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OpenAI and Elon Musk

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Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The comments in this thread alone would indicate the the crowd is pretty split even after this blog post

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I _voluntarily_ decide to join a "collective", am I individualist or collectivist? An individualist, if you are free to leave it at any time. There's nothing wrong with forming a collective in the US, I think like 20,000 of them have been formed over the last 240 years. You don't hear about them much because they all failed. You're free to start a collective anytime in the US and try to make it work. Isn't freed…

Sorry, that question was purely rhetorical. That divide between individual and collective as stated above was very sketchy, and I merely wanted to indicate that. If one take the strict definition of individualist and collective from a dictionary (well, which one, to begin with?), of course they are opposite, just looking at the idea conveyed by the word radicals (ie individualist -> individual, vs collective). As alw…

The whole point this thread seems to be missing is the collectivist vs individualist debate that this relates to is about how society is governed. People assembling to address their needs/wants collectively might be collectivist in the broad sense, but it requires individualist governance framework to exist, because under a collective governance framework such freedom of association would not be permitted.

Just like how a large company is essentially governed in the same way as a planned economy is, but nobody’s under the impression that JPMorgan is a socialist institution.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#553
Is there some executive summary of this? I find it hard to wade through the waffling and while I appreciate citing sources by pasting e-mails verbatim this doesn't exactly make the statement easier to follow. It sounds like they're damning Elon with faint praise?

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#554

Aren't there tax implications in this whole scheme? Shouldn't they have to pay taxes retroactively from the day they were founded as a non-profit? Shouldn't the donations be taxed?

Non profits are allowed to own fornprofits. Mozilla Foundation owns Mozilla Corp which brings in tons of money for years.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#555
From: Elon Musk

To: Ilya Sutskever

The most promising option I can think of, as I mentioned earlier, would be for OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow. I believe attachments to other large suspects (e.g. Apple? Amazon?) would fail due to an incompatible company DNA. Using a rocket analogy, Tesla already built the “first stage” of the rocket with the whole supply chain of Model 3 and its onboard computer and a persistent internet connection. The “second stage” would be a full self driving solution based on large-scale neural network training, which OpenAI expertise could significantly help accelerate. With a functioning full self-driving solution in ~2-3 years we could sell a lot of cars/trucks. If we do this really well, the transportation industry is large enough that we could increase Tesla's market cap to high O(~100K), and use that revenue to fund the AI work at the appropriate scale.

Surprise.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't refute that they did betray it They do. They say: > Elon understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI. As Ilya told Elon: “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science...” Whether you agree with this is a different matter but…

So.. "open" means "open at first, then not so much or not at all as we get closer to achieving AGI"? As they become more successful, they (obviously) have a lot of motivation to not be "open" at all, and that's without even considering the so-called ethical arguments. More generally, putting "open" in any name frequently ends up as a cheap marketing gimmick. If you end up going nowhere it doesn't matter, and if you'r…

OpenAI is literally not a word in the dictionary.

It’s a made up word.

So the Open in OpenAI means whatever OpenAI wants it to mean.

It’s a trademarked word.

The fact that Elon is suing them for their name when the guy has a feature “AutoPilot” which is not a made up word and had an actual well understood meaning which totally does not apply to how Tesla uses AutoPilot is hilarious.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#557
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…

> here they explain why they had to betray their core mission. But they don't refute that they did betray it. you are assuming that their core mission is to "Build an AGI that can help humanity for free and as a non-profit", the way their thinking seems to be is "Build an AGI that can help humanity for free" they figured it was impossible to achieve their core mission by doing it in a non-profit way, so they went wit…

There is no fixed point at which you can say it achieves AGI (artificial general intelligence) it's a spectrum. Who decides when they've reached that point as they can always go further.

If this is the case, then they should be more open with their older models such as 3.5, I'm very sure industry insiders actually building these already know the fundamentals of how it works.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but China is already honestly more careful than America: the CCP really doesn't want competitors to power. They're very open to slowdown agreements. And NK, Iran and Russia honestly have nothing. The day we have to worry about NK ASI takeoff, it'll already long have happened in some American basement. So we just need active monitoring for US/EU data centers. That's a big ask to be sure, and definitely an invasi…

> Sure, but China is already honestly more careful than America: the CCP really doesn't want competitors to power. They're very open to slowdown agreements. Don't be naive. If the PRC can get America/etc to agree to slowdowns then the PRC can privately ignore those agreements and take the lead. Agreements like that are worse than meaningless when there's no reliable and trustworthy auditing to keep people honest. Do…

I do think the PRC has shown no indication of even wanting to pursue superintelligence takeoff, and has publically spoken against it on danger grounds. America and American companies are the only ones saying that this cannot be stopped because "everybody else" would pursue it anyway.

The CCP does not want a superintelligence, because a superintelligence would at best take away political control from the party.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#559
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

At one time their mission statement said: > OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. That's obviously changed to "let's make lots of…

I still do not see the point that you are trying to make. Do you think that their current path is somehow constrained (instead of unconstrained) by a need to generate financial returns? I haven’t seen any evidence of a change to the core mission described in the statement.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there’s no advancements in alignment before takeoff, is there really any remote hope of doing anything? You’d need to legally halt ai progress everywhere in the world and carefully monitor large compute clusters or someone could still do it. Honestly I think we should put tons of money into the control problem, but otherwise just gamble it.

Funnily enough, I’m currently reading the 1995 Sci-fi novel "The Star Fraction", where exactly this scenario exists. On the ground, it’s Stasis, a paramilitary force that intercedes when certain forbidden technologies (including AI) are developed. In space, there’s the Space Faction who are ready to cripple all infrastructure on earth (by death lasering everything from orbit) if they discover the appearance of AGI. […

Also to some extent Singularity Sky. "You shall not violate causality within my historic lightcone. Or else." Of course, in that story it's a question of monopolization.
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