And lo and behold, Altman chooses gdb's twitter account to make the first joint statement instead of his own, creepily signing off "Sam and Greg" instead of "Greg and Sam" on gdb's own personal twitter account.
EDIT: The only reason to go to these weird lengths is if he is feeling especially vulnerable right now and feels the need to broadcast a "Greg is with me, I swear" message to signal he is not alone.
He also stuck by Altman in November. I'm surprised by how much credit and how much hate goes to the CEO when there are clearly other people making their own decisions, too.
Say whatever you want, they've done something impressive. That credit goes to more than just Sam. Ilya & Jan aren't the only ones making decisions.
Also, if you've ever been at a startup growing at the speed OpenAI is growing (think revenue, fundraising, headcount), it's not that unusual to see cofounders leave or to have other leadership changes. The reason why everybody thinks OpenAI looks particularly bad is because everybody is watching them (and public sentiment towards ai has shifted)
A reason, sure. The reason? Come on. There's a clue in their name about what part of their history is particularly controversial.
This sort of high level turnover isn't that uncommon. OpenAI is growing quickly and going from initial concept to hundreds of millions in revenue - this is a time of transition for a lot of startups.
You can absolutely criticize them for hypocrisy or whatever other issue, but I don't think most people should read too much into Ilya/Jan leaving.
1) AGI is not around the corner, so no worries
2) He no longer cares about the possible negative effects, a departure from his past statements
3) I missed something, please help me learn
I agree with this.
I no longer agree that the "safety" people want the same things we do. I suspect after the bard debacle a bit back that "safety" looks a lot more like 1984.
> He no longer cares ... I missed something
Sam was gone, none of these people spoke up, and now they are leaving. I think the story is plain as day but we're pretending it isnt.
Sam isnt a leader, he never has been. This is not what leadership looks like, its want a megalomanic trying to keep control looks like.
AI Safety will inevitably look a lot like DEI programs. They're trying to thread a needle with two fundamentally opposed ideas, and with a bit of time it turns into little more than a combination of Cover Your Ass policies.
The ridiculous thing is that we actually need initiatives that follow what both AI safety and DEI set out to be. Somehow along the way they get ruined though, leaving us in an even worse spot because for a while we have an excuse to think there are adults in the room actually making sure things are moving in the right direction.
I raised both because I see them going down very similar paths. DEI conceptually is a really important idea and could lead to really important change or course correction. As implemented today though, it seems to most often be implemented as a much more surface level program that sure feels more like PR or legal protection than anything else.
With AI safety, based on those in the industry I have spoken with, there's a very real risk the same happens. AI safety, again as I've seen implemented and what I've heard from people working in the field, is much more concerned with minor risks and has given up on concerns like the alignment problem. AI safety isn't concerned with moral or ethical questions of what happens as the technology progresses.
I'm not just talking about job loss concerns. Thinking bigger for a minute, what rights would a real AI have? Can it be turned off? Can it commit crimes or be punished? Does it have rights? No one in AI safety is realistically considering whether these systems should be on the public internet at all, unless there are drastically more powerful systems kept under wraps due to these risks. No one is seriously asking about risks to privacy, I'm sure some in the field share those worries but they are the outlier and don't seem to be given the ability to meaningfully move the industry.
None, and the court has already spoken on this. It's a pretty dead issue.
> Can it be turned off?
Yes it's a machine. Save state, power down.
> Can it commit crimes or be punished?
See PGE and its own death toll.
> Does it have rights?
No, and we aren't even on a path where these questions are relevant. It's all an exercise in mental mastrubation. If you think that were going to accidentally stumble into sentience never mind sapenenc I have a bridge I would like to sell you.
People will think they "know it when they see it". The arguing will be fun.
The question of rights would be legislative rather than judicial. More importantly, the discussion should actually be among the people first in anything resembling a democracy, the few in charge are meant to represent us not rule us.
> See PGE and its own death toll.
Unless I'm mistaken, PGE isn't an artificial intelligence or sentient.
> No, and we aren't even on a path where these questions are relevant. It's all an exercise in mental mastrubation. If you think that were going to accidentally stumble into sentience never mind sapenenc I have a bridge I would like to sell you.
OpenAI's explicit goal is to create and release an AGI. A majority of experts in the industry I have either talked with personally or heard in long form interviews expect that we could be very close to AGI, on the order of a couple years up to maybe 15 or 20 years on the high end. Given how slowly any societal discussion related to rights of a population move, do you think we'll have plenty of time to decide this after an AGI is released in some spectacularly Silicon Valley product release party?
Fusion, flying cars, AI in the 50's and in the 70's... Hell Hal was born in 97 and the film was in 68.
For as impressive as LLM's are once you dig into them they aren't magical at all. A sophisticated model of language that predicts the next word is about as likely to become an AGI as whether predictions are likely to control the weather. Ask any expert in AGI what the "next token" is and they are going to fucking disagree. This isnt us building the bomb where we have a pretty good idea of how to do it and just need to put all the parts together. This is a bunch of people stabbing in the dark and getting lucky here and there.
Were not going to bumble fuck our way forward on this, and the path were going down has potential to be a game changer but its not going to give us a super intelligence...
The definition OpenAI uses for AGI is being more economically valuable than most humans at most things. That definition is entirely backwards looking. They'll keep releasing new models and occasionally check in to see how each model compared to humans economically. If that isn't bumble ducking our way into it I don't know what is.
Its interesting that you raise the difference in knowing the physics behind a bomb before building it and AI research stabbing in the dark as an acceptable thing. Its precisely that they don't know exactly what they're doing that there is so much risk. They're building potentially very powerful and dangerous things, connecting them to the public internet, and selling them to whoever wants to use them. That doesn't seem at all risky or dangerous to you?
Then were already there. The web, amazon is already more valuable than sears and roebuck was as a paper catalog. All those people who took calls or opened envelopes, all the manual tracking of inventory and orders... we replaced all that years ago.
It is a good example of how poor the OpenAI definition is, but confusing any human invention with intelligence is a bit of a stretch.
I suspect that some DEI efforts are helpful and effective, and some DEI efforts are hollow or foolhardy. We probably can’t speak of “DEI today” as a monolith. Also we may be biased to hear about instances of it being stupid and ineffective because that can be a useful talking point to some. Instances where it works well and gets more people hired and engaged are less interesting to a predominantly white society, so maybe aren’t discussed as much outside of non-white communities.
Idk that’s all a load of speculation but I wanted to share these thoughts/observations about your argument.
> Instances where it works well and gets more people hired and engaged are less interesting to a predominantly white society, so maybe aren’t discussed as much outside of non-white communities.
This got me curious, have you sewn any examples of DEI programs helping to get more people hired rather than different people hired? Either can be useful, but that distinction would be a big one as the former means DEI is somehow growing the job market rather than refocusing hiring practices.
Nothing wrong with speculation as far as I'm concerned! Reliable and accurate data is hard to come by, I'd argue that most of what is presented as fact is little more than speculation backed by fuzzy data full of assumptions.
Is Taiwan a country? I would say yes, most Americans would (I hope). Ask ChatGPT...
4chan is still a thing, the library is still a thing. The nuclear boy scouts made a giant mess before there was an internet.
As for safety, well, it's gonna be a long time before shutting down the world isnt a weekend project for a hand full of people if they are allowed.
DEI has definitely become a political trope, but regardless of what Newt Gingrich or any other talking head might say, there are plenty of valid critiques that can and should be made of the field if its going to get back on track.
I raised DEI as an example of a system that, in my opinion, is further down the path that I see AI safety going down. They both started with strong intentions to help guide or redirect an industry but, again in my opinion, both fields have ended up playing a role of PR and "cover your ass" more than anything else.
It's interesting that's how it looks like to you from the outside.
If you look a little closer at the "AI Safety" community, it consists of two competing factions: the faction responsible for the Bard debacle, and the faction that's focused on trying to prevent human extinction -- "AI notkilleveryoneism", as in https://x.com/aisafetymemes
They both insist that the other faction is "distracting everyone from the real issues".
Because in part, it's a false dichotomy. AI safety just is. It's like airplane safety; we can write all these cool guidelines and track people from hell and back, but there's still a degree of determinative capability that pilots assume when they fly a plane. Same goes for operating AI; the onus of not using it to kill everyone falls on everyone, not one person.
Both sides are distracting each other because neither of them have anything to support without their valueless tribal politics. AI research operates independently of their discourse, and gets deployed without ever consulting any of them. They are armchair experts at best, and stoop to being Twitter reactionaries when they demand respect from their core audience.
The only dichotomy that exists in AI is the stuff that gets made and the stuff that doesn't. I say this as someone that despises the field by now and wishes it never existed in my lifetime; if you don't make it, they will. How's that for an AI safety policy?
Astonishing claim, when some such researchers have (unfortunately) been responsible for many of the most impressive capabilities advancements in the last few years, and the three most cited AI researchers of all time are all doing extinction-risk-mitigation work (with Bengio and Sutskever both doing technical work; Hinton mostly seems to be focusing on outreach).
Note that this is not a valid argument against any argument that superintelligent AI might kill everyone; it's just a character attack.
That’s why we don’t let a random Joe fly a 747, there is extensive training, licensing, etc.
Do you envision the same for operating AI? In the real world you can’t even drive a moped without licence, registration and insurance. Same goes for access to dangerous chemicals. If AI is dangerous, this is the logical conclusion
The same is going to happen with AI. There will be bad actors, and trying to stop them from using AI for whatever "hostile" purposes it might yield is going to be nigh-impossible.
The idea behind that was people would go on to pursue more creative or artistic jobs that don’t prioritize profit after being given a basic income to live off.
Unfortunately it won’t work out that way: We see now that AI will mostly take over creative and artistic work and people will have no motivation to pursue art. The only jobs left for humans are hard physical labor and no one seems excited to do that… so you’ll just be giving people basic income to sit around and do nothing all day.
Having a society of mostly idle people that cost you money doesn’t really sound like a great or sustainable idea, nor does there seem to be any benefit to society.
So what are we going to do with all of the excess humans once human productivity jumps one, two, or three more orders of magnitude?
/s
The other half is me dead scared that he is right. LLMs/GPTs != cryptocurrency. There are actual use cases other than money laundering. If you are paying attention, then the insane scaling in capabilities should have us all dumbfounded. I agree with Linus Torvalds: "just" predicting the next token is not an insult, that's mostly what we are all doing.
Human productivity/the global economy has been growing at an exponential rate[0] since the industrial revolution. In our lifetimes we have ridden the close-to-vertical part, and if GPTs continue to scale, then it will continue to near-vertical. This will be near-post-scarcity society. Capitalism will soon have become so successful that it will make itself obsolete. Are we ready for that, politically? Most of our ruling a-holes maintain power via scarcity, how will they react?
Culling might not be an action, just an apathy. The transition is going to suck as the poors now will also have taken advantage of that hockey stick of asymmetric warfare aka "productivity" via things like ML powered kill drones. This tech is happening now, in 2024-25, in Ukraine.
We are at a crossroads, more than when horse-driven carriages turned horseless. The humans are the horses now, and they will not be happy.
We really should have worked out global civility by now, given the risks of truly global destabilization.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...
Not even close.
Take something like the iPhone. Everyone will want a pro max latest version. Great we can make 8 billion of them. How do you hand them out... we have to get in line I think.
The person at the back of the line, looking at 8 billion assholes in front of them is gonna get stabby...
The chart you're pointing out is showing us that an increase in productivity and/or creativity only will serve to exacerbate disparity, not improve it. Who goes first when there are more firsts is going to be a bigger problem.
Unfortunately while this is very likely the case, the vast amount of money being poured into these projects will also seep into other horrifying projects like: Lavender or Pattern (seriously go look up both of these, it's actually going to fry your brain).
Make of that what you want.
And it seems that between the choice of OpenAI reassembling at Microsoft and OpenAI continuing under Sam Altman, the nonprofit board had decided to go ahead with Sam Altman.
Altman seems to be very aware of that, dropping short sound bites/bits like implying that he has no financial interest in OpenAI (congress hearings IIRC) or comparing GPT4-o to Her.
It sounds like complete nonsense (if you know anything about tech) or cringe at best (Her), but what matters is quotability/catchiness because that what gets pumped by the media.
I think that's true though? He has an interest in HN, which has an interest in OAI.
No, they're still the "name brand" option for commercial LLM stuff.
What cult-like vibes? The OpenAI employees wanted Sam back because of financial reasons and peer pressure. Sam has learnt how to keep employees on leash via money.
Sometimes it pays to look at the fundamentals. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-alignment-intro-materials
And then the lines will cross over the break even point and be absorbed into Microsoft who proceeds to enjoy the lunch for the foreseeable future.
Are you sure about that? Maybe you would like to think a bit harder about what exactly offsets "all criticism"? Being very good at one thing doesn't absolve you from consequences of your other shitty actions.
It’s very likely they’ll bounce back. I’d rather OpenAI continue to innovate and push the industry forward as they have been. Haven’t seen much of that from Microsoft, so heavily disagree with you there. Prefer to focus on the actual product of the company not the personalities of the people there or armchair assumptions on the vibes of the culture.
Microsoft is the de facto controlling shareholder in OpenAI. They provide all the money, compute, and backing, and have full access to the models. If OpenAI collapsed tomorrow, Microsoft would absorb its key employees (as they almost did during the board debacle) and everything would continue under the Microsoft umbrella. “OpenAI” is just a shinier name for work that is being done under the near-total control of Microsoft.
Nobody knew that scaling transformer architecture would lead to the emergent intelligence we see today. Among other things, OpenAI did R&D for years on that. Also the only situation where this could true is if Google knew that LLMs could lead to this intelligence and decided to not make it happen, (along with every other tech company now that is furiously trying to catch up to OpenAI), which is absurd.
That's a very strange way to read (the inverse of) the word "most".
It seems that Google really didn't know what to do with the tech, and hadn't figured out a way to control it (OpenAI's RLHF - critical for ChatGPT's success). It's a bit ironic that DeepMind were doing so much with RL, but Google Brain being separate at the time apparently were not consulting with them or tapping into their expertise.
No, they are not even a shareholder.
> Microsoft is entitled to up to 49 percent of the for-profit arm of OpenAI's profits, according to reports. But that's not the same as 49% ownership. That investment does not result in Microsoft owning part of OpenAI
Note that that diagram is now a little out of date - Microsoft now has an actual (albeit non-voting) board seat, not just effective control.
However, I don't think the general public's view of OpenAI is much better at this point, given that their exposure is Hinton on 60 Minutes claiming that AI is going to imminently end civilization, creatives arguing that OpenAI has stolen their work, and students using their products to cheat.
The only people that I do know who have historically had a positive view of OpenAI has been people working in tech. And Sam seems to be doing everything he can to destroy that goodwill.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/28/growing-p...
"More concerned than excited" went from 37% in 2021 to 52% in 2023, "more excited than concerned went from 18% to 10%.
It’s corroded his credibility in D.C. and Brussels for a generation. He raised his profile tremendously right before people credibly called him a liar. It’s like he lofted an adversary’s payload into orbit. He will still get an audience with anyone, as he deserves. But people fact check him in a way they didn’t before and don’t with others. Even those who support his policy priorities, and with whom he and his team talk frequently. (OpenAI’s GR is between incompetent and non-existent.)