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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#281
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> v13 is way better and safer than a great Uber driver, let alone average. Will need to see a source for this. Especially since NHTSA crash reporting data is not made public.

I’m sure soon enough we won’t have to worry about NHTSA keeping that sort of data private (because that agency will simply be found inefficient and eliminated).

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#282
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

> I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys.

Unprecedented change has already happened with LLMs. So this is expected.

> So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return

...because it's expensive to build what they're building.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#283
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define everyone. I was delighted when they fired him. I don't believe he has humanity's best interest at heart.

745 of 770 employees responded on a weekend to call for his return, threatened mass resignations if the board did not resign; among the signatories was board member Sutskever, who defected from the board and publicly apologized for his participation in the board's previous actions.

>745 of 700 employees responded on a weekend to call for his return, threatened mass resignations if the board did not resign

I would think final count doesn’t really matter. Self serving cowards, like me, would sign it once they see the way the wind was blowing. How many signed it before Satya at Microsoft indicated support for Altman?

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#285
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? Yes, frequently and loudly. When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors . > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much l…

> The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public. Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others . 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri a…

>people will move on to the next fad

AI isn't really a fad. It's going to something more like electricity, say.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#287

Maybe a weird question, but how does a capitalist economy work where AGI-performed-labor is categorically less expensive than human-performed labor? Do most people who labor for wages just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?

There are essentially two answers to this question, and neither are in the interests of capital so there will never be progress if power toward them until forced.

The first is the bill gates "income tax for robots" idea which does a kind of hand wavey thing figuring out how to calculate a robot, how the government will distribute taxes, etc. That one is a mess impossible to get support for and nearly impossible to transition to.

The other idea, put forth by the Democracy in Europe 2025 party, is called a universal basic dividend, which essentially says that to make AI owned by humanity, the utility of automation should be calculated, and as a result, a dividend will be paid out (just like any other stock holder) which is a percent of that company's profit derived from automation. It becomes part of the corporate structure, rather than a government structure, so this one I think kinda has merit on paper, but likewise zero motivation to implement until it's virtually too late

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine that's what he's doing. He's willing to put a lot of company money into getting the city on Mars started, because if he's first there, he's gonna set himself (or his dynasty?) up to make hundreds of billions of dollars. Being effectively in control of your own planet? Neat. Scary too.

Doing what exactly? What industry could Mars possibly support profitably?

> What industry could Mars possibly support profitably?

Government crew and supply launch contracts probably, though these don't need to be "profitable" in the conventional sense for the entity footing the bill.

All that's needed to be profitable for the launch provider is to convince Congress that it's in America's interest to establish a public-private project for a moon base and a Mars base. Now more than ever, when framed against a background of an ascendant Chinese Space program that will soon be sole operator of a space station.

Once the "Race to Mars" is won, NASA can grow soy-beans, do bone density studies, and any other science shit the NASA nerds can come up with post-hoc, but the main point will just be being there, and having the Stars and Stripes on the first flagpole planted in Martian soil.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#289
post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

>and no obvious large-scale product-market fit

I'm afraid you are in as much an echo chamber as anyone. 200 million+ weekly active users is large scale pmf

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on your spreadsheet analogy? I think Joel Spolsky explained the main Office moat well here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros... > ... it might take you weeks to change your page layout algorithm to accommodate it. If you don’t, customers will open their Word files in your clone and all the pages will be messed up. Basically, people who use Office have extremely specific expe…

"Basically, people who use Office have extremely specific expectations." Interesting point, but to OP's point- This wasn't true when Office was first introduced and Office still created a domineering market share. In fact, I'd argue these moat-by-idiosyncracy features are a result of that market share. There is nothing stopping OpenAI from developing their own over time.

Sure, there's nothing stopping any business from developing a moat. The Excel example doesn't make the case of OpenAI any clearer to me.
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