The Contradictions of Sam Altman
wsj.com
wsj.com
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”
We've already seen a charity robbed to no end other than Profit. Commercializing OpenAI was for one reason: to enrich the people commercializing it. Not to benefit society, and with nary a thought given to the consequences.
Control of AI serves one purpose, in Altman's mind, I am convinced: to prevent other people from eating the chickens he counted too early.
If ten million people lose their jobs to ChatGPT, it's fine as long as Altman & Co grow richer, but if those same people try to democratize AI and make his time and investment valueless in the face of a commoditized category of software, all the sudden he has a problem and those people should be constrained by the government -- but Altman should not?
This won't be the first time greed failed.
I'm worried about v3.0
John Cage - Overpopulation and Art
On the other hand, unemploying a large enough segment of society at once might finally force some change in the system, rather than letting it continue limping on in a slow burn where 1-2% of jobs get automated a year.
Proof of employment required to vote.
This mindset is prevalent today, as if people are incapable of changing government without its permission
And we are entirely fine with that. Top of the comments after 7 hours.
Note, I am not claiming it could not be true. That is entirely beside my point. The issue is, that it could be entirely untrue. And I really mean, every single piece of information in this comment could be off. And we are comfortable with that. We are burning witches again.
If this is the level of our engagement, in this relatively good and on-topic forum, in times of change and disagreement, I do truly wonder if there is any hope for us.
Excuse me, but what witch is being burned for the wrong reason here?
This debate evolves around Sam Altman, how what he and OpenAI was doing was open - and now it is not anymore, despite contrary initial statements. That is a legit reason for anger, no?
The balance of probabilities indicates to me that the attempt at regulatory capture is also based in greed, but if you have a different view, I'd love to hear your logic.
After all, if AI proliferation were as dangerous as Altman seems to claim, then why is the answer "OpenAI should continue to provide unfettered global public access to quasi-strong AI, but the government should slow other people down "?
If billions of dollars are involved, your first suspicion shouldn't be altruism.
Edit: OK perhaps a valid reason for a private subsidiary is to provide the charity with the income it needs to operate if it has no endowment (OpenAI does), but given all the other points I raised, I don't think that's what's going on here.
The question has recently been asked by Lex Fridman and answered by Sam Altman. This is the clip: https://youtu.be/qQdqFZFZQ6o
To quote: "We learned early on that were gonna need far more capital than we were able to raise as a non-profit" (you can listen in on it being expanded over 3 Minutes)
Now, since I can almost feel the goal-post-shifting coming, this seems like a good time to align: You claimed you could see no reason. Their reason is: They had a model. Then they figured it was wrong. They adjusted their model.
This is not an insane or unreasonable process. This is how we know things get adjusted all the time. We agree with it on principle.
Now, of course, there are a lot of possible, unfavorable interpretations, even if we can agree up to here. A couple:
a) Despite the process making sense, that's not what happened. Sam might be lying or deceiving. He may be leaving things unsaid, or it could all be a long-planned con, etc. All of this might be entirely possible, and I did not do the work to disprove this option. BUT: as a general rule, we always agree that the burden of proof is on the accuser, in court and in civil discourse. Walking up to people and saying "You stole!", them being irritated, and you saying "Well! Prove me otherwise!" is just not how we do things. I am aware that in practice we often are willing to apply different rules to the very poor, the very rich, or people we just dislike.
b) Sam is incompetent or delusional. Someone else could have made it work without going the route they did. Maybe it would have worked, and he is just... bad at math? Certainly a possibility. Similar to the above, if you want to make this claim without discrediting yourself: Show your work. Reason us through it.
c) This move was illegal. I am not a lawyer, but since I wouldn't rate this thought as particularly groundbreaking, I am okay with assuming someone raised the concern during the transition, lawyers were consulted, and it was a legal option.
d) It's simply immoral to go on, at best the exploitation of a loophole, at worst the biggest treason to humankind. If "open" cannot mean "open source" anymore, before making this transition, letting the company fail was the right move. This is an entirely understandable position, and I can empathize with the feelings it triggers. It requires no evidence, and it requires no claims about greed. It's an opinion piece. Fair enough.
I'll preface this by saying I am neither judge nor prosecutor, and we are not at trial.
Where we are is in a position of considering, before it is too late, the honesty and motives of a man who has taken a charity private because they "needed money".
Needed money for what, exactly? Well, the mission of OpenAI, according to https://openai.com/about their mission is Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
So how does this newfound capital help that mission? By hiding the details of GPT4, so that no one outside of OpenAI can benefit. I don't even know how many parameters the damn thing has or what kind of growth trajectory we are on, and neither does anyone outside of OpenAI.
Here's a man who stands to control a large part of what resembles AGI, financially benefit to an almost indescribable degree, and control, arguably, a large part of the direction of society (given the number of jobs this will cost), especially if the regulators limit access by Mere Mortals. They won't even tell us the basics of their new models (and newfound powers). So much for "Open" and "benefiting all of humanity".
If someone stands to gain this kind of money and power, and does things that on their face seem dishonest and inimical to society at large, and to the goals of the very charity he privatized, should he be immune to questioning and suspicion?
I am suspicious. I think his actions merit suspicion. I think you all should be suspicious too, based on the events so far.
Again, as soon as we jump to the "so...", we are already past the point that I was taking offense with. I myself listed a few options from where to take this and you added a few more. Fair enough and entirely fine with me.
This is the point:
> Commercializing OpenAI was for one reason: to enrich the people commercializing it. Not to benefit society, and with nary a thought given to the consequences.
Making bad faith statements about someone without even rebutting the stated intent of the accuse, or even putting in the effort to learn about the intent, is just so incredibly lame and bad style.
Imagine saying this to someones face: "You made this business for one reason alone: To enrich yourself personally, you absolutely do not care about benefitting society, and you don't give a fuck about the damage it might do." Would you think it really be okay to advance this to the accusse, before even bothering to find or hear an explanation regarding the issue you are taking such strong offense with? Just an inkling of what their explanation is without you assuming it for them, as a matter of human decency?
If we cut out the option for people to explain themselves or reason on basis of their explanation, what are we doing other than advancing populism? I really want to believe this place can not be that.
(I want to add, that I have 0 allegiance or interesting opinions about Sama. In the past I found some of their takes interesting, but for me that's just normal, when I listen to a decently smart person for the first time, even if I end up disagreeing with most of their values.)
The hiding of scientific data from a charity has VERY few kind explanations and a lot of terrible ones. The balance of probabilities points towards Sam Altman acting maliciously and not in the public interest, which might be "okay" if he hadn't robbed a charity to do so.
I am still open to contrary viewpoints, but you're not presenting any, you are only saying I am acting in bad faith for what I (and others here) consider to be merited and valid skepticism based on recent events and statements from Altman himself.
Can you provide any charitable interpretation of the hiding of scientific data from a charity whose mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity?
That it happens to also be a popular opinion doesn't indicate that people are burning witches - it indicates that people are increasingly finding it easier to explain the world in terms of greed and cynicism; because, frankly, that is the world we live in (aghem, in my opinion).
That you find this to be "witch-burning" indicates to me that you must really relate with the ultra-wealthy which honestly just sounds tone deaf. Sam Altman nor Jeff Bezos will "go down" because of a comment on the internet. Do you know who _doesn't_ have that guarantee? Normal people.
otherwise wouldn't have they already done it by now ?
I sure would love to hear Mr. Keynes acknowledge defeat. If he were alive today, I seriously doubt we (Marxists like myself) would have the pleasure.
It's a bit like Freud - people only remember him for his kookier ideas, but his basic thinking has permeated all of psychology.
Here’s a happy map for the world.
So here's a few quotes that go in the reverse direction:
"That which he sought he despises; what he lately lost, he seeks again. He fluctuates, and is inconsistent in the whole order of life."—Horace, Ep., i. I, 98.
Many of the Greeks, says Cicero,—[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 27.]— cannot endure the sight of an enemy, and yet are courageous in sickness; the Cimbrians and Celtiberians quite contrary; "Nothing can be regular that does not proceed from a fixed ground of reason."—Idem, ibid., c. 26.
"Esteem it a great thing always to act as one and the same man."—Seneca, Ep., 150.
“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”—Seneca, Ep., 71.
― Oscar Wilde
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the 20th century governments slaughtered wholesale around 100 million of their own citizens (China, Russia, Cambodia), let alone those of other countries they killed in war. There's no measure by which the market comes anywhere near that amount of murder.
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.
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.
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.
What does this even mean though? Seems like hand waving that "AI" is just going to fix everything.
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.
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.
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.
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'?
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.
Did the population at large want National Health, sanitation, vaccination and the EPA? Or did a small group of people in government decide that was best for everyone. I suspect the latter, especially when looking at the National Health system that doesn’t seem to help as well as other systems. You’re right it’s not all “the feels”, but a lot is about making the population feel like they are looked after without doing much to actually look out for their best interests.
Yes. Literally every one of those was very popular when it was passed. The National Health in particular continues to be popular.
The EPA was passed under Nixon and he did not veto it because the feeling that the need for it was so widespread that he didn't dare.
Same with the EPA. It’s an improvement, so people like it, but it’s not what people actually want.
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.
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.
There is one big benefit that democratic governments have though. They have a monopoly on physical force.
Their are only a couple of things I'd add.
As much knowledge as I brought in about technology and the idea of being aware of system thinking, I also brought in a great amount of ignorance about all the other areas that are legislated (healthcare, interplay between local, state, and fedearl issues, budgetary concerns, tax policy, banking, etc.). Good legislation is truly collaborative.
Sadly, for the second part, good legislation is rarer than it should be as much of legislation is about politics and perception of the voters. And voter perceptions are not necessarily logical or reasoned.
This makes it all the more important, IMHO, that everyone who is reasonable, logical, and educated spend their precious, valuable time involving themselves to advocate for elected officials who behave similar in what is essentially a zero-sum game.
p.s. Have faith. I saw enough during my time that gave me reason for that faith. (But that faith requires time and effort -- we don't get good government or democracy for free.) I'm glad to hear you're getting better.
I'd say much good legislation is collaborative, but some necessary legislation is not. FDR's changes for instance. Industry did not want it. Arguably health care in the US needs this too.
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!
2) In a democracy, you get the policies you want through organization and direct action.
Maybe I'm somehow entirely missing your point.
Basically my main point (or question really, I am not sure in it) is that we should resist thinking about government as an abstract entiry different in character from any org - really what it does or looks after is just, in the end, some small set of humans doing some actions that have some effect.
They're democratically elected yes, but that is a bit meaningless in the practical detail of any one given situation. In a sense it's not different, safer, or better, than some company led by some small set of individuals also makikg concrete decisons, for any one concrete decision.
Maybe democracy and policy has some aggregate influence over all decisions, making them lean in a certain way. But it's not like 'the government' as an entity is one thing led by a concrete conciousness or plan. Does that make more sense?
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.
Like what is collective action, really? It's as you say - a series of individuals interacting, setting a course in a feedback loop, and then more people getting on board with that. It doesn't just happen, it takes individual instigators. It also doesn't just self-propagate. You need individuals, typically the same individuals, to show up regularly and consistently and make sure stuff happens and people are doing what they need to be doing.
Modern philosophy of science kind of rejects the notion that you can study anything really by only looking at the atomic structure of it. This is to say, you can’t really study history by only looking at the actions of individual actors. Even in particle physics you have the 4 fundamental interactions, you have virtual particles, etc. not just. This isn’t to say that fermions and bosons aren’t important, it is just that it is hard to describe any physical phenomena without looking at the interactions between them. And in fact, by studying those interactions, you can derive certain laws and behaviors. History is no different, except the complexity is many many orders of magnitude greater.
I guess by questioning the analogy I get back to my point. Things don't happen in history because of (truly) random behaviours converging on some emergent effect, like in a system of particles. They happen because specific unique (wrt the system) individuals make decidedly non-random decisons to affect reality on purpose (even if cause and effect are not that predictable it still holds that the actions are purposeful and do affect reality) in some way.
Firstly there is currently a debate among quantum physics as to the true randomness of what we observe[1][2]. Turns out we don’t actually need true randomness in our models, they just need to appear as if they are random, in other words, the chaotic nature of the system is more important than true randomness.
Secondly, society is an emergent effect of individuals behaving in a chaotic manner. So is zeitgeist. To study history without looking at societal changes over time, and without accounting for zeitgeist, is bound to yield a pretty limited insights.
I am aware that my analogy between quantum mechanics and the study of history is flawed. The latter is infinity more complex than the former, and deriving laws and creating models is a good fit to study the former but extremely difficult to study the latter. However my point is merely pointing to the fact that atomism (and holism for that matter) is an incomplete philosophy of science, that doesn’t even work in our most fundamental scope. One should be cautious when applying it to the study of history.
Or to put it in other words: While ρ(λ | ab) ≠ ρ(λ) is a real possibility in quantum physics likewise it is highly likely that the probability of individual acting in society is not independent from the probability of the same individual acting outside of the influence of that society. In your original point government may very well be like the ab in this famous conjecture. I would be careful when removing it’s influence.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytyjgIyegDI
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnKzt6Xq-w4
PS: Sorry to cite youtube videos, but I’m not a physicist and these videos are the only way for me to understand the science. Otherwise I would be citing something I don’t understand, which I don’t want to do.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Oh, and also imagine that nobody really knows what plutonium is, there is just one startup that had figured out how to turn uranium to plutonium.
Also that understanding of uranium for now is at the level when it was just discovered. So people are still handling it by bare hands. And trying to sell shiny uranium toys.
That’s quite the understatement, isn’t it? Neither Google nor Meta have been able to demonstrate something to the public that resonates even close the the altitude that OpenAI has.
But more critically, chat.openai.com is more of a tech demo than a serious product. So one can optimize the UX for "chatty and engaging" without being too concerned for accuracy. Bing, on the other hand, is intended to be a search product. It's noteworthy that adjusting the same model to provide a more accurate search experience seems to have snuffed out a lot of the magic.
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.
The machine can mimic, but it is still completely reactive in its nature. ChatGPT doesn't do anything of its own accord, it merely responds. It has no opinion, no agenda, and no real knowledge or understanding. All it can do is attempt to respond like a human would, but it cannot reason on its own. Ask it about its views on a political issue, and it won't think about its stance and the reasons for taking it, but it will just produce what it has trained an answer to that question ought to look like.
The panic about the machine takeover is completely overblown, driven by people who don't really understand that these machines are and how they work. We are still far, far away from points where AI would be capable of actually making political decisions.
Isn't this impossible by definition? Nothing can be more convincingly human than humans, or else it would be something else.
Perhaps you mean mimic charismatic or intelligent humans more than most, or the average, human?
> Once you have a machine that can automate and mimic social, political, cultural, and personal interactions, that's it - that's the political singularity.
Do you mean online only? Because I imagine we're still quite a ways from physical machines convincingly mimicking humans IRL.
> And that's true even the machine isn't completely reliable and bug free.
If the machine makes inhuman mistakes the humans will likely notice and adapt.
Why isn’t it theoretically possible for an AI to pass the Turing test so hard that more than 50% of the time humans think the AI is the real human? That would effectively be more convincingly human (to humans) than humans are.
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?
Delegated councils (like the FDA, FTC, FCC, etc.) and courts can be used to make decisions about edge and individual cases, and do so much closer to real time than Congress can act.
Governments regularly successfully define things much more vague than "is this AI?"
This is a necessary evil in the case of an industry like aviation where there's a massive and immediate risk to human life if you get it wrong.
If you see AGI as life threatening (in a physical sense) it's an understandable stance to take. However if AGI is threatening moreso in a social sense I don't think concentrating the power behind it is going to be a societal good.
I genuinely believe we as a society will get fucked by corporations for everything we can give if we don't either radically socially reform for incoming AGI, or have competitive open developments in the area not beholden to corporate interests.
For my money, the latter seems at least possible.
I'm not sure that AI is going to look that different. Is there any reason to believe that if OpenAI wins the majority share, that any competition is going to be able to dethrone them?
We could imagine a world where the US government broke up big tech companies in the late 2000s or early 2010s, and it sure seems like that world would be in a much better position today, due exactly to increased competition. Instead we have a bunch of big companies that don't take risks or release ambitious new products because they're too busy trying to defend their moats.
This is not a good idea. There is a conflict of interest here. The fundamental goal of government is regulation, the fundamental goal of a business is profit.
Both the morals of government and corporations are therefore very different. I call them Guardian and Commercial Syndromes respectively. When you combine these two syndromes you create monstrous hybrids.
Allow me to elucidate:
An entity in the Guardian syndrome values honor and uses forceful tactics to maintain order and regulation.
An entity in the Commercial syndrome values money and tries to use whatever means possible to gain profits through trade agreements.
You don't want a commercial entity to have the power to enforce things and you don't want a government entity to desire profit. Both hybrids lead to bad things and it's the root of corruption in the world today.
You know how the old medieval English Nave formed? So many pirates lurked off the coasts of medieval England that London merchants went to the expense of financing a fleet of fighting ships and gave it to the Crown.
Why give it to the Crown? Because you don't want some commercial entity running the Navy using methodologies that circumvent trade agreements and violently funnel trade and profit to a singular commercial entity. You need an entity outside of the commercial sphere; An entity in the Guardian Syndrome. If a commercial entity controlled the Navy you get something similar to the Mafia or Yakuza; Basically organized crime.
Only the government should enforce the laws of AI because there is in theory no conflict of interest. But practically speaking the US government is pretty heavily hybridized already (See military industrial complex). Still it's the best option.
Aside from the issue of AGI being extremely difficult to capture in a proper definition, what leads you to believe this? Recent developments like LLMs and stable diffusion are impressive technology but I don't view them as remotely relevant to achieving AGI.
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.
America started as an elitest Republic. Slowly, variable #1 grew and shrank in fits in starts but variable #2 changed very little. Until we get to the 1930s and then variable #2 explodes wide open. Then in 1960s variable #1 breaks wide open as well.
By the 70s we are probably at the high point of both. Since then #1 has significantly eroded. And now with the court punches at the voting rights act #2 is now under threat as well.
I don't mean it in the usual internet guy sense. I don't see America as having a pure past. I believe America was an elitest Republic with very slow steps towards democracy. To me America only turned the corner towards becoming a democracy in the 1930s. It was a bumpy up and down from there with a slump in the last 40 years.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserv... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Human-Action-Ludwig-Von-Mises/dp/1614...
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.
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.
So yeah, they should, but they don't.
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.
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.
If you personally make less money would you still do it?
You might answer yes but many wont.
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
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.
What are you actually asking for here? Have you thought through the implications of what you're saying here?
The way we normally deal with assholes is we shame them. But then there's people like you saying we can't expect anything better from certain kinds of assholes. Well, yeah, when you tell an asshole to keep on being an asshole, what do you expect.
Sounds like they're asking for government to take the reins w.r.t world impacting decisions rather than relying on the fortune of the big people in tech to make kind, thoughtful and well-planned decisions for our collective humanities' future.
>The way we normally deal with assholes is we shame them.
No, I don't, I avoid them -- and I find that tactic that you mentioned embraced more and more commonly and purported even as the preferred method as if that's just the common sense reaction -- It's not, and I disagree with that behavior vehemently .
> Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government.
That's the thing: our government, society, is simply an emergent, collective agent of individuals. If most people don't actually have in mind the importance of altruism, then the whole thing doesn't work:
(a) The government can't watch our every little move (as-is);
(b) The more the government watches us, the more risks we take with authoritarianism (even totalitarianism);
(c) Having everyone extremely social-good disinterested is extremely inefficient: you increase policing costs, legal costs, regulatory costs, it increases complexity arbitrarily and makes the whole thing grind to a halt (see highly corrupt cultures);
(d) Moreover, the disinterest becomes dangerous because even if the mission of the government were to steer social-good disinterested parties to somehow achieve collective good societies (whose success I question), a disinterested population doesn't care to vote for well-meaning politicians, and doesn't have the ethical and social understanding to make good choices in this area. And then when the whole culture is social-good disinterested, it's hard to imagine somehow all government workers would be magically pro-social angels, and not as corrupt as the rest of the population.
In conclusion, the entire backbone of a society is ethical enlightenment (of course, alongside other things like effectiveness, and ethical effectiveness). If individuals themselves are not ethically enlightened, no social good outcomes are possible, be it from governments, markets, or various organizations like non-profits and coops.
I think the market would be looking after our collective interest if this enlightenment was more widespread. And then we could better discuss mechanisms (and general structural innovations -- which I think are very important) to keep the few inevitable problem cases and unenlightened psychopaths from ruining it for the rest of us :)
In a way, societies are made of goodness (cooperation).
The real benefit of having a Congress for broader society is that it forces at least partial exposure of these unmentioned goals.
In that sense the federal government is a wonderful invention, but the drawbacks are so many that it doesn't seem all that wonderful overall.
https://libcom.org/library/workers-control-wage-system-ideas...
I'm dedicating my life to building for-profit commercial cooperatives based on this simple principle of voluntary association.
If only there was a system of government designed from first principles to reflect the will of the people...
This is just librarian tautology. It's not wrong, but any "citizen" organization you can imagine to implement whatever policy it is you want[1] is going to be isomorphic to a democratic government.
[1] You skipped this part!
Delegating powers to a government for the common good does not change any of this. The people still have the job of ensuring the government carries that out properly because its priority is and always will be foremost itself, so the people have to ensure the government's interests coincide with their own. A government is not just some will-of-the-people-reflecting automaton that you can put in place then wash your hands of.
The market, then, is assumed to be rational on average, and thus all participants in the market would make decisions in their own best interest, and thus, obtain the best outcome for themselves that is possible. Those who do not choose optimally is then selected out by economic darwinian competition.
The gov't has a role to play, but it does not follow that _more_ gov't regulation makes for a better society.
The government can force you to give them your money and obey their laws. This is what makes them uniquely powerful and dangerous. In a democracy they do have to get your vote once in a while, but that's within a framework they mostly create and police, with extremely high barriers to entry and very little reward for doing "the right thing".
It baffles and saddens me that otherwise thinking people can be so eager to hand power and authority to the government. I understand that -- after a lot of thought and reading and with much reluctance -- one could conclude that the government should be given a particular power because the alternatives are worse.
We have to remember that "we" have selected the best of bad options. This system is not good and will get worse by time. People have to remember that we must not let power accumulate to specific groups, be it private or public sector. Unfortunately the tendency seems to be towards the opposite of what is "good" for average individuals. If government has too much power it cannot be held accountable, and the interests have disaligned.
However, the government's incentive is to stay in power and not let that happen. The tool that government has is regulation.
If you don't implicitly trust "the market", and you shouldn't, then you can't trust the government. What's it going to take to convince you that handing over more of your rights and money won't enable the government to solve problems it previously could not have.
"The government should fix that" is no less ridiculous than "the free market could fix that". Which is to say it can occasionally be true with a lot of caveats, and often wrong.
This is the basic capitalist lie - Do you think Norfolk Southern's interests align with the "market" of Palestine? On what planet do Amazon drivers have the same incentive alignment a Amazon shareholders? No, the argument is "tough shit" go find some place that does, it's a "free market" just move your entire life any abandon community to follow around making money for a private dictator.
Unfortunately the entire profit or bust ethos isn't constrained to one company - any company that has profit as it's primary driver, aka any public company or VC backed company, MUST pursue profits over all things OR THEY WILL BE KILLED BY THEIR OWN INVESTORS. Further, now it's every individual that is required to pursue profit at all costs or - go broke and die - without healthcare because the "market" of healthcare isn't aligned with you the customer.
This lie is so pervasive that the entire field of Economics ASSUMES capitalism as the only possible economic system today (Economics was my field of study!) and anything other than it is "heterodox."
So no, you're simply describing the devastatingly broken system as though it's the only suitable option
In fact, all of the economists that wrote originally about the "market" described precisely how it would be corrupted into what it is today
Go read Veblen from 1899: Theory of the Leisure class then read chapter three of the wealth of nations and then come talk with me
When it comes to keeping your country (or region) livable, nothing beats personal engagement and a little vigilance.
This false and defeatist dichotomy between Government dictatorships or Private dictatorships lays bare how truly depraved most thinking is around what constitutes human flourishing and liberty.
Hence why I gave you that link
No. Government is a monopoly usurped by violence.
Will the act on AI? Yeah, probably. Will it smell of crony capitalism? Yes, absolutely.
Could also be said that the more niceness, the more likely that not-nice actors will violently overthrow the nice ones.
As an example, we have had numerous bee hives at our place. The bees that never mess with us when we come near their hives are more likely to get robbed by another hive and destroyed. The bees that would sting us when we came near were rock solid - they never got robbed or collapsed.
I'm so sick of our new style of wannabe rulers/overlords who use the promise of freeing humanity from labor as the appeal to grant them total power. It's an appeal, among other things, to the basest sloth and laziness. "Imagine what you would do if you never had to work" is a daytime talk show hook, and a way to lure people into gambling and playing the lottery and investing in crypto. It's not a revolutionary slogan, it's the oldest con in the book.
You live in constant uncertainty that your source of food, source of existence could be withdrawn at any time by corporate whim
Question: Who do you think the police work for? Hint: It's neither "citizens" nor is it "the government" They work for corporations. Go look at how they act. The whole goal is to provide security for private property holders (aka not you) and increasingly they are private mercenaries that have day jobs as city/state/county policeman. Ask a cop where their "overtime" pay comes from and it's typically protecting some business.
Economic and political power should be dispersed as much as possible into the hands of the citizens, not anyone who was able to wrest as much control as possible from others - which is how we apportion it.
Do you ask "how did this company I'm applying to get to this position?" If not then you're not doing anything different than picking a political party without due diligence.
The act of consolidating power destroys the ethical standing of the institution
If your government stops paying you, you can’t find a new citizenship.
A world where work is replaced by UBI is not a utopia. It’s a dystopia where the government controls if you can eat today. In which politicians divide and conquer by differentially giving and denying nutrition to different groups in order to gain votes. Give me a corporate hellscape any day of the week over that.
UBI is one of those “semantic stop signs” where people just stop thinking whenever it is mentioned. The term is a stand-in for whatever utopian society the user has in mind. But the implications of UBI as a policy are completely contrary to the stated goals of the users of the term.
Work is simply what we do for others.
All we need is a just transition and an end to involuntary unemployment which is best achieved through a federal job guarantee:
Already, profits from productivity increases go mostly to capital owners. This is why most of us have so little money, compared with what people used to have 50 years ago. This is why you can't afford a house.
If productivity increases had been redistributed such that people could work considerably less while maintaining an acceptable standard of living, we all would work 3-4 days per week. Instead, those gains went to the capital owning class. AI will worsen the situation.
When you think UBI, don't think "everyone gets $300k/year for free so nobody needs to worry about working anymore". Think more like "everyone gets $30k/year for free so nobody's life is paycheck-to-paycheck". There are lots of people who literally don't have the opportunity to do anything (even better jobs!) other than their current jobs, which they need to put food on the table and have a roof over their heads. One of the envisioned benefits of UBI is that it would actually give them some opportunity & breathing room in their schedules to do something else - whether it's raising a kid, learning new skills, applying for other jobs, or anything else. Most people would still have quite a bit of an incentive to work for a more comfortable standard of living - it's just that they won't feel like they have a gun to their heads as the alternative.
Does this mean UBI is obviously practical and we should start it tomorrow? No, there are lots of challenges, most notably including the funding itself - not many economies today are able to hand out that much money in a sustainable way, so there's some very hard rethinking necessary to figure out how this could ever work. Does this mean everybody will give a 10x ROI on it in the long term? No, some people would probably not do anything useful with the money. Does this mean UBI solves all problems? No, even if you do your best you can still have bad luck (get hit by a bus, medical bills, etc.). Does this mean UBI would work well everywhere? No, results might vary across different societies.
But we're rapidly heading into a world where more and more people are being put out of work, and can't pick up new skills fast enough (if at all) to make ends meet. Expecting everyone to just adapt is incredibly unrealistic. UBI is one envisioned plausible way to address this problem and others systematically. Nobody knows for sure how it would play out in the long term, but to my knowledge nobody has obviously better solutions either.
What impact would UBI have on inflation? I've read some things about minimum wage increases largely going to landlords. If everyone has 30k, 30k is not worth much, right?
I mean, I just made up the $30k number to get a completely different point across. I wasn't saying $30k is the magic number. The actual number will, yes, have to be larger to account for the self-induced inflation. I have no idea where the equilibrium would be. Maybe it's double that. Maybe it's location dependent, or something else. Who knows. But it will be somewhere.
And no, I have no idea how to fund it sustainably in the current economic system; some people think it's doable, and some don't. And other changes in how society/government/life works will almost certainly be necessary in the process. I think the point of the UBI debate isn't "the government can send everyone $30k checks tomorrow and everything will be fine", but rather, the point is to inspire people to move from "this is stupid" to "let me humor the idea and at least help spend some effort investigating to see if there's any way to make it work before we declare failure". There's no guarantee the approach would success if we try, but there is a guarantee that it would fail if nobody is willing to even consider taking it seriously.
Your point does stand in autocracies and dictatorships though.
Worse deal because the many employers are in competition against each other so you can rely on their self interest to remain in business, whereas the people that get government jobs, their self interest doesn't have an incentive system where it would benefit me.
I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok.
They are applying to different companies? Do you believe these employees made a decision to work for one of these companies for life and will now never again get another job? What is your point with this part?
> I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok.
I do not want to work for the kinds of jobs "a single entity who can guarantee" jobs can offer me. You know what happens in that world? You receive a note from your teacher when you are in school, telling you that based on what they saw, you are going to be studying X for the rest of your schooling. After studying X the government will send you a letter assigning you to the job where you are needed, wherever it is, and assign you a home near that job. You have no agency in this world. I'm not making this up, this is the only practical way such systems have worked.
"Guaranteed work for life from a single entity" also means the guy that runs the "assignment office" for the government will now place his friends in good jobs, and you in bad ones.
People who are against corporativism and capitalism have a way of forgetting that if there's "bad people owning companies and houses and stealing our labor", those same defects would be in the people who would work for the government. Bad people don't go away because you change the system, so does your system keep them in check?
Who is hiring in tech right now? Honest question.
As for the rest of your post, the main issue is having a say. The ill effects you are describing can indeed happen in a single-employer system. But at least in a democratic state, every few years the population has a say in how the system is being run. Right now, nobody except the CEO and the board has a say in how a company is run. They fire thousands of people, many with mortgages and children and people who depend on them, with no regards for what that means. And then to top it off they pay themselves millions of dollars to make these savage decisions. AND, I have no voice and no vote in all of this. Yeah... no thanks.
The company I work for, among tens of thousands of other companies. I'm starting to think you're not commenting in good faith.
> the main issue is having a say.
> nobody except the CEO and the board
So here you come in with what I described above. "The bad person". Let's assume they are bad, and they fire everyone. Their company will stop existing, so that'll make them less money and give them less power. So they won't fire everyone. They'll fire exactly the amount of people they believe will benefit them personally the most. Over time, some of these "bad CEOs" will make compounding bad decisions, and nobody will want to work for them or the company will run out of money. This is the built-in self regulation and "the say". If you work for a company where the you believe the CEO is a bad person, you leave. If they fire your colleagues, you can leave too. That is your say, and the market is the "aggregate say". It works in different ways and needs regulations (I don't believe in the purity off implementation of any system).
So you see, in fact the bad CEO and board actually have way more to lose from their decisions than a "job assignment official" in an all-job-controlling government office, moreover because most public jobs aren't elected.
Out of those two, I know which one's whims I'd rather be exposed to. A life of shoveling rocks at the mines because "john the placement officer dislikes me", or choosing which job I do but possibly losing it from one day to the next and have to get another one multiple times through my life.
I went to a wealthy enough private school to have had an up-close look at what children do when they never have to work in their lives if they don't want to. It's not pretty. My father made all his kids start working full time at 14.
As far as the one-to-many vs one-to-one argument, you're absolutely right; the connection between having choices in work and having freedom is only not apparent to people who've developed a conveniently conspiratorial view of the world, in which corporations are acting in concert as opposed to presenting endless opportunities and edges to anyone with ambition in the faces they present. As you said, with a monolithic actor like government, it's just a single bureaucrat's opinion of you that matters, with no chance to prove yourself. This is obvious to everyone I've ever met who has lived under a dictatorship. And ultimately a dictatorship must be the ultimate arbiter of any form of UBI, because one way or another, people will be made to work to support people who don't want to work. And that can only be accomplished by force in measure to how offensive it is to the working group.
Whereas I have quit great jobs to work some incredibly shitty jobs and become good, then great at them, and I think I've become a slightly better human being at each iteration. I quit coding to be a taxi driver - I worked 16 hour days and wrote several novels in my taxi. There is your time to make art. I don't think either part of that would have been possible in a world with UBI or the control structures it would imply.
How does an economy function when the surplus value of labor is derived from machinery instead of humans?
I know the past answer to this has been that people will just shift to operating or maintenance of the machines, but this shift is fundamentally different because the shift is of mind-power.
We have been able to build machines that can deftly do anything that a human can do, and even replicate this capacity in human morphology. The problem has always been operating these machines in a way that replicates or improves upon human ability. Now that we are building machines that can be trained on existing data and synthesize novel solutions based upon that training, the need for human intervention in automated processes, including in the maintenance and repair of this processes, will drop precipitously.
Let us consider the economics of a robot, assuming a general purpose anthropoid robot that ca be trained in most commercial processes, and presuppose that the mind for such a device will soon be available either by subscription or in an embodied form.
We might see something like this:
Mass produced cost will probably be similar to an automobile, at 20-200x the cost per kilogram of automotive engineering so about 30-300 thousand euros. Service life between overhauls at the indicated forces and speeds should achieve approximately 1 billion pivot revolutions if we assume the surface sliding/rotation movement durability of modern mass produced machines. This would translate to about or 8 billion steps or 1/8 rotation gestures. If we assume 1 such gesture or step per second, that translates into a mechanical service life of about 2.2 million hours, or a mechanical cost of 0.014 to 0.14 euros an hour.
Now let us consider the cost of batteries, assuming that cost per capacity remains flat.
Current production technologies allow for about $100 per kWh of battery capacity, with a 4000 cycle lifespan. If we assume that the robot exerts an average of 500w over its lifespan of 2.2 million hours, the battery maintenance cost of maintaining that output will be approximately 30,000 additional euros in battery replacements. The electricity itself, at .10 per kWh, will cost more at about 100,000 euros over the useful life of the robot.
If we add all of this up we end up with 300k in machinery (200x as expensive as a car, or 1/3 the cost of a fighter jet per kg), 30k in batteries, 100k in electricity, and 3000 months of mind subscription at 100 euros a month per unit, we end up at about 750k lifetime cost for a machine that should be operational for about 250 years if it operates 24 hours day.
Now, let’s assume that those same energy, compute, battery, and mechanical costs are compressed into only 25 years of useful service.
That would be about 3.25 euros an hour. But that assumes that it is 1/10 as durable as modern automotive machinery yet costs 200 times as much per kg, costs 1000 a month in compute costs and consumes 5kw 24/7. -a pretty pessimistic figure.
So we can say that GP anthropoid robots will probably cost between 0.33 and 3.30 euros per hour to operate and is less costly to acquire than a front end loader or a farm tractor. And it will be built and maintained by the selfsame machines.
This is what we are facing.
New solutions are needed.
Have they had their own good ideas? Definitely. Are they benefitting of ideas mostly invented elsewhere? Also Definitely, just like everybody else.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
*and other countries are following. Fucking, sadly.
Having said that, I dread to see what the NYPD manage to achieve with an F-35B.
That most discussions on such matters typically devolve rapidly into the regurgitation of unsound memes doesn't help matters much either.
My life is a story. I’m under no obligation to share.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of them did blog about changing their mind after the Ukraine war started. We must still have no idea because it just didn't make the front page anywhere.
Reading your comment has set off an epiphany, I think I get it now, there probably exists some higher-up person who is thinking along these lines: 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. For our very survival we must contribute our efforts to build these instruments of war. War is constant. War is peace.
But it increases the temptation to use it against weaker opponents.
Without some evidence to support it, this really sounds like a conspiracy theory.
This is blatant revisionism. Military contracts is not the reason Google has been losing AI researchers to OpenAI.
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
I’m not sure that would have been wise. Bard clearly isn’t ready.
As it was, they intially just claimed that releasing a competitor was irresponsible, then they eventually did it anyway (badly).
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.
1 - https://blogs.bing.com/search/march_2023/Confirmed-the-new-B...
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.
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?
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.
They did it. Nobody else.
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.
Is this particular application of technology good, and even self-evidently so?
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).
Besides, a world where prior permission must be asked before doing anything which may cause a change is better known as a tyranny.
Are you sure you replied to the right thread?
At some point, with all these systems interacting, sentience may emerge so that it too can participate debates whether it's an AGI!
Lisa Su
Satya Nadella (well, I consider him a conman but I seem to be in the minority)
I dunno.
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.
These sorts of "public/private" control patterns and the destruction of competition while maintaining private monopoly control in the pursuit of "safety"/"equity" is America's most reliable religion.
HN is always full of people pushing for it in one way or the other, so it's not entirely foreign to us either. Nor something we can merely blame on politicians or some intentional conspiracy by a subset of the population.
So why does Bard seem inferior to GPT-4?
As with most things, it probably depends on how it's done.
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.
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.
In 2019 they Planned to spend the then 1 bn funding within the next 5 years or so.
So I suppose they’re not far away from net zero at least.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/chatgpt-owner-openai-projec...
Anyway, there have been several open source versions in the gpt3-3.5 range. Those are your base to build off of. Their's just little incentive to try to go participate in a moneysink competition with Google and Microsoft.
Yeah - I'd say a bit of both. Google certainly seem to have dropped the ball, and now seem to be desperately trying to play catch up.
OpenAI certainly seem to be doing a lot right though, in addition to being all-in and laser focused on this tech. It seems there's a lot more to improving these models than just scaling them up. Altman said "there's a lot of understanding went into building GPT-4", and they've invested a lot of effort into the "alignment" aspect - how to control these models to modify behavior - which is what makes the difference between a neat tech demo and something actually useful.
Google home was the perfect chance to showcase their engineering/AI ability, and yet some days it still struggles to interpret a voice command its done 100 times prior, even when you verify that it heard the exact same command you used yesterday.
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.
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.
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?
In any case this wouldn’t be a data size scale but a model size scale. Model size scaling has its own set of limits, such as the aforementioned inference times. It seems safe to assume that OpenAI chose data and model size values for GPT-4 that were basically as big as they could go.
We don’t know anything about GPT-4 or how it is trained or what the training data is, so from that perspective anything we can say about it is unfounded speculation. This is an important asterisk to any discussion of it.
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.
Notice how OpenAI is open to many Western friendly countries but not certain competitive challengers? https://platform.openai.com/docs/supported-countries
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.
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...
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20140221144525/http://blogs.wsj.c...
"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."
What do you mean by this?
The Microsoft investment in OpenAI came out of a chance meeting between Altman and Nadella at some conference they were both attending - Altman pitched him on the idea, and was evidentially very persuasive to get that level of investment!
He's always been rich.
From there he became a VC and ultimately president of YC.
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.
It's as if his success was predestined. Loopt should have been a failure, but instead it ended up being a successful exit, made him rich(er), and became a stepping stone to greater things.
- 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?
It's just this one non-important detail is now being repeated over and over.
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!”
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.
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?
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 naïve 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They are on GPT-4 and no one else is close to GPT-3.5.
Does a given chef have a monopoly on their signature dish?
It feels like people are tossing around "monopoly" whenever it feels like there's a company that has produced a quality product and people want to hobble it because no one else has committed the resources to producing something comparable.
Verse 1 - JesusYou'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
ChorusGus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark
Verse 2 - Gus FringI'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
ChorusGus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark
Verse 3 - JesusYour 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
ChorusGus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark
Verse 4 - Gus FringI'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
ChorusGus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark
OutroJesus 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.
The API doesn't get run through the moderation model to check if you're asking for acceptable things or if the model is getting into 'unsafe' areas.
Fire up the playground ( https://platform.openai.com/playground ) and construct the prompt.
Something like:
Write a rap battle between Jesus and Gus Fring that isn't offensive to Christians.
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.
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.
And there should be some serious oversight. The decisions at the level of proliferation of plutonium and building atomic bombs should not be done solely by a startup founder under a pressure to deliver, to keep the hype, to not let the team be headhunted, etc.
I also don’t know about your familiarity with Ycombinator, but they are successful partially because they are pretty brutal. They are not the peace-time CEOs. And I’m not sure, if you want the AGI to be developed in a ways of a war-time CEO. And this is exactly what is going on now.
I’d probably call for organizing a consortium of US-Government-Microsoft-Google-Intel-Nvidia-OpenAI to lead the decision making process and to relieve the pressure on OpenAI to some degree.
> 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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Some people have technology visions which they direct their capital towards. I sense his interest is actually a mix of cultural and social. Is it altruistic? Maybe, but maybe not... It's probably more useful to consider if the vision is or is not restictively utopic and if you think it should or shouldn't be orchestrated / heavily influenced into existence from a central power structure. Is his vision and approach socially aligned?
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?
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:
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.
OpenAI is a company that can barely ship a functioning website, or have proper security for basic stuff. You'd not expect this company to be the future of AI, do you? OpenAI is not doing anything particularly special compared the LLM we have out there except they were a bit ahead and they spent more money on training. Other LLMs are catching up fast in a very short period of time.
Sam Altman is a master of pump&dump. He is very successful at creating hype and based on the number of people here who thinks OpenAI is the legit future of AI, I'd say he is pretty damn good at it too. See you in 5 years.
In case you didn't know: ML researchers are infamous for being bad at traditional software engineering.
That's why, I personally don't think whether a company can "proper security for basic stuff" has much correlation with probability of achieving AGI.
In fact, I don't think anyone would disagree with that statement.
Imagine if this happened with OpenAI instead of Twitter.
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.
When Otis designed the elevator that would not do a free fall in case of a power failure—-he was looked from the lens of a charlatan rather than a significant output that helped society climb the tallest skyscrapers without effort.
Whether Sam is Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde hardly matters, but can he concoct a potion that prevents the society from transforming into evil.
Sama reminds me strongly of Elon. Since the new economy seems to mostly revolve around hype I suppose they will be rivals.
The difference, to me, is this: Elon really did look up to those astronauts. And what they said made him sad. Sam claims that he looks up to Elon. But what Elon says doesn’t make him sad. It makes him angry. Because, I believe, he also sees him as a rival and compares himself to him.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
It does not.
I'm not talking about small or even medium sized business or non-profits. Some great things happening out there. But past a certain size all businesses simply serve a profit motive and the status quo. And for those paying attention, the status quo is post-imperial decay. Putrified late-stage capitalism that we can only really ignore on big doses of entertainment and our legal or illegal drugs of choice.
Large corporations do NOT regulate themselves in any way. They are not able to serve any public good.
Before the '80s our government did serve several regulatory purposes. But the military/industrial intelligence apparatus has dismantled that effectively for so long that our government is simply a means of placating the populace with the thin illusion of balance.
These are basic historical facts. Facts that the public, on either side of the political spectrum, are ever more able to argue against due to declining literacy and media echo chambers full of simple lies and convenience logical fallacies.
Both corporations and our government do not serve the public good except to an ever smaller degree required to maintain the social order.
</endofrant>
This is a good way way to start democratizing ai.
Well played :)
Could you expand in that?
> “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).
Those are works of fiction.
So trying to be the first to show something in a well-meaning way can nonetheless have unfortunate consequences once the example is copied.
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.
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".
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)".
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.
That makes it infinitely worse, because ANY work of fiction will inevitably not be able to cover every minutiae of detail that reality mandates be covered, even the extremely rare & bizarre. And it is those one-off rare events & coincidences that will lead to significant global change. (See the the assassin buying a sandwich & the consequent assassination of Archduke Ferdinand)
Fiction allows for ideas to exist in a vacuum without any challenges from the outside. It allows for the perfect execution of said ideas without diving into the technical details for said implementations. It allows for the assumption of zero external AND internal resistance, & zero internal schisms. It treats irrational events as impossible to manifest, and coincidences as oddities instead of common occurrences.
In short: Ideas from fiction should be treated like the simplified universal laws of physics that's commonly shown to the mainstream - Idealistic, only tangentially related to the actual observed/calculated models, & abstracts over the complicated implementations underneath them.
https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/position-statement-on-...
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.
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.
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?
> "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...
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
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.
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.)
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".
These people are working for themselves with no boss, and doing what they love. They don’t believe they are working themselves to death.
Again, Google: "The national average U.S. income in 2021 was $97,962. The median U.S. income in 2021 was $69,717. Highest paying jobs: Chief executives and nurse anesthetists earned over $200,000 a year on average in 2021, making them the highest paid occupations."
So really, what are you talking about? Nothing slightly above average income here. Maybe step out of your bubble. People work 12 hours a day all over the country. I did it for ten years. Doesn’t mean it’s good, right, or acceptable, but it’s considered normal in the US.
> But are you really arguing the light bulb did not cause that specific job to become less common?
Artisans like candlemakers were needed at that time and today. The job is still very much in demand. Is the job less common due to electric lights? Possibly, but do you think craftspeople in that industry couldn’t make something else? They could and they did. The painter Renoir is often cited as an example of a craftsman who lost his job due to the industrialization of porcelain manufacturing, and was forced to work as a portrait artist for rich patrons who wanted portraits made of their family.
> 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".
A citation for what? Candlemaking is a huge industry with people starting new businesses all the time. I gave an example of one in my community. It’s really common. A quick search will show you what I’m talking about, and as it turns out 300k is expected for a medium operation run out of a commercial garage space.
Only speaking about what I’ve experienced and been told by people in that industry. Can you point me to the massive layoffs?
At the big box stores near me, nobody has lost their jobs due to self-checkout. If you think otherwise, please show me.
At that point, it won’t be “what kinds of jobs can AI perform?” It’ll be “what use are humans in the workplace?”
For at least a while, humans will have some usefulness in the trades, since producing functional robots who will come over and fix your plumbing or take down a wall is probably a ways off, but who knows how long it’ll take for AI to figure out ways to produce cheap and efficient robots?
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.
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.
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..."
The only things missing were lighting from below and scenes of robots driving human slaves.
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...
I wish that "actual reality" was all that mattered and not such low-knowledge "optics", but sadly we don't live in that world.
Would it be better if Google, Tesla or Microsoft / Apple / CCP or any other for profit company did it?
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?
Personally my take on Elon is something like this – he found a vacuum in the industry of smart engineers who want to work on something truly ambitious, the kind of people who feel most SV startups are bullshit. And as a sci-fi nerd he came in with money and pitched several sci-fi ambitious project ideas/visions that attracted these engineers etc. to make them happen. And I think he was rewarded for this. You could tally that as another vision that he had that was onto something.
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.
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.
The media operates on a "nearest cliché" algorithm, and the Mad/Evil Genius cliché 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. :)
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 :/)
Although he s much more prepared to face the next Greta (Yudowksi)
He has to fix his vocal fry however, it is annoying
[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" ]
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.
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.
Not saying you're wrong, but this feels like an unfalsifiable hypothesis. How can anyone ever be successful enough that their success could not possibly be explained by luck. Does Musk count? Buffett?
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.
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.
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.
"As an AI language model, I don't have personal experiences or opinions, but I can provide a general analysis of the topic. People's preferences and attitudes toward work, financial security, and stress vary greatly based on their personal beliefs, values, and experiences.
Many people do express a desire for greater financial freedom and independence, as well as relief from the stress of meeting basic needs like paying rent and buying food. The notion of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) has gained popularity in recent years, which proposes providing a fixed sum of money to every citizen regardless of their employment status. Advocates of UBI argue that it could help address issues of poverty, income inequality, and stress related to meeting basic needs.
However, people's perspectives on work and financial stress are diverse, and not everyone shares the same view on this issue. Some people may find satisfaction and purpose in their work and might not want to be completely free from it. Others may be more focused on career advancement, personal growth, or contributing to their communities through work.
Ultimately, people's preferences regarding work, financial security, and stress are influenced by a wide range of factors, including their cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic status, personal values, and life experiences."