I wonder if Altman's definition also includes taking on the same liability as a coworker would.
Probably not.
Probably not.
If it can replace a worker but does too much work to be checked routinely by a human, and bears no real responsibility for its actions, well... it's really just a way to jack up the value of the settlement the company using it gets to pay out when it does something that causes a lawsuit.
If OpenAI had just simply stuck to making "good enough" models that were open sourced (like they promised they would be when starting out) and could be used to augment a human doing a task - a human that could be given actual consequences for messing up - they wouldn't have burned all of this money trying to reach this nebulous definition of AGI. Hell, "good enough" is what many open-source models are, and that's what terrifies Altman.
If the provider says "the model will always be right or your money back" then the provider has got responsibility. If there's no guarantee, there's no responsibility on their part, just on the person whose job it is to try and solve a problem with the model.
Right now I think it's still a dream for a few reasons, not the least of which is that all of this goes to shite if you have mass unemployment in a country with more firearms than people legally allowed to own them, a plurality of the population that treats wealth as an indication of personal virtue, and an elite that more-or-less refuses to offer any further evolution of the social safety net past what it was in 1970.
> Nothing in the process of developing and selling access to a more advanced LLM requires the customers to do away with human labor,
That's the hook, though. You acknowledge this yourself:
> You can subscribe to their AI right now and complete many tasks for cheaper than it would cost to pay a human to do those tasks
Businesses exist primarily to make money. It's an iron-clad rule that one must spend money to make money. If they have to spend less on humans to make the same amount of money, they'll do it. Furthermore, AI providers (especially hyper-scaling frontier model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI with insane operating costs) have every incentive to keep the price of their service as close as possible to the cost of the human. Ideally for them, you replace the human that cost $100,000.00 to employ by paying for a subscription that costs $99,999.99 while making the same revenues.
> So far the LLMs have always made lots of mistakes and the companies sure keep making a lot of money.
The clients, sort of. I know my team's velocity has increased. You can screw up with LLMs, like you say. OpenAI and Anthropic? lol no, they're massive furnaces for money, and will be until they can charge that $99,999.99.
If you give an "intelligent agent" offered by one of these model providers a task of updating the content of your website, and it updates it with inappropriate adult content, who incurs the cost of the machine's error? The model provider generally does not.
It it makes a mistake and deletes your website from AWS, who is responsible?
If it targets another website because it decides that it is "part" of your website and attempts to break into it, who is responsible?
In general, the person whose job it is to provide the company with a working, non-adult website and not hack into other websites is the one who would receive consequences for failing to meet those expectations.
These tools can push out more results than a human can hope to evaluate in a business-sensitive, or even realistic, amount of time. You have to take it at its word that it did things right, and there's no real fear of failure or consequence on the behalf of the agent.
Something in your prompt led it to do that, is alex0015's point. The statistical odds of these frontier models screwing up to that extent are so impossibly low that it would almost have to be intentional or accidental negligence on the part of the prompt writer to accidentally have their agent write pornography to their website.
The burden of the mistake would have to fall on the person that gave the tool instructions, because it can't know that what it did was wrong. Wrong is subjective in this case. It only did what it did because you, figuratively speaking, encouraged it to.
What I'm arguing is that yes, it's your fault if you misprompt the model and it does something catastrophic. It's also your fault if you prompt it correctly and it does something catastrophic anyway due to some other glitch beyond your control.
The whole discussion started with the point that OpenAI could be financially responsible for damages if their models cause problems for users. If my job is to design a system that works, and instead my system doesn't work, it's my fault regardless of whether I used no LLM, a local LLM, or OpenAI's LLM. Depending on whoever's in charge of doling out consequences, I might get away from it with zero, light, or heavy consequences. But at all levels, I can't reasonably expect to deflect blame onto the model itself.