Altman handpicked for Homeland Security's AI safety board
axios.com
axios.com
An AI safety board would be dominated by representatives of grassroots civil society organisations, maybe some labour unions. Almost all of these are CEOs of large for-profit corporations. Altman fits right in with the rest.
If you want a board that actually deals with AI safety, these are the precise wrong people to put on it.
I doubt it's a safety focused council. It seems rather like a council for economically useful applications. If there's any interest in safety it's in the limited sense of making AI robust enough for these applications.
From the official post (linked elsewhere in discussion):
> DHS is responsible for the overall security and resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure
Not people, apparently.
The bad thing is really only calling it an AI safety board.
the “safety” in “AI Safety” isn’t what you think it is. it’s homeland security, not labour/societal security.
AI safety is AI safety. I only really object to the name of the board. Otherwise it seems quite reasonable to have one, although if it's for what I think it is I think some grid people should also be on it.
Ed Bastian, CEO, Delta Air Lines;
Vicki Hollub, President and CEO, Occidental Petroleum;
Wes Moore, Governor of Maryland;
Fossil fuel infrastructure is critical for self explanatory reasons.
I’m not sure why Wes Moore or Bruce Harrell (Mayor of Seattle) are on there - I view them as people looking to use these boards as a path to future federal positions. And the DHS probably wants them to be able to claim they have representation from political leaders of various levels.
""" Dear Ed. Bastian,
Just as Delta has decided to move away from Boeing for the majority of its fleet, so should it also steer clear of AI as it may relate to the rest of your business model.
Sincerely, The Internet """
they've literally put the group of foxes in charge of the hen house
These types of highly biased political organizations and leaders are rarely interested in actually upholding civil and human rights like free speech and instead want to impose their personal moral code on everyone else under labels like “ethics” or “safety”.
But I suppose that’s not as bizarre a pick as Li Fei Fei, who allegedly has various links to Chinese leadership and China in general.
This reads the same way.
Dude makes Zuckerberg from the movie look flat fucking humanitarian.
Eyeball scanning poor countries.
Fuck Altman.
Why this guy is becoming an unappointed regulator rather than sharing a bunk with SBF is like, a lagging indicator.
I hate them both.
You and I used to share an office in SF, btw. Your emacs Java hot-reload setup was cool. Cheers.
I try to be fair to Meta because I’m in the position to criticism them accurately, this raises the bar on my responsibility to acknowledge good decisions.
My memory is that of a guy my age and your username isn’t jumping out, what did we collaborate on?
I only know about the worldcoin idea, his post apocalyptic bunker (not sure if true) and the fact ppl tried to oust him because he dismissed ethical AI considerations?
These people should have gone to jail before ChatGPT:
Altman advice: Yeah bro, just instruct tune harder and it’ll be just fine, I believe in you.
No conflict of interest whatsoever. /s
A board that has Sam Altman on it is going to be much better able to craft safety guidance for the use and misuse of AI than a board that doesn’t have access to such a domain expert.
Just, you know, don’t give him veto power.
Incentives. You can't trust a man who makes billions on a this tech to make decisions in the best interest of the nation.
It's inevitable that commercial motives become a factor here. It's well known that OpenAI wants a "moat" and holding back competition with red tape for things they themselves have already managed to achieve before said red tape was introduced is a great way to make that happen.
I’ve never heard Altman describe so much as a ReLU, I’ve never seen him publish code, I’ve never seen him do a company’s thats not at least two of: fired for shady shit and self dealing (YC, OpenAI), a massive loss to investors and/or acquirers (Loopt, Socialcam, countless), paid for by a massive network of people who just back who the other guy backed.
The guy is a dark-triad sociopath, this is well documented [0], and yeah, let’s get fucking Larry Summers in there to play the cool head.
Guy’s a super, super creepy scam artist who fails up because people say difficult to define stuff like “domain expert” to keep the myth going.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
I mean, they’d just as much get screwed as human victims right?
OpenAI has a lot to gain by selling a particular view of the dangers of this technology, orthogonal to the accuracy of that view.
But a member of a board of experts seems reasonable.
What is he an expert in?
So I'd definitely count him as someone that has a good view of what's going on, and what's coming over the horizon.