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Comment by rw | Hacker News Reader

Fair comparison, but I didn't intend any monopoly on fear. All I'm saying is that the risk of GAI should be taken seriously, calibrated along with the other problems you mention. There's a lot of room between 'irrelevant' and 'the most important issue' :-)

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Yes, and given the $1B in funding that OpenAI has, I'd seriously say that too much attention is given to the AI "risk."

OpenAI has nothing to do with AI risk. They want to accelerate research in AI and make it open to the public. Which is the exact opposite you would want to do to protect against superintelligent AIs. They are not focusing on solving the control problem, or anything meaningful.

This is clearly false. OpenAI would not exist if Sam Altman and Elon Musk were not worried about AI.

Actually, @Houshalter, OpenAI has several purposes, and one of them is to address AI risk. You may not think that is an effective approach, but that is their stated intent. They believe that the best hedge against the dangers of superintelligence is to conduct open research that encourages a multipolar world of several AGIs, rather a unipolar world where one company, such as Google, reaps the benefits and determines the course of such an advance. It's true that OpenAI accelerates AI research, which makes it paradoxical. But that's the nature of a hedge. You bet on both sides at once. I do believe that they will focus on solving meaningful problems (they are only a few weeks old...).

>rather a unipolar world where one company, such as Google, reaps the benefits and determines the course of such an advance

Yes that is their model of AI risk. However the people worried about AI risk are not worried about any single organization controlling AI. They are worried about a world where no one controls AI.

Controlling AI is actually a very difficult and unsolved problem. OpenAI is not intended to solve that problem, and if anything they are making it far worse by accelerating AI research before the problem has been solved.

What do you mean by unsolved problem? Controlling AI is not even an actual problem at all yet. It's merely a hypothetical problem.

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