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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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341–350 of 678 posts

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#341
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite comparison right now is to the microwave oven. It's a novel thing. It's not going anywhere. It makes some things easier, sometimes, in both personal and professional settings. But you're not at a big loss without it and in many cases your choice to do without is a choice that favors quality, control, nuance, and skill refinement.

AI probably has more capacity to be incorporated into many things than microwaves.

I will bite, going with your analogy comparing to electricity on the other end of the spectrum.

electricity is not ubiquitous in many parts of the global south full 130 years.

The common definition is- access to electricity source that can provide very basic lighting, and charge a phone or power a radio for 4 hours per day. Not even grid connected.

Even with this basic definition there is still full 660 million people who don’t have access to even that. It only dropped below a billion in 2015.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access

You need beyond the basic to be meaningfully transformative, clean cooking fuel access is one proxy used that is still 2Billion people without access for example.

Nobody is denying the transformative nature of electricity or say internet , but even these things take a long long time, more than one life time to propagate and be world changing, and not because of their choice of lifestyle to live disconnected.

If electricity, clean water, sanitation and nutrition and basic healthcare is not available to half the population, what is AI going to do in next 3- 5 years or whatever ridiculous timeframe Sam Altman keeps talking about .

And this is a not productivity problem, there is more than enough food production capacity to feed the world, yet starvation and malnutrition is not solved.

AI may rock your world, it is not going to rock the world anytime soon even if was like electricity.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#342
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we really giving Twitter that much credit these days? I feel like we gave it less credit when it was actually popular. I would give Elon jumping around on stage more credit than what Twitter/X did for this election.

[flagged]

In no way do the election results justify that claim.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#343
post #142
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not talking about your anecdotes, they're talking about the capex and returns. Which are overwhelmingly negative.

What do you think the capex returns were for DARPA NET? These reflexive humanist anti-AI takes are going to age like peeled bananas.

Likewise for the breathless praise.

The early internet was a public project, it didn't have to worry about its own return because the point was to build a robust communications system that could survive a nuclear strike. Seeing as Openai is trying to change to a for profit corporation, it's hardly an apt comparison.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

perhaps the "not dying on earth industry" after climate catastrophy hits

There's no climate scenario in which Mars is more habitable than Earth. Even if a Texas-sized asteroid crashed into Earth, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars.

This is strangely comforting

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He bought Twitter for $40B. His Tesla stock was 0% ytd until the election. Post election it is up roughly 70% ytd & has paid for Twitter & the Mars colony multiple times. Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter.

> Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter. Its fairly easy. In almost every western country the incumbent administration has been punished by voters due to inflation, this has been the case in the uk, germany, romania, france, mexico... list goes on. So Trump could have won without Elon buying twitter. Similarly he could have donated to Trump without buying Twitter, and been on stage and been all day o…

Twitter famously deplatformed Trump, as a sitting president. They were a captured institution and it was shown that corrupt intelligence agencies were directly influencing Twitter's censorship. There was no other distribution channel available. Messaging is important. Counter narratives are important.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. In hindsight, buying Twitter at a loss was well worth the long (though, more like medium) term results. As much as it disgusts me, I'm impressed.

Note he didn’t just buy Twitter. He was forced to buy twitter after trying to pump and dump the stock.

That's a mischaracterization. He tried to get out of the deal because the stock market overall had crashed significantly between 2021 and 2022 and Twitter was no longer worth $40B.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think their suggestion ever implies that he isn’t.

If the believed he already was competing in the marketplace, then what would be the point of saying "he should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom." ? I'm genuinely trying to understand what I'm missing here because it seems illogical to tell someone they should do something they are already doing.

[deleted]

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

It’s the fastest product to 100m users ever. Even if they never update their models from here on out, they have an insanely popular and useful product. It’s better at search than Google. Students use it universally. And programmers are dependent on it. Inference is cheap — only training is expensive. To say they don’t have PMF is nuts.

> And programmers are dependent on it.

that is clearly not the case

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#350
post #168

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?

I remember watching an episode of the 1960s police drama, Dragnet. In one of the episodes, Detective Joe Friday spoke with some computer technicians in a building full of computers (giant, at the time). Friday asked the computer technician, > "One more thing. Do you think that computers will take all our jobs one day?" > "No. There will always be jobs for humans. Those jobs will change, maybe include working on and m…

To summarize, fears of AI out competing humans for labor rely on the "lump of labor fallacy" which is the same fallacy employed to justify anti-immigrant sentiment in the form of "they took our jobs"?
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