Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

bloomberg.com

51–60 of 101 posts

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

SBF's biggest problem was that he got caught (and became famous) before he could do the work necessary to clean things up. There's tons of grey/hinky stuff that goes on inside companies starting up. These companies either die, get acquired, or professionals are brought in to clean it up before it goes public. FWIW I think Sam is an honest actor here though. No real funny business with OpenAI.

> No real funny business with OpenAI.

Well, except for the funny business such as backpedaling on being "open", trying to be a billion dollar company while pretending they aren't trying to be a billion dollar company, etc.

And with Sam Altman personally, it's really, really hard for me to get past all that WorldCoin stuff and pretend it never happened.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#52

Why do we need to regulate ai?

Can you really not see how this will automate harm at massive parallelized scale? Even if you're nearsighted you can see how the internet will in short order be rendered useless by fake real-time interaction and digital malice. Look at how much automated ssh poking you get on an IP address. Look at how much email you receive without a comprehensive spam filter (it's much more than shows up in your Gmail spam folder).…

We already get spammed and hammered by bots without ai so? Did we manage to somehow regulate away existing systems to stop this? No, so why put ai behind a bunch of regulation. Maybe in a dystopia we have ai judges...wait he already have judges using shitty software for sentencing.

You want to further regulate what I can build in my basement?

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Sam Altman the answer to regulating AI? If yes, why?

The article makes assertions about Sam's intentions being negative without acknowledging the possibility that he actually meant what he said and wants regulation because he thinks it is best for humanity. I don't understand all of the one sided hate for his statements. Say he did actually want to do what was best for humanity, how should he have acted differently in that meeting with congress? It seems entirely plaus…

He might be convinced of his own discourse, but this is strangely aligned with the interests of his own company.

We should remember how "open" OpenAI really is. The funny business started at this point.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#54
I see two possible motivations:

1) he is truly scared AI can become dangerous and try to distribute the responsibility to more people 2) he anticipates that there will be some regulation anyway, and when that's the case, it is better to be involved and act friendly.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#55
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be so, but given the switcheroo that happened with "Open" AI, he and the entire company is untrustworthy on this particular front.

When OpenAI started I don't think anyone would have thought that AI this powerful was around the corner.

This is just more openAI marketing at work. ChatGPT is a chatbot, and it’s good at language for sure, but it isn’t some huge breakthrough that people were expecting would take a century. Its literally just a fancy RNN which we’ve had for awhile

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#57
post #35
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems silly, but that's an insightful remark. AI systems mis-identifying people and getting them arrested - minor problem. Systems firing people for underperforming - that's just a company exercising its right to enforce "at-will employment". Chatbots designed to make it difficult or impossible to cancel a service - almost standard. Announcing a hiring freeze while jobs are replaced with AI systems - that's produc…

`rm -rf /` could be a set of 'bad words' too. Or `shred -uf /dev/sda`

Or every influential villain in history. Hitler and Goebbels didn't use their fists to kill millions of people.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#58

Outside of self driving cars (which imo can and should be regulated by the ntsa), the thing that has never killed zero people probably shouldn't be regulated by the thing that has killed... a lot more than that until there's a clear and obvious safety concern with something specific within the "AI" category of technology (would love if we de-scifi'd this and called it machine learning but I'm picking my battles here)…

I don't think "it hasn't killed people yet" is a very good criteria. There are a lot of plausible dangers that existing and imaginable large-machine-learning could involve. I can't see how one could do the regulating of AI but I don't think one can limit the worry-area to "clear and obvious" situations.

If “has killed people” was a viable argument for regulation we’d have a lot more regulation.

Which is fine; engineers are not divine beings. They can have their figurative value deflated like everyone else is these days. Engineered devices have killed a lot of people.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#59

Outside of self driving cars (which imo can and should be regulated by the ntsa), the thing that has never killed zero people probably shouldn't be regulated by the thing that has killed... a lot more than that until there's a clear and obvious safety concern with something specific within the "AI" category of technology (would love if we de-scifi'd this and called it machine learning but I'm picking my battles here)…

I don't think "it hasn't killed people yet" is a very good criteria. There are a lot of plausible dangers that existing and imaginable large-machine-learning could involve. I can't see how one could do the regulating of AI but I don't think one can limit the worry-area to "clear and obvious" situations.

> plausible dangers

Name three. There are 50,000 gun related deaths in the United States per year, are any of them a bigger threat than gun violence? I struggle to find a single thing AI can do, sans being hooked up to nuclear weapons and time travelling robots with german accents, that's even imaginatively more dangerous than what this country already allows and decides doesn't require useful regulations.

I'm sorry if that's too political for HN but you know what, it actually does matter to compare real dangers (car accidents, gun violence) to conceived and made up ones (gender indifferent bathrooms, AI) when deciding how governments should prioritize policy and regulations.

Re: Sam Altman isn’t the answer to regulating artificial intelligence

#60

Why do we need to regulate ai?

It creates situations no existing laws cover or are ambiguous about. Copyright, for example. Can you demand the training data to exclude your works? Can you circumvent GPL by using machine learning? Can you make discrimination legal by flaming AI did it? Can you sue for damages when AI produces incorrect result?
Post reply on HN