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Evolving OpenAI's Structure

openai.com

551–560 of 746 posts

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#551
post #21

It's somewhat odd to me that many companies operating in the public eye are basically stating "We are creating a digital god, an instrument more powerful than any nuclear weapon" and raising billions to do it, and nobody bats an eye...

I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI. The intersection of the two seems to be quite hard to find. At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output. This isn't a nuclear weapon. We're not going to ac…

alignmentforum.com

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#552
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised that they found a reason to uncap their profits, but I wouldn't try to infer too much from the justification they cooked up.

As a deeper issue on "justification", here is something I wrote related to this in 2001 on the risks of non-profits engaging in self-dealing when they create artificial scarcity to enrich themselves: https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#... "Consider this way of looking at the situation. A 501(c)3 non-profit creates a digital work which is potentially of great value to the public and of great v…

Enlightening read, especially your last paragraph which touches on the nuance of the situation. It’s quite easy to end up on one side or the other when it comes to charity/nonprofits because the mission itself can be very motivating and galvanizing.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#553
post #21

It's somewhat odd to me that many companies operating in the public eye are basically stating "We are creating a digital god, an instrument more powerful than any nuclear weapon" and raising billions to do it, and nobody bats an eye...

I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI. The intersection of the two seems to be quite hard to find. At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output. This isn't a nuclear weapon. We're not going to ac…

> Progress of technology should not be artitrarily held back to protect automateable jobs though. We need to adapt.

So you don't mind if your economic value drops to zero, with all human labour replaced by machines?

Dependent on UBI, existing in a basic pod, eating rations of slop.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#554
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We're looking for curious conversation here, and this is not that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It seems like there are other comments that have the same amount of substance as mine, yet it looks like mine was the only one that was flagged.

Quite possibly! Consistency in moderation is impossible [1]. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, and the explanation for most of these things is randomness (or the absence of time travel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823271)

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

At the same time, though, we need you (Think of it like speeding tickets [2]. There are always lots of other drivers speeding just as bad (nay, worse) than you were, and yet it's always you who gets pulled over, right? Or at least it always feels that way.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#555
post #21

It's somewhat odd to me that many companies operating in the public eye are basically stating "We are creating a digital god, an instrument more powerful than any nuclear weapon" and raising billions to do it, and nobody bats an eye...

It'd be odd if people batted eyes before the 1st nuclear weapon came to be, but not batting now.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#556
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, we don't wait for somebody to give us a task and go do it as if that is our sole existence. We live with our thoughts, blank out, watch TV, read books etc. What we currently have and possibly in the next century as well will be nothing close to an actual AGI. I don't know if it is optimism or delusions of grandeur that d…

It seems like you believe AGI won't come for a long time, because you don't want that to happen. The turing test was succesfull. Pre chatGPT, I would not have believed, that will happen so soon. LLMs ain't AGI, sure. But they might be an essential part and the missing parts maybe already found, just not put together. And work there will be always plenty. Distributing ressources might require new ways, though.

While I also hold a peer comment's view that the Turing Test is meaningless, I would further add that even that has not been meaningfully beaten.

In particular we redefined the test to make it passable. In Turing's original concept the competent investigator and participants were all actively expected to collude against the machine. The entire point is that even with collusion, the machine would be able to pass. Instead modern takes have paired incompetent investigators alongside participants colluding with the machine, probably in an effort to be part 'of something historic'.

In "both" (probably more, referencing the two most high profile - Eugene and the large LLMs) successes, the interrogators consistently asked pointless questions that had no meaningful chance of providing compelling information - 'How's your day? Do you like psychology? etc' and the participants not only made no effort to make their humanity clear, but often were actively adversarial obviously intentionally answering illogically, inappropriately, or 'computery' to such simple questions. And the tests are typically time constrained by woefully poor typing skills (this the new normal in the smartphone gen?) to the point that you tend to get anywhere from 1-5 interactions of a few words each.

The problem with any metric for something is that it often ends up being gamed to be beaten, and this is a perfect example of that.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook had immense network effects working for it back then. What network effect does OpenAI have? Far as I can tell, moving from OpenAI to Gemini or something else is easy. It’s not sticky at all. There’s no “my friends are primarily using OpenAI so I am too” or anything like that. So again, I ask, what makes it sticky?

OpenAI (or, more specifically, Chat GPT) is CocaCola, not Facebook. They have the brand recognition and consumer goodwill no other brand in AI has, incredibly so with school students, who will soon go into the professional world and bring that goodwill with them. I think better models are enough to dethrone OpenAI in API, B2C and internal enterprise use cases, but OpenAI has consumer mindshare, and they're going to b…

Coca Cola does insane amounts of advertising to maintain their position in the mind of the consumer. I don't think it is as sticky as you say it is for OpenAi

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing OpenAI is doing, or ever has done, has been close to AGI.

Please, keep telling people that. For my sake. Keep the world asleep as I take advantage of this technology which is literally General Artificial Intelligence that I can apply towards increasing my power.

[deleted]

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first-mover advantages of an AGI that can improve itself are theoretically unsurmountable. This has some baked assumptions about cycle time and improvement per cycle and whether there's a ceiling.

> this has some baked assumptions about cycle time and improvement per cycle and whether there's a ceiling To be precise, it assumes a low variability in cycle time and improvement per cycle. If everyone is subjected to the same limits, the first-mover advantage remains insurmountable. I’d also argue that whether there is a ceiling matters less than how high it is. If the first AGI won’t hit a ceiling for decades, it…

> I’d also argue that whether there is a ceiling matters less than how high it is.

How steeply the diminishing returns curve off at.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#560
post #21

It's somewhat odd to me that many companies operating in the public eye are basically stating "We are creating a digital god, an instrument more powerful than any nuclear weapon" and raising billions to do it, and nobody bats an eye...

I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI. The intersection of the two seems to be quite hard to find. At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output. This isn't a nuclear weapon. We're not going to ac…

Which of these statements do you disagree with?

- Superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity

- Predicting the future is famously difficult

- Given that uncertainty, we can't rule out the chance of our current AI approach leading to superintelligence

- Even a 1-in-1000 existential threat would be extremely serious. If an asteroid had a 1-in-1000 chance of hitting Earth and obliterating humanity we should make serious contingency plans.

Second question: how confident are you that you're correct? Are you 99.9% sure? Confident enough to gamble billions of lives on your beliefs? There are almost no statements about the future which I'd assign this level of confidence to.

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