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OpenAI and Elon Musk

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Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#861

Post by qarl »

layer8 wrote: post #842
qarl wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. But it seems like everyone agreed that they'd need a lot of money to train an AGI.

Sure, maybe. (Personally I think that’s a mere conjecture, trying to throw more compute at the wall.) But obtaining that money by orienting their R&D towards a profit-driven business goes against the whole stated purpose of the enterprise. And that’s what’s being called out.

Well, I don't think it's a maybe. From the emails it seems clear that even Elon thought the project would flop without a ton of money.

It seems pretty clear that they felt they had to choose between chasing money and shutting down. I'm guessing you'd prefer they went with the latter, but I can entirely understand why they didn't.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#862

Post by pama »

boringg wrote: post #703
pama wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how expecting a financial return is in conflict with the original mission statement. Of course the employees expect a financial return.

If you advertise your company as a wholesome benevolent not-for-profit and generate a lot of goodwill for your human enhancing mission and then pull a bait and switch to what looks to be a profit/power motive at all costs. It certainly makes most people who are following the organization sour on your mission and your reputation. Typically when organizations do something like that it speaks to some considerable underl…

I don’t see any changes to the core mission of OpenAI between its founding and now. Maybe some people misinterpret what a nonprofit vs for-profit company status means and confuse the former with other types of organizations like academia or charity. For example, no early founder or investor in a nonprofit can expect to make money simply out of their investment, and I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary for OpenAI. Any profits that a nonprofit makes, even those through ownership of the for-profit entity, must go back to the initial cause, and may include paying employees. Salaries in AI are high these days so if you want to stay on top you have to keep them higher than competition. In any case, I think this thread was not as productive as I hoped.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#863

Post by qarl »

deepsun wrote: post #726
qarl wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You can say that about any initiative: "to achieve X they need more money". But that's not necessarily true.

But it does seem to be true in this case.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#864

Post by shafyy »

tcgv wrote: post #595

This post is a lame PR stunt, which will only add fuel to the fire. It tries to portray openAI as this great bennefactor and custodian of virtue: > “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...” > I've seen you (and Sam and other OpenAI people) d…

A bunch of rich people who are all full of shit pissing on each other. Nothing to see here, keep scrolling.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#865

Post by shafyy »

mordymoop wrote: post #746
chaorace wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really depressing thing is that the board anticipated exactly this type of outcome when they were going "capped profit" and deliberately restructured the company with the specific goal of preventing this from happening... yet here we are. It's difficult to walk away without concluding that "profit secondary" companies are fundamentally incompatible with VC funding. Would that be a pessimistic take? Are there bett…

I think the fact that a number of top people were willing to actually leave OpenAI and found Anthropic explicitly because OpenAI had abandoned their safety focus essentially proves that this wasn’t a thing that had to happen. If different leaders had been in place things could have gone differently.

My sweet summer child. Do you really belive this Anthropic story and that Anthropic will go any other way? Under late-stage capitalism, there is no other way. Everyone has ideals until they see a big bag of money in front of them. It doesn't matter if the company is a non-profit, for-profit or whatever else.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#866

Post by woopsn »

davej wrote: post #479
LatticeAnimal wrote: post #18

> 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 (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes). That is surprisingly greedy & selfish to be boasting about in their own…

I think you're misreading the intention here. The intention of closing it up as they approach AGI is to protect against dangerous applications of the technology. That is how I read it anyway and I don't see a reason to interpret it in a nefarious way.

Many people consider what OpenAI is building to be the dangerous application. They don't seem nefarious to me per se, just full of hubris, and somewhat clueless about the consequences of Altman's relationship with Microsoft. That's all it takes though. The board had these concerns and now they're gone.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#867

Post by jrflowers »

paulddraper wrote: post #684
jrflowers wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are clearly saying that the word “Open” in their name means nothing. Similarly Micro soft makes incredibly large software and my letters about this have gone unanswered

Microsoft made software for small computers (PCs) not diminutive software

But my PC is enormous compared to my watch

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#868

Post by edgyquant »

qarl wrote: post #839
polygamous_bat wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great way to be transparent would be to admit that some enormous egos prevented work that should be open from being open, and counterfactually opening them up. Sure, it may piss off microsoft, but statistically things that piss off microsoft also has been great for the world at large. But that will never happen, will it?

I thought it was the fact that they needed a lot of money to train AGI. Everyone seems to agree that's the case. Do you have evidence that it's not?

What does “train AGI” even mean dude

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#870

Post by advael »

gandutraveler wrote: post #526
advael wrote: post #113

Like most airing out of drama, this doesn't really materially change anything aside from making everyone involved look extremely bad But also, all entities involved looked bad already to observers who weren't so deeply rooting for them already that nothing would change their minds, so this is basically tabloid fodder drama in terms of importance as far as I can tell

Agree. But this showed Elon to be a much worse cry baby.

Like I said before this seems par for the course for him
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