OpenAI's Sam Altman to Brief UN Security Council Next Week
reuters.com
reuters.com
He will probably get up there and say his companies products will destroy every citizen of their countries.
1. https://genius.com/Justin-kuritzkes-potion-seller-annotated
This seems especially true for Anthropic employees.
What I mean by Occam's Razor:
There are many assumptions that need to be true to link "they say they're terrified of AI" to "they get paid more / longer", in both their own minds and everyone else's. It's a bit of 4D chess that could go their way, but also could go 100 different ways.
In contrast, linking "they say it" to "they believe it" is simple.
The implication (or as you said, "the links"), that talking about how dangerous their product is leads to more money, is true regardless of their intention. They create hype, they get money, that's not an assumption, that's an observation.
The question is only if their intention was to make money, or are they speaking from the heart. That's the assumption we choose.
Because we can't observe the counterfactual world, this actually is just an assumption.
Diving their intention also still requires many assumptions about their intermediate beliefs that I find dubious
If you discard all empirical claims categorically due to "inability to observe the counterfactual world", your own reasoning falls apart. Why would you assume people mean what they say?
> Diving their intention also still requires many assumptions about their intermediate beliefs that I find dubious
You're assuming CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies are honest. I find that dubious.
I don't.
There are a lot of counterfactuals we can observe empirically.
I'm just saying there is no empirical evidence to support the marketing strategy of "tell people our product is going to kill their families". I believe this is the first time it's been tried out.
OpenAI got $10 billion from Microsoft after Sam Altman claimed AI could lead to extinction of humanity.
Anthropic got similar multi-billion dollar funding from Amazon and Google after warning AI could develop biological weapons.
xAI got similarly massive funding after Elon Musk predicted a terminator-style future.
If you don't accept this as "empirical evidence", then there's nothing to discuss.
Right now, what seems to be missing from general intelligence is mostly the ability to learn from experience and continue operating in a useful way well beyond context window size. That might already be technically feasible, but probably not in a cost-effective way.
I have no idea. Anyone claiming to is hubristic.
The burden of proof exists, it’s not hubristic to require it.
Again, hubris to have an unshakeable firm belief one way or the other. None of us are omnipotent.
And then guaranteed bust of AI bubble. 2000 billion dollars for a single company? That too when bottom of the boat has been drilled by open weight Chinese models that are cheaper and good enough but can even be deployed locally?
In face of all that - that kind of return is not realistic.
However - good gimmick scaring UN asking for a ban on Chinese models perhaps.
Expect the fear mongering to escalate to a fever pitch.
The UN has no authority to ban anything but it's a good platform.
AI is being adopted and used, but if there was ever a chance of Russia being an AI power, it died in 2022.
A few formerly-Russian IT companies had their "rainy day" HQs overseas, and leveraged them to slip the noose and leave Russia - brain draining what AI expertise was available in the country. See: Yandex -> Nebius.
Is ads in the AI gonna drive that revenue valuation? Are buyers going to lock in contracts when a new model in 120 days is ever better and cheaper?
They exclude the global south from having a permanent seat at the table, and they need a veto reform.
No resolution when they captured Maduro. Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022 and vetoed any Security Council action.
171 days into the Gaza conflict, they passed Resolution 2728, by that time, over 10,000 people had already been killed, and Israel’s immediate response was to announce it would ignore the resolution entirely.
There were a lot of smaller-scale conflicts in the meantime, where the Security Council had a lot of meetings, but nothing ever happened.
Altman could tell them to go fuck themselves and that he is specifically developing tools to kill any person in that room, and the US would just veto the Council from taking any action that could save their own life.
That’s the kind of joke they have become.
That's the whole presentation, saved you a couple of insufferable hours
Which is just... highly unfortunate.
They can add 2 + 2 correctly in 10% of cases. So, no, they are not.
(I put "technology" in quotes because it is closer to alchemy.)
Bankers or politicians or the plebs?
These kind of meetings are to create common vocabulary/seed common frameworks across the world for problems all govts are seeing or expecting on the horizon.
I get it. We dislike Sam. I got it 3? 4? years ago. Would be nice and more interesting if we could see past that at some point, given that he is a fairly important figure, doing important things, that would be cool to share interesting thoughts about.
Like Copyright Infrigement and propaganda.