Inside OpenAI's crisis over the future of artificial intelligence
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Sure, but you probably ought to have considered that when you joined the non-profit with a vague mission about safety and magical AGI.
1. Human-level (or greater) AI is possible. 2. The development of AGI can be prevented, or even slowed by more than, let's say, a decade.
If there is, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how (2) can be achieved.
A large part of why we think AGI poses an existential threat is because it's an anchoring bias around theorizing from the 60s when people wondering what should happen when there's something smarter than humans were informing that projection by the misinformed picture of the past where homo sapiens was smarter than Neanderthals and killed them off.
That's likely not what happened, with pandemics or climate change as more likely culprits, and instead we were having children with Neanderthals, had cross cultural exchanges in both directions, and don't appear to have been any smarter than they were at the time.
The most likely outcome is symbiosis. And intentionally delaying something that will likely advance medical and scientific progress in ways that will save or improve millions of lives because of legacy projections that have been wrong about pretty much every aspect of the technology which has emerged to date including the supposed impossibility of creativity or empathy - I can think of few greater examples of our species cutting off its nose to spite its face.
And our insistence on trying to conform the emerging product to fit legacy projections because that's what matches user expectations is one of the dumbest things I've seen in tech in a long time, and the modern equivalent of Ford was building faster horses instead of the car.
Is the average human that intelligent??
As the article points out, he was one of the founders but left in 2018 “in a huff”.
On the other hand, they were a nonprofit, and even now have this weird capped profit structure.
I never imagined CEOs kept up with gossip in a large Whatsapp group. Is this how they've all been coordinating RTO mandates?
The fact that CEOs talk to each other has been plainly obvious to me for quite some time. Every single instance of coordination can always be explained away, but the pattern seems rather clear when you take a step back and look at the broader context.
I'm not saying they aren't colluding, because by their behaviors it seems like they are, I'm just saying it is much much harder to prove.
That would be spectacular.
It seriously rubs me the wrong way. The way it surfaced was in a discussion about money. I foolishly admitted I don’t really want much money and if I was exceptionally wealthy, I would have to quit development in order to find ways to use my wealth constructively in my community.
This was a disturbing concept. He relayed anecdotes from the WhatsApp group in which various absurdly wealthy people discuss the need to have more wealth, in some form or another. To him this wasn’t a sign of illness or anything, it was evidence that we all in fact should pursue wealth. Because look, even this billionaire does. Very surreal. Despite that, one of the best bosses I’ve had.
Bing-fucking-o. Now we know where the illegal collusion happens. I’d bet serious money RTO and a whole lot of other more important policies are hashed out in that.
Lest we forget when Steve Jobs was calling people up to hold down salaries.
https://phys.org/news/2015-09-415m-settlement-apple-google-w...
Overall: This one leaks heavily from the Altman/Conway camp but also from the director side, especially what must be Adam D'Angelo. The meaning of all this leaking is that the players have moved into phase 3, warring over the independent report, which will determine whether Altman stays & appoints the new board, or whether his proxy Brockman replaces him and he gets possibly a more ceremonial role like board chairman and bows out quietly (similar to his YC firing where he was going to be an advisor etc and then all that got quietly ignored). Note how Brockman has been built up as Altman's equal and has been running marathon meetings at OA with everyone possible (see his tweets - with photographs, no less) while Altman is, oddly considering how hard he worked to get back into the building, hardly to be seen.
Key points:
- another reporting of internal OA complaints about Altman's manipulative/divisive behavior, see previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38573609
- previously we knew Altman had been dividing-and-conquering the board by lying about others wanted to fire Toner, this says that specifically, Altman had lied about McCauley wanting to fire Toner; presumably, this was said to D'Angelo.
- Concerns over Tiqgris had been mooted, but this says specifically that the board thought Altman had not been forthcoming about it; still unclear if he had tried to conceal Tigris entirely or if he had failed to mention something more specific like who he was trying to recruit for capital.
- Sutskever had threatened to quit after Jakub Pachocki's promotion; previous reporting had said he was upset about it, but hadn't hinted at him being so angry as to threaten to quit OA
- Altman was 'bad-mouthing the board to OpenAI executives'; this likely refers to the Slack conversation Sutskever was involved in reported by WSJ a while ago about how they needed to purge everyone EA-connected
- Altman was initially going to cooperate and even offered to help, until Brian Chesky & Ron Conway riled him up
- the OA outside lawyer told them they needed to clam up and not do PR like the Altman faction was
- both sides are positioning themselves for the independent report overseen by Summers as the 'broker'; hence, Altman/Conway leaking the texts quoted at the end posturing about how 'the board wants silence' (not that one could tell from the post-restoration leaking & reporting...) and how his name needs to be cleared.
- Paul Graham remains hilariously incapable of saying anything unambiguously nice about Altman
I just want to register my amusement regarding the act of being annoyed when a title isn't clickbait for a change. :P
> Paul Graham remains hilariously incapable of saying anything unambiguously nice about Altman
The joy of getting rid of someone cleanly with mutual agreement to not talks it publicly and not to diss each other.
1. In this scale first-rate is the likes of John von Neumann and Albert Einstein.
Not criticizing is not the same as doing what others tell you.
There is no evidence he has ever stood up to do the right thing on principle.
I don't think the article supports this. All we know is that sama appeared cooperative when the board fired him. This was probably a reasonable posture for him to adopt regardless of his actual intentions at the time.
Also, there is no fight over what the independent report is going to conclude. That is already decided, and the whole thing is a PR charade.
What a bunch of children. I feel like most of them pretend to be working for a noble cause, when they actually just want that sweet payday from Thrive and other VCs. Nothing wrong with that, but it is disappointing to see their leader bring up AI safety when they do not really care.
There are people who genuinely believe in a singularity-type AI that would have the potential to wipe out humanity. I personally don't think strong GAI is possible, or at least it's not likely using any known technique or any refinement of any known technique, but if you believe this, there's no such thing as AI safety. The best and most obvious course of action is to politically organize for a total ban on AI and make the development of AI anywhere in the world a cause for war. Thinking you could figure out how to chain up such an AI so that it only does what you want is taking an insane risk, and as t -> infinity, the risk becomes 1.
But when most people say AI safety, they seem to mean rigid ideological enforcement of whatever they believe is right, even if that means censoring true facts from AI, or forcing it to abide by some set of arbitrary values that represent consensus only in their clique...while at the same time, bemoaning what could happen if the wrong people got their hands on LLMs. This represents almost the totality of AI safetyism: we can only allow LLMs to enforce my beliefs. These people are effectively aligned (or often the same people as) those who believe we have to return to broadcast-media levels of information control, which for the elites, represents a historical oddity that gave them unprecedented control, which was then weakened by the Internet.
Sometimes they will make an actual safety argument along the lines of "but what if Bad Guys ask an LLM how to make a bioweapon." Aside from this being a silly hypothetical, fortunately, doing mass damage in this way is not easy, even with step-by-step directions. All the resources you need to do so that exist are already publicly available. It just requires lots of time, equipment, material, and expertise that an LLM cannot give you. Of course, you might make the argument that it cannot give them to you yet, but then the only solution is to shut down public science, not to ban LLMs from answering the wrong questions.
Top compensation, highly educated bubble, too much attention and praise on a chat bot. "Mean tweets" are actually some of the most threatening things these people can imagine.
There's a point though about how social media algorithms have toxified society in a big way by promoting content that gets people worked up. Considering the ubiquity with which we'll be using GAI this would be a cause for concern there too in an even bigger way. Because AI will be all over society. I do agree there.
But skynet taking over the world? I don't see it happen but if it can happen it's pretty much inevitable anyway. Sooner or later someone will go there, rules or not.
This isn't true at all, but it is at least a common trope among technologists. There's lot of things we don't pursue, and lots of technology we control. We could be investing tons of R&D into improving nuclear weapons. We don't. But either way, “us vs them” doesn’t matter when you’re talking about h leashing some hypothetical non-human superintelligence. The “them” is the AI and you cannot control it.
> There's a point though about how social media algorithms have toxified society in a big way by promoting content that gets people worked up.
You can find people making the exact same argument anywhere you like in history as a reason we should forbid free speech and free press. It is not new or unique to social media, and the historical consequences of unfounded rumors and misinformation have often been quite deadly, from mass violent riots to brutal unjustified suppressions to wars.
The "but misinformation" argument is so not new, you can find people arguing in the Constitutional Convention about "designing men" riling up the masses with fake news for political ends. [1]
[1] https://teachingamericanhistory.org/resource/convention/deba...
> The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute.
We can already build a warhead that takes up less than 1m^2, and can destroy a city of 10M people. There's not much ROI in developing "better" nuclear weapons, given the scarcity of credible scenarios for using them.
The universe has done it at least one time. And now we can control the gradient descent.
That may be the fatal flaw. The universe had a few billion years and offered only the threat of death. Our reward functions pale in comparison.
You mean humans? "GAI" means General Artificial Intelligence, and the "artificial" bit is supposed to exclude human intelligence.
Which imo is true
Believe? They genuinely welcome it. Larry Page, for example, in another recent NYT piece.
Marc Andreeseen?
"Effective accelerationism aims to follow the 'will of the universe': leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe," and "E/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism."
These people are so up their own asses, they completely lost the plot. These are the individuals who will self-regulate, also while casually musing about systematic genocide of the entire planet.
A superior race of being that is more efficient and which is to replace us? Geeee, never heard that one before. Sounds real nice. Maybe it can build very efficient gas chambers and furnaces too so it can thin the herd faster, eh!
AI is less of a problem than the people around it, who are borderline certifiable, but at least are raging sociopaths who masquerade as "thinkers". Dude, you were a good coder who came up with a better way of ranking pages when the field was wide open. Calm down.
I noticed a weird thing in many of them, the people building all that tech and breaking new ground seem to just be invisible, and all the drama seems to be created and perpetuated by a bunch of elitist techno-priest type people.
These people generally have 0 clue on what's actually going on. I doubt most of them could even explain basic stats concepts.
I don't know if this makes sense, but that's the imagery in my mind.
I fundamentally feel like this is what happens when exceptionally lucky people view themselves as genius - exposing themselves to the mental decay from decades of having no guardrails or accountability.
How is this different from, say, a newspaper with an editorial board, or a book publishing house with a particular set of standards and conventions? For that matter, how is this different from dang enforcing the rules of this board?
LLMs aren’t being built only by big corporations.
See how those are run. There is emphasis on accommodating multiple views and journalistic integrity. Software development doesn’t have an ethics code, which means there is no common ground for truth finding. That turns a balanced process into anything goes.
People don't have a universal standard of ethics. Not when it comes to something complicated like a profession. Journalism, medicine--these fields have base sets of ethics that ground discussions. You aren't allowed to challenge the base rules in a dispute; you take them as given and go from there.
This prevents the grandstanding common in technology discussions, where the person on the losing side of a common ethical framework escalates to challenging the framework within the context of that dispute. The framework, of course, is not unassailable. But not within a particular dispute. Sort of like a court deciding on the law and the Constitution it operates under.
Taking OpenAI as an example, the non-profit Board acted on its judgement. But when that wasn't convenient for the profit-motivated side, they threw it away. There was no base set of rules or ethics agreed upon by anyone. It was just sort of hashed out ad hoc based on who had power and could exercise it. (I'm not critising anyone's moves. Mostly the structure. Within that system's framework, there is literally no wrong decision leadership could make.)
Not when it comes to something interesting, like making money.
Your claim is doctors and civil engineers don't make money?
I would be inclined to agree, if AI safetyists were not in general advocating that LLM source, training data, models, etc. not be released to the public, because AI safetyists do not want non-AI safetyists to have unfettered access to any LLMs (and other AI tech), anywhere, for "safety" reasons. Of course, if it was all open, I agree it wouldn't much matter if "Open"AI wanted to restrict their hosted LLM in whatever ways they felt best.
For people who don’t work in PR and are associated with anything even remotely controversial it is usually better to not talk. I learned the hard way - I said one thing, and the reporter put my words in a totally different context to suggest I supported something I am totally against.