Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

vice.com

191–200 of 595 posts

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#191

Step by step, ever since the calling the diver a "pedo", every since the "funding secured" i've began to realise just how petty and pathetic elon is. Every opportunity he has he seems to show just how vindictive he really is. Man child who now has way too much money. Buying Twitter on a whim is the latest in a string of decisions which do not align with the "let's get to Mars and save earths environment" stuff he lik…

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a great sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within hims…

It's interesting to think that maybe the reason Steve Jobs remains so highly admired is that he died before he had the chance to do or say something monumentally dumb that broke the illusion of his greatness.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#192

"Open" as in "Open for Big Business"? The main reason to worry, though, is not the proprietary monetization of "AI" algorithms: Just like it was not an algorithm (pagerank) but the invention of adtech that spawned surveillance capitalism, here too the main question is what sort of "disruption" can this tech facilitate , as in which social contract will be violated in order to "create value". "Success" in "tech" has f…

I'm curious as to what you mean by scorched Earth. Literally the fact that we are burning up our atmosphere, or something else? That said, I'll root for nature batting last before I root for the hellscape people unleash for economic incentives . What needs to be understood is that this sort of technology is not an equalizer, regardless of the PR behind having your own personal Einstein/secretary at your beck and call…

> become more and more restrictive as time goes on, despite the capabilities of such computers increasing regularly

True, and it is to be expected that existing interests will seek to integrate any new tricks into the old patterns

The question is to what extend this can go on without imploding. How big the mismatch between what you could do with a mobile or a desktop or a decentralized cluster of millions of computers and what you actually do before some random bug in a typewriter short-circuits the entire system.

People are banking on widespread digital transformation as one of the few major economic growth drivers in an otherwise exhausted opportunity landscape - the literally scorched Earth. I fail to see, though, how this regeneration could possibly be achieved with parasitic business models and behaviors. We should not think just about individuals or "consumers", as in this role we are effectively disenfranchised, but our role in all sorts of private and public organizations that collectively have much more political and economic weight than "big tech".

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#193
post #39

Nice grift by Sam Altman taking all the donations and good will a non profit gets just to flip 180. He probably would have done the same with his crypto scam startup worldcoin if it would not have failed in every way before he could scam.

Did worldcoin fail or shut down? Is there an article about that? It seems they stopped operating in a few countries in March 2022, anything beyond that?

It never succeeded to able to fail :) . Last I remember was an artice a few years ago describing how this scheme worked - basically it was a pyramid (incoming dictionary warriors in 3...2...1...), when earlier believers were inviting new people in the sect, to operate these orbs for pittance, and a fraction of funds from newcomers was given to early members. Where the money came in the first place I don't remember, but I won't be surprised if it was from a VC injections.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird to me that this is even possible legally (turning a nonprofit into a for-profit).

It’s not difficult. I suspect it’s not as much as turning a non-profit into a for-profit, as it is about starting a new company and somehow transferring/licensing the IP from the old into the new.

Do you have any evidence that’s what openai did? Seems like it would be pretty easy to document.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#195
post #4

I find it a little odd that Elon seems to take a swipe at OpenAI any opportunity he gets. If he cares so much about them not making money, maybe he should have put his twitter cash there instead? It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy work at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely good humans. I've known Jack for 10 years…

> It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy work at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely good humans. I've known Jack for 10 years and he's for sure a measured and reasonable person who cares about not doing harm.

I think this hardly matters. Both companies are competing in a market and if the ethics stands in the way of market dominance and shareholder value, ethics will generally lose out.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#197

> It is "hard for anyone except larger companies to benefit from the underlying technology," OpenAI stated. Ugh. This is the part of the recent AI advancement that annoys me the most. The web, at least in its infancy, was pretty accessible to individual hobbyists. You could run a web server on your own computer. AI technology seems highly centralized from the start.

If you expand your timeline a little bit you'll reach a spot where the computers, equipment and comms necessary to create a computer network were highly centralized and only run by large corporations and institutions. How many times do we need to see this pattern for it to be obvious?

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#198

When I realized that OpenAI is not open source, you knew it wasn't gone be open in any sense. How can you in 2010s start a thing with the name 'Open' and then not have it be Open Source.

Well it’s still open access. All those GPT-3 tools doing their thing at no cost. They have more than just ChatGPT.

its a data acquisition platform - you upload your sensitive data and skillfully created prompts to their server.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#199
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying: > Ford straight up proved that Béla Barényi (of Mercedes Benz) ideas around crumple zones is all a big waste of time. The world didn't end with the 1938 Ford Prefect[0]. The world won't end overnight with an open fork of ChatGPT. But it will mean the signal-to-noise ratio rapidly shifts, that spammers and scammers will be much more effective, and that even minor special interest groups (or individ…

That car analogy doesn't work because Mercedes Benz didn't actively work against other cars from existing. https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7nby/researchers-think-ai-...

First: Crumple zones have since become mandatory, which pattern matches what would happen if OpenAI gets what they ask for in that link.

Second: I'm just as concerned about automated generation of propaganda as they seem to be. Given what LLMs are currently capable of doing, a free cyber-Goebbels for every hate group is the default: the AI itself only cares about predicting the next token, not the impact of having done so.

Edit:

Also, the headline of the Vice story you linked to is misleading given the source document that the body linked to.

1. Of the 6 researchers listed as authors of that report, only 2 are from OpenAI

2. Reduced exports of chips from the USA are discussed only briefly within that report, as part of a broader comparison with all the other possible ways to mitigate the various risks

3. Limited chip exports does nothing to prevent domestic propaganda and research

https://cdn.openai.com/papers/forecasting-misuse.pdf

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#200

Step by step, ever since the calling the diver a "pedo", every since the "funding secured" i've began to realise just how petty and pathetic elon is. Every opportunity he has he seems to show just how vindictive he really is. Man child who now has way too much money. Buying Twitter on a whim is the latest in a string of decisions which do not align with the "let's get to Mars and save earths environment" stuff he lik…

I think it’s a weird narcissistic need to feel that they are the center of the conversation and so they are important. What is so interesting about Elon is that he was objectively quite important prior to Twitter... but that wasn't enough. Whatever your target, whatever you achieve... it is not enough.

if you have this massively outsized will to power/wealth/fame, it doesn't suddenly go away once you get there. this means that if you are super wealthy, for you not to become a black hole of power/fame accumulation, your path there has to have been almost an accident
Post reply on HN