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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

#451

Post by margalabargala »

scottLobster wrote: post #130
ericmay wrote: post #117

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.

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…

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

You really think that's the only and most likely explanation?

This criticism is coming from the people being asked to make the weapons. Just because one isn't against the military having expanded capabilities, doesn't mean that one wants to spend their time creating things used to kill people.

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

#453

Post by jacquesm »

sershe wrote: post #441
jacquesm wrote: post #204

Utterly predictable. AI will be weaponized and anybody working on it is going to have to live with that knowledge. Consider yourselves part of the MIC from now on, no more bs about doing this for the betterment of humanity. And to add to that: once any party figures out how to do this it is a matter of time before the rest does too, there is no such thing as a secret. The atomic bomb leaked and so will the recipe for…

As an immigrant to the USA I'd be really happy to work for MIC without leaving the tech industry (I'm too selfish to accept lower salary + move to the East Coast + deal with, presumably, a huge bureaucracy). Atomic bomb still hasn't leaked beyond ~10% of the countries and many had to do it ~from scratch, so it's not a very good example. The choice with AI is either make one, or wait for it to leak from those who do a…

> Atomic bomb still hasn't leaked beyond ~10% of the countries and many had to do it ~from scratch, so it's not a very good example.

On the contrary, it's a fantastic example because we've been living under the shadow of them ever since they were invented. And long term the chances of them being used again is 100%.

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

#454

Post by nojvek »

China and Russia knows US will use AI for autonomous weapons. If they don't have it, they'll be left behind. Adapt or wither away.

Before it was the nuclear cold war. This time, it is the AI cold war.

I don't trust Sam Altman or what Open AI says. The employees are in it for the money. The non-profit is a joke.

It's usual corporations do what corporations have always been doing.

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

#455

Post by nuclearsugar »

hahnchen wrote: 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

But in reality it's more subtle than that. Suppose an LLM isn't directly trained to develop new weapons, but can indirectly accomplish it. This collaboration opens that door.

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

#456

Post by pastacacioepepe »

walthamstow wrote: post #440
pastacacioepepe wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asian men didn't have it good. The Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, still have unexploded USA bombs on their territories. African and South American men didn't either. It seems nuclear weapons only allowed one side of the world to bully the rest.

First your point was about Ukraine, now you're on US atrocities Latin America and SE Asia. Yeah, the US did that. I don't think they needed nuclear weapons to do it. I don't know what point you're trying to make.

That the world hasn't enjoyed peace at all. The West just relocated its wars somewhere else.

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

#457

Post by lumost »

maxglute wrote: post #434
lumost wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For dual-use tech, its relatively common to have a small "government" division alongside the much larger commercial division. If the only difference for government is fine tuning data/DoD servers - it shouldn't cost OpenAI much to support.

People are escalating AI to strategic/end of world tier of dual use tech. Questionable if it will be treated the same way. OpenAI is not lockheed, but question is how much they value Pentagon contracts or really gov connections especially with all the regulation talk.

There will certainly be DARPA and other grants to test if dedicated defense suppliers make sense. In some areas, the funding model may be easier as a pure defense initiative where the DoD could shell out 50-100 Billion for cross-service AI functionality.

In theory there is no reason why an individual soldier shouldn't be able to order an air strike, or be informed about inbound strikes on their position and how to react to those. Today, this is not possible due to the complex decisioning process for whether a target is worth a strike by X munition vs. Y munition and when. AI could simplify this process.

On the other hand, well funded open source and commercial companies may deliver faster and with higher quality. The DoD doesn't use bespoke databases, and microchips for a reason (except when they do).

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

#458

Post by fulladder »

Trapais wrote: post #324
tavavex wrote: post #254

I'm confused - what exactly does the Pentagon have to gain from OpenAI's products? Their front-runners are an LLM and an image generator, and I'm not sure what large-scale use case the US Department of Defense can have for either of these.

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…

You're misunderstanding the AI use cases. Take propaganda, for instance. A human expert can craft much better flat earth propaganda posts than any AI can. The difference is that a human expert cannot engage in 10 million simultaneous relationships with Twitters humans, sustained for several years, in which is it periodically but very subtly suggested or implied that the Earth is actually flat. From the point of view of the human being targeted with this, what they're going to experience is that they have a bunch of online friendships that are actually fulfilling and rewarding, and over time they'll naturally come to adopt the values of their online friends (including on the specific subject of the shape of the Earth). And it cost so little to do this that you could just as easily have done it to tens or hundreds of millions of targets concurrently.

This is the type of scenario people are concerned about. I have my doubts about whether it would really work this cleanly, but I'm sure we'll be seeing people try to do this. They've probably already started.

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

#459

Post by sidcool »

Qiu_Zhanxuan wrote: post #425
d--b wrote: post #198

Ok so a few weeks ago, virtually every OpenAi employee signed a letter saying “reinstate Altman or I quit”. Is any OpenAi employee wanting to sign a “don’t use OpenAi for war or I quit”? Or was everyone in on betraying all OpenAi’s founding principles from the start?

Yes, they were mostly driven by money and ego.

Which of the two is worse?

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

#460

Post by sidcool »

d--b wrote: post #198

Ok so a few weeks ago, virtually every OpenAi employee signed a letter saying “reinstate Altman or I quit”. Is any OpenAi employee wanting to sign a “don’t use OpenAi for war or I quit”? Or was everyone in on betraying all OpenAi’s founding principles from the start?

VCs like unprincipled and money minting founders more than ethical and broke ones.
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