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OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

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Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

#121

Slightly off-topic, but it's absolutely shocking to me how quickly OpenAI has managed to do a meteoric PR nosedive. I think within 6 months they've gone from one of the most exciting (yet controversial) non-profits in the world to mistrusted company that it seems most people are rooting against.

Sam Altman. There was an attempted fix and that fix failed. Evil prevailed because of public misunderstanding and mob mentality. Be real, who else would permit this? Paul Graham fired him from ycombinator. I'm pretty sure if the public didn't support Sam he wouldn't have been reinstated.

I think they failed due to not having the courage to admit why they removed Altman.

Their messaging was extremely weak and uncertain, a complete failure to communicate anything of value, until everyone was rallying against them.

Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

#122
post #94

The future of warfare is AI powered drones, zero doubt in my mind. Imagine the micro from Starcraft Go on a real life drone with a gun and bombs.

Imagine once they hallucinate and attack friendlies. Although if Machine Vision counts as AI then it's already widespread.

I imagine you point it at a location where only enemies are.

Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally welcome cooperation with the Pentagon for OpenAI and other American companies. The disdain that seems to infest so many when it comes to working with our national defense organizations is both annoying and bewilderingly naive and that's even when we take into consideration all of the bad things that happen. Strengthening partnerships with our government certainly doesn't make me mistrust OpenAI.

They have aligned themselves with he people you should exactly NOT trust. Corporations and governments.

So... pretty much everyone who matters in our current system.

Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

#124

I was brought up in a household that was anti military. Only as an adult was I able to form my own opinion. Without a strong military in the past we would certainly not be here today and without a strong military now, who knows what other nation might decide to attack our sovereignty. It's childish to be anti military - it shows you do not understand the interconnectedness of our society - good and bad.

This is a complex topic: I’m a firm believer that Pax Americana has been good for the world as a whole, but there are also no shortage of terrible crimes, and no small number of people who are worse off (including many members of the military itself).

I don’t believe it’s “childish” to have serious concerns about the military.

Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

#125
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But you're delusional if you think some alternative power would have been gentler. You're saying that people who don't agree with a non-falsifiable claim about hypothetical alternatives are delusional. That suggests a closed system of thought which has left behind empiricism and must now be considered metaphysical. I'm a plain materialist so I can't go any further with any statements that assert definite knowledge o…

It feels like you understand where he was going with his comment and are deliberately misconstruing it to have something to reply to? As much as I do not enjoy the US doing all these things, I think it’s fair to say that they’re maybe the most benevolent? I don’t think China historically has a great track record when it comes to military intervention, but they also mostly leave people alone. The US seems to always go…

A more sophisticated thinker would ask questions like "from which people's perspective?" and "at what point in time?"

These questions would give you access to critical insights, one of them is that it's never persuasive to take a rough estimate of hypothetical aggregate good and bad and then attempt to weigh it using one's personal intuitions at present to derive a universal claim.

Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.

People whose countries need the US as an ally to protect them from an aggressive regional power and/or currently experience economic prosperity and political stability within a democratic government because of the US will tend to have a positive view of the US as an empire.

Telling a Guatemalan whose entire family was massacred by US-trained death squads in the Guatemalan civil war that you've done the math from a god's eye view and the US is the best possible hegemon in aggregate is unpersuasive, bordering on absurd.

It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.

If you can't understand that the second example and the first are equally absurd, you are wearing ideological blinkers that make it hard for people outside the US to take you seriously.

Attributing malice to other empires but "good intentions gone awry" to your own is a fundamental attribution error, and one you should be wary of to avoid unpleasant surprises in foreign policy outcomes.

Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

#126

Slightly off-topic, but it's absolutely shocking to me how quickly OpenAI has managed to do a meteoric PR nosedive. I think within 6 months they've gone from one of the most exciting (yet controversial) non-profits in the world to mistrusted company that it seems most people are rooting against.

I personally welcome cooperation with the Pentagon for OpenAI and other American companies. The disdain that seems to infest so many when it comes to working with our national defense organizations is both annoying and bewilderingly naive and that's even when we take into consideration all of the bad things that happen. Strengthening partnerships with our government certainly doesn't make me mistrust OpenAI.

Say that again when they use AI to spy on you even more than they already do

Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

#127

> "Fire!" > "I'm unable to help, as I am only a language model and don't have the ability to process and understand that."

Having seen ChatGPT's results when you ask it to solve an ethical puzzle and substitute in various demographics to see how its answer varies (viz. with extreme bias), I'm far more concerned about how its fundamental bias will be woven into systems that develop weapons of war and provide intelligence.

Fundamental bias against the demographics it’s currently biased against seems to be exactly what American military wants. The foundational models are trained on mountains of propaganda and propaganda-inspired content against America’s enemies after all, much more than the other direction.

Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

#128
They haven't changed their principles page yet: https://openai.com/safety-standards

``` Minimize harm We will build safety into our AI tools where possible, and work hard to aggressively reduce harms posed by the misuse or abuse of our AI tools. ```

And I think they can still do that. If they corner every big usecase while they are the top ai models - they get to set the standard and define safety for all upcoming ai use cases.

At this point, the ai genie is fully out of the bag. If not openai, it would have been some other company...

Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

#129

I was brought up in a household that was anti military. Only as an adult was I able to form my own opinion. Without a strong military in the past we would certainly not be here today and without a strong military now, who knows what other nation might decide to attack our sovereignty. It's childish to be anti military - it shows you do not understand the interconnectedness of our society - good and bad.

I could make literally the opposite argument.

Other countries antagonize the US because of its military interventionism. If the US had lower military spending, other countries wouldn't feel the need to be aggressive.

It's childish to be pro military. It shows you think arbitrary lines on a map determine who's good or bad.

Re: OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon

#130

Slightly off-topic, but it's absolutely shocking to me how quickly OpenAI has managed to do a meteoric PR nosedive. I think within 6 months they've gone from one of the most exciting (yet controversial) non-profits in the world to mistrusted company that it seems most people are rooting against.

I personally welcome cooperation with the Pentagon for OpenAI and other American companies. The disdain that seems to infest so many when it comes to working with our national defense organizations is both annoying and bewilderingly naive and that's even when we take into consideration all of the bad things that happen. Strengthening partnerships with our government certainly doesn't make me mistrust OpenAI.

Yeah I understand skepticism over the USE of our military, but being categorically against our military having expanded military capabilities is just intentionally weakening ourselves. It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong.

I can only surmise that Silicon Valley has a sizeable contingent raised by hippie Vietnam protestors that produced a generational vibe of "military bad".

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