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Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

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Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#301

Post by edanm »

robbie-c wrote: post #275
dheera wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you don't sign? If you leave a company on your own it's not like you're getting a severance anyway.

You lose all your vested equity, which for people who've been at OpenAI for a while would be the majority of their comp.

That can't actually be the way it works. You can't say "sign this or we *take away something you're already legally entitled to". It has to have been something people agreed to beforehand, to at least some extent.

In any case, Sama's tweet says he is cancelling this practice and anyone affected by it can contact him to get their equity back.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#302

Post by ilyagr »

doubloon wrote: post #210

i don't care what they say, i care what they do, and what they do is force employees to sign a "life time non criticism" document before leaving. that tells me everything i need to know about Open AIs concern for any kind of safety.

Discussed recently here, if you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40393121

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#303

Post by consumer451 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #260
consumer451 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having a society of mostly idle people that cost you money doesn’t really sound like a great or sustainable idea, nor does there seem to be any benefit to society. So what are we going to do with all of the excess humans once human productivity jumps one, two, or three more orders of magnitude?

We will cull them like we did when we invented the sewing machine and the loom... them luddites were right then and they can be again /s

I am half /s, half dead serious. The sarcastic half is me playing along with AGI singularity maximalists like Sama.

The other half is me dead scared that he is right. LLMs/GPTs != cryptocurrency. There are actual use cases other than money laundering. If you are paying attention, then the insane scaling in capabilities should have us all dumbfounded. I agree with Linus Torvalds: "just" predicting the next token is not an insult, that's mostly what we are all doing.

Human productivity/the global economy has been growing at an exponential rate[0] since the industrial revolution. In our lifetimes we have ridden the close-to-vertical part, and if GPTs continue to scale, then it will continue to near-vertical. This will be near-post-scarcity society. Capitalism will soon have become so successful that it will make itself obsolete. Are we ready for that, politically? Most of our ruling a-holes maintain power via scarcity, how will they react?

Culling might not be an action, just an apathy. The transition is going to suck as the poors now will also have taken advantage of that hockey stick of asymmetric warfare aka "productivity" via things like ML powered kill drones. This tech is happening now, in 2024-25, in Ukraine.

We are at a crossroads, more than when horse-driven carriages turned horseless. The humans are the horses now, and they will not be happy.

We really should have worked out global civility by now, given the risks of truly global destabilization.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#304

Post by ramoz »

carliton wrote: post #259

LLMs are useful to a certain extent, but from my usage they are not ready for anything harder than very basic tasks. I feel like this megaphone about AI safety and creating a sense of doom is a strategy to increase importance of OpenAI and exaggerate the capabilities of LLMs. This era of “AI” is all about pretending that machines can think and the people working in these machines are prophets.

The call for AI safety has existed since before we broke through the Turing test with LLMs. And I personally wouldn’t call things like code generation or content-generated learning experiences for advanced topics “basic”. Not to mention where we’re headed with multimodal integration.

Many have argued for safety for decades. They’ve predicted and built the AI trajectory, they’ve been right, and we should listen.

> If one accepts that the impact of truly intelligent machines is likely to be profound, and that there is at least a small probability of this happening in the foreseeable future, it is only prudent to try to prepare for this in advance. If we wait until it seems very likely that intelligent machines will soon appear, it will be too late to thoroughly discuss and contemplate the issues involved. ~ Co-Founder of Deepmind, 2008 https://www.vetta.org/documents/Machine_Super_Intelligence.p...

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#305

Post by ornornor »

bboygravity wrote: post #151
tummler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that these aren't standard-issue HR/legal issues. The technology they're working on poses the gravest of dangers. This is uncharted territory, not just for the tech sector, but period. Whether the recent public back-and-forth is just internal drama/politics spilling out, or there really is a lack of gravitas around the handling of these issues within the company-- neither is good. Others have s…

OpenAI is one of the few companies that is so messed up that even the name itself is a flat out lie. From there it's censorship, lies and manipulation all the way down from leadership to product. There's no ignoring that. There's no way any organization like that can succeed IMO. Just another technology development that Musk will eventually beat everyone else at IMO. Grok 1.5 is getting pretty good and the fact that…

[flagged]

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#306

Post by JohnKemeny »

mjburgess wrote: post #293
carliton wrote: post #259

LLMs are useful to a certain extent, but from my usage they are not ready for anything harder than very basic tasks. I feel like this megaphone about AI safety and creating a sense of doom is a strategy to increase importance of OpenAI and exaggerate the capabilities of LLMs. This era of “AI” is all about pretending that machines can think and the people working in these machines are prophets.

also keep open that these AI researchers are as delusional as they seem. ilya sutskever has said that you can obtain any feature of intelligence by brute force modelling of text data. It's quite possible these are profoundly naive individuals, with little understanding of the empirical basis of what they're doing.

There are (relatively simple) examples of what the transformer architecture is simply not able to do, regardless of training data, so that's simply not true.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#307

Post by RandomLensman »

edanm wrote: post #298
dragonwriter wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The technology they’re working on poses the gravest of dangers.” Or, rather, its been actively marketed by Altman as doing so, as part of his effort to buy influence with government to restrict competition. The simplest explanation for the conflict is that it doesn’t , and that OpenAI internally has allocated resources based on reality rather than it’s public propaganda, and the team whose internal turf was built ar…

> Or, rather, its been actively marketed by Altman as doing so, as part of his effort to buy influence with government to restrict competition. I mean, maybe sama is also doing so. But you're ignoring the many people who have been warning of these dangers for years, some before OpenAI even existed, and many with no part of OpenAI and no monetary incentive. To describe everything as "Altman is marketing this as danger…

The world is full of dangers. AI danger has gotten some attention now - whether it turns out to be warranted beyond certain levels is still unclear.

While there has been some regulatory action it also feels there is some "moving on" from the more apocalyptic risk views towards more mundane risks and their management (i.e., more vanilla product and technology risk management).

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#308

Post by tgv »

camillomiller wrote: post #13

Why do we give this people credit by giving for granted that AGI is somehow magically around the corner? It is not, and everyone’s delusional.

AGI isn't close, but as long as people keep throwing billions at it, the research will produce something. We now have publicly accessible models to generate revenge porn. I guess that wasn't the intention, but here we are.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#309

Post by ergl »

next_xibalba wrote: post #137
pdonis wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If few or none, does that not indicate that OpenAI has done a good job at safety? No. It only indicates that OpenAI is less technically capable than it claims. To judge OpenAI's competence at safety, you have to look at the ethics of their behavior, since building the right ethics into an AI before it gets powerful enough to do serious harm to humans is the essence of AI safety. And the ethics of OpenAI's behavior,…

Ok, what actions have they taken that are unethical?

Sharing a CEO with Worldcoin

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#310

Post by fzeindl »

corry wrote: post #62

In any sufficiently large tech company, the "risk mitigation" leadership (legal, procurement, IT, etc) have to operate in a kind of Overton window that balance the risks they are hired to protect the corp from vs. the need or desire of the senior leadership to play fast and loose when they want or feel they need to. Either the risk-mitigator 'falls in line' after repeatedly seeing their increasingly strident exhortat…

> Either the risk-mitigator 'falls in line' after repeatedly seeing their increasingly strident exhortations are falling on deaf ears (or even outright contradicted)... or they leave because it violates their sense of ethics.

Or both continue to work together in a healthy, never ending discussion, that has temporary victories on both sides and ultimately benefits all, because nothing happens and the company strives.

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