Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI and Elon Musk

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 1001 posts

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#211

Post by pama »

mac-attack wrote: post #127
pama wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear people complain about the 'Open' a lot recently, but I'm not sure I understand this type of concern. Publications, for companies, are always PR and recruitment efforts (independent of profit or nonprofit status). I recall that OpenAI were very clear about their long term intentions and plans for how to proceed since at least February of 2019 when they announced GPT2 and withheld the code and weights for about…

With all due respect, they are not doing a sleight of hand while selling widgets... they are in the process of reshaping society in a way that may have never been achieved previously. Finding out that their initial motives were a facade doesn't portend well for their morality as they continue to gain power.

I still don’t understand why you think their initial motives were a facade. They have always been trying to get to AGI that will be useable by a large fraction of society. I am not sure this means they need to explain exactly how things work at every step along the way or to help competitors also develop AGI any more than Intel or Nvidia had to publish their tapeouts in order for people to buy their chips or for competitors to appear. If OpenAI instead built AI for the purpose of helping them solve an internal/whimsical project then that would not be “open” by any reasonable definition (and such efforts exist, possibly by ultra wealthy corporations but also by nations, including for defense purposes.)

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#212

Post by resonious »

barrell wrote: post #126
resonious wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah seems pretty cut and dry. It'd feel pretty bad to see OpenAI doing what they're doing now after saying things like "My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%."

I don’t think anything about this is cut and dry. You may have a strong opinion on the matter, but at the most charitable it’s people doing their best in a murky situation

I did say it seems cut and dry. It just looks a certain way. I know that things may not be as they seem. Elon's complaints about OpenAI pulling a profit make sense in isolation, but look very different in light of these emails. This blog post is a very good move in OpenAI's favor.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#213

Post by danans »

elif wrote: post #56
Reubend wrote: post #13

Their evidence does a nice job of making Musk seem duplicitous, but it doesn't really refute any of his core assertions: they still have the appearance of abandoning their core mission to focus more on profits, even if they've elaborated a decent justification of why that's necessary to do. Or to put it more simply: here they explain why they had to betray their core mission. But they don't refute that they did betra…

>they may be right that open sourcing AGI would lead to too much danger. I think this part is proving itself to be an understandable but false perspective. The hazard we are experiencing with LLM right now is not how freely accessible and powerfully truthy it's content is, but it is precisely the controls upon it which are trying to be injected by the large model operators which are generating mistrust and a poor und…

> I think there is far more societal harm in trying to codify unresolvable sets of ethics

Codification of an unresolvable set of ethics - however imperfect - is the only reason we have societies, however imperfect. It's been so since at least the dawn of agriculture, and probably even earlier than that.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#214

Post by gamblor956 »

the_optimist wrote: post #145
ipsum2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity."

1) They defied their original charter. 2) separately: Creating a for-profit entity is not what happened here. They transformed into a for-profit entity and discarded the non-profit mission. There is no vestige left of the original non-profit. Same funds, same code, same IP.

The for profit entity is owned by the non profit entity. This is permissible and a number of non profits operate this way.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#215

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #118
Reubend wrote: post #13

Their evidence does a nice job of making Musk seem duplicitous, but it doesn't really refute any of his core assertions: they still have the appearance of abandoning their core mission to focus more on profits, even if they've elaborated a decent justification of why that's necessary to do. Or to put it more simply: here they explain why they had to betray their core mission. But they don't refute that they did betra…

> To some extent, they may be right that open sourcing AGI would lead to too much danger. That's clearly self-serving claptrap. It's a leveraging of a false depiction of what AGI will look like (no ones really knows, but it's going to be scary and out of control!) with so much gatekeeping and subsequent cash they can hardly stop salivating. No strong AI (there is no evidence AGI is even possible) is not going to be a…

> there is no evidence AGI is even possible

Reading this is like hearing "there is no evidence that heavier-than-air flight is even possible" being spoken, by a bird. If 8 billion naturally-occuring intelligences don't qualify as evidence that AGI is possible, then is there anything that can qualify as evidence of anything else being possible?

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#216

Post by danans »

enriquec wrote: post #208
ajisiekskaiek wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are advocating here for an unresolvable set of ethics, which just happens to be one that conveniently leaves abuse of AI on the table. You take as an axiom of your ethical system the absolute right to create and propagate in public these AI technologies regardless of any externalities and social pressures created. It is of course an ethical system primarily and exclusively interested in advancing the individual a…

[flagged]

What has failed are completely "collectivist" or "individualist" societies.

Societies that balance the two (like the post WWII US) are the ones that have advanced their standard of living the most.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#217

Post by insane_dreamer »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #118
Reubend wrote: post #13

Their evidence does a nice job of making Musk seem duplicitous, but it doesn't really refute any of his core assertions: they still have the appearance of abandoning their core mission to focus more on profits, even if they've elaborated a decent justification of why that's necessary to do. Or to put it more simply: here they explain why they had to betray their core mission. But they don't refute that they did betra…

> To some extent, they may be right that open sourcing AGI would lead to too much danger. That's clearly self-serving claptrap. It's a leveraging of a false depiction of what AGI will look like (no ones really knows, but it's going to be scary and out of control!) with so much gatekeeping and subsequent cash they can hardly stop salivating. No strong AI (there is no evidence AGI is even possible) is not going to be a…

> No strong AI (there is no evidence AGI is even possible) is not going to be a menace. It's software FFS.

have you even watched Terminator? ;)

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#218

Post by trimethylpurine »

ajisiekskaiek wrote: post #159
ajisiekskaiek wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are advocating here for an unresolvable set of ethics, which just happens to be one that conveniently leaves abuse of AI on the table. You take as an axiom of your ethical system the absolute right to create and propagate in public these AI technologies regardless of any externalities and social pressures created. It is of course an ethical system primarily and exclusively interested in advancing the individual a…

I should also note that the wild west was not at all lacking in a set of ethics, and in many ways was far stricter than the east at the time.

I think the contrast is that strict behavior norms in the West are not governed behavior norms in the East.

One arises analogous with natural selection (previous commenter's take). The other through governance.

Arguably, the prior resulted in a rebuilding of government with liberty at its foundation (I like this result). That foundation then being, over centuries, again destroyed by governance.

In that view, we might say government assumes to know what's best and history often proves it to be wrong.

Observing a system so that we know what it is before we attempt to change it makes a lot of sense to me.

I don't think "AI" is anywhere near being dangerous at this point. Just offensive.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#219

Post by intended »

elif wrote: post #56
Reubend wrote: post #13

Their evidence does a nice job of making Musk seem duplicitous, but it doesn't really refute any of his core assertions: they still have the appearance of abandoning their core mission to focus more on profits, even if they've elaborated a decent justification of why that's necessary to do. Or to put it more simply: here they explain why they had to betray their core mission. But they don't refute that they did betra…

>they may be right that open sourcing AGI would lead to too much danger. I think this part is proving itself to be an understandable but false perspective. The hazard we are experiencing with LLM right now is not how freely accessible and powerfully truthy it's content is, but it is precisely the controls upon it which are trying to be injected by the large model operators which are generating mistrust and a poor und…

> but it is precisely the controls upon it which are trying to be injected by the large model operators which are generating mistrust and a poor understanding of what these models are useful for.

Citation needed.

Counterpoints: - LLMs were mistrusted well before anything recent.

- More controls make LLMs more trustworthy for many people, not less. The Snafu at Goog suggests a need for improved controls, not 0 controls.

- The American culture wars are not global. (They have their own culture wars).

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#220

Post by rrr_oh_man »

danans wrote: post #213
elif wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they may be right that open sourcing AGI would lead to too much danger. I think this part is proving itself to be an understandable but false perspective. The hazard we are experiencing with LLM right now is not how freely accessible and powerfully truthy it's content is, but it is precisely the controls upon it which are trying to be injected by the large model operators which are generating mistrust and a poor und…

> I think there is far more societal harm in trying to codify unresolvable sets of ethics Codification of an unresolvable set of ethics - however imperfect - is the only reason we have societies, however imperfect. It's been so since at least the dawn of agriculture, and probably even earlier than that.

Do you trust a for profit corporation with the codification?
Post reply on HN