571–580 of 596 posts
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That's not their stated goal, you're misinterpreting it by changing the wording.
Sorry, I read a quote from one of the people involved in this mess and assumed it was direct from the company charter. Can you fill me in as to what the goal of OpenAI is?
Benefit and available can have very different meaning when you mix in alignment/safety concerns.
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GPT-4 is a magnitude larger and not a magnitude better. Even before that, GPT-3 was not a particularly high watermark (compared to T5 and BERT) and GPT-2 was famously so expensive to run that it ran up a 6-figure monthly cloud spend just for inferencing. Lord knows what GPT-4 costs at-scale, but I'm not convinced it's cost-competitive with the alternatives.
GPT-4 is an existential threat to Google. Since March 24 of this year, 80% of the time I ask GPT-4 questions I would google before. And Google knows this. They are throwing billions at it but simply cannot catch up.
From an indexing/crawling POV, the content generated by LLMs might (and IMO will) permanently defeat spam filters, which would in turn cause Google (and everyone else) to permanently lose the war against spam SEO. That might be an existential threat to the value of the web in general, even as an input (for training and for web search) for LLMs.
LLMs might already be good enough to degrade the benefit of freedom of speech via signal-to-noise ratio (even if you think LLMs are "just convincing BS generators"), so I'm glad the propaganda potential is one of the things the red team were working on before the initial release.
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I think there is a lot to be said for being remembered as the Steve Wozniak. I'd much rather be remembered as Wozniak than as Jobs.
Also Wozniak is relatively known, maybe Gates/Allen works better as an analogy.
For instance:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/paul-allen-goes-after-...
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Can you explain the reddit one?
Assuming the Reddit app does not use certificate pinning, you can use your computer to provide internet to your phone and then use an app like Charles Proxy to inspect requests being made from an app. Pretty easy to reverse engineer the API. If the app does use certificate pinning, then you can use an Android phone and a modified app that removes the logic that enforces certificate pinning. This is more involved but…
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A rough guess is that Elon will pick up Ilya, with a promise to really aim for safe AGI.
I apologize in advance for this snarky comment, but with Elon’s track record when it comes to safety at Twitter and Tesla, I would doubt his sincerity or follow-through on AI safety.
In the case of Tesla, to accelerate the development of electric cars, in the case of Twitter, to reduce the probability of civil war and in the case of SpaceX to eventually have humanity (or our descendants) spread out enough that a single catastrophic event (like a meteor, gray goo or similar) doesn't wipe us out all at once.
His detractors obviously will question both his motives and methods, but if we imagine he's acting out of good faith (whether or not he's wrong), his approach to AI fits the pattern, including his story about why he helped with the startup of OpenAI in the first place.
From someone with an ex-risk approach to AI safety, the first concern is, to quote Ilya from the recent Alignment Workshop "As a bare minimum, let's make it so that if the tech does 'bad things', it's because of its operators, rather than due to some unexpected behavior".
In other words, for someone concerned with existential risk, even intentional "bad use" such as using AI for killer robots at a large scale in war or for a dictator to use AI to suppress a population are secondary concerns.
And it appears to me that Elon and Ilya both have this outlook, while Sam may be more concerned with shorter term social impacts.
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A majority of the board removing a minority of the board doesn’t seem like a power play to me. If the opposite were somehow achieved, e.g. through persuading one member of the majority to vote against their own interests, and using the chairman’s casting vote, that would be a power play. Also, the executive who said it wasn’t for malfeasance wasn’t himself on the board and appears to be trying to push for Altman’s re…
You’re saying the board is trying to bring back an employee they know committed malfeasance?
The board was considering the requests to bring back Sam because they realized they were handling the situation badly and didn’t want the organization to blow up and fail at its mission, but they refused to resign unless and until suitably mission-aligned replacement board members were agreed upon (note that profit is not the nonprofit’s mission).
Of course they didn’t bring him back in the end, or resign, after all.
If the board had yielded to similarly minded replacements and brought back Sam, that isn’t the same as exonerating him, only realizing how badly they handled the firing. I can imagine that an independent investigation into the truth of the existing board’s allegations would still have been ordered by the new board, just as the new interim CEO actually did. If it was truly just a personality clash leading to mistrust, that would probably be the end of it. If there truly was malfeasance that makes Sam and unsuitable CEO, they’d probably then engage a PR firm to help make the case to the world far more persuasively than happened on Friday.
Yes, this is speculation, but I’ve been a nonprofit director and president myself, and if I were on that replacement board it’s what I’d do. In that case, the organization was much lower-profile than OpenAI, and we were spare-time volunteers with a tiny budget. The closest we came to self-dealing is when a long-time director wanted to become a paid software engineer contractor for us, but he left the board in order to make that ethically clear, and the remaining board approved the arrangement. Nothing hidden or dishonest there, and he’s continued to be a great help to the organization.
(Disclaimer: I stopped my own involvement with the org over 4 years ago myself, but that was truly because the rest of my life got too busy. There was no drama or anything around that.)
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You don’t typically do it this quickly either.
What do you mean? Typically (always?) the firing itself is instantaneous. We have no idea how long the issues that led to the firing went on. The communication was certainly very poor, and we don't know if the reasons were good, but I don't understand the speed complaint.
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A majority of the board removing a minority of the board doesn’t seem like a power play to me. If the opposite were somehow achieved, e.g. through persuading one member of the majority to vote against their own interests, and using the chairman’s casting vote, that would be a power play. Also, the executive who said it wasn’t for malfeasance wasn’t himself on the board and appears to be trying to push for Altman’s re…
It is if the board had 9 members originally and only temporarily has 6 because of recent resignations. And that there is a proposal to expand the board on the table (because 6 is kind of thin for a company this size).
Let’s assume for a second that it is a power play. If the point of it is just the power struggle between two factions seeking power then yeah it’s not a good thing to majorly disrupt an organization. But if the point of the power play is to rescue the nonprofit’s pursuit of its mission from a CEO’s misuse of power that goes against the mission, it’s a board acting exactly as it should, other than badly handling the communications around this mess.
I have no inside info and therefore am not expressing any opinion on what the truth is. But I’m not going to rush to believe the PR war being waged by Altman and his allies merely because the current board is bad at PR/comms.
I look forward to reading any public summary of the report from the investigation which the new interim CEO has ordered.
The only power MS has is soft power as a backer. Will that win over the board's actual power? If MS pulls investment it will be a catastrophic blow.
Yeah, MS leaving is the absolute end of OpenAI (and for all practical purposes the end of Ilya's career). It's Satya's call now, he's not happy and wants @sama back. Next week is going to be interesting!
The only power MS has is soft power as a backer. Will that win over the board's actual power? If MS pulls investment it will be a catastrophic blow.
Yeah, MS leaving is the absolute end of OpenAI (and for all practical purposes the end of Ilya's career). It's Satya's call now, he's not happy and wants @sama back. Next week is going to be interesting!
Satya got what he wanted, @sama joins MS to create pretty much a spin-off startup there, OpenAI on suicide watch with employees leaving, absolutely no new funding ever and a just-appointed CEO that wants to "pause" the company, lol.
Right all along!