| shouldn't act like corporations are appreciably less
| responsible.
| fyloraspit wrote:
| They are worse together. Achieving some fine balance of
| corporations may seem somewhat utopian but we are pretty
| far from utopia in the current day.
|
| Building a mega corporation without big government/s I
| would argue is basically impossible. And local level
| governance is more likely and potent without big
| government. Again though, all of that is quite hard to
| achieve / see how to achieve when people with existing
| power enjoy the status quo control more of the levers than
| the masses, including the ones used to influence the
| masses.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The market responds to need.
|
| If nobody were able to socialise the cost of going in a
| foreign country and killing people, there would be no war.
|
| If the government didn't steal my money against my will on
| threat of incarceration, there is no way in hell I'd spend
| my money on bullets to kill someone's son in another
| country.
| syzarian wrote:
| The absence of government just leads to a situation in which
| some group takes control of a given area. In effect
| government will then exist again. During the absence of
| government there will be chaos and rampant crime.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I'd take a local firm offering to protect me for money over
| one that manages the large part of a continent.
|
| The small one will redistribute my money where I live at
| least.
|
| Besides, there is an alternative model where there are
| competing groups of people and I can pick the best among
| them based on price and services.
| krapp wrote:
| >Besides, there is an alternative model where there are
| competing groups of people and I can pick the best among
| them based on price and services.
|
| In the absence of government, what's stopping these
| groups from simply joining forces into a cartel, getting
| some armed thugs and making you an offer you can't
| refuse? History suggests that to be a far more likely
| scenario. Oligarchy, rather than competition, is the
| natural state of capitalism.
| majormajor wrote:
| That's just quibbling over what "your individual rights" are;
| where does the line get drawn between "exercising my right"
| and "having my rights infringed on by the actions of
| another." There is no shortage of harm done by "anyone in the
| market" today, whether it's currently illegal and we call it
| "crime" instead of just a person exercising their freedom, or
| whether it's harm that isn't regulated today.
| 7e wrote:
| Promoting the general welfare is literally discussed in the
| first paragraph of the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights
| came later.
| clarkmoody wrote:
| The Constitution is just a piece of paper. For every
| thousand steps the Congress, regulators, and state
| assemblies take in the direction of tyranny, the courts
| claw back one or two.
| [deleted]
| atmosx wrote:
| If we could connect social responsibility with the stock, it
| would matter a great deal :-)
| deltree7 wrote:
| chatGPT, like Google search has essentially democratized
| knowledge and wisdom to every human on planet earth.
|
| OTOH, it's the governments that have banned it.
|
| Do you think the citizen's of Italy are better off because of
| chatGPT?
|
| Corporations are more benevolent than government
| davnicwil wrote:
| I don't know, isn't history really just a series of specific
| people doing concrete actions?
|
| Do you think on some level the idea of some abstract
| 'government' taking care of things is just a narrative we apply
| to make ourselves feel better?
|
| Sure individual decision makers _in_ that government can
| concretely affect reality, but beyond that are we just telling
| a story and really nobody is 'in control'?
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| The actions that idnoviduals take on behalf of government are
| a direct reflection of the "abstract" policies and laws of
| that government. If you cannot discern this from 20th century
| history I don't know what to tell you.
| runarberg wrote:
| > I don't know, isn't history really just a series of
| specific people doing concrete actions?
|
| That is like saying: "Aren't human brains just series of
| neurons, firing at specific moments."
|
| History is as much--if not more--about interactions between
| people, feedback loops, collective actions, collective
| reactions, environmental changes, etc. I would argue that the
| individual is really really insignificant next to the system
| this individual resides under, and interacts with.
| Mezzie wrote:
| > beyond that are we just telling a story and really nobody
| is 'in control'?
|
| Basically. Or at least that's the impression I'm left with
| after spending a couple of years in politics work.
|
| I had a nice long breakdown.
| trendroid wrote:
| Possible to Elaborate?
| Mezzie wrote:
| tl;dr: Nobody is steering the ship because they don't
| know they're on a ship. Or that the ocean exists.
|
| It's hard without doxxing myself or calling out specific
| people and organizations which I'd rather not because I'm
| a nobody and can't afford lawsuits, but for various
| reasons I ended up political education and marketing for
| civics advocacy. Ish. To be semi on topic, I know some
| people who are published in the WSJ (as well as the
| people who actually _wrote_ the pieces). I 'm also a 3rd
| generation tech nerd in my mid 30s so I'm very
| comfortable with the digital world - easily the most so
| outside of the actual software engineering team.
|
| I've spoken with and to a lot of politicians and
| candidates from across the US - mostly on the local and
| state level but some nationally. And journalists from
| publications that are high profile, professors of legal
| studies, heads of think tanks, etc.
|
| My read of the situation is that our political class is
| entangled in a snare of perverse disincentives for action
| while also being so disassociated from the world outside
| of their bubble that they've functionally no idea what's
| going on. Our systems (cultural, political, economic,
| etc.) have grown exponentially more complex in the past
| 30 years and those of us on HN (myself included)
| understand this and why this happened. I'm a 3rd
| generation tech nerd, I can explain pretty easily how we
| got here and why things are different. The political
| class, on the other hand, has had enough power to not
| need to adapt and to force other people to do things
| their way. If your 8500 year old senator wants payment by
| check and to send physical mail, you do it. (Politicians
| and candidates that would not use the internet were
| enough of a problem in _2020_ that we had to account for
| it in our data + analyses and do specific no tech
| outreach). Since they didn 't know how the world is
| changing, they also _haven 't been considering the
| effects of the changes at all_.
|
| Furthermore, even those of them that have some idea still
| don't know how to problem solve _systems_ instead of
| _relationships_. Complex systems thinking is _the_ key
| skill needed to navigate these waters, and _none of them
| have it_. It 's fucking _terrifying_. At best, they can
| conceive of systems where everything about them is known
| and their outputs can be precisely predicted. _At best_.
| Complex systems are beyond them.
|
| Add to this that we have a system which has slowly ground
| itself to a deadlocked halt. Congress has functionally
| abandoned most of its actual legislative duties because
| it's way better for sitting congresspeople to not pass
| any bills - if you don't do anything, then you don't piss
| any of your constituents off. Or make mistakes. And you
| can spend more time campaigning.
|
| I left and became a hedonist with a drug problem after a
| very frank conversation with a colleague who was my
| political opposite at the time. I'm always open to being
| wrong, and hearing that they didn't have any answer
| either was a very 'welp, we're fucked' moment. I'm
| getting better.
| olao99 wrote:
| history is a simplified, prettified story that we tell
| ourselves about how things happened.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| The more we remember the possibility of true collective self
| determination, the more likely we are to survive all this
| mess we're making.
|
| These days we are constantly bombarded by this contradiction
| of individualism being primary and desirable, but at the same
| time impotent in the face of the world this individualism has
| wrought. And its all a convenient way to demoralize us and
| let us forget how effective motivated collective interest is.
| Real history begins and ends with the collective!
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Yes. There is a reason that when Britain felt threatened by
| the turmoil in France they didn't just bar unions or
| political clubs. They banned "combination" almost entirely
| in general.
| invig wrote:
| "think on some level the idea of some abstract"
|
| This! So much this! These conversations are being held at
| such a high level of abstraction that they don't make sense.
| It's one giant "feels" session.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Right. The National Health, turn of the century sanitation,
| widespread vaccination and the EPA are just all about "the
| feels".
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Sure but in my country (USA) the government is hopelessly inept
| at regulating technology. We still don't have privacy
| regulations and now to work around this they're trying to ban
| specific foreign apps instead of protecting us from all apps!
| I'd honestly be horrified if they tried to regulate AI. They
| would be in bed with Facebook and Microsoft and they'd somehow
| write legislation that only serves to insulate those companies
| from legal repercussions instead of doing anything to protect
| regular people. As far as I can tell it is the view of congress
| that big tech can to whatever they want to us as long as the
| government gets a piece.
| alex_sf wrote:
| There is no government that _isn 't_ hopeless inept at
| regulating technology.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Agreed. The US has backslidden since the 20th century back
| towards an elitest Republic and away from democracy. But even
| in the US, collective action has a better track record than
| "altruism".
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if the back slide narrative is really
| accurate, or if we're looking back at the myth of history
| rather than the facts. When the country was founded, only
| white men could vote and people of color were legally
| property with no rights. That's obviously not democracy, so
| I question at what point after that but before today we
| really had democracy to have slid back from.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| When we realize it's really only about from the 1970s
| that we had full enfranchisement and political
| participation of all citizens, this becomes more obvious.
| "Coincidentally," this enfranchisement was followed by
| the Volker shock and then the Reagan administration, both
| of which led to the decimation of labor's political power
| and share of the economic pie.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| AI is not true AI.. at the moment. ChatGPT is inherently biased
| by its developers, which means at least half the population may
| not trust its answers. For true AI he will have to give it
| autonomy, and I'm more interested if Altman is ready to live with
| an AI he cannot control.
| ur-whale wrote:
| https://archive.is/Quo4t
| gardenfelder wrote:
| https://archive.ph/YTOeD
| eternalban wrote:
| None of archive.* are working for me - cloudflare dns issues.
| Anyone else has access issues?
|
| [thanks to those who replied. strangely stopped working for me
| since yesterday [US]. can you post the ip you see?
|
| Cloudflare returns a 1001 error: "Ray ID: 7b128f151e4b0c90 *
| 2023-04-01 17:30:15 UTC" ]
| version_five wrote:
| Works for me in western europe
| wslh wrote:
| No issue here (Buenos Aires).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Works for me
| wslh wrote:
| Sidenote: I just reported to archive.is that it would be great
| to have the capability to render it throught services such as
| Pocket.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Listening to Sam talking with Lex Fridman about the dangers and
| ethics of AI while his company destroys entire industries as a
| consequence of their decision to keep GPT4 closed source and
| spitting out an apex api aggregator is one for the history books.
|
| Well played :)
| nomel wrote:
| > destroys entire industries as a consequence of their decision
| to keep GPT4 closed source
|
| Could you expand in that?
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Like contemporary language models, some HN commenters read
| the text itself in isolation and then extrapolate about "what
| that means" but then immediately jump to the conclusion that
| whatever real-world (beyond the text) that they imagine will
| eventually happen has in fact already happened--in effect
| they're hallucinating.
| washywashy wrote:
| OpenAI/ChatGPT seem to be very creative based on variations it
| can make on "things" that already exist. I'm just curious if we
| see AI being truly creative and making something "new". Perhaps
| everything is based on something though, and that's a rough
| explanation for this creativity. Maybe AI's true creativity can
| come from the input prompts of its "less intelligent", but more
| flexibly creative users.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| Perhaps if more CEOs / controlling shareholders were criminally
| liable for damage caused by their products, like the Sackler
| family, they wouldn't be so gung-ho.
| leetharris wrote:
| What a ridiculous take and a slippery slope.
|
| Should car manufacturers be liable for drunk drivers? Should
| kitchen knife manufacturers be responsible for stabbings?
|
| Your idea is great if you want your country to be left behind
| entirely in innovation.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Worth reminding that the slippery slope argument is not a
| valid argument at all.
|
| As with standard slippery slope reasoning, you jump to the
| most extreme interpretation. Yet reality shows us that you
| cannot, in fact, boil a frog, because at some point it just
| gets too fucking hot.
|
| Should car manufacturers be liable for drunk drivers? Maybe,
| if they include a space in their vehicle specifically to
| store and serve alcohol.
|
| Should kitchen knife manufacturers be responsible for
| stabbings? No. But no reasonable person would ever suggest
| they should. I might remind you also that "reasonable
| standard" is a legal concept.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Without defining the reasonable standard, it remains a
| silly idea in this case.
| iibarea wrote:
| There's tons of extremely effective marketing around who this guy
| is, what he stands for - and so I'd instead look at what he's
| done. He took a non-profit intended to offset the commercial
| motives driving AI development, and turned it into a for profit
| closely tied to Microsoft. I think he's an extremely shrewd
| executive and salesman, but nothing he's done suggests any
| altruistic motivations - that part always seems to be just
| marketing, and always way down the road.
| startupsfail wrote:
| What I'm afraid of is that he and Ilya are not as good and
| smart as they paint themselves.
|
| And that a lot of key people had left (i.e. to Anthropic). And
| that by pure inertia they have GPT-5 on their hands and not
| much control over where this technology is going.
|
| I can't tell for certain, but it does look like one of their
| corner pieces, the ChatGPT system prompt which sits at the
| funnel of the data collection had degraded significantly from
| the previous version. Had the person that was the key to the
| previous design left? Or it no longer matters?
|
| One could argue that OpenAI is very hot and everyone would want
| to work there. But a lot of newcomers only create more pressure
| for the key people. And then there is the inevitable leakage
| problem.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| There are some vague ideas and fears here. Understandable.
| Trying find a silver lining from where to get somewhere:
| Where would GPT4 and onwards be better housed? Is there a
| setup -- an individual, a company, an institution, a concept,
| license -- where the whole thing would clearly better fit,
| than with OpenAI?
|
| Note, I am not suggesting that they are particularly
| un/qualified or un/trustworthy. I am just trying to figure,
| if the problem is with the nature of the technology, that
| maybe there is not entity or setup, that would obviously be a
| good fit for governing gpt because gpt is simply scary, or
| this is a personality issue.
| bmitc wrote:
| > What I'm afraid of is that he and Ilya are not as good and
| smart as they paint themselves.
|
| This describes almost any venture capitalist or high-profile
| startup founders, as far as I can tell. Most don't realize
| their either privileged path or lucky path or both had more
| to do with it than their smarts.
|
| I really like James Simons as he mostly attributes his
| success to luck and being able to hire and organize smart
| people and give them the tools they need to work. He
| basically describes it as luck and taste, despite his actual
| smarts and his enormous impact on the world.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I don't know everything about him but from what I do know,
| I would put Bezos in the "not just luck" very lonely camp.
| I think his Day 1 work and iterate every day idea is just
| that powerful and real and he really did it instead of
| talking about it. Even though he says he won several
| lotteries to get where he is, I'm not so sure.
| saghm wrote:
| > I really like James Simons as he mostly attributes his
| success to luck and being able to hire and organize smart
| people and give them the tools they need to work. He
| basically describes it as luck and taste, despite his
| actual smarts and his enormous impact on the world.
|
| Plenty of really smart people don't end up having a big
| impact on the world, and it's possible to make a difference
| without being an outlier in terms of intelligence. Everyone
| who has made an impact has benefited to some degree by
| circumstances beyond their control though, so even if
| someone is genuinely smarter than anyone else, it's a
| fallacy for them to assume that it was the determining
| factor in their success and a guarantee of future success.
| iibarea wrote:
| ... and Simons would maybe be the most justified in
| overlooking luck, but he's smart enough to realize how
| random the world is. Peter Norvig also emphasizes the role
| of luck in his life. It's honestly a very good test of
| self-awareness and empathy, though there's def some
| negative selection against those traits in sv.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I'm sure they are both pretty smart, but if anything that
| makes their apparent monopoly more concerning.
| dnissley wrote:
| Monopoly over what?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| LLMs that actually work.
|
| They are on GPT-4 and no one else is close to GPT-3.5.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| You can use Anthropic's chatbot in Quora's Poe app. Right now
| it isn't as good as Bing or ChatGPT. Misses some basic logic
| things, and the "As an AI language model" BS still stops it
| from doing fun things like making Jesus rap battle Gus Fring
| (that was like a month ago, someone in the replies got it to
| do that so I'll have to check it out again). I'd have to see
| how it is at writing PowerPoints but idk
| IncRnd wrote:
| Verse 1 - Jesus
|
| I'm the son of God, the King of Kings
|
| You're just a drug lord, selling crystal meth and things
|
| My teachings change lives, bring peace to the world
|
| You bring addiction, violence and pain, unfurled
| Chorus
|
| Jesus, the savior, the light in the dark
|
| Gus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark
| Verse 2 - Gus Fring
|
| You talk a big game, but where's your proof?
|
| I've built an empire, with power that's bulletproof
|
| Your miracles are outdated, my tactics are new
|
| I'll take you down, no matter what you do
| Chorus
|
| Jesus, the savior, the light in the dark
|
| Gus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark
| Verse 3 - Jesus
|
| My love conquers all, it's the greatest force
|
| Your money and power, just lead to remorse
|
| You're just a man, with a fragile ego
|
| I'll show you mercy, but you reap what you sow
| Chorus
|
| Jesus, the savior, the light in the dark
|
| Gus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark
| Verse 4 - Gus Fring
|
| You may have won this battle, but the war is not done
|
| I'll continue to rise, until I've won
|
| You may have followers, but they'll never be mine
|
| I'll always come out on top, every time
| Chorus
|
| Jesus, the savior, the light in the dark
|
| Gus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark
| Outro
|
| In the end, it's clear to see
|
| Jesus brings hope and love, for you and me
|
| Gus Fring may have power, but it's not enough
|
| Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, and that's tough.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| Huh, last time I checked it it gave me a message about
| how that was "offensive to Christians". I'll have to
| check it out again
| sroussey wrote:
| > ChatGPT system prompt which sits at the funnel of the data
| collection had degraded significantly from the previous
| version
|
| They purposely moved free users to a simpler/cheaper model.
| Depending on your setting and if you are paying, there are
| three models you might be inferencing with.
| startupsfail wrote:
| I'm not talking about GPT-3.5 vs GPT-4. I'm talking about a
| change to their system prompt.
| TechnicolorByte wrote:
| It's a capped-profit structure where excess profit will
| supposedly go back to the no-profit side. From a recent NYTimes
| article [1]:
|
| > But these profits are capped, and any additional revenue will
| be pumped back into the OpenAI nonprofit that was founded back
| in 2015.
|
| > His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the
| world's wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then
| redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat
| chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed
| out several figures -- $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100
| trillion.
|
| How believable that is, who knows.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/sam-altman-
| ope...
| G_z9 wrote:
| This is ducking insane. How are people not up in arms about
| this? Imagine if the guy who invented recombinant insulin
| stated publicly that he intended to capture the entire
| medical sector and then use the money and power to reshape
| society by distributing wealth as he saw fit. That's ducking
| insane and dangerous. This guy has lost his fucking mind and
| needs to be stopped.
| [deleted]
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I find OpenAI a bit sketchy, but this is an overreaction.
| The only difference between OpenAI and the rest is that
| OpenAI claims to have good intentions, only time will tell
| if this is true. But the others don't even claim to have
| good intentions. It's not like any of OpenAI's actions are
| unusually bad for a for-profit compnay.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I'm sorry your AI keyboard didn't like your sentiment.
| Words have been changed to reduce your vulgarity. Thankyou
| for your human node input.
|
| On a serious note I think you are right. In private the
| ideology of him and his mentor Theil is a lot more...
| elite. Their think tank once said "of all the people in the
| world there are probably only 10,000 unique and valuable
| characters. The rest of us are copies."
|
| I'm not going to criticize that because it might be a valid
| perspective but filter it through that kind of power. I
| don't love that kind of thinking driving such a powerful
| technology.
|
| I am so sad that Silicon Valley started out as a place to
| elevate humanity and ended with a bunch of tech elites who
| see the rest of the world generally as a waste of space.
| They claim fervently otherwise but at this point it seems
| to be a very thin veneer.
|
| The obvious example being GPT was not built to credit or
| give attribution to its contributors. It is a vision of the
| world where everything is stolen from all of us and put in
| Sam Altmans hands because he's... better or Something.
| blibble wrote:
| > How are people not up in arms about this?
|
| they will be once they realise
|
| > This guy has lost his fucking mind and needs to be
| stopped.
|
| I agree, hopefully via regulation
|
| otherwise the 21st century luddites will
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Are the profits capped for Altman?
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Returns are capped at 100x their initial investment, which,
| you know, is not that big of a cap. VCs would go crazy for a
| 100x return. Most companies, even unicorns, don't get there.
|
| They're justifying it by saying AGI is so stupidly big that
| OpenAI will see 100000x returns if uncapped. So, you know,
| standard FOMO tactics.
|
| [0] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp
| mirekrusin wrote:
| This cap is much smaller, 100x was for initial investors.
| Microsoft took every single penny they could to get 49%
| stake.
|
| If they won't do AGI, they won't go over the cap with
| profits and all drama is for nothing - so saying it's fake
| cap is not right.
|
| Please somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
| [deleted]
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I mean, presumably they are at like 30x already?
| jprete wrote:
| I believe the Microsoft investment is around $10 billion,
| so they can get up to a trillion dollars of return under
| the cap.
| iibarea wrote:
| Again, this is unbelievably good marketing - and good sales
| when pitching VCs. Plus it's a nice reworking of the very for
| profit nonprofit model (see also FTX). But in terms of actual
| reality openAI is mostly succeeding by being more reckless
| and more aggressively commercial than the other players in
| this space, and is in no meaningful way a nonprofit any
| longer.
| btown wrote:
| I'm sure he believes that at such a time when OpenAI creates
| AGI, all the company's investors' profit caps will have been
| passed (or will immediately be passed), and thus he will have
| removed all incentives for anyone at the company - including
| himself - to keep it from the world.
|
| But there are so, so many incentives other than equity that
| come into play. Pride, well-meaning fear of proliferation,
| national security concerns, non-profit-related but still-
| binding contractual obligations... all can contribute to
| OpenAI wanting to keep control of their creations even if
| they have no specific financial incentive to do so.
|
| Whether that level of control is good or bad is a much longer
| conversation, of course.
| birdymcbird wrote:
| > altruistic motivations
|
| feel like trend among Silicon Valley companies and tech
| 'genius' personality about having altruism. some delusion that
| basing personality on this lie will make them untouchable and
| elevate their character, as if they not in this just to make
| ton of money like every other company and industry. and
| American media generally push this propaganda. SBF prime
| example.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| > and American media generally push this propaganda. SBF
| prime example.
|
| Did they? I've only listened to one interview of SBF and that
| was done by Tyler Cowen. He seemed totally aloof to the
| seriousness of running an exchange. If anything we've been
| convinced that idiosyncratic individuals are our saviors.
| birdymcbird wrote:
| Sbf constantly promoted in us media by news organization
| like nytime and celebrity before all the fraud became
| apparent.
|
| once cat was out of bag they run story going easy on sbf.
| never apologizing for promoting this fraud and they wrote
| articles sympathetic to sbf, also giving him platform to
| visit each news show or talk show and give defense of
| himself as he knew nothing about what was happening, all
| part of legal defense strategy to say incompetence but not
| criminal negligent
| cookingrobot wrote:
| He didn't take equity in OpenAi. Does that suggest altruism?
| iibarea wrote:
| Assuming we take this at face value, once you have a lot of
| money power becomes appealing - and control over a very
| important player in the AI space is that. The original vision
| of openAI was democratization of that decision-making
| process, the model now is - these guys are in charge. Maybe
| that's altruistic, because they're the smartest guys in the
| room and they can mitigate the downside risks of this tech
| (... not fucking AGI, but much more like the infinite
| propaganda potential of chatGPT). I'm more a fan of
| democratization, but that's not a universally held opinion in
| sv.
| choppaface wrote:
| He also invited peter theil to YC and made his first millions
| selling the personal data of Loopt users to low income credit
| card vultures. Also ... Worldcoin?
| victor106 wrote:
| > OpenAI and Microsoft also created a joint safety board, which
| includes Mr. Altman and Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin
| Scott, that has the power to roll back Microsoft and OpenAI
| product releases if they are deemed too dangerous.
|
| what a joke.
|
| find me one instance where the ceo of a company picked public
| interest/safety over profits when there was no regulatory
| oversight?
| dragonelite wrote:
| Do people really think AI will go haywire like in the Hollywood
| movies?
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Some do. Personally I think that LLMs will hit a ceiling
| eventually way before AGI. Just like self driving - the last
| 20% is orders of magnitude more difficult than the first 80%
| pell wrote:
| I don't think we're close to a situation where they send us
| into a Matrix. But I can see a scenario where they are
| connected to more and more running systems of varying degree
| of importance to human populations such as electrical grids,
| water systems, factories, etc. If they're essentially given
| executive powers within these systems I do see a huge
| potential for catastrophic outcomes. And this is way before
| any actual AGI. The simple "black box" AI does not need to
| know what it's doing to cause real-world consequences.
| gwd wrote:
| Not like in Hollywood movies, but yes:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA1sNLL6yg4
|
| https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/mzgtmmTKKn5MuCzFJ
|
| Look around alignmentforum.org or lesswrong.com, and you'll
| see loads of people who are worried / concerned at various
| levels about what could happen if we suddenly create an AI
| that's smarter than us.
|
| I've got my own summary in this comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35281504
|
| But this discussion has actually been going on for nearly two
| decades, and there is a _lot_ of things to read up on.
|
| EtA: Or, for a fun version:
|
| https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
| jeron wrote:
| Yudkowsky, to begin with
| sobkas wrote:
| > Do people really think AI will go haywire like in the
| Hollywood movies?
|
| No, it will just make every inequality even harder to fight.
| Because computer algorithm can't be biased so every decision
| it makes will be objective. And because it's really hard to
| know why AI made decision, it will be impossible to accuse it
| of racism, bigotry, xenophobia. While rich and powerful will
| be ones deciding (through hands of "developers") what data
| will be used to train AIs.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I don't think it's about AI going haywire, more about how the
| technology will be used by people for nefarious purposes.
| benrutter wrote:
| I don't for one, but I still think there could be legitimate
| safety concerns. LLMs are unpredictable, and the possibility
| for misinformation in pitching them as search aggregators is
| pretty large. Disinformation can have, and previously has
| had, genuinely dangerous effects.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Are there any employees of OpenAI around? I had a question:
|
| Does anyone in the office stop to contemplate the ramifications
| of developing technology that will likely put most people out of
| a job, which will have a whole host of knock-on effects?
| NickBusey wrote:
| Self checkout machines put people out of a job.
|
| Cars put stable boys out of jobs.
|
| Light bulbs put candlemakers out of jobs.
|
| Are the people who made them also morally culpable?
|
| Let's just make no progress ever in the name of employment I
| guess. /s
| madmask wrote:
| I think these comparisons always miss that humans are still
| useful because they are the control system in the end. Even
| if at very high level. When AGI comes along, humans will have
| to compete with it in the market, and there may be very
| little actual need for humans.
| NickBusey wrote:
| I believe humans will continue to be useful. You apparently
| do not. I have not missed anything.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > Self checkout machines put people out of a job.
|
| Have they, though? Is there good data on this? I haven't seen
| anyone lose any jobs over this in my area. They either get
| reassigned to different departments or get better jobs doing
| the same thing in companies that refuse to use self-
| checkouts. And I read here just a month or so ago that Amazon
| closed many of their "no cashier" stores in NY and Trader
| Joe's vowed to never use them.
|
| > Light bulbs put candlemakers out of jobs
|
| I would guess that such artisans moved on to other niche
| products. Where I live, candlemakers today make a lot of
| money, and I had a chance to watch them do their thing in
| their small commercial space. This was a one person
| operation, no employees and no mechanization, and judging by
| the amount of product they were creating and their wholesale
| prices, they were pulling in about about 300k a year or more,
| after taking into account supplies.
| NickBusey wrote:
| I like that your first point asks for data on a common
| phenomenon. (Side note: Everyone was reassigned or got a
| better job? You sure about that?)
|
| Then your second point is a wild anecdote with zero data.
| (Side note: With zero additional data I can tell you that
| your "judging" of their profit is wildly inaccurate.)
| sammalloy wrote:
| Google is your friend. Candlemaking businesses run by
| sole proprietors are highly profitable with total revenue
| in the billions. I probably wouldn't have believed it if
| I didn't see the operation up close and personal for
| myself. It's a lot of work for one person, and the the
| person who runs the business I saw works 12 hours a day.
| Carrok wrote:
| > person who runs the business I saw works 12 hours a day
|
| Oh OK, so if you work yourself to death you can make
| slightly above average income.
|
| Cool, I guess.
|
| I'm not seeing how it's relevant to GP's point though.
| Candle makers still exist yes.
|
| But are you really arguing the light bulb did not cause
| that specific job to become less common?
|
| I also thought it was fun how, you asked for a citation,
| then when you were asked for to provide one yourself, you
| respond with "gOoGlE iS yOuR fRiEnD".
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Many of them probably
| do contemplate it. Aware that since AI is a sea change, there's
| difficulty predicting the full range of first-order
| consequences, much less all the resulting second-order ones.
|
| But... genie, bottle; prisoner's dilemma. If they object to
| what they're building, or how it's implemented, too
| strenuously, they will be out of a job. Then not only do they
| have more immediate concerns about sustaining themselves, they
| have _no_ weight in how things play out.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| Maybe Sam thinks about this at some level. From his New Yorker
| profile[0]:
|
| > "The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks
| us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources." The
| Shypmates looked grave. "I try not to think about it too much,"
| Altman said. "But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide,
| antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli
| Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly
| to."
|
| This doesn't explicitly talk about him being worried about AI
| putting a lot of people out of jobs but he is prepping for AI
| going awry.
|
| [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-
| ma...
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| The fact that his backup plan if things go really wrong is to
| bug out, damn the rest of the world, is, to put it mildly,
| _not great_.
| efficientsticks wrote:
| > The goal, the company said, was to avoid a race toward building
| dangerous AI systems fueled by competition and instead prioritize
| the safety of humanity.
|
| > "You want to be there first and you want to be setting the
| norms," he said. "That's part of the reason why speed is a moral
| and ethical thing here."
|
| Clearly having either not learned or ignored the lessons from
| Black Mirror and 1984, which is that others will copy and emulate
| the progress.
|
| The fact is that capitalism is no safe place to develop advanced
| capabilities. We have the capability for advanced socialism, just
| not the wisdom or political will.
|
| (I'll answer the anonymous downvote: Altman has advocated giving
| equity as UBI solution. It's a well-meaning technocratic idea to
| distribute ownership, but it ignores human psychology and that
| this idea has already been attempted in practice in 1990s Russia,
| with unfavourable, obvious outcomes).
| sampo wrote:
| > lessons from Black Mirror and 1984
|
| Those are works of fiction.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| And works of prediction.
| efficientsticks wrote:
| They're dystopian fictions, ie. examples of what _not_ to do.
| But experience has shown that the real-world often recreates
| dystopian visions by example.
|
| So trying to be the first to show something in a well-meaning
| way can nonetheless have unfortunate consequences once the
| example is copied.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| Tell me, are the dystopian fictions that represent
| socialism or communism as bad, just as reasonable?
|
| Then following up with whatever your answer is: Why are you
| picking and choosing which fictions are reasonable?
|
| Let's dispel the notion that artists and writers are more
| aware and in tune with humanity than other humans.
| roywiggins wrote:
| 1984's Oceania is at least as Stalinist as it is anything
| else.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Then following up with whatever your answer is: Why are
| you picking and choosing which fictions are reasonable?
|
| This is arguing in bad faith. You don't care what their
| answer will be, you have decided that they are absolutely
| picking and choosing, and will still accuse them of as
| much even if their answer to your first question is,
| "Yes".
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| This isn't an argument in the first place buddy.
|
| You're right that I don't care, because it has already
| been decided that Orwell is representing the future if
| things go "The Wrong Way (tm)", buy 1984 at Amazon for
| $24.99, world's best selling book. Or more succinctly to
| OP, "The Capitalist Way (tm)".
| maxbond wrote:
| It's okay to decide that something isn't worth arguing
| against, and to spend your time in a way you find more
| productive.
|
| Having articulated an argument (which you absolutely
| did), it's not okay to try to retcon that you were just
| trolling and everyone else is the fool for having taken
| you seriously.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| > It's okay to decide that something isn't worth arguing
| against, and to spend your time in a way you find more
| productive.
|
| Who the hell are you talking to? This is some weird segue
| way into something that wasn't even being talked about at
| all.
|
| > Having articulated an argument (which you absolutely
| did), it's not okay to try to retcon that you were just
| trolling and everyone else is the fool for having taken
| you seriously.
|
| I think you're hallucinating anything and whatever you
| want. Anyway don't feel the need to be productive today.
| It's Saturday after all.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Maybe because they are more digestible then reality. Reality
| is much much worse.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| "The only thing stupider than thinking something will happen
| because it is depicted in science fiction is thinking
| something will not happen because it is depicted in science
| fiction."
|
| https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/position-statement-
| on-...
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| The only issue is that in the real world, capitalism has a
| better track record than socialism.
| efficientsticks wrote:
| I agree it's worth looking at the history, and to not repeat
| its mistakes, though at the same time this is a new
| situation, and it will continue to be new into the future, so
| sticking to heuristics may not serve humanity as well than
| being open-minded on the policy front.
| htss2013 wrote:
| Do we have the capability for advanced socialism? Because I
| recall all the smartest economists circa 2021 saying inflation
| wasn't a thing, it's transient, it's only covid affected supply
| chains. In reality we are in an broad sticky inflation crisis
| not seen since the 70s, which may be turning into a regional
| banking crisis.
|
| It's difficult to believe we have reached advanced socialism
| capabilities, and all of the forecasting that would require,
| when we don't even understand the basics of forecasting
| inflation 1-2 years out.
| efficientsticks wrote:
| The ambiguity of "advanced socialism" is problematic for any
| meaningful debate, so I apologise for that.
|
| I was meaning something closer to "we have the resources and
| technology (in this advanced era), just not the wisdom or
| political will". The actual nature of what could be provided
| is up for debate, but if we're looking at mass unemployment
| in 2 decades' time, perhaps it's a conversation worth having
| again.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I'd be very happy to see existing regulation on safety critical
| software systems updated to put a moratorium on AI integration
| for at least the next 5, maybe 10 years.
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| Sama <3
|
| He stuck to the 99.9% gamble of setting money on fire that were
| startups and navigated to the big time(tm).
|
| Also, he helped lift Clerky, Triplebyte, YC, and may others pre,
| during, and post Loopt.
|
| Not many people (or no one) "deserves" success, but Sama brings a
| healthy dose of goodwill wherever he goes.
| choppaface wrote:
| Triplebyte and Loopt both ended up selling / monetizing user
| data in ways the users really didn't like.
| jackblemming wrote:
| Are you kidding? He had one startup that was more or less a
| flop, then for some reason was appointed to a high position at
| y combinator, got lucky allocating capital (plenty of idiots
| can and have gotten lucky or were at the right place at the
| right time) and now is the CEO of OpenAI. This man is the
| definition of it's not what you know, it's who you know, and
| that's not a good thing.
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| Even with the best ideas, execution, and teams 99.99% of
| startups are. That's okay. They're assumed to be experiments.
|
| There is no such thing as self-made. And there's nothing
| wrong with friends and networking, especially as some
| particular help or chance encounter could be pivotal to
| nudging onto something great.
|
| It's the trying and learning that are the gold to try again.
| Timing, honest perspective, persistence, and a measure of
| prepared luck seem to be more of it. There is no magic
| formula. I wish success to all who want it.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Altman befriended Paul Graham, and his life blossomed...
| w3454 wrote:
| [dead]
| schiffern wrote:
| Looks like the media has chosen Sam Altman as the next Elon Musk.
|
| This makes sense. He perfectly fits their cliche of a socially-
| awkward technologist, and he's trusting (foolish?) enough to make
| complex nuanced statements in public, which they can easily mine
| for out-of-context clickbait and vilification fodder.
| eternalban wrote:
| 2014: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-
| president/
|
| 2015: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/sam-
| altman...
|
| 2016: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-
| altmans-ma...
|
| ..
|
| That last link, _Sam Altman 's Manifest Destiny_, is worth the
| read. However the last time I posted that link HN went down for
| an hour right afterwards. (of course correlation is not
| causation :/)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35334023
| greyman wrote:
| What would make him "socially-awkward"?
| tedunangst wrote:
| Never forget the time he wore sneakers to the Ritz.
| schiffern wrote:
| Sam or Elon?
|
| I'll assume you meant Sam. IMO Sam is mostly just shy and
| cerebral, but to many people that will come off as awkward
| and robotic.
|
| Watch his recent Lex Fridman interview. Personally I thought
| it was great, but I'm aware enough to realize that (sadly)
| many low-knowledge people will judge such demeanor harshly.
|
| Mark my words: the media will, 10 times out of 10, _exploit
| that misconception_ , not correct it. "Ye knew my nature when
| you let me climb upon your back..."
| lubesGordi wrote:
| I don't know, it seemed to me his responses on Lex were
| very measured and carefully restrained in a lot of places,
| calculated and vague in others. He doesn't come off as
| genuine to me at all.
| drewcoo wrote:
| If you mean the one where the interviewer, Lex, was wearing
| a suit and Sam was in a hoodie, where Sam droned in a
| robotic monotone and often sat with crossed arms, staring
| downward . . . I think the knowledgeable people might also
| assume he's the next evil tech overlord. Or certainly
| distant and uncaring.
|
| The only things missing were lighting from below and scenes
| of robots driving human slaves.
| [deleted]
| Kkoala wrote:
| It's interesting that in the article he was described being
| "hyper-social", "very funny" and "big personality" as a
| child. I guess those don't necessarily contradict with
| awkward and robotic, but also wouldn't come to my mind at
| the same time
| andsoitis wrote:
| You'll get some clues when you watch his recent interview
| with Alex Fridman https://youtu.be/L_Guz73e6fw
| seydor wrote:
| No, the next Zuckerberg. The media sees (rightly) openai as a
| competitor medium.
|
| Although he s much more prepared to face the next Greta
| (Yudowksi)
|
| He has to fix his vocal fry however, it is annoying
| [deleted]
| phillryu wrote:
| When I compare the two Elon was (lucky?) to at least have a
| string of vision-fueled ventures that became a thing. What is
| Sam's history of visions? Loopt? Is Y Combinator considered in
| a new golden era after he took over? Did Worldcoin make any
| sense at all?
|
| I'm honestly hoping I'm entirely ignorant of his substance and
| would feel better if someone here can explain there's more to
| him than that... I would feel better knowing that what could be
| history's most disruptive tech is being led by someone with
| some vision for it, beyond the apocalypse that he described in
| 2016 that he tries not to think about too much:
|
| "The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us
| and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources." The
| Shypmates looked grave. "I try not to think about it too much,"
| Altman said. "But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide,
| antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli
| Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly
| to." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-
| ma...
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Are you really insinuating that Elon was simply "lucky" when
| it came to disrupting and transforming two gargantuan and
| highly complex industries at the same time?
| schiffern wrote:
| I'm not talking about the _reality_ of Sam and Elon. I 'm
| putting my ear to the ground and observing the way the media
| is (and will) portray them.
|
| I wish that "actual reality" was all that mattered and not
| such low-knowledge "optics", but sadly we don't live in that
| world.
| wetmore wrote:
| I'm with you, listening to his interview with Ezra Klein gave
| me the impression that he doesn't actually think that deeply
| about the possible impact of AI. He says it worries him, but
| then he seems to wave those worries away with really
| simplistic solutions that don't seem very tenable.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| The main question about OpenAI is this: can you have any
| better structure to create singularity that will happen
| anyways (Some people don't like the word AGI, so I just
| definine it by machines having wastly more intellectual
| power than humans).
|
| Would it be better if Google, Tesla or Microsoft / Apple /
| CCP or any other for profit company did it?
| davidivadavid wrote:
| What bothers me most is that the picture he paints of
| _success_ itself is some handwavy crap about how it could
| "create value" or "solve problems" or some other type of
| abstract nonsense. He has displayed exactly 0 concrete,
| desirable vision of what succeeding with AI would look
| like.
|
| That seems to be the curse of Silicon Valley, worshiping
| abstractions to the point of nonsense. He would probably
| say that with AGI, we can make people immortal, infinitely
| intelligent, and so on. These are just potentialities with,
| again, 0 concrete vision. What would we use that power for?
| Altman has no idea.
|
| At least Musk has some amount of storytelling about making
| humanity multiplanetary you may or may not buy into. AI
| "visionaries" seem to have 0 narrative except rehashed,
| high-level summaries of sci-fi novels. Is that it?
| efficientsticks wrote:
| I agree, listening to the podcast I think the answer is
| that "yes" that is it: faith in technological progress is
| the axiom and the conclusion. Joined by other key
| concepts like compound growth, the thinking isn't deep
| and the rest is execution. Treatment of the concept of
| 'a-self' in the podcast was basically just nihilistic
| weak sauce.
| jasmer wrote:
| AI is not an abstraction. It's rational to be hand wavy
| about future value, it's already materialized. AI is
| basically an applied reseaarch project, he should be more
| like a Dean herding researchers and we should take him as
| that. In a previous era, that's what it would be: a PhD
| from Berkley in charge of some giant AT&T government
| funded research Lab thing. He'd be on TV with a suit and
| tie, they'd be smoking and discussing abstract ideas.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| [flagged]
| ninth_ant wrote:
| What specifically in that article was vilification of Sam or
| clickbait, or statements taken out of context?
| schiffern wrote:
| In these early days of a smear campaign (even an
| unintentional one that's just about chasing clicks), the game
| is mostly about plausibly deniable innuendo.
|
| The headline is a great start. Contradictions are bad. Altman
| has contradictions. Therefore Altman is bad. They don't say
| it, but they also know _they don 't need to_. They lead the
| audience to water and trust that enough of them will drink.
|
| The closing paragraph is another great example. It
| intentionally leaves the reader hanging on the question "so
| why did Altman do AI if there are moral downsides," without
| resolving the question by giving Altman's context when he
| said it.
|
| Trust me or don't, but what you see here is just the
| beginning. In 6 month's time Altman will be (in the public's
| eye) evil incarnate.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| They discussed the why earlier in the article, specifically
| a fear of AI being primarily developed in private labs
| outside of public view -- the partners feeling they could
| help bring an alternative approach.
|
| I feel they left it on that point not as part of some grand
| conspiracy theory, but because the potential for this to be
| good or bad is a question taking place around the world
| right now.
|
| Overall this piece feels positive towards Sam, despite what
| you feel is a negatively loaded headline. He's walking a
| delicate balance between profit and nonprofit, between
| something that could be harmful or helpful to society --
| these things are in contradiction and he's making those
| choices deliberately. This is an interesting subject for an
| article.
|
| I find it deeply unlikely he will be viewed like Musk in 6
| months. Musk is a fairly special case as he's unhinged and
| unstable more than evil. If someone wanted to paint Sam
| with an evil stick, Zuckerberg would be a more apt
| comparison -- playing with something dangerous that affects
| all of us.
| schiffern wrote:
| I genuinely hope that you're right and I'm totally wrong,
| but my experience watching the media landscape says
| otherwise. It would seem I have less faith in our
| journalistic institutions than you.
|
| The media operates on a "nearest cliche" algorithm, and
| the Mad/Evil Genius cliche is so emotionally appealing
| here that they'll find it irresistible. Even if it's not
| true, _they 'll make it true._
|
| Don't say I didn't warn you. :)
| okareaman wrote:
| This is a very fluid and chaotic situation so I'd be more
| concerned if he said one thing and stuck to it
|
| _When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?_
| - John Maynard Keynes
|
| _A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored
| by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With
| consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well
| concern himself with his shadow on the wall_ - Ralph Waldo
| Emerson
|
| _Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself.
| / (I am large, I contain multitudes)_ - Walt Whitman's "Song of
| Myself"
| balls187 wrote:
| When will we get the "Contradictions of Dang?"
| roflyear wrote:
| I hope dang gets a small piece of the YC pie
| maxbond wrote:
| "The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News"
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
| gamesbrainiac wrote:
| I think there are some interesting questions:
|
| - Sam does not have equity in OpenAI. Does this mean he can
| potentially be removed at any point in time?
|
| - OpenAI's profit arm will funnel excess profit to its non-profit
| wing. If this is the case, who determines excess profit?
|
| - OpenAI's founding charter commits the company to abandoning
| research efforts if another project nears AGI development. If
| this happens, what happens to the profit arm?
| whitepoplar wrote:
| I refuse to believe that Sam doesn't have equity in OpenAI. It
| _must_ be some 4D-chess-style ownership structure, which I 'm
| guessing is for tax avoidance.
| brookst wrote:
| There's plenty of evidence that he has no equity. I'd love to
| see contradictory evidence, but without that, just refusing
| to believe things based on intuition isn't great.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Why is that not great? It makes absolutely zero sense for
| him to have no equity, or at least some agreement in place
| that equity is coming. Or some other terms that essentially
| amount to equity. You don't need evidence to be skeptical
| of the situation.
| peripitea wrote:
| Why does it make zero sense? It makes perfect sense to
| me.
| brookst wrote:
| He was wealthy before and has other means to parlay
| openai to further wealth.
|
| You're doing the "only the true messiah would deny his
| divinity" argument -- if he was going to profit, that's
| bad. If he's not going to profit, obviously he's lying
| and is going to profit, so that's bad.
|
| IMO arguments are only meaningful if they can be
| falsified. Your argument can't be falsified because
| you're using a lack of evidence as proof.
| graeme wrote:
| With no equity comes no control. I would find it very
| surprising he has no control over the project.
|
| And if he does have control that has value whether you
| label it equity or not.
|
| It is possible he literally has no control and no financial
| upside but who would turn down control over what they
| believed to be a world shaping technology?
| peripitea wrote:
| The parent is a non-profit, hence no equity is required
| to have control. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
| somsak2 wrote:
| I mean, most non-founder company CEOs don't have a
| significant % of total equity and they still have control
| over the company.
| [deleted]
| xiphias2 wrote:
| It's nothing special, there's a company under the foundation,
| he doesn't have share in the company, he's ceo and board
| member of the foundation.
|
| It's just this one non-important detail is now being repeated
| over and over.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| > It must be some 4D-chess-style ownership structure, which
| I'm guessing is for tax avoidance.
|
| How would this even work? If only I got a dollar for someone
| suggesting that there are Magic ways to avoid tax..."they
| just write it off!"
| namaria wrote:
| Magic is just a word for things we don't understand. As a
| poor wage slave sap, I'm 100% sure the world is run by
| magic guilds, i.e. a bunch of powerful people conspiring
| stuff I could never fathom. Whatever gets to my eyes and
| ears has been approved for public disclosure. I don't know
| shit, everything is magic to me. I kinda know how to
| survive. So far.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> OpenAI's founding charter commits the company to abandoning
| research efforts if another project nears AGI development. If
| this happens, what happens to the profit arm?_
|
| I think the definition of AGI is sufficiently vague that this
| will never happen. And if it did happen, abandoning research
| efforts could take the form of selling the for-profit arm to
| Microsoft.
| gamesbrainiac wrote:
| I think you have a point there. AGI doesn't have a straight-
| forward litmus test.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| he admits in the article to having equity via his investment
| fund, they are using semantics because he doesn't "personally"
| have equity. He also tries to downplay by saying it's an
| "immaterial" amount, but in reality that could be billions of
| dollars.
|
| There's also nothing preventing Microsoft from gifting him
| billions in Microsoft stock so they can claim he's not
| motivated by profit with OpenAI despite indirectly making money
| off it.
|
| You'd have to be extremely naive to look at the decisions he's
| made at OpenAI and think it was all purely out of good will.
| Google and AWS both offer credits for academic and charity
| projects, why did Altman choose to go all in with Microsoft if
| it wasn't for money?
| peripitea wrote:
| Do you honestly think that AWS or Google Cloud would have
| given them billions in credits just because they're a
| nonprofit? I'm all for being skeptical of powerful people's
| motives but that suggests a major disconnect from reality
| somewhere in your thinking.
| davidgerard wrote:
| didn't know Thiel had helped start this here Y Combinator
| dang wrote:
| He didn't. That sentence was a bit confusingly written but "co-
| founded" binds only to the second name.
| mimd wrote:
| He's begging for regulatory capture. "I can destroy the world but
| I won't. My competitor's will, so regulate them." A shrewd plan
| considering he's not offering something beyond what another
| company with a large nvidia cluster could offer.
| [deleted]
| dmix wrote:
| The odds that is the end game of the AI ethics movement is
| pretty likely: A mega-monopoly AI firm with a wall of gov
| policy that will cripple any upstart who can't jump through
| "safety" hoops written for and by the parent company. So any
| talented dev who wants to do great AI work either has to work
| for parent company or build a startup designed to get acquired
| by them (aka don't rattle the cage).
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think that's the goal but there is a reasonable chance that
| they completely fail and no serious regulation ever gets
| passed.
|
| That's the thing with technology, people get used to it and
| then trying to ban/control it makes you look ridiculous. It's
| like how now that Tesla has made it normal to have driving
| assistance (and calling it FSD) there is little appetite
| outside of contrarian circles for serious regulation. If,
| however, regulation was proposed before Tesla shipped then it
| might have passed.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >A shrewd plan considering he's not offering something beyond
| what another company with a large nvidia cluster could offer.
|
| It's been 4 months, no one has released anything nearly as good
| as the initial release of ChatGPT. Meanwhile OpenAI has
| released GPT-4 and is trialing plugins and 32k context.
|
| Either their competition is incompetent or OpenAI is doing
| something right.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > A shrewd plan considering he's not offering something beyond
| what another company with a large nvidia cluster could offer
|
| So why does Bard seem inferior to GPT-4?
| jamaliki wrote:
| It'll get better fast.
| skybrian wrote:
| All that may be true, but it doesn't help us decide whether
| more AI regulation is a good idea or not.
|
| As with most things, it probably depends on how it's done.
| mimd wrote:
| That's a difficult question. I'm just pointing out that Sam's
| "contributions" are unhelpful to solving that question.
|
| You're limited by two prisoners and separate, sometimes
| antagonistic, countries. For example, we have little
| agreement on nuclear weapons, at best we've gotten
| concessions on testing, a few types of missiles, and so on.
| Same with current climate legislation. So getting global
| agreement is hard outside of the bare minimum. Most of the
| inner county approaches seem to be either panic, political
| distraction, or like Sam, regulatory capture, as they are
| ignoring that it means nothing if another country pursues it.
|
| So I'd focus on what simple agreements we could get
| worldwide.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| An excellent case of doing the right thing for the wrong
| reasons.
| breck wrote:
| I love what OpenAI has built and it's awesome to see them succeed
| on the AI front (also I'm forever amazed to see SamA live up to
| the Lebron James early level hype about his entrepreneurial
| skills).
|
| This article sheds more light on how the non-profit front failed.
| I find that to be a very hard and interesting problem. IMO, it
| points to a larger problem with our current laws, where trying to
| do good and compete fairly is made much harder (near impossible?)
| when you compete against companies that exploit unfair
| monopolistic laws.
| mellosouls wrote:
| There seems a lot of negative perception of the guy here, and
| OpenAI definitely deserve criticism for some stuff (so as the
| CEO, so does he), but - even if it was built on the work of
| others, and with the obvious caution about what may come next -
| he and they deserve immense respect and credit for bringing in
| this new AI age.
|
| They did it. Nobody else.
| [deleted]
| BarryMilo wrote:
| The expression "on the shoulders of giants" has never been so
| relevant.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Ha! To be fair though, Isaac Newton is not a bad person to be
| implicitly compared to. :)
| anileated wrote:
| I for one have nothing against Sam as a person (not knowing him
| well enough), but I question the sentiment that he and the
| company deserve respect for what they're doing--much less _by
| default_ , for some self-evident reason that doesn't even
| require explanation.
|
| Do people mean it in a sarcastic sense--and if not, why does
| OpenAI deserve respect again?
|
| -- Because it is non-trivial (in the same way, say, even Lenin
| deserves respect by default--even if the outcome has been
| disastrous, the person sure had some determination and done
| humongous work)?
|
| -- Because this particular tech is somehow inherently a good
| thing? (Why?)
|
| -- Because they rolled it out in a very ethical way with utmost
| consideration for the original authors (at least those still
| living), respecting their authorship rights and giving them the
| ability to opt in or at least opt out?
|
| -- Because they are the ones who happen to have 10 billions of
| Microsoft money to play with?
|
| -- Because they don't try to monetize a brave new world in
| which humans are verified based on inalienable personal traits
| like iris scans, which they themselves are bringing about[0]?
|
| This is me stating why they shouldn't have respect _by default_
| and counting to get a constructive counter-argument in return.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35398829
| cvalka wrote:
| >Because this tech is somehow >inherently a good thing
| Without technology humans are just unworthy bugs.
| anileated wrote:
| It is generally accepted that some applications of
| technology are good and some are not, or at least not self-
| evidently so (weapons of mass destruction, environmentally
| disastrous things like PFAS, packaging every single product
| into barely-recyclable-once plastics, gene editing humans,
| addictive social media/FB/TikTok, etc.)
|
| Is _this_ particular application of technology good, and
| even self-evidently so?
| nice_byte wrote:
| > he and they deserve immense respect and credit for bringing
| in this new AI age.
|
| Why? Who asked for it? I think that if openAI's breakthroughs
| never happened, we would not be any worse off (actually, we'd
| probably be better off).
| nadermx wrote:
| Meh, the contradiction seems to be that creating a source of
| power, be it via a physical or virtual means is different. It is
| not. A tool, is and always will be, a tool.
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