Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 146 posts

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#61

Post by somenameforme »

andrewstuart wrote: post #7

Sam Altman himself sat in front of the top levels of government and freaked them out by telling them his company was putting in place the groundwork to possibly end humanity. A really strange thing to do, I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this. Having panicked regulators with science fiction, I hope he's not surprised when they take action.

I think something that's increasingly clear is that OpenAI's only moat is time. Every other company, and even completely independent models, are rapidly catching up. And this is happening at the same time that OpenAI is already making claims that they're hitting diminishing returns on model size [1], as happens in literally every single neural net based field.

If Sam's Gambit succeeded, OpenAI could have potentially been granted a near absolute monopoly with the legislative reach of the US government working to imperil competitors through a Gordian knot of rules and regulations which OpenAI could have been the primary creator of, perhaps even as the head of some sort private-public 'Artificial Intelligence Accountability and Trust Division.' It really just gives one that happy feeling of bureaucrazy mixed with dystopia.

[1] - https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of...

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#62

Post by ChatGTP »

NoTelnyxBad wrote: post #13
andrewstuart wrote: post #7

Sam Altman himself sat in front of the top levels of government and freaked them out by telling them his company was putting in place the groundwork to possibly end humanity. A really strange thing to do, I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this. Having panicked regulators with science fiction, I hope he's not surprised when they take action.

There's a simple explanation: he believes what he said.

If he believed what he said, why would he put the thing on the internet with plugins? Why would he be helping to secure funding to build even more powerful models?

If he believed it was truly dangerous, I don't think he'd be working for a company that is advertising they are actually pursuing super-intelligence ?

Not saying you're wrong, but there is definitely some very noticeable dissonance in his messaging and in his actions.

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#63

Post by mellosouls »

zarzavat wrote: post #51
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn’t it closer in the same way that I’m closer to Japan than my dog who is sitting 1 meter to the east of me is? We are still both 10,000 km away

This technology (transformer language models) was invented about 6 years ago. For it to be far away means that at some point the exponential has to stop and we have an AI winter. That’s possible but doesn’t look likely at this point. It’s more likely that we will see superintelligence in our lifetime. And if the rate of progress does not slow it will be sooner rather than later. My current estimate is parity by 2030…

For it to be far away means that at some point the exponential has to stop

Not if we are on the wrong path, going in the wrong direction, which I think was at least partly the point of the comment to which you are responding.

There is a school of thought that something fundamental is being missed by modern AI and the (amazing) success of GPT3+ ironically risks directing us further down that wrong path at an accelerating pace.

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#64

Post by visarga »

flangola7 wrote: post #39
janalsncm wrote: post #27

Well that’s one way to solve AI alignment. Just sue the companies for harming consumers. I’m half joking, but in the statistical distribution of good, bad and ugly things automation can do, we will need to draw some line as to what is legally actionable. For example, if I Google search recipes for explosives, Google isn’t liable for surfacing accurate information. And imo OpenAI isn’t liable if their chatbot gives th…

One of the differences is Google isn't originally writing that text themselves, they're pointing to someone else who has written it. In a potential lawsuit Google would be able to solidly point to the domain and ownership of the actual author of the text. If (when) OpenAI ends up in court, who will they point to? If someone was slandered, the courts will find a human being responsible for it.

What about the responsibility of the person writing the prompt?

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#65

Post by NoTelnyxBad »

ChatGTP wrote: post #62
NoTelnyxBad wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a simple explanation: he believes what he said.

If he believed what he said, why would he put the thing on the internet with plugins? Why would he be helping to secure funding to build even more powerful models? If he believed it was truly dangerous, I don't think he'd be working for a company that is advertising they are actually pursuing super-intelligence ? Not saying you're wrong, but there is definitely some very noticeable dissonance in his messaging and in…

I imagine he thinks OpenAI can get superintelligence right, and that someone else would get it wrong.

You're right that there's some dissonance there, however. Especially since three of the leading labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind) were _all_ founded on the premise that they had to be the ones to get superintelligence right because the risks were so high.

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#67

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

biofunsf wrote: post #20
cmcaleer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a gambit to try to secure OAI's moat. It failed, and while competitors are catching up (still a while to go yet), he put a target on OAI's back.

Why not both? I think true AGI super intelligence (a lot smarter than us) does have the potential to destroy humanity, and as the current leader, Open AI seems closest to achieving that. Of course superintelligence might be far away or just unachievable, but we don't know that. And I agree Altman's statement also builds OAI's moat, but that doesn't make his statement false.

I can't imagine that LLMs are anything other than one tiny component of a true AGI. Maybe/probably necessary, but altogether insufficient by themselves. Even if one could spawn true AGI, it's sort of like the tornado tearing through the junkyard and accidentally assembling the 747. Just altogether improbable.

It even seems unlikely that eve after having invented/improved the LLM, that the other components are anywhere close to being developed.

If his statement were honest and not strategic, then he's utterly irrational and quite possibly self-destructive (even genocidal). One simply wouldn't continue in that line of research if one believes there was the risk of an omnicidal AGI being spawned. It's like something out of a bad Lovecraft story... if you think the spell will summon Cthulhu, the best thing to do is just stop.

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#68

Post by infinitifall »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #56
m3kw9 wrote: post #31

Has google ever been investigated over surfaced search results that could cause harm?

It should be investigated.

And this would achieve what goal exactly? Even more search result sanitizing? Google scrubbing everything even remotely controversial from their search results because it might "harm" someone? No thank you, I value access to information. The last thing we need is more of "As a search engine I cannot...".

Re: FTC investigating ChatGPT over potential consumer harm

#70

Post by thomasfromcdnjs »

cjbprime wrote: post #42
flangola7 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conspiracy theory is myopic. Altman has been cognizant[1][2] of the very-not-scifi danger of machine intelligence since before OpenAI was even founded. I believe he has dangerous levels of hubris but I don't see him being profit motivated. From his statements in the past and his regrets today[3] of bringing the current tech into existence, I'm confident his motivator is simply the desire to not die. >WHY YOU SHO…

Lots of retrospectively-good predictions in there, but this was the one I undervalued the extent of: > We also have a bad habit of changing the definition of machine intelligence when a program gets really good to claim that the problem wasn’t really that hard in the first place We've done this so much recently that I'm now seeing rewritten definitions of "real" intelligence that most humans do not meet.

> We've done this so much recently that I'm now seeing rewritten definitions of "real" intelligence that most humans do not meet.

Love this sentiment, stealing it =)

Post reply on HN