641–650 of 979 posts
Through all of this, no one has cogently explained why Altman leaving is such a big deal. Why would workers immediately quit their job when he has no other company, and does he even know who these workers are? Are these people that desperate to make a buck (or the prospect of big bucks)? It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting ou…
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You could say the same thing if they were rooting for the board instead..
It’s not the job of the media to root for anyone. The media should dispassionately report the truth. In this case they did not do so.
Through all of this, no one has cogently explained why Altman leaving is such a big deal. Why would workers immediately quit their job when he has no other company, and does he even know who these workers are? Are these people that desperate to make a buck (or the prospect of big bucks)? It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting ou…
Of course, some employees may agree with the doom/safety board ideology, and will no doubt stay. But I highly doubt everyone will, especially the researchers who were working on new, powerful models — many of them view this as their life's work. Sam offers them the ability to continue.
If you think this is about "the big bucks" or "fame," I think you don't understand the people on the other side of this argument at all.
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Tip for builders: you can use the GPT APIs on Microsoft Azure. Managed reliably, nobody's quitting, no drama. Same APIs, just with better controls, global availability, and a very stable, reliable, and trustworthy provider. (disclosure: I work at Azure, but this is just my own observation).
You want me to trust M$ in all this? Embrace, extend, extinguish. Fellow nerds, you really need to go into work on Monday and have a hard chat with your C levels and legal (Because IANAL). The question is: Who owns the output of LLM/AI/ML tooling? I will give you a hint, it's not you. Do you need to copyright what a CS agent says, no, you want them on script as much as possible. An LLM parroting your training data is…
Through all of this, no one has cogently explained why Altman leaving is such a big deal. Why would workers immediately quit their job when he has no other company, and does he even know who these workers are? Are these people that desperate to make a buck (or the prospect of big bucks)? It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting ou…
It is Sam Altman. He will have one in a week.
> It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting out their turn for big bucks and fame.
I would imagine most employees at any organization are not really there because of corporate values, but their own interests.
> What does Altman bring to the table besides raising money from foreign governments and states, apparently?
And one of the world's largest tech corporations. If you are interested in the money side, that isn't something to take lightly.
So I would bet it is just following the money, or at least the expected money.
The new board also wants to slow development. That isn't very exciting either.
For a change, maybe it'd be a good idea to get a CEO who at least has faint idea about how ML works on a technical level? Would you like a company that builds rockets to be led by some salesman who doesn't understand basic Physics? Probably not. You don't need to be Hinton or Schmidhuber, but come on, who thinks it's a good idea to have these typical "Silicon Valley VC CEOs" lead an AI company?
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> When does it stop existing in boxes that require a continuous source of electricity and can’t survive water or fire? When someone runs a model in a reasonably durable housing with a battery? (I'm not big on the AI as destroyer or saviour cult myself, but that particular question doesn't seem like all that big of a refutation of it.)
But my point is what is it actually doing to reach out and touch someone in the doomsday scenario?
And even that isn't the easiest scenario if an AI just wants us dead; a smart enough AI could just as easily use send a request to any of the the many labs that will synthesize/print genetic sequences for you and create things that combine into a plague worse than covid. And if it's really smart, it can figure out how to use those same labs to begin producing self-replicating nanomachines (because that's what viruses are) that give it substrate to run on.
Oh, and good luck destroying it when it can copy and shard itself onto every unpatched smarthome device on Earth.
Now, granted, none of these individual scenarios have a high absolute likelihood. That said, even at a 10% (or 0.1%) chance of destroying all life, you should probably at least give it some thought.
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Even so it buys some time to do safety work
I don’t really understand what safety work is or entails here, given OpenAI will surely not be the only group to achieve AGI (assuming any group does.) What stops other companies from offering similar models with no (or just less) regard for safety/alignment, which may even be seen as a sort of competitive edge against other providers? Would the “safety work” being done or thought about somehow affect other eventual…
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That's assuming a big overshoot of human intelligence and goal-seeking. An average human capability counts as "AGI." If lots of the smartest human minds make AGI, and it exceeds a mediocre human-- why assume it can make itself more efficient or bigger? Indeed, even if it's smarter than the collective effort of the scientists that made it, there's no real guarantee that there's lots of low hanging fruit for it to self…
If AI gets to human levels of intelligence (ie. can do novel research in theoretical physics) then at the very least it’s likely that over time it will be able to do this reasoning faster than humans. I think it’s very hard to imagine a scenario where we create an actual AGI and then within a few years at most of that event the AGIs are far more capable than human brains. That would imply there was some arbitrary phy…
I'm assuming you meant "aren't" here.
> That would imply there was some arbitrary physical limit to intelligence
All you need is some kind of sub-linear scaling law for peak possible "intelligence" vs. the amount of raw computation. There's a lot of reason to think that this is true.
Also there's no guarantee the amount of raw computation is going to increase quickly.
In any case, the kind of exponential runaway you mention (years) isn't "pandemic at the speed of light" as mentioned in the grandparent.
I'm more worried about scenarios where we end up with an 75IQ savant (access encyclopedic training knowledge and very quick interface to run native computer code for math and data processing help) that can plug away 24/7 and fit on an A100. You'd have millions of new cheap "superhuman" workers per year even if they're not very smart and not very fast. It would be economically destabilizing very quickly, and many of them will be employed in ways that just completely thrash the signal to noise ratio of written text, etc.
Kara Swisher has some additional details: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726477828072382480