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What OpenAI really wants

wired.com

101–110 of 190 posts

Re: What OpenAI really wants

#101

I'm sorry- perhaps the intention and wording of the article changes towards the end, but this entire thing as far as I've managed is just a thinly veiled propaganda piece that tries to make OpenAI, the team, and their product out to be some kind of equivalent to a modern day messiah. For me, and everybody I've seen or recently discussed it with, the whole ChatGPT craze has largely died out, and all we're left with is…

> I've managed to make it is just a thinly veiled propaganda piece that tries to make OpenAI, the team, and their product out to be some kind of equivalent to a modern day messiah

I don't agree at all. The article itself is giving a pretty neutral overview of the company and what the company believe to be the case, for sure.

It is OpenAI who thinks that skynet is going to be created, and that they need to be the gatekeepers in charge of it.

But, for all the people who are not in a literal cult, it is very useful to know that this is what they believe.

It is important to know this, because it gives significant insight as to what they are going to do in the future. That being that they are going to lobby congress to destroy the open source AI movement that is currently on track to destroy OpenAIs mote.

And they want to do this all because of some nonsense about skynet.

I can understand why this might come off as bias. But I really recommend that you reread the article, but come at it from the perspective of "The writer is describing what the people at OpenAI believe, not what the author believes".

Because if you do that, you will quickly understand how the depth of the problem that we have here, which people who are basically in a psuedo cult are in positions of power at significant tech companies and are lobbying congress to stop everyone else from competing against them.

You shouldn't read this and think that the author is biased.

Instead you should come out of reading this article horrified at the nonsense that major people at major tech companies actually believe, and the fact that they are doing something about it. (IE lobby congress in this case and attempting to destroy the open source AI movement)

Re: What OpenAI really wants

#102

I'm sorry- perhaps the intention and wording of the article changes towards the end, but this entire thing as far as I've managed is just a thinly veiled propaganda piece that tries to make OpenAI, the team, and their product out to be some kind of equivalent to a modern day messiah. For me, and everybody I've seen or recently discussed it with, the whole ChatGPT craze has largely died out, and all we're left with is…

> I've managed to make it is just a thinly veiled propaganda piece that tries to make OpenAI, the team, and their product out to be some kind of equivalent to a modern day messiah I don't agree at all. The article itself is giving a pretty neutral overview of the company and what the company believe to be the case, for sure. It is OpenAI who thinks that skynet is going to be created, and that they need to be the gate…

> "The Beatles set off colossal waves of cultural change, but they anchored their revolution for only so long: Six years after chiming that unforgettable chord they weren’t even a band anymore. The maelstrom OpenAI has unleashed will almost certainly be far bigger."

There is no way I can interpret a comparison to the Beatles with the added statement that the Beatles cultural impact will likely be much smaller as anything less than an absolutely massive overstatement based entirely out of some internal bias. If the author was intending this to be written from the perspective of how they think of themselves then in my opinion they have failed.

Re: What OpenAI really wants

#103
some people are not aware of the one hundred and eighty degree turnaround their business structure took since founding. Insights welcome:

Open (for Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power and the Political Economy of Open AI; 16Aug2023 Widder et al

Re: What OpenAI really wants

#104
Some of the people reading this article and seeing that this is "bias" I think are missing the point.

The author is not biased. Instead they are just giving a window into the world of what many of the people at OpenAI actually believe. (Perhaps there are some people there just doing web dev for a job... but a lot of them seem to believe the hype, in my personal experience)

They actually believe that in a short period of time, literal skynet is going to be created. And they think that they are pretty much the only ones capable of stopping an evil skynet by creating a good skynet themselves. And they think that anyone else working on AI is so dangerous that it might end the world.

This implications of this belief are obvious, if you take them at face value. (even though it is nonsense).

What they are going to try to do is lobby the government to destroy the open source AI movement and make sure only a couple big companies are allowed to run or train their own models. And they've already fired the first shots due to their existing efforts to work with congress.

Do not dismiss these beliefs as hype. Instead, take them at their word that this is what they believe. That is the only way that you will understand the threat that they could be to the quickly emerging open source AI movement that has shown so much promise lately.

Re: What OpenAI really wants

#105
post #5

i highlighted this last night which seems to be making the rounds - https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1699369076529971545 Alec's CV ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/alecradford/ ) seems to be: - 2011-2016 BSc Eng from Olin College - 2013+ started a data/AI consultancy as a sophomore that turned into a vague startup/product? - 2015 first paper on GANs coauthored with soumith https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06434.pdf%C3 - 2016 f…

A true 10xer. Respect.

Re: What OpenAI really wants

#106
post #40

“It’s rare that an industry raises their hand and says, ‘We are going to be the end of humanity’—and then continues to work on the product with glee and alacrity.” OpenAI rejects this criticism. imagine that for humanity's sake I really hope that Altman is another Elizabeth Holmes

It's free hype and an attempt to create a regulatory moat as competing LLMs emerge. Kinda how Cloudflare tries to kill the internet: only to protect you of course. :)

Re: What OpenAI really wants

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're really talented in the US you can get very far on talent alone While this seems true, I wonder how much selection bias is involved here. I mean, we wouldn't know about talented people that kept failing, right? Edit: since they failed, they must be dumb, right? No matter how many PhDs they have. (I am being sarcastic, ofc)

The point is not that there are not failing people in USA, but that there are much less successfully ones in EU.

GP comment is saying that the situation is better in the US than in Germany for talented people.

I am wondering whether this is really true in average or just selection bias.

Re: What OpenAI really wants

#108
post #95

> All they want to do, they say, is build computers smart enough and safe enough to end history, thrusting humanity into an era of unimaginable bounty. This sounds terrifying to me. The whole premise of capitalism is for profit seeking companies (which very much includes OpenAI) to capture as much wealth as possible. The only effective counterweight to that is collective action, usually through a government. The more…

> and force most of humanity to dramatically alter their lives History tells us that when that happends it's their lives that get dramatically altered. See what happened in europe with most dictators and kings that didn't please the masses long enough.

I could certainly see it being an unstable enough situation that it leads to a violent revolt, but that doesn't do much to allay my fears. Maybe I'm getting old but I really don't want to live through a violent revolution, even if I'm on the side of the revolutionaries. Heading the problem off before it gets to that point would be much more pleasant.

Re: What OpenAI really wants

#109
post #89
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What model, pray tell, do you think Copilot runs on, if not a fine-tuned version of GPT?

It's not just about the model, it's about the integration. Copilot is easy to use because it's basically automatic in vscode. So it isn't a 'flow breaker'. That is in some ways its primary benefit: it gives you something similar to searching for the solution a problem without having to leave the editor. (At the loss of being able to see the context of where the solution comes from, of course.)

This is a thread about hallucinations.

>ChatGPT craze has wore off for me, because of constant hallucinations when you ask for something slightly more esoterical. And I can't justify paying 20$ for GPT-4 to have more convincing hallucinations

Integration has nothing to do with hallucinations.

Re: What OpenAI really wants

#110
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What model, pray tell, do you think Copilot runs on, if not a fine-tuned version of GPT?

ChatGPT is a product built with models. So is copilot. GPT and llama are model (families).

Yes and GPT powers copilot?

I'm really straining to understand your point here. Are you implying Llama is the model underneath Copilot?

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