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Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

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Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#951

Post by Kaytaro »

NotMichaelBay wrote: post #904
r3trohack3r wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how people reach this sentiment. Humans strike me as being awesome, especially compared to other species. I feel like there is a general sentiment that nature has it figured out and that humans are disrupting nature. But I haven't been convinced that is true. Nature seems to be one big gladiatorial ring where everything is in a death match. Nature finds equilibrium through death, often massive amounts of…

I don't see how you can look at global warming, ocean acidification, falling biodiversity and other global trends and how little action is being done to slow these ill effects and not arrive at that sentiment. Yes, the world has scientists saying "hey, this is happening, maybe we should do something" but the lack of money into solutions shows the interest just isn't there. Being the smartest species on the planet isn…

Still better than any other species we know of and nature itself. Nature doesn't mind the Earth turning into a frozen wasteland, it's done it before. And it certainly doesn't care that we're rearranging some of its star stuff to power our cars.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#952

Post by tuppermd »

grogenaut wrote: post #873
nilkn wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What matters is how much personal work and money Adam put into Poe. It seems like he's been working on it full-time all year and has more or less pivoted to it away from Quora, which also faces an existential threat from OpenAI (and AI in general). Either way, Adam's conflict of interest is significant, and it's staggering he wasn't asked to resign from the board after launching a chatbot-based AI company.

Does openai exist without stack overflow or quora?

Don't you mean: Do Quora or Stack Overflow exist with OpenAI?

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#953

Post by everforward »

busterarm wrote: post #893
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defense and offense don’t seem easily separated when it comes to military technology.

We're in a really privileged position in human civilization where most of the species is far removed from the banal violence of nature. You're lucky if you only need weapons to defend yourself against predators. You're far less lucky if you need weapons to defend yourself because the neighboring mountain village's crops failed and their herds died. You're less lucky if you don't speak the same language as them and th…

Sure, but the point is that those same tools that you can use to fend off the neighboring village work equally well to invade the neighboring village for their prosperous farm land. You will not be the one that gets to decide how those tools are used.

There's a line of thought that having advanced weaponry inherently promotes its use, because who's going to stop you? How gung-ho do you think the US would have been about going to war in Iraq if it weren't for the billion dollar tanks and aircraft and bombs?

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#954

Post by PawgerZ »

busterarm wrote: post #894
komali2 wrote: post #892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to deter military action involving your country, contributing to its defense is probably the best thing that you can do. Given that Google is an American company, do you believe contributing to the American Department of "Defense" increases, or decreases, the amount of military action involving the USA? The American military isn't called "world police" for nothing, and just like the cops they're stickin…

We already have nation states and wannabe nation states that take shots at us when they feel like the opportunity is there, despite us being the dominant military around the world. As does France, who has been a leading military power for longer than we have. That's what having a funded and functional defense is all about -- making other entities not think that the opportunity is there. I think the planet has relativ…

"defense"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#955

Post by busterarm »

everforward wrote: post #953
busterarm wrote: post #893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in a really privileged position in human civilization where most of the species is far removed from the banal violence of nature. You're lucky if you only need weapons to defend yourself against predators. You're far less lucky if you need weapons to defend yourself because the neighboring mountain village's crops failed and their herds died. You're less lucky if you don't speak the same language as them and th…

Sure, but the point is that those same tools that you can use to fend off the neighboring village work equally well to invade the neighboring village for their prosperous farm land. You will not be the one that gets to decide how those tools are used. There's a line of thought that having advanced weaponry inherently promotes its use, because who's going to stop you? How gung-ho do you think the US would have been ab…

Just about any technology advancement ever has weapons potential. If you want to take that reasoning, just quiver in fear at home and not develop anything.

You have to be optimistic about humanity.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#956

Post by busterarm »

PawgerZ wrote: post #954
busterarm wrote: post #894

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have nation states and wannabe nation states that take shots at us when they feel like the opportunity is there, despite us being the dominant military around the world. As does France, who has been a leading military power for longer than we have. That's what having a funded and functional defense is all about -- making other entities not think that the opportunity is there. I think the planet has relativ…

"defense" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

You're proving my point. If we stopped working on our defense, somebody else would be doing this to us.

If your starting point of logic though is "America Bad" then your moralizing isn't about working at Google or not.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#957

Post by abakker »

nonethewiser wrote: post #885
abakker wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dude voted to fire Altman. He could have not done that. Actions have consequences.

At best he doesn’t have much integrity and caves to peer pressure. I would respect him more if he stood by his actions. Abandoning them just shows how frivolously his decision making was. Perhaps more info will come out that casts a different light, but as of now it seems obvious that he decided to vote to fire Altman for reasons that he’s not willing to clarify and which he abandoned as soon as he saw the overwhelmi…

Yeah, these votes were supposed to be what kept us safe from AI. The whole board was ill equipped to keep themselves neutral from their own business, let along protect humanity from the irresponsible outcomes of their models.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#958

Post by lovecg »

dontlaugh wrote: post #938
adventured wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's based on the false premise that there is a specific amount of wealth and that's it (which also requires fixed productivity, which is a crazy premise if one knows anything about the past several hundred years or has ever read a single history textbook). So in order for someone to be rich, they had to steal it from someone else. If you follow it to the logical conclusion, it's nothing more than repackaged original…

No, it’s based on the fact that workers (often poor) generate all wealth, yet they don’t get to keep it. In China they do get to keep more proportionally, as a class. That only happens because they form the ruling class.

And yet workers in those societies tend to end up poorer in the absolute sense. Funny how that works.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#959

Post by MauranKilom »

zucker42 wrote: post #834
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what the board did in this instance was completely idiotic, even if you assign nothing but "good intentions" to their motives (that is, they were really just concerned about the original OpenAI charter of developing "safe AI for all" and thought Sam was too focused on commercialization), and it would have been idiotic even if they had done it a long time ago. There are tons of "Safe AI" think tanks and orgs that…

The main mistake the board made was tactical, not philosophical. From the outside, it's seems likely that Altman was running OpenAI so as to maximize the value of the for-profit entity, rather than achieve the non-profit's goals, if only because that's what he's used to doing as a tech entrepreneur. Looking at OpenAI from the outside, can you honestly say that they are acting like a non-profit in the slightest? It's…

I mean, without overthinking it: If your company focuses on making money, you are likely to keep your job/salary. Ideally there are also other concerns affecting this choice (like not creating something that may or may not destroy humanity), but that is less tangible.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#960

Post by Aerbil313 »

busterarm wrote: post #955
everforward wrote: post #953

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the point is that those same tools that you can use to fend off the neighboring village work equally well to invade the neighboring village for their prosperous farm land. You will not be the one that gets to decide how those tools are used. There's a line of thought that having advanced weaponry inherently promotes its use, because who's going to stop you? How gung-ho do you think the US would have been ab…

Just about any technology advancement ever has weapons potential. If you want to take that reasoning, just quiver in fear at home and not develop anything. You have to be optimistic about humanity.

I disagree. All technological development changes human societies and imposes its rules upon them and rules over them, not the other way around. The combination of technology and human nature is an unstoppable deterministic force, one whose effects are so easily predicted when traced from… invention of cannons (?) in hindsight. No modern (organization-dependent) technology should have ever been developed. The people lived happier, more mentally healthy and more fulfilling lives despite living in worse material conditions and the lifespan isn’t that bad when you factor out child mortality anyway. Turns out human brain can (actually even designed to) easily deal with bad material conditions if it’s not messed up with thousand addictions, mouthbreathing, sedentary life and smartphones.

Saying this as an aspiring software engineer. I use NixOS, and rewrite things in Rust. It’s not some unga-bunga speaking.

Read some Ted Kaczynski.

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