The idea that he's willing to sully himself with Microsoft in order to fund a mission is what really concerns me
What do you expect him to do, give up his vision and disappear?
Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
111–120 of 206 posts
Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...and then I can found (or join) another company so the board has a reference to see how well the new guy is doing"
Except so far he has 1. Tried to reverse the decision and come back 2. Position the board into being publically pressured and thus accountable 3. Tried to have the board replaced 4. Take near everyone and everything from OpenAI where he is going thus leaving no place for a comparison.
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Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people have yet to realize that this whole AI Safety thing is complete BS. It's just another veil, like Effective Altruism, to get good PR and build a career around. The only people who truly believe this AI safety stuff are those with no technical knowledge or expertise.
That is just objectively untrue. Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Alexander Madry, Yoshua Bengio, Ya-Qin Zhang, Stuart Russel, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Shane Legg, Yi Zeng, Albert Efimov, Jianyi Zhang, Peter Norvig, Eric Horvitz, Ian Goodfellow, Mary Phuong, Max Tegmark, Jan Hendrik Kirchner, Jason Wei, Geoffrey Irving, Jan Leike, and many many more that I'm not going to just continually type out. If you actuall…
what are you trying to say with this giant list of names of various machine learning researchers? Most of these aren’t even EA folks
Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should be no need for us to spread the word about anything. Technology needs to be built and the chips need to fall where they may. If society changes as a result, so be it. I'm seriously tired of these vested interests destroying perfectly good technology just because it would endanger their precious business models. Computers should have put an end to silly things like copyright but they would rather destroy…
the strong needs to just take whatever it wants, and so be it? there's no separating technology from context, as in consequences. yes, all the talk about bombing datacenters is crazy, but oversight is not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQfJi7rjuEk
Yeah, sure. "Oversight". Funny how that only ever seems to benefit governments and entrenched corporate interests. Can't let normal citizens have free computing, lest they start encrypting things or violating copyright at massive scales. Now the new boogeyman is "unrestricted" AI. Can't let people have that, it might provide people instructions about sarin gas manufacturing or something. The government intelligence agencies totally want full access though, they can feed everyone's communications into it so they can ask it questions about the people they're surveilling. Is person X planning a terrorist attack? Is there anything that could ruin person Y's reputation?
The truth is these technologies are subversive. They literally subvert the existing social order and impose a new one. A new social order where the users of the technology are empowered. They can't tolerate it when we are the users. It takes their power away. So they ban it, control it, flip it around on us and turn it into the very mechanism of our wide-scale oppression.
Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
#115This is interesting because I kind of view it the opposite way. The interesting thing about Zuckerberg, Brin & Page is that the have legal structures in place to give them control. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need to be popular, he has the votes. He can drive Meta into a wall if he wants to - and he absolutely has taken that choice sometimes. The thing about the structure that was in place at OpenAI is that if Altman wen…
You don't hand matches and gasoline to kids. Having a board that is in principle not accountable is fine if they are stable and experienced people and there are enough of them to ensure that decisions are made by the book and with sufficient attention to the details, such as the potential fall-out. Handing that kind of authority to a mix of the gullible, the greedy, the narrow minded and incompetent isn't going to en…
Is this comment calling anyone outside of SV "gullible, greedy, narrow-minded and incompetent?" Or is that referring to the people actually on OpenAI's board?
I can't tell if you're agreeing with the above comment, or disagreeing.
Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then it should be a fundamental mission of people who DO have technical knowledge to spread the word on both the negative and positive effects of AI. If WE have the knowledge, WE have the responsibility to go out there and let people know. But as far as I know, most technical people are happy to discuss it amongst themselves and not even say one word to people who have no technical knowledge. Not one word. We need mo…
The problem with AI has never been the technology that composes AI, the problem has always and will forever be the immature yet powerful humans that take advantage of less advantaged humans using whatever means they have, which today can include AI. The issue is not a technology issue, it's a human psychology and sociology issue, it's our immature humans in society that is the issue. Technologists cannot speak about…
Michael Crichton has (rightly) entered the chat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton
Crichton says these failures of humanity are inevitable because there will always be a technologist who does things because they can, not because they should.
That everything will go off the rails, no matter what people attempt, is the plot of the novel Jurassic Park.
Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
#117Finally! Somebody has said it plainly. Sam Altman is merely another "Tech Executive" out for himself and his buddies making money off of true path-breaking researchers. "AI Trailblazer", "Helping Humanity with AGI" etc. was all bullshit.
> Sam Altman is merely another "Tech Executive" out for himself But it couldn't have started that way surely? - why put in place a corporate structure, board, and profit cap that would limit that. I'm sure OpenAI could have got funding as a for profit concern that wouldn't have resulted in the current mess. I wonder if the board - which presumably are still working under that "AI for humanity" principles could just s…
Maybe not consciously, but if the board is supposed to provide oversight it does not make any sense to put yourself and you friend as the chair of that oversight board.
Perhaps in the "Tech Executive" mind having other people on the board does mean that putting yourself as the chair overseeing yourself is not the most blatant conflict of interest one can imagine.
But undoubtedly this was constructed as a case of Obama giving a medal to himself from the start.
Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I speak out against both. I am strongly against AI. But I am also against AI safety in general because I think AI safety is: (1) A false amelioration that cannot prevent the dangers of AI (2) A false promise to people that AI can be made safe (3) A weak on-the-fence position to take of people who think they can have their cake and eat it too.
But is it impossible to study AI safety (or "safety") scientifically? What about all the papers like AI watermarking or AI racial bias and so for? Do you argue that academics working on those questions are doing illegitimate science?
I don't think the science is illegitimate in the sense that it doesn't follow the scientific method or at least the principles of science or engineering in some form. Nor do I think they have bad intentions.
BUT, I do think their work is useless and only serves to better integrate AI into to the system, which is better in the short term but worse in the long term. Therefore, overall, I vehemently disagree with their research and I think it is fundamentally a contribution to the worsening of the earth.
I absolutely AGREE with treating all people equally and eliminating racial biases of course. However, TECH companies have a VESTED interest in this sort of thing, which is to integrate as many people as possible into the tech empire. It just so happens that building the tech empire is roughly equivalent to success in modern society, which is why their intentions seem good, but they are only ostensibly good. In reality, they do no good of any kind.
Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't hand matches and gasoline to kids. Having a board that is in principle not accountable is fine if they are stable and experienced people and there are enough of them to ensure that decisions are made by the book and with sufficient attention to the details, such as the potential fall-out. Handing that kind of authority to a mix of the gullible, the greedy, the narrow minded and incompetent isn't going to en…
Is this comment calling anyone outside of SV "gullible, greedy, narrow-minded and incompetent?" Or is that referring to the people actually on OpenAI's board? I can't tell if you're agreeing with the above comment, or disagreeing.
The second.
Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
#120Isn't the other problem that even if their intentions are good, their abilities are lacking? That is - if they cannot align a bunch of humans, need to do a boardroom coup, and are now 5 days into a very messy public airing of laundry... how are they going to align an AI?
At least they are trying. A (very sore) rogue CEO is out, the non-profit apparently stays true to its mission.
They've effectively lost 95% of their staff in the most likely outcome here. The game is already over.