OpenAI scrapped a promise to disclose key documents to the public

I think they had no choice at that point but to fire Sam and remove him from the board. When that turned into a shitshow and they faced personal threats, they resigned to let a new board figure out a way out of this mess.

Also, I am not surprised the new board isn't being completely open because they are still probably trying to figure out how to fix their governance problems.

People are not interchangeable.

Most employees may have bills to pay, and will follow the money. The ones that matter most would have different motivation.

Of course, of your sole goal is to create a husk that milks the achievement of the original team as long as it lasts and nothing else — sure, you can do that.

But the "organizational desires" are still desires of people in the organization. And if those people are the ducks that lay the golden eggs, it might not be the smartest move to ignore them to prioritize the desires of the market for those eggs.

The market is all too happy to kill the ducks if it means more, cheaper eggs today.

Which is, as the adage goes, why we can't have the good things.

All I know is that the first time that the authority of the board was used to make an unpopular decision in what presumably the board members thought was in the interest of protecting the values of OpenAI, there was an insurrection that succeeded in having the board reverse the decision. The board exists to make unpopular decisions that further the core mission of OpenAI as opposed to furthering the bottom line. But the second that the core mission and the bottom line came into conflict with one another, it became clear which one actually controls OpenAI.

    λ>:t ( $ ) . ( $ )
    ( $ ) . ( $ ) :: (a -> b) -> a -> b

Yes, the public was to blame, but inherently the board was doomed because OpenAI had morphed from a public benefit mission-driven company to a profit-driven one heavily funded by MSFT which expected its due return. Once the for-profit "sub"-company, the parent mission-driven company was doomed, because most people were going to be working for the profit-driven child company and therefore had different goals (i.e., salary, options) than the mission-driven parent company (scientific breakthroughs, responsible creation/development of AI). This is why the employees (of the child company) revolted and supported Sam (who had reneged on OpenAI's mission and gone full capitalist like any other tech mogul out there). The only question in my mind was whether "Open"AI was always a scam from the start to get attention or a genuine pivot (which the board unsuccessfully tried to stop).

And now responsible AI development is gone and everyone is chasing the money, just like the social media companies did, and well, we know how that ended up (Facebook, Twitter).

Sad day indeed.

The board was not going to make them rich.

There is something wrong if it harms others. For example, if AI is a risk to other people outside the company, and their vote increases that risk, then it's wrong (depending on the amount of risk).

Maximizing personal gains, despite recent hype, does not at all make something right. In fact, it's possibly the leading cause of doing wrong.

> Back to reality

Maybe you can come up with some better ideas than just offhand dismissal of ideas that have been embraced, examined, and followed by a great many humans for thousands of years. That's reality.

The bible isn't a book by an author (Like the Quran claims to be). It is a mix/match of stories over long periods of time from different people. You read it as parables from the times, not as a history lesson.

The precursor form (training data etc) is only needed if you want to recreate it from scratch. Which is too expensive to bother with.

OpenAI was explicitly founded to NOT do that.

Yeap... you get it, the guy above you doesn't.

George Carlin said it best, "It's a big club... AND YOU AIN'T IN IT!"

“The public” in this case refers to all people irrespective of their ability to pay

"string theory breakthrough to unify relativity and quantium mechanics"

"The future will have flying cars and robots helping in the kitchen by 2000"

"Agi is going to happen 'soon'"

We got a rocket that landed like it was out of a 1950's black and white B movie... and this time without strings. We got Star Trek communicators. The rest of it is fantasy and wishful thinking that never quite manages to show up...

Lacking a fundamental undemanding of what is holding you back from having the breakthrough, means you're never going to have the breakthrough.

Credit to the AI folks, they have produced insights and breakthroughs and usable "stuff" unlike the string theory nerds.

> Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.

Suppose there was a country where collectivism was prioritized. Harmony, conformity and agreeing with others is a point of pride.

Suppose both countries have similar government structures that allow ~everyone to vote. Would it really be surprising that the first country regularly has 50-50 splits, and the second country has virtually unanimous 100-0 voting outcomes? Is that outcome enough basis to judge whether one is "democratic" or not?

The "Defense of Marriage Act" comes to mind. There was one so bad that a judge ordered the authors to change it, but I can't find it at the moment.

This is only the 2nd or 3rd thing that seems to me even a little incoherent with their initially stated position, the other certain one being the mystery of why the board couldn't find anyone to replace Altman who didn't very quickly decide to take his side, and the other possible one being asking for a profit making subsidiary to raise capital (though at the time all the criticism I remember was people saying they couldn't realistically reach x100 and now it's people ignoring that it's limited to only x100).

Wired claims OpenAI’s “reports to US tax authorities have from its founding said that any member of the public can review copies of its governing documents, financial statements, and conflict of interest rules.” That was apparently a lie.

> Changing their goals is also not lying

Changing a forward-looking commitment is. Particularly when it changes the moment it’s called.

I don't know if I'd put this in terms of a "lie" or not, but OpenAI's stated principles and goals are not backed up by their actions. They have mined other people's works in order to build something that they purport as being for the benefit of mankind in some way, when their actions actually indicate that they've mined other people's work in order to build something for the purpose of massively increasing their own power and wealth.

I'd have more respect for them if they were at least honest about their intentions.

That’s potentially harmful.

> is enough information about this tech that leads to the possibility of it causing systemic damage

Far from established. Hypothetically harmful. Obvious harm would need to be present and provable. (Otherwise, it’s a political question.)

As for "too important to privatize"... practically all the important work in the world is done by private companies. It wasn't the government who just created vaccines for Covid. It isn't the government producing weapons for defense. It's not Joe B producing houses or electricity or cars or planes. That's not to say the government doesn't do anything but the idea that the dividing line for government work is "super important work" is wildly wrong and it's much closer to the inverse.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestine/comments/18mvigw/openai_h...

[2] https://twitter.com/ArarMaher/status/1736519079102476766

"That's what some people assert, but there's no solid reason to assume that's true. We don't even know if it's in the realm of the possible"

True, but there are a lot of very smart people getting handed huge amounts of money by other very smart people that seem to think it is.

We know it's possible, because you typed it. Unless you believe in the metaphysical, then it is proven possible, with physical systems. The question is then, can the fundamental aspects of intelligence, in the biological systems, be practically emulated in other systems?

What's needed is closer to a government agency like NASA, with multiple independent inspectors like IAEA empowered by law to establish guardrails, report to congress, and pump the brakes if needed. Think Gibson's "Turing Agency."

They could mandate open sourcing the technology that is developed, maintain feedback channels with private and public enterprises, and provide the basis for sensible use of narrow AI while we collectively fund sensible safety, cognition, consciousness, and AGI research.

If we woke up tomorrow to aliens visiting us from a distant galaxy, and one alien was 100 times more intelligent and capable than the average human, we would be confronted with something terrifying.

Stuart Russell likens AI to such an alien giving us a heads up that it's on the way, and we may be looking at several years to several decades before the alien/AI arrives. We have a chance to get our shit together sufficient to meet the challenges we may face - whether or not you believe AI could pose an existential threat, or that it could destabilize civilization in horrible ways, it's probably unarguably rational to establish institutions and frank discussions now, well before any potential crisis.

Heck, it's not like we hold our governments to account for spending at the scale of NASA - even a few tens of billions is a drop in the bucket, and it could also be a federal jobs program, incentivizing careers and research in a crucial technology sector.

Allowing self-regulated private sector corporations operating in the tech market to be the fundamental drivers of AI is probably a recipe for dystopian abuses. This will, regardless of intetions, lead to further corrosion of individual rights to free expression, privacy, intellectual property, and so on. Even if a majority of the negative impact isn't regulatory or "official" in nature, allowing these companies to impose cultural shifts on us is a terrible thing.

Companies and corporations should be subject to humans, not infringe on human agency. Right now we have companies that are effectively outside the control of any individual human, even the most principled and respectable CEOs, because the legal rules we operate them by are not aligned with the well-being of society at large, but the group of people who have invested time and/or money in the legal construct. It's worked pretty well, but at the speed and scale of the modern Tech industry, it's very clear that our governmental and social institutions are not equipped to mitigate the harms.

NASA and the space race are probably the most recent and successful analogy to the quest for AGI, so maybe that's a solution worth trying again.

Sure? It’s like the folks who write $MSFT instead of Microsoft. I know what they mean. But it’s going to cheapen their argument for anyone who doesn’t already agree with them.