OpenAI and Elon Musk • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#671

Post by mlrtime » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:27 PM UTC

boredtofears wrote: post #655

mlrtime wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer Slack over email... coming from using Outlook for 20+ years in a corporate environment, slack is light years beyond email in rich communication. I'm trying to think of 1 single thing email does better than slack in a corporate communication. Is slack perfect? Absolutely not. I don't care that I can't use any client I want or any back end administration costs or hurdles. As a user, there is no comparison.

I can think of a few: - Long form discussion where people think before responding. - Greater ability to filter/tag/prioritize incoming messages. - Responses are usually expected within hours, not minutes. - Email does not have a status indicator that broadcasts whether I am sitting at my desk at that particular moment to every coworker at my company.

1 & 2 are human behaviors, not a technology. You can argue that a tech promotes a behavior but this sounds like a boundaries issue, not a tech issue.

#2 I agree with you, again Slack is not perfect but better than email [my opinion]

#4 Slack has status updates, email does not. So you can choose to turn this off, again boundaries.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#672

Post by SpaceManNabs » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:28 PM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #273

> we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI This has to be a joke, right? I'd like to think Altman paused for a second and chuckled to himself after writing - or reading - that.

This whole post makes OpenAI look like a clown show.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#673

Post by boringg » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:28 PM UTC

hackerlight wrote: post #183

boringg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kicked off the board? Thats news to me.

> In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding. Reid Hoffman bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations. I misspoke. He may have just resigned from the board when he didn't get what he wanted.

Indeed he did resign - which is a significant difference.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#674

Post by edgyquant » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:29 PM UTC

qarl wrote: post #599

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like one of the steps leading to the fulfilment of the iron law of bureaucracy. They are putting the company ahead of the goals of the company. "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy…

> They are putting the company ahead of the goals of the company. I don't follow your reasoning. The goal of the company is AGI. To achieve AGI, they needed more money. What about that says the company comes before the goals?

That may be the goal now as they ride the hype train around “AGI” for marketing purposes. When it was founded the goal was stated as ensuring no single corp controls AI and that it’s open for everyone. They’ve basically done a 180 on the original goal, seemingly existing only to benefit Microsoft, and changing what your goal is to AGI doesn’t disprove that.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#675

Post by hiatus » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:30 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #575

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…

Nah, the harm from these LLMs are mostly in how freely accessible they are. Just pay OpenAI a relatively tiny fee and you can generate tonnes of plausible spam designed to promote your product or service or trick people into giving you money. That's the primary problem we're facing right now. The problem is... keeping them closed source isn't helping with that problem, it only serves to guarantee OpenAI a cut of the…

> Just pay OpenAI a relatively tiny fee and you can generate tonnes of plausible spam designed to promote your product or service or trick people into giving you money. That's the primary problem we're facing right now.

Is content generation really the thing holding spammers back? I haven't seen a huge influx of more realistic spam so I wonder your basis for this statement.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#676

Post by nibab » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

the email evidence confirms that infrastructure is one of the strongest moats in this space. From Elon:

"Not only that, but any algorithmic advances published in a paper somewhere can be almost immediately re-implemented and incorporated. Conversely, algorithmic advances alone are inert without the scale to also make them scary."

This is reinforced by the fact that infrastructure / training details are much more sparse in papers than algorithmic adjustments.

It's all about 1. researchers (capable of navigating the maze and carefully chosing what to adopt from the research space) 2. clean data 3. infrastructure

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#677

Post by amarant » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:34 PM UTC

friendzis wrote: post #548

amarant wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace "AI" in your comment with "human journalists" and it still holds largely true though. It's not like AI invented clickbait, though it might have mastered the art of it. The convincing bullshit problem does not stem from AI, I'd argue it stems from the interaction between ad revenue and SEO and the weird and unexpected incentives created in when mixing those 2. To put it differently, the problem isn't that AI w…

> I'd argue it stems from the interaction between ad revenue and SEO and the weird and unexpected incentives created in when mixing those 2. Personally, I highly dislike this handwaving of SEO. SEO is not some sinister agenda following secret cult trying to disseminate bullshit. SEO is just... following the rules set forth by search engines, which for quite a long time is effectively singlehandedly Google. Those "wei…

It's a classic case of "once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric"

To clarify, Google defines the metrics by which pages are ranked in their search results, and since everyone want to be at the top of Google's search results, those metrics immediately become targets for everyone else.

It's quite clear to me that the metrics Google have introduced over the year have been meant to improve the quality of the results on their search. It's also clear to me that they have, in actual fact, had the exact opposite effect, namely that recipes are now prepended with a poorly written novella about that one time the author had a emotionally fulfilling dinner with love ones one autumn, in order to increase time spent on the page, since Google at one point quite reasonably thought that pages where visitors stay longer are of higher quality, otherwise why did visitors stay so long?

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#678

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #590

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…

This looks like one of the steps leading to the fulfilment of the iron law of bureaucracy. They are putting the company ahead of the goals of the company. "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#679

Post by throw4847285 » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:36 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #375

danans wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The US became a superpower long before WW2. The US was the deciding factor in WW1, and the Germans were shocked at how well-fed and well-equipped the US soldiers were, even with having to ship everything across the ocean. The US saw the most spectacular rise in the standard of living from 1800 up to WW2 the world had ever seen. This was all due to the free market, not collectivism. During WW2, the US supplied its all…

There are other free market economies. And America reached the apex of its power under the New Deal and during wartime, when the "free market" was carefully constrained to meet the needs of the state.

It's funny to watch people try and analyze what made the US the world's dominant global empire when in reality it was a series of complex and contingent factors that can't be replicated because they could have only occurred in their exact historical circumstances.

For example, other countries have tried to replicate American dairying culture, buying into the propaganda put out by the dairy industry that milk drinking is the secret to America's success. So China started up loads of American-style dairies to provide drinking milk for a population... without the gene for lactase persistence.

That's what the free market talk feels like to me. America is at the top and that can't be replicated. There's only room for one at the top. When it collapses, we'll see what circumstances lead to the next great empire. It might be collectivism!

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#680

Post by iteygib » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 2:40 PM UTC

This is the usual Musk play book. He is a salesman, not a tech guru, and plays the "good guy card" when it suits him in order to fool his followers en masse. A few months ago this forum was very much for the profit model of Altman after his ouster, and now it's the other way around.

Why believe any sort of discussion on the internet at all anymore? Can hackernews prove the discussions here are not by Tesla staff? By OpenAI staff? By bots? By AI responses? There is a saturation point being hit by the credibility and reliability of this medium we call the internet. This was obviously always the case to some degree, but the profit model of most businesses now are built on the backbones of social media hype, all of which is completely, and easily, falsifiable, more than ever before.