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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

An observation about the current clamor around OpenAI is the minuscule number of people involved.

Altman, Brockman, Ilya, and a handful of mostly-unknown board members — the entire relevant group could sit (and has sat) around a table.

Not to mention they’ve all had the most stressful year of their lives, worked harder, and been exposed to insane hyper growth.

I don’t know what happened anymore than anyone else does but I suppose the people involved were experiencing substantial, prolonged, elevated stress.

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So the big issue is that the control is in so few hands? If we are to believe that OpenAI will develop AGI is this not a form of dictatorship? Should there be a kind of surrogate shareholders who the board answer to?

Apologies, but I’m seeing this everywhere so I have to quip on this: OpenAI is no closer to developing AGI than you or I am. Transformer models and the GPT series are huge breakthroughs, but they are not AGI and there’s no indication the path to AGI is via transformer models. It seems increasingly like transformers/LLMs are just a local optima on the path to AGI.

Right, right, nothing surprising about computers suddenly creating original works of art, poetry, legal arguments, bedtime stories and screenplays. AGI? Pshaw. Wake me up when they’ve proved the Riemann Hypothesis using nothing but a collection of vintage cookbooks.

But OpenAI believe that they will develop AGI, maybe they will, and may they won’t, and also highly unlikely if they don’t close the next round, but that misses the point.

They believe that they will and therefore we need to ask is their governance structure fit for purpose if they achieve their goals?

AI researchers have been making breakthroughs and proclaiming that AGI is "just around the corner" since 1959.

There's absolutely no reason to believe OpenAI is right about this when thousands of experts have been wrong. AGI is deceptively difficult because it's almost impossible to see how far away you are from the goal. You can see how far you've come and extrapolate, but that's always a mistake.

They operate inside a legal framework. If they do achieve AGI, various parliaments will quickly pass laws. Congress is likely to take action.

It has been done for weapons, it has been done for cryptography in the 80s, it has been discussed for vaccines during the pandemic, it has been done for finance and surely it will be done for AGI.

> Should there be a kind of surrogate shareholders who the board answer to?

Boards do answer to shareholders. The structure is execs answer to the chief exec who answers to the board who answers to share holders. No one else is relevant.

Are you suggesting confiscation of their property? That’s a terribly dark path. The government doesn’t exist to steal private property. It exists to create regulations and legal frameworks for them.

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