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OpenAI Supporters

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113 pointspicodguyo38 comments

"Additionally, Elon Musk will depart the OpenAI Board but will continue to donate and advise the organization. As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon."

Bit of a nitpick, I read this sentence a few times because it sounded a little confusing, but shouldn't that be:

"but will continue to donate to, and advise the organization..."

rather than just "to donate and advise..." sounds like he's donating OpenAI to someone.

I'm unsure.

Think of it as "...will continue to donate and will continue to advise the organization," with the repetition taken out.

Yes, but if the object had to be included for advise for clarity, you'd think it'd have to be included for donate as well, no?

"to donate to" would be more correct, but very likely, a prickly editor said "YOU ENDED YOUR CLAUSE WITH A PREPOSITION, BE GONE WITH YOU!" and deleted the 'to'.

Ah, the sort of editor who knows just enough about language to be dangerous.

The injunction against ending with prepositions entirely comes from people wanting to turn English into Latin (similarly for split infinitives). There is no basis to deny it, and it's one of those rules where trying to adhere to it makes things harder, not easier, to understand.

Yes, and relatively recently too (lots of this sort of "all languages should be Latin" nonsense is from the 1700s).

You probably know the old joke, a visitor is on the Harvard campus, and says to one of the passing students:

Visitor: Excuse me, can you tell me where the library's at?

Student: Here at Harvard, sir, we do not end a sentence with a preposition.

Visitor: I do beg your pardon. Allow me to rephrase my question. Can you tell me where the library's at, you pompous asshole?

[I mean, if one is going to make up silly rules, at least they should have enough knowledge to know that the relevant domain in which the ridiculous rule would be applied isn't the sentence, but the clause.]

I read it to mean "but will continue to donate to, and advise the organization..." when I first read it but unable to do so after reading your comment. Not sure if this phenomena has a name for it.

could also have switched the verbs, i.e. "but will continue to advise the organization and donate"

What kind of AI solutions would Tesla work on, aside from automated driving software?

Do you need any more? "automated driving software" is a pretty big umbrella.

Well the quote was "As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI", so I was curious to know what else they would work on.

Intelligence for the Tesla factories.

Cool. Judging from his statements, he has very limited knowledge of the current state-of-the-art in AI. Because he is a great entrepreneur, has knowledge of other domains, people think he must know what he is saying about AI too.

Edit: Original title had Elon Musk on it. My comment refers to him.

I don't know. I think automated driving is a big use case, even if I don't necessarily agree with his very pessimistic view of AI.

Do you want only experts in the field on your board? It looks like they had Elon on the board to inform what to research. His company has a bunch of data and motivation for AI research in general. Not many experts have domain knowledge that he has.

That is a separate issue. His comments made the incredibly talented researchers at OpenAI look really bad. I suspect this is one of the prime reasons he is leaving.

Have some examples of how he made them look really bad? Not disputing, just curious.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/7ftxow/d_e...

Likewise, I'm tired of hearing about what Bill Gates thinks about such and such big problem. Just because he was clever at manipulative business dealings pushing 2nd rate OSes and milking billions from tax players, doesn't mean he knows much about anything else.

He has a charitable foundation since 2000 backed by billions of dollars and he has the ability to talk with a lot of experts.

Please do some searching on the internet about what Gates knows about. There are many articles and first hand accounts of the array of experts and topics he familiarizes himself with.[0] He astounds high level researchers with his domain knowledge.

[0]https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

I believe the GP forgot /sarcasm tag

The addition of Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton, two olympic athletes with no obvious ties to this, struck me as interesting. Does anyone have any insight to that?

They are being added as donors, not advisors, right? So some rich people with interest in AI decided to support OpenAI, it seems.

Which is surprising and great to see as it indicates the issue becoming a more main stream concern.

How exactly did the Eaton's become rich? I didn't realize there was that much money in running, unless you are someone like Usain Bolt and have endorsement deals.

It's only a google away: https://heavy.com/sports/2016/08/ashton-eaton-net-worth-endo...

Interesting. I was expecting you would need to have $50+M to be considered an announced donor.

The Eatons are now in the Bay Area and are working in tech. Here's an article about their transition: https://medium.com/south-park-commons/ashton-eaton-from-olym...

>Elon Musk will depart the OpenAI Board but will continue to donate and advise the organization. As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon

Interesting.

Makes sense, considering he already stole one of their best vision engineers to lead the AutoPilot project.

“Provided a superior opportunity and compensation.”

These are people, you can’t “steal” them.

If I was working for Open AI, or had donated or provided funding, I would probably be angry that Elon moved a great engineer to Tesla because he thought that was more important. I would wonder if we could truly build a great team of if SpaceX and Tesla would just poach anyone exceptional.

I would hope that exceptional individuals would work wherever they choose. In most cases the folks who stick with non-profits like that they're working for a non-profit, even though the financial rewards are smaller than industry.

People will generally go where they are paid the most, especially when choosing between two companies both working on very exciting AI projects such as Tesla and OpenAI. And Elon is setting (or at least influencing) what both companies are willing to offer him.

OpenAI is not a company. It is a non-profit.

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