Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

I forget, wasn't OpenAI the company that was formed as a nonprofit to limit the risks of LLMs? Founded by a bunch of visionaries scared of what they had wrought and anxious to lead so they could make sure it was only used responsibly?

View on HN

That was before it was discovered that these LLM have incredible monetary potential.

Not really. The entire premise of the structure was that obviously AI would be immensely valuable and that they needed binding contract structures to prevent themselves from falling victim to the greed and ambition that would obviously consume those at the helm.

Unfortunately their contract structures weren't strong enough to protect from the combination of the "king of the cannibals" and completely absentee regulatory oversight.

Trust that they already knew long before, and that this was the play all along.

And if you don't believe that, do some digging into the lives of the psychopaths that started it.

LLMs themselves don't. But selling LLM related bullshit to investors has.

I think Mr Altman had this idea from the beginning, and in his own, "can't stop lying" way, he lied.

The writing was on the wall when they feigned horror at an early GPT being able to play poker in the 2010s, and failed to release the model

Rule #1: Never trust a company with "Open" in only their name and is anything but, in real.

Might as well complete the loop, rename the company the Democratic People’s Republic of OpenAI LLC

:)))))) laughed hard at that one. Wish HN had smiley support.

Everyone has a price.

Come on now. Let's not pretend it wasn't a grift from the start.

Don't feel bad, they forgot too.

They were lying through their nose even then?

Yeah the whole “rationalist” movement is full of those lying fks that use a thin veneer of fallacious logic and self aggrandising discourse to rationalise their hoarding of resources and bottomless greed. They’re very well established in Bay Area and AI world.

Is Sam even a rationalist, or describe his views as rationalist?

Not directly, but very friendly to the movement and people in it.

Looks to me like the rationalist/AI researcher/EA cohort of (admittedly odd) people was quite deliberately hijacked by a sociopath

The movement itself is consistently aligned with Tech Bros interests, the philosophical foundation is interesting, but the movement itself is quite problematic

Depends.

Would it lead to increasing his wealth?

He was not the founder of OpenAI

nobody was "the" founder of OpenAI. Sam was one of many cofounders, though I don't see how the particulars here are relevant to the point above.

There are several points above:

> wasn't OpenAI the company that was formed as a nonprofit to limit the risks of LLMs?

>> the whole “rationalist” movement is full of those lying fks

>>> Is Sam even a rationalist, or describe his views as rationalist?

The relevancy is that a question of how and why the company was formed isn't fully answered by only talking about his motivations.

I see I see. Makes sense!

Not really, when OpenAI was formed in 2015 there were no LLMs, at least none that worked well. It was a regular AI research lab mostly doing Reinforcement Learning on game environments like Atari similar to DeepMind. Once they struck gold with LLMs (2019 or so?) and saw there is money to made everything changed, as expected when a bunch of SV types get involved.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com