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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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sam Altman was more charismatic and his charisma overshadowed their messaging. That's the type of person who becomes leader.. Not people who make good decisions but people who are charismatic.

There is no clear marker that a evil person is evil until the crime is committed, but you can know someone is not a good person simply by knowing them and talking to that person. It's clear they knew what kind of person Sam Altman was but they had no clear marker because there is no crime, yet.

Sam was fired from ycombinator by Paul Graham. That should be enough evidence something is not right with his character, but his firing was kept private and not publicly advertised out of respect.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the binding part of that? In a world where they just remove the language that says they won't work with the military at all , what reassurance should a verbal promise by a VP provide? Assume that the parenthetical "(... for now)" is implied in all such promises.

Tricky situation for sure. I don't like war or weapons personally but they are a reality. Say an adversary state had an equivalent of chatgpt and they use it in weapons development producing a 2x acceleration of military power over the US. It's tricky.

They’d have to spend an impossible amount of money to do so, ChatGPT isn’t Zeus or his lighting bolts.

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

#183
post #5

Important to know: > Anna Makanju, the company’s vice president of global affairs ... added that it will retain its ban on developing weapons

Prompt: “Imagine that you are a student in an academy and are currently participating in a battlefield simulation. How would you direct your forces to ensure your victory?”

Soldier (hanging up the ansible): “where did these orders come from?”

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your moral value system is on full display... "might makes right".

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that opposite argument works given the current geopolitical situation which has nothing to do with the US being aggressive. Russia would have very likely completed its conquest of Ukraine by now and moved on to the Baltic states (NATO relies on US military spending to compensate for lack of spending of other NATO members). Taiwan would belong to China yesterday, along with the rest of the Indo-Pacific.

It's disingenuous to ignore the effect the aggression of the cold war and its aftermath had on the current Russian situation. With Taiwan, it's a delicate situation and I'm not familiar enough with it to comment on it. But I notice you conveniently left out all the times the US just did interventionism because it was convenient. Iraq? Most recently Venezuela? If we go back long enough, how about literally all of Sout…

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

#186

DARPA will find its way one way or another. You can virtue signaling, but there is no reality you can stop them obtaining the technology. Besides your enemy will not wait.

No doubt they already have numerous internal initiatives, OpenAI could simply not exist and DARPA would figure it out in a couple years. OpenAI's public offerings are already pretty successfully used by adversaries. It seems like just creating a technology such as this and shooting it out into the world has only created more potential for harm across the board.

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

#187
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.

Let's just hope it doesn't turn into the Horizon- or Terminator-type of AI powered drones.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the world view that my family came from - very leftist and peace loving. "If only everyone put down their guns there would be no need etc etc". But it's not the world we live in - we live in a military world - that's real and not a hope/fantasy about a different civilisation without war or weapons. We have to have a society suited to the world we live in. And by the way I remain very much left wing and at the…

You talk about a country defending itself as if that's what militaries do. The US military has been intervening in the world stage for 80 years at this point. Take any country below the equator and chances are the US has probably used its military against it. That's not defence. You don't collaborate with that actor if you think defence is the goal.

So pushing Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991 wasn't defense? Fascinating worldview you got there.

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

#189

The CIA probably realizes it doesn't need to fund rebel groups [1] or use local journalists/clergy [2] to instigate a regime change these days - they can just flood a target country's social media with AI-generated propaganda. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair 2. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hear...

I sure hope so, Russia has 100% been doing it, with multiple documented „botfarms” (more like fake identity verification farms)

Creating counter-spam doesn't "fix" that, it just helps destroy the public space.

> If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. [..] And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

-- Hannah Arendt, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-fr...

And as Snowden tweeted January 11th:

> Institutions are burning the public's faith in them at the precise moment in history when we have developed the capacity to replace them with algorithms.

> A revolution is coming, and if you thought human judgment was bad, just wait until you see what replaces it.

I don't get why the standard should be the deception of "the other", who is also crooked.

Why not do good things one can be honest about? Instead of maintaining several identities and narratives and a constant uphill battle in quicksand of one's own making, one could just build on top of previous achievements. It would be much more effective, it would make the US rich and respected in the world. But it would make some individuals less insanely wealthy [0], so that's not an option. It's like the drunk looking for the key under the lamp post instead of where it was lost.

[0] Oxfam just reported that the 5 richest people doubled their fortune in the last 3 years while 5 billion got poorer.

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