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Comment by DebtDeflation | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the issue was a technical difference of opinion regarding whether transformers alone were needed or other architectures required. It seems the split was over speed of commercialization and Sam's recent decision to launch custom GPTs and a ChatGPT Store. IMO, the board miscalculated. OpenAI won't be able to pursue their "betterment of humanity" mission without funding and they seemingly just pissed off their biggest funding source with a move that will also make other would be investors very skittish now.

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Making humanity’s current lives worse to fund some theoretical future good (enriching himself in the process) is some highly impressive rationalisation work.

Try to tell that to the Effective Altruism crowd.

Literally any investment is a divert of resources from the present (harming the present) to the future. E.g. planting grains for next year rather than eating them now.

There is a difference between investing in a company who is developing ai software in a widely accessible way that improve everyone’s lives and a company that pursues software to put out of work entire sectors for the profit of a dozen of investors

"Put out of work" is a good thing. If I make a new js library which means a project that used to take 10 devs now takes 5 I've put 5 devs out of work. But ive also made the world a more efficient place and those 5 devs can go do some other valuable thing.

What percent of those devs don’t do a valuable thing and become homeless?

Maybe devs are a bad example, so replace them with “retail workers” in your statement if it helps.

Is “put out of work” a good thing with no practical limits?

Yes, the ideal is when most jobs are genuinely automated we can finally afford UBI.

Who can afford it? When LawyerAI and AccountAI are used by all of the mega corps to find more and more tax loopholes and many citizens can’t work then where will UBI come from?

And people with money will want to make UBI happen because...?

My thought exactly. Some people don’t have any problem with inflicting misery now for hypothetical future good.

Here's the discussion on the EA forum if anyone is interested: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjgD3Q5uWD2iJZpEN/...

I think the EA movement has been broadly skeptical towards Sam for a while -- my understanding is that Anthropic was founded by EAs who used to work at OpenAI and decided they didn't trust Sam.

> Making humanity’s current lives worse to fund some theoretical future good

Note that this clause would describe any government funded research for example.

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