Live data from Hacker News

Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

openai.com

561–570 of 678 posts

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#561
post #98
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…

> So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return Modern (2024) LLMs are "little return"? Seriously? For me, they've mostly replaced Google. I have no idea how well the scaling will contiue and I'm generally unimpressed with AI-doomer narratives, but this technology is real.

> For me, they've mostly replaced Google.

That probably says more about you than about the tech.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t pay much particular attention to AI but I’m not seeing the knock on him saying “no.” What human in the world could be trusted with AI? Only delusional people could say yes to that question.

a smartphone can be used to guide an ICBM. what human in the would could be trusted with it?

A road can be used for abductions, acts of violence, and other harmful activities.

What human in the world could be trusted with it [roads]?

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#563
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know companies that have had layoffs - but those would have happened anyways - regular layoffs are practically demanded by the market at this point. I know companies that have (or rather are in the process of) adopting AI into business workflows. The only companies I know of that aren't using more labor to correct their AI tools are the ones that used it pre-ChatGPT/AI Bubble. Plenty of companies have rolled out "t…

> Even code gen seems pretty underwhelming to most of the developers I've heard from that have used it - it may very well be extremely impactful to the next generation of developers - but most current developers have already honed their skills to out-compete code gen in the low complexity problems it can competently perform. I'm in academia, and LLMs have completely revolutionized the process of data analysis for sci…

I've heard something similar from the legal field as well. When you're dealing with massive amounts of unstructured documentation that needs to be searched LLMs seem to be doing a better job of indexing that information than conventional search indexers. I agree that it is having a pretty big impact in those fields where large amounts of unstructured data needs to be combed through.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#565

From Brockman's email: "Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity." Well, reading this in 2024 with (so-called) "Open"AI going for-profit, it aged like milk. Also a few lines later, he writes: "We don’t encourage paper writing, and so paper acceptance isn’t a measu…

These people talk like 20th century communists in a Vienna coffeehouse.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#566
post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between just working on ML tech and working on ML tech with US$XXX billion of Microsoft’s money—salaries aside—imaginably, having access to nuclear plants worth of energy, compute power and cutting edge GPUs, legal department for defending intellectual property violation, etc., makes for a very different value proposition compared to some other startup in the space. (The self-image of working at a company allegedly “…

True to some extend. But if you have OpenAI on your resume I have to imagine there’s no necessity for your next job to be much different (e.g. go to any FAANG)

I think (based on very shallow research) among FAANG behemoths Meta is the closest in terms of resources thrown at ML, but it’s an ad company that hasn’t got such a “we advance humanity” image. Equity vesting and that sort of stuff can additionally make moving companies a problematic prospect, even if the new place offered a competitive salary…

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#567
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk is nothing if not famous for astronomically over-promising and under-delivering.

He is overly optimistic about timelines, but he usually delivers. Or did I imagine his company catching a fucking rocket out of the air with chopsticks? Guess that was under delivering

Red Dragon? Falcon 9 Booster 24-hr turn around? The plethora of missed milestones required to land on the moon's surface?

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to fully describe, so let's just give up and use a deeply flawed benchmark? Why not try to develop benchmarks that actually work and tell us something useful instead? The key issue is that there is no result an AI can achieve on a standard IQ test which guarantees that same AI can do any task at a superhuman level, apart from taking IQ tests. Can an LLM that scores 250 replace a human driver? Who knows…

More importantly, basically all of the IQ tests are in the training sets, so it's hard to know how the models would perform on similar tests not in the training set.

Indeed. People do try to overcome this, for example see the difference in results between "Show Offline Test" and "Show Mensa Norway" on https://trackingai.org/IQ

Even the lower value is still only an upper-bound on human-equivalent IQ, as we can't really be sure the extent to which the training data is (despite efforts) enough to "train for the test", nor can we really be sure that these tests are merely a proxy for what we think we mean by intelligence rather than what we actually mean by intelligence (a problem which is why IQ tests have been changed over the years).

My intention in this sub-thread is more of the economic issues rather than the technical, which complicates things further, because if you have an AI architecture where spending a few tens of millions on compute — either from scratch or as fine-tuning — gets you superhuman performance (performance specifically, regardless of if you count it as "intelligent" or not), then any sector which employs merely a couple of hundred workers (in rich economies) will still have an economic incentive to train an AI on those workers to replace them within a year.

This is still humans having jobs, and still being economically relevant, but makes basically everyone into a contractor that has to be ready and able to change jobs suddenly, which is also economically disruptive because we're not set up for that.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no obvious large-scale product-market fit I mean, I know pessimistically "ackshually"-ing yourself into the wrong side of history is kind of Hackernews's thing (eg. that famous dropbox comment). But if you don't think OpenAI found product-market-fit with ChatGPT, then I don't think you understand what product-market-fit is...

There is no killer app (yet). Chat is nice and there's various tools that are useful to devs. But broadly, there is no killer app that makes _everyone_ adopt it and gladly pay for it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application

Yea same with Google. I mean search is nice. But broadly there’s no killer app that makes _everyone_ gladly pay for it.

Jury is still out on whether they’ll be able to subsidize those massive server costs of indexing the entire web.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#570
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this trend of using IQ as a primary measuring stick is flawed. I agree, but it's difficult to fully describe the impact of a tech where $5 gets you the ability to do arithmetic faster than literally every human combined even if we were all working at the speed of the current world record holder , yet simultaneously it took a billion dollar research team 14 years to figure out how to get a robot to reliably…

It's difficult to fully describe, so let's just give up and use a deeply flawed benchmark? Why not try to develop benchmarks that actually work and tell us something useful instead? The key issue is that there is no result an AI can achieve on a standard IQ test which guarantees that same AI can do any task at a superhuman level, apart from taking IQ tests. Can an LLM that scores 250 replace a human driver? Who knows…

> It's difficult to fully describe, so let's just give up and use a deeply flawed benchmark? Why not try to develop benchmarks that actually work and tell us something useful instead?

Two reasons. First: in this sub-thread I'm focusing on employment issues due to AI, so consider the quote from above:

> At the point that we have an AI that's capable of every task that say a 110 IQ human is, including manipulating objects in the physical world, then basically everyone is unemployed unless they're cheaper than the AI.

IQ doesn't capture what machines do, but it does seem to capture a rough approximation of what humans do, so when the question is "can this thing cause humans to become economically irrelevant?", that's still a close approximation of the target to beat.

You just have to remember that as AI don't match human thinking, so an AI which is wildly superhuman at arithmetic or chess isn't necessarily able to tie its own shoelaces. The AI has to beat humans at everything (at least, everything economically relevant) at that IQ level for this result.

Second: Lots of people are in fact trying to develop new benchmarks.

This is a major research topic all by itself (as in "I could do a PhD in this"), and also a fast-moving topic (as in "…but if I tried to do a PhD, I'd be out of date before I've finished"). I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole in the space of a comment about the exact performance thresholds an AI has to reach to be economically disruptive.

For a concrete example of quite how fast-moving the topic is, here's a graph of how fast AI is now beating new benchmarks: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/test-scores-ai-capabiliti...

Post reply on HN