[HN Gopher] Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
___________________________________________________________________
Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
Author : arvindh-manian
Score : 245 points
Date : 2024-12-13 19:36 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| ronsor wrote:
| I like this practice of publicly airing out dirty laundry.
| motorest wrote:
| This is not airing out dirty laundry. This is calling bullshit
| on a bullshitter making bullshit claims.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| It's certainly in response to Elon getting more involved in the
| government.
|
| Recently the CFO basically challenged him to try and use his
| influence against competition "I trust that Elon would act
| completely appropriately... and not un-American [by abusing his
| influence for personal gain]".
|
| The best thing they can do is shine as much light on his
| behavior in the hope that he backs down to avoid further
| scrutiny. Now that Elon is competing, and involved with the
| government, he'll be under a lot more scrutiny.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| > Now that Elon is competing, and involved with the
| government, he'll be under a lot more scrutiny.
|
| That's the cutest fucking thing I've heard this year. In what
| world is anyone going to scrutinize Elon Musk? He's the
| right-hand man of the most powerful person in the world. The
| time for scrutiny was 8 years ago.
| nativeit wrote:
| Scrutiny: _noun_ critical observation or examination
| snozolli wrote:
| He'll be under scrutiny, just not by anyone with any
| power whatsoever to stop or even meaningfully influence
| his behaviors.
| zie wrote:
| Well Congress could meaningfully influence behaviors, but
| it seems very unlikely unless something drastic happens.
| nyc_data_geek1 wrote:
| Scrutiny without the ability to exert oversight, control
| or any modicum of restraint is... utterly useless to
| everyone except the historians.
| whoitwas wrote:
| I didn't even realize he was American until this year. I
| thought he was African.
| hn1986 wrote:
| It's naive for anyone to think that Elon _won 't_ use his
| influence in government to empower his companies and weaken
| his competitors.
| threeseed wrote:
| He spent $250m+ on helping getting Trump elected.
|
| Of course he is going to try and recoup some of that money
| back.
| themanmaran wrote:
| Agreed!(assuming that wasn't sarcasm)
|
| Has a nice "nailing my grievances to the town square bulletin
| board" feel. Doesn't result in any real legal evidence either
| way, but it's fun to read along.
| leonmusk wrote:
| well it seems Elon is playing to win at all costs. Win what
| though "the culture" from that ian banks book?
| vidarh wrote:
| Whole series of books. Banks would have detested where Musk has
| ended up, though - he was a committed socialist.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| How could he! _thank god that did not happen._
| MassiveQuasar wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > Summer 2017: We and Elon agreed that a for-profit was the
| next step for OpenAI to advance the mission
|
| So basically Elon had the same idea as Sam Altman.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| Sam too?!! how could he! thank god that did not happen
| either.
| m463 wrote:
| I wonder who wrote this missive?
| jtokoph wrote:
| GPT-4 :)
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yes ... and?
|
| The part that raises eyebrows is how a non-profit suddenly become
| a for-profit, from a legal standpoint.
| ascorbic wrote:
| He is suing to try to stop them becoming a for-profit. This
| post is showing that he originally supported the idea.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >This post is showing that he originally supported the idea.
|
| Yes ... and?
|
| That still wouldn't make it _legal_. The lawsuit will be
| decided based on jurisprudence, not based on "what Elon
| thinks is right".
|
| This is a very amateurish move, tbh. Did they hire Matt
| Mullenweg's legal team?
| claudiulodro wrote:
| I think it's supposed to be juxtaposed to this tweet of his:
|
| > I'm still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated
| ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is
| legal, why doesn't everyone do it?
| Vespasian wrote:
| Well apparently that's a very bold faced lie if the timeline
| claimed by sam altman is even close to being plausible.
|
| Elon Musks image is, for some reason beyond me, one of a
| "common man" who doesnt know all that much about business
| (and he's trying to pander to Twitter fans with that).
|
| Even more fascinating is that people are apparently buying
| into it. As if you can just stumble into that much business
| success (besides inheriting) without having a very firm grasp
| on how the corperate structures behind it work.
| topspin wrote:
| A non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary...
|
| Legal, despite the stench.
| moralestapia wrote:
| (Could still be) illegal.
|
| Private inurement is a thing. There are laws written
| explicitly to prevent this.
| topspin wrote:
| > Wrong
|
| ?
|
| OpenAI's non-profit+for-profit structure is detailed at
| their own site: https://openai.com/our-structure/
|
| It's a non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary. Please
| elaborate on "wrong."
| aipatselarom wrote:
| (I'm @moralestapia, but on my phone)
|
| Non-profits have a mission that has to be aligned with a
| public/social benefit.
|
| No amount of structuring would help you if it turns out
| that your activities benefit a private
| individual/organization instead of whatever public
| benefit you wrote when setting up the non-profit.
|
| All it takes if a judge ruling that [1] is happening, and
| then it's over for you and all your derived entities,
| subsidiaries, whatever-you-set-up-thinking-you-would-
| outsmart-the-irs. Judges can see through your bullshit,
| they do this 100s of times, year after year.
|
| And also, "oh, but we wanted to do this since the
| beginning" only digs you a deeper hole, lmao. Do they not
| have common sense?
|
| I'm surprised that @sama, whose major talent is
| manipulat... sorry "social engineering", greenlit this
| approach.
|
| 1. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-
| organiz...
| akira2501 wrote:
| [flagged]
| adamrezich wrote:
| That's the funniest part about all of this--the continued
| posturing that AGI is _totally_ a thing that is _just_ beyond
| our grasp.
| blibble wrote:
| just give us another $100 billion to spend, it's all we need
| _wink_
| kachapopopow wrote:
| 23 trillion.
| colechristensen wrote:
| One of these days if AGI ever does actually come about, we
| might very well have to go to war with them.
|
| There might be a day where billionaires employ zero humans and
| themselves merge with the AGI in a way that makes them not
| quite human any more.
|
| The amount of data being collected about everyone and what
| machine learning can already do with it is frightening.
|
| I'm afraid the reaction to AI when it actually becomes a threat
| is going to look like more of a peasant revolt than a skynet
| situation.
| talldayo wrote:
| > One of these days if AGI ever does actually come about, we
| might very well have to go to war with them.
|
| And the same conditions of material wealth that dictate
| traditional warfare will not be changed by the _ChatGPT for
| Warlords_ subscription. This entire conversation is silly and
| predicated on beliefs that cannot be substantiated or
| delineated logically. You (and the rest of the AI preppers)
| are no different than the pious wasting their lives in fear
| awaiting the promised rapture.
|
| Life goes on. One day I might have to fistfight that super-
| dolphin from _Johnny Mnemonic_ but I don 't spend much time
| worrying about it in a relative sense.
| bobthebuilders wrote:
| The rules of traditional warfare will still exist, they
| will just be fought by advanced hyper intelligent AIs
| instead of humans. Hunter Miller humanoids like Optimus and
| drones like Anduril will replace humans in war.
|
| War will be the same, but the rich are preparing to unleash
| a "new arsenal of democracy" against us in an AI takeover.
| We must be prepared.
| talldayo wrote:
| > Hunter Miller humanoids like Optimus and drones like
| Anduril will replace humans in war.
|
| You do not understand how war is fought if you sincerely
| believe this. Battles aren't won with price tags and
| marketing videos, they're won with strategic planning and
| tactical effect. The reason why the US is such a powerful
| military is not because we field so much materiel, but
| because each materiel is so effective. Many standoff-
| range weapons are automated and precise within feet or
| even inches of the target; failure rates are lower than
| 98% in most cases. These are weapons that won't get
| replaced by drones, and it's why Anduril _also_ produces
| cruise-missiles and glide bombs in recognition that their
| drones aren 't enough.
|
| Serious analysts aren't taking drones seriously, it's a
| consensus among everyone that isn't Elon Musk. Drones in
| Ukraine are used in extreme short-range combat (often
| less than 5km in range from each other), and often
| require expending several units before landing a good
| hit. These are improvised munitions of _last resort_ ,
| not a serious replacement for antitank guided weaponry.
| It's a fallacy on the level of comparing an IED to a
| shaped-charge landmine.
|
| > but the rich are preparing to unleash a "new arsenal of
| democracy" against us in an AI takeover
|
| The rich have already taken over with the IMF. You don't
| need AI to rule the world if you can get them addicted to
| a dollar standard and then make them indebted to your
| infinite private capital. China does it, Russia does
| it... the playbook hasn't changed. Even if you make a
| super-AI as powerful as a nuke, you suffer from the same
| problem that capitalism is a more devastating weapon.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >These are weapons that won't get replaced by drones
|
| Those weapons _are_ drones. They 're just rockets instead
| of quadcopters. They're also several orders of magnitude
| more expensive, but they really could get driven by the
| same off-the-shelf kind of technology if someone bothered
| to make it.
|
| And they _will_ get replaced. Location based targeting is
| in many cases less interesting than targeting something
| which can move and could be recognized by the weapon in
| flight. Load up a profile of a tank, a license place,
| images of a person, etc. to be recognized and targeted
| independently in flight.
|
| >Battles aren't won with price tags and marketing videos,
| they're won with strategic planning and tactical effect.
|
| Big wars tend to get won by resources more than tactics.
| Japan and Germany couldn't keep up with US industrial
| output. Germany couldn't keep up with USSR manpower.
|
| Replacing soldiers with drones means it's more of a
| contest of output than strategy.
| bobthebuilders wrote:
| I am not talking about drones like DJI quadcopters with
| grenades duct taped to them or even large fixed wing
| aircraft, I am talking about small personal humanoid
| drones.
|
| Civilization is going through a birth rate collapse. The
| labor shortage will become more endemic in the coming
| years, first in lower skill and wage jobs, and then
| everywhere else.
|
| Humanoid robots change the economics of war. No longer
| does the military or the police need humans. Morale will
| no longer be an issue. The infantry will become materiel.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Robot soldiers is a today problem. You want a gun or a bomb
| on a drone with facial recognition that could roam the
| skies until it finds you and destroys it's target?
|
| That's a weekend project for a lot of people around here.
|
| You don't need AGI for a lot of these things.
|
| We are not far away from an entire AI corporation.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yes, when one group of people, a small minority of the
| population, controls the ability to produce food and
| violence, then we have a serious problem.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > One of these days if AGI ever does actually come about, we
| might very well have to go to war with them.
|
| They arguably already exist in the form of very large
| corporations. Their lingering dependency on low-level human
| logic units is an implementation detail.
| dboreham wrote:
| Like Jonny Depp in that movie.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Neither of you have anything even _approaching_ AGI.
|
| On that note, is there a term for, er... Negative hype? Inverse
| hype? I'm talking about where folks clutch their pearls and
| say: "Oh no, our product/industry might be _too awesome_ and
| _doom mankind_ with its strength and guaranteed growth and
| profitability! "
|
| These days it's hard to tell what portion is cynical marketing
| ploy versus falling for their own propaganda.
| rvz wrote:
| > Neither of you have anything even _approaching_ AGI.
|
| There are so many conflicting definitions of what "AGI" means.
| Not even OpenAI or Microsoft even knows what it means.
|
| "AGI" is a scam.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Of course it's clear: AGI is achieved when a machine can
| completely capable of simulating a human being.
|
| At that point remote / office work is 100% over.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please don't fulminate on HN*. Comments like this
| degrade the community for everyone.
|
| You may not owe people who you feel are spoiled rich kids
| better, but you owe this community better if you're
| participating in it.
|
| * this is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| akira2501 wrote:
| Ok, but I think it's clear that what I wrote does not convey
| violence or vehemence but simple disrespect. A disrespect not
| born out of their early life and personal history but out of
| their actions here _today_.
|
| Which I think I'm entitled to convey as these are two CEOs
| attempting to try a case in public while playing fast and
| loose with the truth to bolster their cases. You may feel
| that I, as a simple anonymous commentor, "owe this community
| better," but do you spare none of these same sentiments for
| the author himself?
| unglaublich wrote:
| If even OpenAI, who could benefit greatly from his money, warns
| you about this person, you might want to take it seriously.
| tuyguntn wrote:
| So much public drama around AI company, just curious how it would
| impact their brand and relationship with enterprise companies,
| who usually seek stability when it comes to their service
| providers
| WhatsName wrote:
| I wonder if there are PR people out there, who watched the
| Wordpress vs. WPEngine disaster from the sideline and took notes.
|
| For me this rhymes with recent history...
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| What, you can't feel the Christmas spirit?
| Havoc wrote:
| Not 100% close to the facts, but from a cursory read this seems
| deeply dishonest on OpenAI's part to me.
|
| Musk appears to be objecting to a structure having profit driven
| players ("YC stock along with a salary") directly in the
| nonprofit...and is suggestion moving it to a parallel structure.
|
| That's seems like a perfectly valid and frankly
| ethically/governance sound point to raise. The fact that he
| mentions incentives specifically to me suggests he was going down
| that line of reasoning outlined above.
|
| Framing that as "Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-
| profit"...idk...maybe I'm missing something here, but dishonest
| framing is definitely the word that comes to mind.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _You can't sue your way to AGI. We have great respect for
| Elon's accomplishments and gratitude for his early contributions
| to OpenAI, but he should be competing in the marketplace rather
| than the courtroom._
|
| Isn't that exactly what he's doing with x.ai? Grok and all that?
| IIRC Elon has the biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right
| now, and is currently training the next major version of his
| "competing in the marketplace" product. It will be interesting to
| see how this blog post ages.
|
| I'm not dismissing the rest of the post (and indeed I think they
| make a good case on Elon's hypocrisy!) but the above seems at
| best like a pretty massive blindspot which (if I were invested in
| OpenAI) would cause me some concern.
| hangonhn wrote:
| > biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right now
|
| Really? I'm really surprised by that. I thought Meta was the
| one who got the jump on everyone by hoarding H100s. Or did you
| mean strictly GPUs and not any of the AI specific chips?
| freedomben wrote:
| Good point, I don't know if it's strictly GPUs or also
| includes some other AI specific chips.
|
| Nvidia wrote about it:
| https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-
| netwo...
| hangonhn wrote:
| oh wow. I think your original assertion is correct. Wow.
| What a crazy arms race.
| kiernanmcgowan wrote:
| > IIRC Elon has the biggest CPU compute cluster in the world
| right now
|
| Do you have a source for this? I don't buy this when compared
| to Google, Amazon, Lawrence Livermore National Lab...
| freedomben wrote:
| I first heard it on the All-In podcast, but I do see many
| articles/blogs about it as well. Quick note though, I
| mistyped CPU (and rapidly caught and fixed, but not fast
| enough!) when I meant GPU.
|
| [1]: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-
| plea...
| mrshu wrote:
| The claim seems to mostly be coming fro NVIDIA marketing [0].
|
| [0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-
| netwo...
| codemac wrote:
| > biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right now
|
| This is wildly untrue, and most in industry know that.
| Unfortunately you won't have a source just like I won't, but
| just wanted to voice that you're way off here.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _This is wildly untrue, and most in industry know that.
| Unfortunately you won 't have a source just like I won't, but
| just wanted to voice that you're way off here._
|
| Sure, we probably can't know for sure who has the biggest as
| they try to keep that under wraps for competition purposes,
| but it's definitely not "wildly untrue." A simple search will
| show that they have if not the biggest, damn near one of the
| biggest. Just a quick sample:
|
| https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-
| netwo...
|
| https://www.yahoo.com/tech/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-
| plea...
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/elon-musk-
| to...
|
| https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/musks-xais-colossus-
| cl...
| codemac wrote:
| i've physically visited a larger one, it is not even a well
| kept secret. we all see each other at the same airports and
| hotels.
| threeseed wrote:
| Technically, it maybe the world's biggest _single_ AI
| supercomputer.
|
| But it ignores Amazon, Google and Microsoft/OpenAI being
| able to run training workloads across their entire clouds.
| rvz wrote:
| It is true. [0]
|
| [0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-
| netwo...
| sigh_again wrote:
| Even just Meta dwarfs Twitter's cluster, with an estimated
| 350k H100s by now.
| BrickFingers wrote:
| 2 months ago Jensen Huang did an interview where he said
| xAi built the fastest cluster with 100k GPUs.he said
| "what they achieved is singular, never been done before"
| https://youtu.be/bUrCR4jQQg8?si=i0MpcIawMVHmHS2e
|
| Meta said they would expand their infrastructure to
| include 350k GPUs by the end of this year. But, my guess
| is they meant a collection of AI clusters not a singular
| large cluster. In the post where they mentioned this,
| they shared details on 2 clusters with 24k GPUs
| each.https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-
| engineerin...
| verdverm wrote:
| Really? Meta looks to be running larger clusters of Nvidia
| GPUs already
|
| https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-
| engineerin...
|
| This doesn't account for inhouse silicon like Google where
| the comparison becomes less direct (different devices,
| multiple subgroups like DeepMind)
| boringg wrote:
| I don't think you've been paying attention to the industry
| even though your posturing like an insider.
| axus wrote:
| Maybe Elon is doing both, competing in the marketplace and in
| the courtroom. And in advising the president to regulate non-
| profit AI .
| freedomben wrote:
| Agree, he is doing both. But if he's competing in the
| marketplace, it seems pretty off base for Open AI to tell him
| he should be competing in the marketplace. So I think my
| criticism stands.
| nativeit wrote:
| I don't think their suggestion ever implies that he isn't.
| freedomben wrote:
| If the believed he already was competing in the
| marketplace, then what would be the point of saying "he
| should be competing in the marketplace rather than the
| courtroom." ? I'm genuinely trying to understand what I'm
| missing here because it seems illogical to tell someone
| they should do something they are already doing.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Surely Meta has the biggest compute in that category, no? I
| wouldn't be surprised if Elon went around saying that to raise
| money though.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >Isn't that exactly what he's doing with x.ai? Grok and all
| that?
|
| They aren't saying he isn't. But he _is_ trying to handicap
| OpenAI, while his own offering at this point is farcical.
|
| >It will be interesting to see how this blog post ages.
|
| Whether Elon's "dump billions to try to get attention for The
| Latest Thing" attempt succeeds or not -- the guy has an
| outrageous appetite to be the center of attention, and sadly
| people play along -- has zero bearing on the aging of this blog
| post. Elon could simply be fighting them in the marketplace,
| instead he's waging a public and legal campaign that honestly
| makes him look like a pathetic bitch. And that's regardless of
| my negative feelings regarding OpenAI's bait and switch.
| elif wrote:
| Eh grok is bad but I wouldn't call it farcial. It's terrible
| at multimodal, but in terms of up to date recent cultural
| knowledge, sentiments, etc. it's much better than the stale
| GPT models (even with search added)
| boringg wrote:
| It's rich coming from Sam Altman -- the guy who famously tried
| to use regulatory capture to block everyone else.
| factorialboy wrote:
| For-profit isn't the problem. Lying about being non-profit to
| raise funds, and _then_ become for-profit, that's the underlying
| concern.
| ozim wrote:
| That should be top comment on all OpenAI threads.
|
| Just like "open source and forever free" - until of course it
| starts to make sense charging money.
| retinaros wrote:
| yes but its easy to hate musk thinking u siding with the good
| guys...
| boringg wrote:
| theres no good guys at the executive level of the AI world -
| its money and power dressed in saving humanity language.
| catigula wrote:
| Yes, which means his post is an attempt to smear the
| credibility of musk, not make a legal defense.
|
| If this were a legal defense, this would be heard in court.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Too bad not disclosing that you always intended to convert the
| non-profit into a for-profit during your testimony while
| numerous senators congratulate you about your non-profit values
| isn't problematic.
|
| https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-sub...
| boringg wrote:
| Its true. Also it looks like Musks original statement was
| correct that they should have gone with a C-corp instead of a
| NFP.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Some might characterize OpenAI leadership as not 'consistently
| candid'.
| InfiniteVortex wrote:
| regardless of what you think of it, the drama is at least
| entertaining!
| hermannj314 wrote:
| A few weeks ago my OpenAI credits expired and I was billed to
| replace them. I had no idea this was the business model, fine you
| got me with your auto-renew scam because you decided my tokens
| were spoiled.
|
| At some point, OpenAI became who they said they werent. You can't
| even get chatgpt to do anything fun anymore as the lawyers have
| hobbled its creative expression.
|
| And now they want to fight with Elon over what they supposedly
| used to believe about money back in 2017.
|
| Who actually deserves our support going forward?
| pc86 wrote:
| Expiring tokens is a pretty standard business model. Are they
| lying and saying the tokens never expire?
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Nope they aren't lying, but they lost me as a customer. My
| Arby's gift card lasted longer than my OpenAI credits, it's a
| horrible business model and I wish them luck, but I won't be
| a part of supporting bad models.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Don't give them any ideas. Next time Starbucks will be
| popping up in the ChatGPT output, offering to convert your
| unused tokens to rewards there.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| The free credit or the tokens? Because that's a very different
| story.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| One year ago I gave openAi $100 to have credits for small
| hobby projects that use their API.
|
| They expired and disappeared and then openAi charged me $100
| to reload my lost money.
|
| I am sure this is what I agreed to, but I personally thought
| I was hacked or something because I didnt expect this
| behavior from them.
|
| They lost me as an API user and monthly chatgpt plus user. I
| hope it was worth it. They want enterprise, business, and pro
| users anyway and not my small potatoes.
| AlanYx wrote:
| Ignoring all the drama, this part is interesting:
|
| "On one call, Elon told us he didn't care about equity personally
| but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."
| pram wrote:
| Measured another way, just a bit under 2 Twitters.
| talldayo wrote:
| The fact that owning Twitter was worth half a Mars colony to
| him should give you an idea of how seriously he's taking this
| whole thing. It's up there next to "Full Self Driving" and
| "$25,000 EV" in the Big Jar of Promises Used To Raise Capital
| and Nothing Else.
| adabyron wrote:
| He bought Twitter for $40B.
|
| His Tesla stock was 0% ytd until the election.
|
| Post election it is up roughly 70% ytd & has paid for
| Twitter & the Mars colony multiple times.
|
| Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter.
| kingofheroes wrote:
| This. In hindsight, buying Twitter at a loss was well
| worth the long (though, more like medium) term results.
| As much as it disgusts me, I'm impressed.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Honestly not convinced it was about that. I'm sure he
| likes the stock going up but I think he is somewhat
| earnest about why he bought twitter, or at least what he
| wants to do with it when he got stuck with it.
|
| As per usual, he bet the house and won. The vibes are
| shifting, Trump won, etc
| TheGRS wrote:
| Are we really giving Twitter that much credit these days?
| I feel like we gave it less credit when it was actually
| popular. I would give Elon jumping around on stage more
| credit than what Twitter/X did for this election.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >I feel like we gave it less credit when it was actually
| popular.
|
| I'm not sure I've ever seen a more self-referential
| comment here. When it was popular _with you_. I know it
| is hard to imagine, but 1 /2 the United States voters see
| it as the last free speech area of the internet. Maybe
| they're all wrong, and you are right, and BlueSky is
| going to magically gain the network effects that Meta
| couldn't drum up.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter.
|
| Its fairly easy.
|
| In almost every western country the incumbent
| administration has been punished by voters due to
| inflation, this has been the case in the uk, germany,
| romania, france, mexico... list goes on. So Trump could
| have won without Elon buying twitter.
|
| Similarly he could have donated to Trump without buying
| Twitter, and been on stage and been all day on twitter
| saying nonsense without purchasing. So being close to
| Trump is possible without buying Twitter.
|
| The market would have reacted the same way, because the
| market is reacting to the fact that Trump is a corrupt
| leader and being close to him means the market will be
| skewed to benefit his cronies (in this case Elon). If im
| not wrong Trump has already mentioned creating "self
| driving car initiatives" that probably means boosting
| Tesla dangerous self driving mode, and also they have
| alluded to investigating rival companies to tesla and
| spacex or at least "reviewing their goverment contracts".
| Other industries without social media owners, like
| private prisions, also skyrocketed after trump won and
| those paid trump as much as Elon but were not on social
| media. The market would have reacted to Trump being
| corrupt regardless of Elon buying Twitter.
|
| So its easy to say that his stock would be up 70% without
| buying twitter, as long as he kept the 250 million
| investment in the Trump campaign, and then market assesed
| Trump admin as affecting market fairness, both of which
| would happen without his purchase.
| elif wrote:
| "full self driving" is a real thing and it's resilient and
| nearly feature complete.
|
| v13 is way better and safer than a great Uber driver, let
| alone average.
|
| Check it out
| ben_w wrote:
| I've been hearing "nearly feature complete" for over a
| decade now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Predict
| ions_for_Autono...
| threeseed wrote:
| > v13 is way better and safer than a great Uber driver,
| let alone average.
|
| Will need to see a source for this.
|
| Especially since NHTSA crash reporting data is not made
| public.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm sure soon enough we won't have to worry about NHTSA
| keeping that sort of data private (because that agency
| will simply be found inefficient and eliminated).
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Town squares go a lot further than I imagined
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| When he bought it, sure? Probably more like 20 X's
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| The ideologue denialism is fascinating. You need to tell
| yourself he's bad and the products he associates with are
| bad - because he decided to be a conservative.
|
| It's an amazing process watching from the outside.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| This made me laugh but also made me think, "...that's it?
| That's all it takes?"
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Land on Mars is cheap...
|
| But no, I really doubt that's all it takes. Unless you
| discount all of the R&D costs as SpaceX operational expenses.
| kulahan wrote:
| I imagine that's what he's doing. He's willing to put a lot
| of company money into getting the city on Mars started,
| because if he's first there, he's gonna set himself (or his
| dynasty?) up to make hundreds of billions of dollars. Being
| effectively in control of your own planet? Neat. Scary too.
| linotype wrote:
| Doing what exactly? What industry could Mars possibly
| support profitably?
| VectorLock wrote:
| Yeah and Mars is a shitty place to live. And will always
| be a shitty place to live. No amount of fantastical
| "terraforming" is going to create a magnetosphere.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| perhaps the "not dying on earth industry" after climate
| catastrophy hits
| bee_rider wrote:
| While I'm convinced we're going to screw this planet up,
| the gap between "as bad as we can make Earth" and "as
| good as we can make Mars" is pretty huge, right? And not
| in a way that is optimistic for Mars.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| True it's probably easier to survive on earth in some
| luxury bunker than on Mars no matter how much we destroy
| earth. Alternative theories: billionaire space tourism,
| it was never really about mars but about asteroid mining,
| it was never about mars he just wants the government
| subsidies
| SaberTail wrote:
| There's no climate scenario in which Mars is more
| habitable than Earth. Even if a Texas-sized asteroid
| crashed into Earth, Earth would still be more habitable
| than Mars.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > What industry could Mars possibly support profitably?
|
| Government contracts probably, but those don't need to be
| "profitable" in the conventional sense. All that's needed
| is to convince Congress that it's in America's interest
| to establish public-private project for a moon base and a
| Mars base, against a background of an ascendant Chinese
| Space program (soon to be the only nation with a space
| station). NASA can grow soy-beans, do bone density
| studies or other science shit, but the main point will
| just be being there.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I will always love Kim Stanley Robinson but I dont care:
| please, Musk, go to Mars, you can have it.
| gattr wrote:
| I wonder if Elon Musk is of the Red or the Green mindset.
| tuyguntn wrote:
| > each board member has a deep understanding of technology, at
| least a basic understanding of AI and strong & sensible morals.
|
| > Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem
|
| ... and we are working to get defense contracts which is used to
| kill human beings in other countries, or fund organizations who
| kill humans
| jcrash wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBoUHay7XBI&t=345s
|
| one of the few youtube links on this page that is still up
| lsy wrote:
| I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of
| millenarianism espoused by all of these guys.
|
| The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of
| the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal
| of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship".
|
| Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their
| thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much
| investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-
| market fit, much less a superintelligence.
|
| As a bonus, they lay out the OpenAI business model:
|
| > Our fundraising conversations show that:
|
| > * Ilya and I are able to convince reputable people that AGI can
| really happen in the next <=10 years
|
| > * There's appetite for donations from those people
|
| > * There's very large appetite for investments from those people
| EA-3167 wrote:
| If you push back on them, you get pushed out. If you suck up to
| them and their delusional belief systems, you might get paid.
| It's a very self-selecting, self-reinforcing process.
|
| In other words, it's also an affective death spiral.
| hengheng wrote:
| These guys didn't get to where they are now by admitting
| mistakes and making themselves accountable. In power play
| terms, that would be weak.
|
| And once you are way up there and you have definitely left
| earth, there is no right or wrong anymore, just strong and
| weak.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| It's been clear for a while now Elon has no one in his life
| that's willing to push back on his inane ideas
| pinewurst wrote:
| Nobody seems to remember how the Segway was going to change our
| world, backed by many of the VC power figures at the time +
| Steve Jobs.
| klik99 wrote:
| In Segways defense that self balancing tech has made and will
| continue to make an impact, just not world changing amount
| (at least not yet) and not their particular company but the
| companies they influenced - the same may end up true about
| openai
| hanspeter wrote:
| I think we all remember, and if we forget, we're reminded
| every time we see them at airports or doing city tours.
| Calavar wrote:
| I don't think I've seen a Segway in close to ten years.
| Also I suspect most people under 25 have never even heard
| of Segway.
| elif wrote:
| One wheels (Segway evolutionary grandchild) are almost as
| popular as electric skateboards.
| 9dev wrote:
| So... not much? If anything, people drive electric
| scooters around here. Those seem to hit the sweet spot.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| I remember serious discussions about how we'd probably need
| to repave all of our sidewalks in the US to accommodate the
| Segway
| elif wrote:
| You mean Steve Wozniak.
|
| Close but no LSD
| favorited wrote:
| Steve Jobs said that Segways had the potential to be "as
| big a deal as the PC."
| pantalaimon wrote:
| What makes you so sure about the LSD?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The Segway was a bit early, and too expensive, but I would
| defend it... sort of.
|
| Electric micromobility is a pretty huge driver of how people
| negotiate the modern city. Self-balancing segways, e-skate,
| e-bike and scooters are all pretty big changes that we are
| seeing in many modern cityscapes.
|
| Hell, a shared electric bike was just used as a getaway
| vehicle for an assassination in NYC.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| e-/bikes and e-/scooters are big changes to city
| navigation.
|
| e-skate and segways are non-factors. And that's the
| difference between a good product (ebike or even just plain
| old bikeshare) and a bad one (segway).
| arthurcolle wrote:
| It reappeared as e-bikes and e-scooters - Lime, Bird, etc.
| anothertroll123 wrote:
| No it didn't
| ldbooth wrote:
| Reappeared as Electric unicycles, which look hilarious,
| dangerous, and like a lot of fun.
| n144q wrote:
| None of which is doing great.
| tim333 wrote:
| There are about 70 lime bikes that commute to the square
| by my flat. There's definitely some ebike stuff ongoing.
| danenania wrote:
| E-bikes are everywhere.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Apparently the first e-bike was invented in 1895. So I
| don't think it is accurate to give Segway too much credit
| in their creation. Anyway the innovation of Segway was the
| balance system, which e-bikes don't need.
|
| (I'm not familiar with the site in general, but I think
| there's no reason for them to lie about the date, and
| electric vehicles always show up surprisingly early).
|
| https://reallygoodebikes.com/blogs/electric-bike-
| blog/histor...
| mbreese wrote:
| The hype cycle for Segway was insane. Ginger (code name)
| wasn't just going to change the world, it was going to cause
| us to rethink how cities were laid out and designed. No one
| would get around the world in the same way.
|
| The engineering behind it was really quite nice, but the hype
| set it up to fail. If it hasn't been talked up so much in the
| media, the launch wouldn't have felt so flat. There was no
| way for them to live up to the hype.
| pinewurst wrote:
| The "Code Name: Ginger" book, by a writer embedded with the
| team, is excellent btw.
| tim333 wrote:
| I guess it depends on what media you follow. As a Brit my
| recollection was hearing it was a novelty gadget that about
| a dozen American eccentrics were using, and then there was
| the story that a guy called Jimi Heselden bought the
| company and killed himself by driving one off a cliff and
| then that was about it. Not the same category as AI at all.
| Flomolok wrote:
| I tried Claude.
|
| If hardware continues it's evolution of speed in the next 10
| years I can have Claude but local + running constantly and yeah
| that would change certain things fundamentaly
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| When ChatGPT was down a few days back, I locally booted up
| Codestral. It was decent and usable.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Try llama 3.3 70B. On groq or something. Runs on a 64GB
| macbook (4bit quantized, which seems to not impact quality
| much). Things have come a long way. Compare to llama 2 70b.
| It's wild
| Terretta wrote:
| Llama 3.3 70B 8-bit MLX runs on Macbook 128GB at 7+ tokens
| per second while running a full suite of other tools, even
| at the 130k tokens size, and behaves with surprising
| coherence. Reminded me of this time last year, first trying
| Mixtral 8x22 -- which still offers a distinctive _je ne
| sais quoi_!
| slibhb wrote:
| > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and
| little return
|
| Modern (2024) LLMs are "little return"? Seriously? For me,
| they've mostly replaced Google. I have no idea how well the
| scaling will contiue and I'm generally unimpressed with AI-
| doomer narratives, but this technology is real.
| __loam wrote:
| They're not talking about your anecdotes, they're talking
| about the capex and returns. Which are overwhelmingly
| negative.
| zachthewf wrote:
| I mean, inference costs have decreased like 1000x in a few
| years. OpenAI is the fastest growing startup by revenue,
| ever.
|
| How foolish do you have be to be worrying about ROI right
| now? The companies that are building out the datacenters
| produce billions per year in free cash flow. Maybe OP would
| prefer a dividend?
| ben_w wrote:
| Given how close the tech is to running on consumer
| hardware -- by which I mean normal consumers not top-end
| MacBooks -- there's a real chance that the direct ROI is
| going to be exactly zero within 5 years.
|
| I say direct, because Chrome is free to users, yet
| clearly has a benefit to Google worth spending on both
| development and advertising the browser to users, and
| analogous profit sources may be coming to LLMs for
| similar reasons -- you can use it locally so long as you
| don't mind every third paragraph being a political
| message sponsored by the Turquoise Party of Tumbrige
| Wells.
| billyhoffman wrote:
| > OpenAI is the fastest growing startup by revenue, ever.
|
| No it's not. Facebook hit $2B in Revenue in late 2010 -
| early 2011, ~5 years after its founding.
|
| https://dazeinfo.com/2018/11/14/facebook-revenue-and-net-
| inc...
| kulahan wrote:
| Finding _one_ example of him being wrong still _kinda_
| supports his point, don 't you think?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Especially when that example is Facebook!
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Coinbase was founded in 2013 and hit $1B in revenue in
| 2019 iirc
| elif wrote:
| What do you think the capex returns were for DARPA NET?
|
| These reflexive humanist anti-AI takes are going to age
| like peeled bananas.
| pembrook wrote:
| Yea, I mean, if it can't show a return in the very short
| term, is it even worth doing? How could something possibly
| develop into being profitable after years of not being so?
|
| All you have to do is point to bankrupt bookseller Amazon,
| whom that dumb Jeff Bezos ran into the ground with his
| money-losing strategy for years. Clearly it doesn't work!
| roughly wrote:
| Regarding the Silicon Valley Mindset, Douglass Rushkoff wrote a
| quite good book on the topic:
| https://bookshop.org/p/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-...
| ben_w wrote:
| > Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on
| their thought process?
|
| Yes, frequently and loudly.
|
| When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other
| year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A
| session, _and he actively empathised with the protestors_.
|
| > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and
| little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit,
| much less a superintelligence.
|
| I just got back from an Indian restaurant in the middle of
| Berlin, and the table next to me I overheard a daughter talking
| to her mother about ChatGPT and KI (Kunstliche Intelligenz, the
| German for AI).
|
| The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time
| I've heard random strangers discussing it in public.
|
| What's not obvious is how to monetise it. Old meme parroted
| around was "has no moat", which IMO is like saying Microsoft
| has no moat for spreadsheets: sure, anyone can make the core
| tech, and sure we don't know who is Microsoft vs StarOffice vs
| ClarisWorks vs Google Docs, but there's more than zero moat.
| From what I've seen, if OpenAI didn't develop new products,
| they'd be making enough to be profitable, but it's a Red Queen
| race to remain worth paying for.
|
| As for "much less a superintelligence": even the current models
| meet every definition of "very smart" I had while growing up,
| despite their errors. As an adult, I'd still call them book-
| smart if not abstractly smart. Students or recent graduates,
| but not wise enough to know their limits and be cautious.
|
| For current standards of what intelligence means, we'd better
| hope we don't get ASI in the next decade or two, because if and
| when that happens then "humans need not apply" -- and by
| extension, foundational assumptions of economics may just stop
| holding true.
| this_user wrote:
| > When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other
| year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public
| talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the
| protestors.
|
| He always does that to give himself cover, but he has clearly
| shown that his words mean very little in this regard. He
| always dodges criticism. He used to talk about the importance
| of him being accountable to the OpenAI board and them being
| able to fire him if necessary when people were questioning
| the dangers of having one person have this much control over
| something as big as bleeding edge AI. He also used to mention
| how he had no direct financial interests in the company since
| he had no equity.
|
| Then the board did fire him. What happened next? He came
| back, the board is gone, he now openly has complete control
| over OpenAI, and they have given him a potentially huge
| equity package. I really don't think Sam Altman is
| particularly trustworthy. He will say whatever he needs to
| say to get what he wants.
| kulahan wrote:
| Wasn't he fired for questionable reasons? I thought
| everyone _wanted_ him back, and that 's why he was able to
| return. It was, as I remember, _just_ the board that wanted
| him out.
|
| I imagine if he was doing something truly nefarious,
| opinions might have been different, but I have no idea what
| kind of cult of personality he has at that company, so I
| might be wrong here.
| samvher wrote:
| Define everyone. I was delighted when they fired him. I
| don't believe he has humanity's best interest at heart.
| ben_w wrote:
| 745 of 700 employees responded on a weekend to call for
| his return, threatened mass resignations if the board did
| not resign; among the signatories was board member
| Sutskever, who defected from the board and publicly
| apologized for his participation in the board's previous
| actions.
| fwip wrote:
| 745 of 700?
| samvher wrote:
| I followed the drama. The point I was (somewhat
| unsuccessfully) trying to make was that while, sure,
| there were groups who wanted him back (mainly the groups
| with vested financial interests and associated leverage),
| my sense was that the way it played out was not
| necessarily in line with wider humanity's best interest,
| i.e. as would have been hoped based on OpenAI's publicly
| stated goals.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| >745 of 700 employees responded on a weekend to call for
| his return, threatened mass resignations if the board did
| not resign
|
| I would think final count doesn't really matter. Self
| serving cowards, like me, would sign it once they see the
| way the wind was blowing. How many signed it before Satya
| at Microsoft indicated support for Altman?
| KerryJones wrote:
| * 747/770
| https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/747-of-770-openai-
| employees-...
| tasuki wrote:
| > I thought everyone wanted him back, and that's why he
| was able to return.
|
| Everyone _working at OpenAI_ wanted him back. Which only
| includes people who have a significant motivation to see
| OpenAI succeed financially.
|
| Also, there are rumours he can be vindictive. For all I
| know, that might be a smear campaign. But _if_ that were
| the case, and half the people at OpenAI wanted him back,
| the other half would have a motivation to follow so as
| not to get whatever punishment from Sam.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > I thought everyone wanted him back,
|
| Ilyia Sutskever who was the chief Scientist of the
| company and honestly irreplacable in terms of AI
| knowledge left after Altman returned.
| yard2010 wrote:
| This guy is outright scary. He gives me the chills.
| 23B1 wrote:
| > and he actively empathised with the protestors.
|
| https://www.simplypsychology.org/narcissistic-mirroring.html
| ben_w wrote:
| Even if so, that's still showing awareness of what his
| critics are critical of.
|
| Now, can you make a falsifiable prediction: what would a
| narcissist do that a normal person would not, such that you
| can tell if he's engaging in a narcissist process rather
| that what your own link also says is a perfectly normal and
| healthy behaviour?
| tivert wrote:
| > Even if so, that's still showing awareness of what his
| critics are critical of.
|
| Mere awareness is really that meaningful.
|
| >>> and he actively empathised with the protestors.
|
| >> https://www.simplypsychology.org/narcissistic-
| mirroring.html
|
| > Now, can you make a falsifiable prediction: what would
| a narcissist do that a normal person would not, such that
| you can tell if he's engaging in a narcissist process
| rather that what your own link also says is a perfectly
| normal and healthy behaviour?
|
| He doesn't have to, because I think the point was to
| raise doubts about your interpretation.
|
| But if you're looking for more evidence, there are all
| the stories (from many different people) about Altman
| being dishonest and manipulative _and being very
| effective at it_. That 's the context that a lot of
| people are going use to interpret your claim that Altman
| "actively empathised with the protestors."
| manquer wrote:
| > The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first
| time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public.
|
| Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in
| the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so
| than others .
|
| 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and
| blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars
| before that personal voice assistants like Siri and so on .
|
| - self driving has not transformed us into minority report
| and despite how far it has come it cannot in next 30 years be
| ubiquitous, even if the l5 magic tech exists today in every
| new car sold it will take 15 years for current cars to
| lifecycle.
|
| - Crypto has not replaced fiat currency , even in most
| generous reading you can see it as store of value like gold
| or whatever useless baubles people assign arbitrary value to,
| but has no traction for 3 out of other 4 key functions of
| money .
|
| - VR is not transformative to every day life and is 5
| fundamental breakthroughs away.
|
| - Voice assistants are useless setting alarms and selecting
| music 10 years in.
|
| There has been meaningful and measurable in each of these
| fields, but none of them have met the high bar of world
| transforming .
|
| AI is aiming for much higher bar of singularity and
| consciousness. Just in every hype cycles we are in peak of
| inflated expectations, we will reach a plateau of
| productivity where it is will be useful in specific areas (as
| it already is) and people will move on to the next fad.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Consciousness is a stupid and unreasonable goal, it is
| basically impossible to confirm that a machine isn't just
| faking it really well.
|
| Singularity is at least definable...Although I think it is
| not really the bar required to be really impactful. If we
| get an AI system that can do the work of like 60% of
| hardcore knowledge workers, 80% of office workers, and 95%
| of CEOs/politicians and other pablumists, it could be
| really change how the economy works without actually being
| a singularity.
| ben_w wrote:
| > 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and
| blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars
| before that personal voice assistants like Siri and so on .
|
| I never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs,
| and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were
| adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about
| it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about
| self-driving cars were the ones I was talking to myself,
| and everyone else was dismissive of them. Voice assistants
| were mainly mocked from day 1, with the Alex advert being
| re-dubbed as a dystopian nightmare.
|
| > AI is aiming for much higher bar of singularity and
| consciousness.
|
| No, it's aiming to be _economically useful_.
|
| "The singularity" is what a lot of people think is an
| automatic consequence of being able to solve tasks related
| to AI; me, I think that's how we sustained Moore's Law so
| long (computers designing computers, you can't place a
| billion transistors by hand, but even if you could the
| scale is now well into the zone where quantum tunnelling
| has to be accounted for in the design), and that
| "singularities" are a sign something is wrong with the
| model.
|
| "Consciousness" has 40 definitions, and is therefore not
| even a meaningful target.
|
| > Just in every hype cycles we are in peak of inflated
| expectations, we will reach a plateau of productivity where
| it is will be useful in specific areas (as it already is)
| and people will move on to the next fad.
|
| In that at least, we agree.
| eastbound wrote:
| Common, VR, NFTs and blockchain were always abysses of void
| looking for a usecase. Driving cars maybe, but development
| has been stalling for 15 years.
| tim333 wrote:
| >people will move on to the next fad
|
| AI isn't really a fad. It's going to something more like
| electricity, say.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| > For current standards of what intelligence means, we'd
| better hope we don't get ASI in the next decade or two,
| because if and when that happens then "humans need not apply"
| -- and by extension, foundational assumptions of economics
| may just stop holding true.
|
| I'm not sure that we need superintelligence for that to be
| the case - it may depend on whether you include physical
| ability in the definition of intelligence.
|
| At the point that we have an AI that's capable of every task
| that say a 110 IQ human is, including manipulating objects in
| the physical world, then basically everyone is unemployed
| unless they're cheaper than the AI.
| ben_w wrote:
| While I would certainly expect a radical change to
| economics even from a middling IQ AI -- or indeed a low IQ,
| as I have previously used the example of IQ 85 because
| that's 15.9% of the population that would become
| permanently unable to be economically useful -- I don't
| think it's quite as you say.
|
| Increasing IQ scores _seem_ to allow increasingly difficult
| tasks to be performed competently -- not just the same
| tasks faster, and also not just "increasingly difficult"
| in the big-O-notation sense, but it seems like below
| certain IQ thresholds (or above them but with certain
| pathologies), some thoughts just aren't "thinkable" even
| with unbounded time.
|
| While this might simply be an illusion that breaks with
| computers because silicon outpaces synapses by _literally_
| the degree to which jogging outpaces continental drift, I
| don 't see strong evidence at this time for the idea that
| this is an illusion. We may get that evidence in a very
| short window, but I don't see it yet.
|
| Therefore, in the absence of full brain uploads, I suspect
| that higher IQ people may well be able to perform useful
| work even as lower IQ people are outclassed by AI.
|
| If we do get full brain uploads, then it's the other way
| around, as a few super-geniuses will get their brains
| scanned but say it takes a billion dollars a year to run
| the sim in real time, then Moore's and Koomey's laws will
| take n years to lower that to $10 million dollars a year,
| 2n years to lower it to a $100k a year, and 3n years to
| lower it to $1k/year.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| I completely agree with everything that you're saying
| here - my use of the term "basically everyone" was lazy
| in that I'm implying that at the 110 IQ level the
| majority (approx 70%) of people are economically obsolete
| outside of niche areas (e.g. care/butler style work in
| which people desire the "human touch" for emotional
| reasons).
|
| I think that far below the 70% level we've already broken
| economics. I can't see a society functioning in which
| most people actually _know_ that they can't break out of
| whatever box they're currently in - I think that things
| like UBI are a distraction in that they don't account for
| things like status jockeying that I think we're pretty
| hardwired to do.
| danenania wrote:
| I think this trend of using IQ as a primary measuring
| stick is flawed.
|
| Human minds and AI minds have radically different
| architectures, and therefore have different strengths and
| weaknesses. IQ is only one component of what allows a
| typical worker to do their job.
|
| Even just comparing humans, the fact that one person
| with, say, a 120 IQ can do a particular job--say they are
| an excellent doctor--obviously does _not_ mean that any
| other human with an equal or greater IQ can also do that
| job effectively.
| jkaptur wrote:
| Can you expand on your spreadsheet analogy?
|
| I think Joel Spolsky explained the main Office moat well
| here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-
| micros...
|
| > ... it might take you weeks to change your page layout
| algorithm to accommodate it. If you don't, customers will
| open their Word files in your clone and all the pages will be
| messed up.
|
| Basically, people who use Office have extremely specific
| expectations. (I've seen people try a single keyboard
| shortcut, see that it doesn't work in a web-based
| application, and declare that whole thing "doesn't work".)
| Reimplementing all that stuff is really time consuming.
| There's also a strong network effect - if your company uses
| Office, you'll probably use it too.
|
| On the other hand, people don't have extremely specific
| expectations for LLMs because 1) they're fairly new and 2)
| they're almost always nondeterministic anyway. They don't
| care so much about using the same one as everyone they know
| or work with, because there's no network aspect of the
| product.
|
| I don't think the moats are similar.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| "Basically, people who use Office have extremely specific
| expectations."
|
| Interesting point, but to OP's point- This wasn't true when
| Office was first introduced and Office still created a
| domineering market share. In fact, I'd argue these moat-by-
| idiosyncracy features are a result of that market share.
| There is nothing stopping OpenAI from developing their own
| over time.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Does office actually have a moat? I thought the kids
| liked Google docs nowadays. (No opinion as to which is
| actually better, the actual thing people should do is
| write LaTeX in vim. You can even share documents! Just
| have everybody attach to the same tmux session and take
| turns).
| jkaptur wrote:
| Sure, there's nothing stopping any business from
| developing a moat. The Excel example doesn't make the
| case of OpenAI any clearer to me.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| > foundational assumptions of economics may just stop holding
| true
|
| Those assumptions are already failing billions of people,
| some people might still be benefiting from those "assumptions
| of economics" so they don't see the magnitude of the problem.
| But just as the billions who suffer now have no power, so
| will you have no power once those assumptions fail for you
| too.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > ...like saying Microsoft has no moat for spreadsheets
|
| Which would be very inaccurate as network-effects are Excel's
| (and Word's) moat. Excel being bundled with Office and
| Windows helped, but it beat Lotus-123 by being a superior
| product at a time the computing landscape was changing.
| OpenAI has no such advantage yet: a text-based API is about
| as commoditized as a technology can get and OpenAI is
| furiously launching interfaces with lower interoperability
| (where one can't replace GPT-4o with Claude 3.5 via a drop-
| down)
| jrflowers wrote:
| > protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk
|
| I'm going to guess that GP does not consider random
| protestors to be in Sam Altman's 'sphere'
|
| > The product market fit is fantastic.
|
| This is true insomuch that you define "product market fit" as
| "somebody mentioning it in an Indian restaurant in Berlin"
|
| > every definition of "very smart"
|
| _Every definition_ you say?
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lclo77koj22y
| TZubiri wrote:
| I remember seeing OpenAI like 10 years ago in GiveWell's list
| of charities along with water.org, deworm the world 80.000
| hours and that kind of things.
|
| It's a wild take to say that they have gotten nowhere and that
| they haven't found product-market fit.
| elif wrote:
| >So far we are multiple years in with much investment and
| little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit
|
| Literally every market has been disrupted and some are being
| optimized into nonexistence.
|
| You don't know anyone who's been laid off by a giant
| corporation that's also using an AI process that people did 3
| years ago?
| munk-a wrote:
| I know companies that have had layoffs - but those would have
| happened anyways - regular layoffs are practically demanded
| by the market at this point.
|
| I know companies that have (or rather are in the process of)
| adopting AI into business workflows. The only companies I
| know of that aren't using more labor to correct their AI
| tools are the ones that used it pre-ChatGPT/AI Bubble. Plenty
| of companies have rolled out "talk to our AI" chat bubbles on
| their websites and users either exploit and jailbreak them to
| run prompts on the company's dime or generally detest them.
|
| AI is an extremely useful tool that has been improving our
| lives for a long time - but we're in the middle of an
| absolutely bonkers level bubble that is devouring millions of
| dollars for projects that often lack a clear monetization
| plan. Even code gen seems pretty underwhelming to most of the
| developers I've heard from that have used it - it may very
| well be extremely impactful to the next generation of
| developers - but most current developers have already honed
| their skills to out-compete code gen in the low complexity
| problems it can competently perform.
|
| Lots of money is entering markets - but I haven't seen real
| disruption.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I'm going to favorite this thread and come back with a comment
| in 10 years. I think it will be fun to revisit this
| conversation.
|
| If you really don't think that this line of research and
| development is leading to AGI then I think you are being
| hopelessly myopic.
|
| >robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020
|
| There are some incredible advances happening _right now_ in
| robotics largely due to advances in AI. Obviously 2020 was not
| exactly correct, but also we had COVID which kind of messed up
| everything in the business world. And arguing that something
| didn't happen in 2020 but instead happened in 2025 or 2030, is
| sort of being pedantic isn't it?
|
| Being a pessimist makes you sound smart and world-weary, but
| you are just so wrong.
| 9dev wrote:
| Being an optimist makes you sound naive and a dreamer. There
| is no scientific agreement that LLMs are going to lead to AGI
| in the slightest--we cannot even define _what consciousness
| is_ , so even if the technology would lead to actual
| intelligence, we lack the tools to prove that.
|
| In terms of robotics, the progress sure is neat, but for the
| foreseeable time, a human bricklayer will outcompete any
| robot; if not on the performance dimension, then on cost or
| flexibility. We're just not there yet, not by a long stretch.
| And that won't change just by deceiving yourself.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > line of research and development is leading to AGI
|
| What do you mean by AGI exactly? if you want to come back in
| 10 years to see who's right, at least you should provide some
| objective criteria so we can decide if the goal has been
| attained.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I'm talking about this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligen
| c...
|
| >Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of
| artificial intelligence (AI) that matches or surpasses
| human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of
| cognitive tasks.
|
| Most (if not all) of the tests listed on the wikipedia page
| will be passed:
|
| >Several tests meant to confirm human-level AGI have been
| considered, including:
|
| >The Turing Test (Turing)
|
| This test is of course already passed by all the existing
| models.
|
| >The Robot College Student Test (Goertzel)
|
| >The Employment Test (Nilsson)
|
| >The Ikea test (Marcus)
|
| >The Coffee Test (Wozniak)
|
| >The Modern Turing Test (Suleyman)
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Echo chambers are very effective at drowning out dissenting
| voices.
| madrox wrote:
| I think an assumption that a lot of people make about people
| with power is that they say what they actually believe. In my
| experience, they do not. Public speech is a means to an end,
| and they will say whatever is the strongest possible argument
| that will lead them to what they actually want.
|
| In this case, OpenAI wants look like they're going to save the
| world and do it in a noble way. It's Google's "don't be evil"
| all over again.
| pembrook wrote:
| > _no obvious large-scale product-market fit_
|
| I mean, I know pessimistically "ackshually"-ing yourself into
| the wrong side of history is kind of Hackernews's thing (eg.
| that famous dropbox comment).
|
| But if you don't think OpenAI found product-market-fit with
| ChatGPT, then I don't think you understand what product-market-
| fit is...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's popular but not making money. So maybe product-audience
| fit so far.
| dbreunig wrote:
| Altman appears to say AGI is far away when he shouldn't be
| regulated, right around the corner when he's raising funds, or
| is going to happen tomorrow and be mundane when he's trying
| break a Microsoft contract.
| worik wrote:
| > and no obvious large-scale product-market fit,
|
| Really?
|
| I use, and pay for, OpenAI every day
| peutetre wrote:
| > _Is nobody in these very rich guys ' spheres pushing back on
| their thought process?_
|
| It's more simple. They've found that the grander the vision,
| the bigger the lie the more people will believe it. So they
| lie.
|
| Take Tesla's supposed full self-driving as an example. Tesla's
| doesn't have full self-driving. Musk has been lying about it
| for a decade. Musk tells the same lie year after year, like
| clockwork.
|
| And yet there are still plenty of true believers who ardently
| defend Tesla's lies and buy more Tesla stock.
|
| The lies work.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on
| their thought process?
|
| The moment someone does that they're no longer in the very rich
| guys sphere.
| delusional wrote:
| I agree with your analysis. The nice thing I've realized is
| that this means I can just stop paying attention to it. The
| product sucks, and is useless. The people are all idiots with
| god complexes. All the money are fake funny money they get from
| their rich friends in silicon valley.
|
| It will literally have no impact on anything. It will be like
| NFT's however long ago that was. Everybody will talk about how
| important it is, then they wont. Life will go one as it always
| have, with people and work, and the slow march of progress. In
| 30 years nobody is going to remember who "sam altman" was.
| benatkin wrote:
| > I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level
| of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys.
|
| Unprecedented change has already happened with LLMs. So this is
| expected.
|
| > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and
| little return
|
| ...because it's expensive to build what they're building.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >and no obvious large-scale product-market fit
|
| I'm afraid you are in as much an echo chamber as anyone. 200
| million+ weekly active users is large scale pmf
| catigula wrote:
| Is it even possible for Sam Altman to stop being dishonest? This
| isn't a method to redress concerns, it's a smear that has nothing
| to do with the lawsuit.
| milleramp wrote:
| Is this one of the 12 days of OpenAI?
| heavyarms wrote:
| If this is a GPT-generated joke, I'd say they cracked AGI.
| meagher wrote:
| People change their minds all the time. What someone wanted in
| 2017 could be the same or different in 2024?
| gkoberger wrote:
| Sure, but the nuance is Elon only wants what benefits him most
| at the time. There was no philosophical change, other than now
| he's competing.
|
| He's allowed these opinions, we're allowed to ignore them and
| lawyers are allowed to use this against him.
| ganeshkrishnan wrote:
| > but the nuance is Elon only wants what benefits him most at
| the time.
|
| Isn't that almost everyone? The people who left OpenAi could
| have joined forces but everyone went ahead and created their
| own company "for AGI"
|
| It's like the wild west where everyone dreams of digging up
| gold.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Maybe a weird question, but how does a capitalist economy work
| where AGI-performed-labor is categorically less expensive than
| human-performed labor? Do most people who labor for wages just go
| unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?
| next_xibalba wrote:
| No one has a strong answer for this. This question was the
| origin of a lot of universal basic income chatter and research
| beginning in maybe 2014. The idea being, whoever creates
| superintelligence will capture substantively all future
| profits. If a non-profit (or capped profit) company does it,
| they could fund UBI for society. But the research into UBI have
| not been very decisive. Do people flourish or flounder when
| receiving UBI? And what does that, in aggregate, do to a
| society? We still don't really know. Oh and also, OAI is no
| longer a non-profit and has eliminated the profit cap.
| slibhb wrote:
| The question shows a total disconnect from reality. People who
| are unemployed with no money today don't die. Even street
| people don't die.
|
| If AGI labor is cheaper and as effective as human labor, prices
| will drop to the point where the necessities cost very little.
| People will be able to support themselves working part-time
| jobs on whatever hasn't been automated. The tax system will
| become more redistributive and maybe we'll adopt a negative
| income tax. People will still whine and bitch about capitalism
| even as it negates the need for them to lift a single finger.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Until now, I didn't think that poverty impacting mortality
| was a controversial statement. Poverty is the fourth greatest
| cause of US deaths[1].
|
| Why would I hire a part time worker when I could hire an AI
| for cheaper? When I said categorically, I meant it.
|
| 1. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-poverty-fourth-
| greate...
| slibhb wrote:
| Quite a goal post move from "just go unemployed, and then
| bankrupt, and then die" to "poverty impacts health"
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I didn't say health; you did. I said mortality which is
| synonymous with death.
|
| Misquoting someone to prove a point is intellectually
| bankrupt. Take a breath and calm down. Why don't you try
| stealmanning instead?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| By artificially recreating scarcity in virtual space and
| reproducing the same kind economic dynamic there, what Antonio
| Negri called 'symbolic production'. Think fashion brands, video
| game currency, IP, crypto, Clubhouse, effectively the world
| we're already in. There's an older essay by Zizek somewhere
| where he points out that this already has played out. Marx was
| convinced 'general intellect', what we know call the 'knowledge
| economy' would render traditional economics obsolete, but we
| just privatized knowledge and reimposed the same logic on top
| of it.
| wmf wrote:
| Most people have nothing to contribute in the
| virtual/knowledge realm. Certainly not enough to live on.
| pixelsort wrote:
| Careful, we are not supposed to discuss how many human jobs
| will remain. The script clearly states the approved lines
| are "there will still be human jobs" and "focus on being
| adaptable". When it seems normal that Fortune 500 execs are
| living at sea on yachts, that's when you'll know OpenAI
| realized their vision for humanity.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I would think certain recent events in New York will
| probably be a bigger impetus for Fortune 500 execs living
| at sea on yachts
| natbennett wrote:
| Comparative advantage. Even if AGI is better at absolutely all
| work the amount of work it is capable of doing is finite. So
| AGI will end up mostly being used for the highest value, most
| differentiated work it's capable of, and it will "trade" with
| humans for work where humans have a lower opportunity cost,
| even if it would technically be better at those tasks too.
|
| Basically the same dynamic that you see in e.g. customer
| support. A company's founder is going to be better than your
| typical tier 1 support person at every tier 1 support task, but
| the founder's time is limited and the opportunity cost of
| spending their time on first-contact support is high.
| judah wrote:
| I remember watching an episode of the 1960s police drama,
| Dragnet.
|
| In one of the episodes, Detective Joe Friday spoke with some
| computer technicians in a building full of computers (giant, at
| the time). Friday asked the computer technician,
|
| > "One more thing. Do you think that computers will take all
| our jobs one day?"
|
| > "No. There will always be jobs for humans. Those jobs will
| change, maybe include working on and maintaining computers, but
| there will still be important jobs for humans."
|
| That bit of TV stuck with me. Here we are 60 years later and
| that has proven true. I suspect it will still be true in 60
| years, regardless of how well AI advances.
|
| Dario Amodei, former VP of research at OpenAI and current CEO
| of Anthropic, notes[0] a similar sentiment:
|
| > "First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that
| comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and
| in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways
| level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only
| better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans
| to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact
| creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying
| what AI is good at, such that the "10%" expands to continue to
| employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of
| things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or
| expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans
| and AI's are meaningfully different, then the logic of
| comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are
| likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for
| a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that
| the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past
| the point where we reach "a country of geniuses in a
| datacenter".
|
| Amodei does think that eventually we may need to eventually
| organize economic structures with powerful AI in mind, but this
| need not imply humans will never have jobs.
|
| [0]: https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace
| jdminhbg wrote:
| The way comparative advantage works, even if an AGI is better
| than me at Task A and Task B, if it is better at Task A than
| Task B, it'll do Task A and I'll do Task B.
|
| I think a lot of people confuse AGI with infinite AGI.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| ... what
|
| No, _you're_ confusing finite AGI for an AGI that can only
| compete with a single person at a time.
|
| In a world of AGI better-than-humans at both A and B, it's a
| whole lot cheaper to replicate AGI that's better at A and B
| and do both A and B than it is to _employ human beings_ who
| do B badly.
| elif wrote:
| There are essentially two answers to this question, and neither
| are in the interests of capital so there will never be progress
| if power toward them until forced.
|
| The first is the bill gates "income tax for robots" idea which
| does a kind of hand wavey thing figuring out how to calculate a
| robot, how the government will distribute taxes, etc. That one
| is a mess impossible to get support for and nearly impossible
| to transition to.
|
| The other idea, put forth by the Democracy in Europe 2025
| party, is called a universal basic dividend, which essentially
| says that to make AI owned by humanity, the utility of
| automation should be calculated, and as a result, a dividend
| will be paid out (just like any other stock holder) which is a
| percent of that company's profit derived from automation. It
| becomes part of the corporate structure, rather than a
| government structure, so this one I think kinda has merit on
| paper, but likewise zero motivation to implement until it's
| virtually too late
| vwkd wrote:
| Sounds like Elon's "fourth attempt [..] to reframe his claims"
| might actually be close to the target.
|
| Otherwise, why would they engage in a publicity battle to sway
| public sentiment precisely now, if their legal case wasn't weak?
| hatsix wrote:
| I'm generally in the camp of "I wouldn't miss anyone or
| anything involved in this story if they suddenly stopped
| existing", but I don't understand how engaging in a publicity
| battle is considered proof of anything. If their case was weak,
| what use is it to get the public on "their side" and they lose?
| If their case is strong, why wouldn't they want the public to
| be on their side?
|
| I hope they all spend all of their money in court and go
| bankrupt.
| dogboat wrote:
| Pre transformers paper emails. Fun to read.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Neither they nor Elon can or should be trusted to tell the truth.
| The only utility this statement should have is to illustrate
| whatever public narrative OAI wishes to affect.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| True. But after Elon's twitter lies and world domination
| ambitions he showed during the past 5 years, I just can't
| support his narrative.
| dtquad wrote:
| Important context: Elon Musk's close friend from the PayPal days
| and fellow libertarian tech billionaire David Sacks has been
| selected as the Trump admin's czar for AI and crypto.
|
| This is why OpenAI and Sam Altman are _understandably_ concerned.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| For additional context: These PayPal guys are very much contra
| Google and YC (Sam/pg).
| dgrin91 wrote:
| dumb question - in one of the emails they mention ICO. What is
| that?
|
| > I have considered the ICO approach and will not support it.
|
| ...
|
| > I respect your decision on the ICO idea
|
| Pretty sure they aren't talking about Initial Coin Offerings. Any
| clue what they mean?
| wmf wrote:
| Altman created Worldcoin so maybe he did mean Initial Coin
| Offering.
| boringg wrote:
| If I read anything from this it's the OpenAI is looking weak and
| worried if they are trying to use this to garner support or, at
| least, generate negative publicity for x.AI / Musk.
|
| Altman being the regulatory capture man muscling out competitors
| via pushing the white house and washington to move for safety,
| the whole board debacle and converting from not for profit to
| profit.
|
| I don't think anyone sees Musks efforts as altruistic.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| It's an aside, but these sorts of timelines are very American
| centric.
|
| I don't know when your autumn ("fall") or summer are in relation
| to September. Don't mix keys here, either use months or quarters,
| not a mix of things including some relative to a specific
| hemisphere.
| ronsor wrote:
| OpenAI is an American company
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| And they intend to "determine the fate of the world". As
| such, communication shouldn't be American centric.
| exprofmaddy wrote:
| It seems the humans pursuing AGI lack sufficient natural
| intelligence. I'm sad that humans with such narrow and misguided
| perspectives have so much power, money, and influence. I worry
| this won't end well.
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| From Musk's email:
|
| "Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking
| this long to figure out concepts. It doesn't sound super hard.
| High-level linking of a large number of deep nets sounds like the
| right approach or at least a key part of the right approach."
|
| Genuine question I've always had is, are these charlatans
| conscious of how full of shit they are, or are they really high
| on their own stuff?
|
| Also it grinds my gears when they pull out probabilities out of
| their asses:
|
| "The probability of DeepMind creating a deep mind increases every
| year. Maybe it doesn't get past 50% in 2 to 3 years, but it
| likely moves past 10%. That doesn't sound crazy to me, given
| their resources."
| hn1986 wrote:
| You should read what he says about software engineering. He's
| clearly clueless
| Biologist123 wrote:
| I'm neither an Elon fanboy nor a hater. But I do wonder both what
| he possesses and is possessed by to have created not just a
| successful company, but era-defining companies plural.
| tonygiorgio wrote:
| Just about the only open part about OpenAI is how their dirty
| laundry is constantly out in the open.
| linotype wrote:
| Google/Gemini have none of this baggage.
| dtquad wrote:
| Google/Gemini are also the only ones who are not entirely
| dependent on Nvidia. They are now several generations into
| their in-house designed and TSMC manufactured TPUs.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Okay. Is OpenAI now deflecting? Deflecting and reframing.
| VectorLock wrote:
| I found all the discussions about Dota pretty amusing. I had no
| idea it was such a big thing for them early on.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If I'm replaced by a DOTA bot I'm going to be pissed. At least
| it could be a bot for a good game, like StarCraft or something.
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