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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#571

Post by foldr »

ben_w wrote: post #128
lsy wrote: 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…

> 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.

> [...]

> What's not obvious is how to monetise it.

This is an interesting new use of 'product market fit'. I would have thought that in the absence of a path to monetisation, there is no market. Or we could talk about the 'market' for selling $10 bills priced at $5.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#572

Post by foldr »

pembrook wrote: post #569
WickyNilliams wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cost to Google per search is way lower, though.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#573

Post by numpad0 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #139
pinewurst wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody seems to remember how the Segway was going to change our world, backed by many of the VC power figures at the time + Steve Jobs.

The Segway was a bit early, and too expensive, but I would defend it... sort of. Electric micromobility is a pretty huge driver of how people negotiate the modern city. Self-balancing segways, e-skate, e-bike and scooters are all pretty big changes that we are seeing in many modern cityscapes. Hell, a shared electric bike was just used as a getaway vehicle for an assassination in NYC.

Segway is just an electric pizza delivery bike _that don't look like one_. That's it. The Segway City is just electric Ho Chi Minh 1995 in style of 2000 Chicago.

People wants to die in style so much that they turn blind eyes to plasticky scooters and Nissan Leafs. To them, the ugly attempt don't exist, and the reskinned clones are the first evers in the history. But reality prevails. Brits aren't flying EE Lightning jets anymore.

Segways were kind of cool to me too, to be fair. To lesser extent Lime scooters too. Sort of. But they're still just sideways pizza bikes.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#574

Post by ben_w »

harrall wrote: post #415
this_user wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wasn't he fired for questionable reasons? There were a number of concerns, including for-profit projects he was pursuing despite his public insistence on OpenAI being non-profit as well as generally deceptive behaviour on his part. The last part at least is consistent with what others have said about Altman previously, including what allegedly led to his exit from YC, although they have kept those stories pretty qu…

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.

> What human in the world could be trusted with AI? Only delusional people could say yes to that question.

"AI" is too broad a topic to draw that conclusion.

Almost everyone can be trusted with Stockfish. Almost: https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish

Most of us can be trusted with current LLMs, despite the nefarious purposes that they can be put to by a minority. Spam and fraud are still minority actors, even though these tools increase the capabilities of those actors; and they're still "only" at the student/recent graduate level for many tasks, so using them for hazardous chemical synthesis will likely literally explode in the face of the person attempting it.

Face recognition AI (and robot control attached to it) is already more than capable enough to violate the 1980 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, and we're just lucky random lone-wolf malicious actors have not yet tried to exploit this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea...

We don't yet, it seems, have an AI capable enough that a random person wishing for world peace will get a world with the peace of the grave, nor will someone asking for "as many paperclips as possible" accidentally von-Neumann the universe into nanoscale paperclip-shaped molecules — indeed, I would argue that if natural language understanding continues in the current path, we won't ever get that kind of "it did what I said but not what I meant" scenario; what I currently think most likely is as an analogy for the industrial revolution, where we knew CO2 was a greenhouse gas around the turn of the 1900s, and still have not yet stopped emitting it because most people prefer the immediate results of things that emit it over the distant benefits of not emitting it.

But even that kind of AI doesn't seem to be here just yet. It may turn out that GenAI videos, images, text, and voice is in fact as much of a risk as CO2, that it collapses any possibility of large-scale cooperation, but for the moment that's not clear.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#575

Post by ben_w »

cinntaile wrote: post #554
chgs wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a city I don’t take public transport over uber due to the cost but due to the convenience and speed. The only exception is the US, and even then that doesn’t apply in Manhattan.

That's what I'm saying. When price goes down, robotaxis become a more viable option due to convenience and speed. You're shopping? Just put it in the trunk. Have fun with 4 grocery bags on public transport. Public transport can be faster for going from A to B, but most people live a couple of kms from A and they're not going to exactly B but somewhere in the vicinity. The "last mile" will more likely be by robotaxi.

> When price goes down, robotaxis become a more viable option due to convenience and speed.

Lower prices don't make things more convenient or fast.

> You're shopping? Just put it in the trunk. Have fun with 4 grocery bags on public transport.

Here is "The Shops at South Town" mall in Salt Lake City: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5617162,-111.8944801,171m/da...

Note that some parts of that car park are 300m from some of the shops in that building. (There are choices of shops and parking spaces larger than that, but it looks like I can easily justify 300m without resorting to maxima).

Here is my old apartment: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Prenzlauer+Promenade+1,+13...

Note that within 300m of that address — i.e. the bounds of the example American shopping mall car park — there are 6 [super]markets, a pharmacy, at least five cafe/bakeries, two cinemas, several takeaways, at least two restaurants, a dentist, a car repair shop, a car dealership, a pet-goods shop, a kitchenware shop, a newsagent/post office, two sets of tram stops, four sets of bus stops, and I'm not counting any corner shops ("Späti" in the local language).

Carrying a few bags of groceries around inside well-planned cities is pretty trivial. Anything connected to that area by a single mode of transport is no harder to take shopping through than the transit systems within a mall — escalator, elevator, travelator — and that means one of the main commercial areas of the city (Alexanderplatz) and the road to it (which itself is basically a 3km long half-density strip mall with a tram the whole length and a railway crossing it in the middle and another at the south end) are both trivial to reach even with shopping — I've even seen someone taking an actual, literal, kitchen sink on one of Berlin's trams.

Even in my current place, still in Berlin but close to the outskirts without the advantages of density, a mere four grocery bags is easier to get through public transport than it is from one end of an American car park to the other.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#576

Post by badsectoracula »

linotype wrote: post #215
kulahan wrote: post #199

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?

I kinda see him as the Andrew Ryan of Mars' Rapture :-P

(if you haven't played Bioshock this probably wont make much sense - but if you have and listened to all the audiologs, i'm sure you'll find a bunch of parallels)

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#577

Post by kmacdough »

lsy wrote: 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 use AI in my work as a machinist/CNC programmer on a weekly if not a daily basis.

It's primary advantage for a while has been it's crazy breadth of knowledge which it can present in a human, flexible form. But perhaps we excuse this as Generally Knowledgeable not Generally Intelligent.

But with the most recent models I'm finding the intelligence harder to deny. They are now catching errors and false assumptions unprompted and with regularity and providing reliable feedback and criticism. Gemini 2.0 can now read prints usefully, if not perfectly and has caught multiple print errors missed by the engineers and experienced machinists alike.

It provides valuable feedback and criticism and frequently interjects when it thinks I'm barking up the wrong tree. The newest models have gotten quite good at asking for clarification rather than leaning into assumptions.

Now it's certainly not the smartest. It's creativity is mediocre and it's lack of practical experience is apparent. But thats understandable, as _it's never machined a day in it's life_. It's merely studied what's been written.

Sure, hallucinations and the like are still a thing (though they've been cut down drastically). And the creativity is quite mediocre. But it seems a lot more intelligent than some of the burnouts coming out of trade schools.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#578

Post by pxmpxm »

madrox wrote: post #223
lsy wrote: 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 think an assumption that a lot of people make about people with power is that they say what they actually believe. In my experience, they do not. Public speech is a means to an end, and they will say whatever is the strongest possible argument that will lead them to what they actually want. In this case, OpenAI wants look like they're going to save the world and do it in a noble way. It's Google's "don't be evil" a…

This. All this bullshit about "AI will kill us all" is purely a device to ensure regulatory capture for the largest players, ie the people saying said bullshit.

Pretend your meme pic generator is actually a weapon of mass destruction and you can eliminate most of your competition by handwaving about "safety".

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#579

Post by VectorLock »

bee_rider wrote: post #284
VectorLock wrote: post #280

I found all the discussions about Dota pretty amusing. I had no idea it was such a big thing for them early on.

If I’m replaced by a DOTA bot I'm going to be pissed. At least it could be a bot for a good game, like StarCraft or something.

I'm curious why they ended up focusing on DOTA. Prize money? Valve make the game particular amenable to machine interface?

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#580

Post by moooo99 »

ben_w wrote: post #128
lsy wrote: 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…

> 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.

People were constantly discussing crypto in public, it even regularly made it into Tagesschau. Yet it remains an (influential) niche product.

People discussing a topic in public is not a good proxy for product market fit. It does not imply those people are using said product, nor does it imply people would be willing to pay for said product.

> even the current models meet every definition of "very smart" I had while growing up, despite their errors.

I recently tried to read a grocery store receipt into GPT4o and asked it what the KG price for the steak position was (it was listed as €/kg right next to the position name). It came up with some elaborate math, but not with the correct answer.

So yeah. These models might be able to confidentially answer questions, but I found them to be (partially) incorrect more often than not.

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