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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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 generat…

We only directly applied napalm to the skin of a couple thousand children, what are those stinky hippies still whining about? They saw the USS Maddox get attacked twice while performing peaceful maneuvers in our own backyard, the Gulf of Tonkin! We only dropped 21,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange, it hardly causes birth defects any more, only a few hundred writhing harlequin babies a year at this point, what exactly i…

Take it up with Nixon. And the fuckers who voted for him who had no problem with the above.

The military is a gun. It shoots what the President wants dead. In that case, it was Cambodia.

You really don’t want a USA where the military decides it doesn’t want to listen to civilian government anymore.

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

#362
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 generat…

> It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong TBF if the US military don't have modern rifles/equipments they will certainly not invade Iraq. So yes, having significantly better weapons does increase the chance of war because it increase your chance of winning (thus make it more politically feasible for politicians to push for it).

I don’t think President Cheney gave a damn about the survivability of the forces in his game playing.

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

#363

The second OpenAI stopped being a not for profit it opened itself up to the highest bidder namely the military industrial complex ... this danger motivated it's corporate structure which explicitly detailed it did not wish to be a pawn of big corporations so sad

It just shows the ‘not for profit’ was just a ploy to sound cool. Really, it should have been ‘only for profit’.

More like, "more than profit".

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

#364
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's maybe also that US population tends to underestimate how other people are smart (US-centrism really does exist). Chinese people are very smart, and there is technically more of them, so I am not surprised that they are releasing amazing open models. China has no problems to push their own models for free, and this is a real strategic advantage. These models are aligned with Chinese values, but well, American mod…

> It's maybe also that US population tends to underestimate how other people are smart (US-centrism really does exist). They do. > Chinese people are very smart, and there is technically more of them, so I am not surprised that they are releasing amazing open models. They also have an educational system that wastes less talent and have fewer - if any - roadblocks to the will of the party bosses. In a war a dictatorsh…

The biggest problem won’t be AGI. It will be the thousands of shitty AI and ML models which predict things with 99.9% accuracy, meaning people (read judges etc) assume it’s 100% accurate regardless of how often it gets used.

Look at the Postmaster General scandal in the UK. Now imagine that in all systems, because AI in inherently statistical in nature.

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

#365
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, history is certainly written by the victors eh? The military is a tool used to maintain the empire of an unsustainable culture of consumption. This military is KILLING people in Yemen (a country with which the US is NOT at war) because they are delaying shipments of stuff. Stuff getting from a to b on time and for cheap is worth more than human life. Go live as a civilian in a country that our military has deci…

Reminder that the US drone strike a wedding in Yemen back in 2013, https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral...

It’s despicable but man the CIA is tasked with one job: kill all the terrorists leaders. We support that mission with who we elect to government.

When all those leaders gather in one place how can our angry pitbull not froth at the mouth? Not saying it’s ethical, just that it’s purely rational.

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To counter this polemic comment with a more serious one: the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks was a central watershed moment in history that lead to a massive shift in the public opinion concerning the US military politics in many countries (and has stayed quite critical of it since then) - including lots of allies of the USA.

> To counter this polemic comment with a more serious one: the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks was a central watershed moment in history that lead to a massive shift in the public opinion concerning the US military politics in many countries (and has stayed quite critical of it since then) - including lots of allies of the USA. Nice try, but no. Iraq was bullshit, and even we protested it ours…

Indeed. Iraq was a case of the nation being conned by evil men (Cheney and Rumsfeld). We tried our DAMNDEST to prevent that war. Biggest protests in America ever. Did nothing.

Europe is now in its second, third? year of seeing what life without Uncle Sam would be like. Peaceful Lithuanian and Polish villages filled with the corpses of raped girls.

The military is important and software engineers need to read more of the news from the last 2 years in detail to understand that we’re still the good guys.

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

#367
post #289

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.

I think the Pentagon cooperation with Boeing is the real cause of Boeing's rot, so this is a partnership that is bad for openAI's engineering and science over a longer term. The incentives switch from making good and useful stuff to getting more military contracts

I think that's just another symptom. My theory is that Boeing is another engineering company that was overtook by MBAs.

10+ years ago I was working for a company acquired by Boeing (Jeppesen) and it was already a massive shitshow. Cost cutting everywhere but weirdly enough there were always money for some dumb initiative some highly placed and connected VP/Director had. None of those in my opinion led to an improvement in products, working efficiency, or any meaningful metric.

Sorry for being salty. Nowadays I feel I am going through the same st my current company and so this hits closer than I like.

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

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has a fascist running for president right now(who was previously elected!). There is every reason to be worried about new tech adoption by the US military.

Good point. I’d be careful even writing that, because that same potentially future president might do some Xi Jinping on you with the help of OpenAI - some psychological profiling to find the people who are a threat to his mental model. You just never know… but if he could do that, you can be damn sure he would. Which means if it’s not him that does it, it is just a matter of time before the next reality TV, possibly…

He was elected in 2016 thanks to such online psychological profiling tools (CA).

The PATRIOT act will make it unstoppable. You all have already put enough online to deserve to be purged (murdered) in the eyes of some 2025 Cultural Revolutionary Red Guards.

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

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Propaganda. DoD already uses hollywood for propaganda: say nice things about Uncle Sam, let America save the day once again, and Uncle Sam will let you play with his toys. Now they have access to tool that can write very smart comments. If you think propagandists will not use SoTA LLM for propaganda, either you are fool or they are(They probably did it already anyway). General writing. Want to implement a new rule? A…

A lot of these look like very big stretches. Most of the things you've listed are either already being done by humans or is something that an LLM simply can't improve upon. Even if you had the best writers and most complex AI in the world, you can't really sugarcoat a gas chamber past a certain point. Fake writings and fake imagery are already easily created by humans, but as far as I know, it's not practiced widely…

> And I have no idea how any of the "all IPs from Russia" or "scan everything on the internet" could even work.

XKEYSCORE[1] probes were already a thing in ~2010. It just needs a LLM integration and additional search capabilities.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore

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

#370
post #289

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.

I think the Pentagon cooperation with Boeing is the real cause of Boeing's rot, so this is a partnership that is bad for openAI's engineering and science over a longer term. The incentives switch from making good and useful stuff to getting more military contracts

Boeing has been making military aircraft since 1917.
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