Interesting how ChatGPT’s style of writing has made people start bolding so much text.
Reflections on OpenAI
31–40 of 446 posts
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few programmers being better off does not make an entire society better off. In fact, I'd argue that you shipping code 10x faster just means in the long run that consumerism is being accelerated at a similar rate because that is what most code is used for, eventually.
I spent much of my career working on open source software that helped other engineers ship code 10x faster. Should I feel bad about the impact my work there had on accelerating consumerism?
I don't know if you should feel bad or not, but even I know that I have a role to play in consumerism that I wish I didn't.
That doesn't necessitate feeling bad because the reaction to feel good or bad about something is a side effect of the sort of religious "good and evil" mentality that probably came about due to Christianity or something. But *regardless*, one should at least understand that because our world has reached a sufficient critical mass of complexity, even the things we do that we think are benign or helpful can have negative side effects.
I never claim that we should feel bad about that, but we should understand it and attempt to mitigate it nonetheless. And, where no mitigation is possible, we should also advocate for a better societal structure that will eventually, in years or decades, result in fewer deleterious side effects.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody decides, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss and figure out if there is an optimal point. Edit: And I think you might dislike automobiles if you were one of the people living right next to a tyre factory in Brazil, which outputs an extremely disgusting rubber smell on an almost daily basis. Especially if you bought your house before the factory was built, and you don't drive much. But you probably live…
I think this is pretty much how many Amish communities function. As for me, I prefer making decisions on how to use technology in my own life on my own.
Of course that makes sense. But for instance, with SOME technologies, I would prefer not to use them but still sort of have to because some of them become REQUIRED. For example: phones. I would prefer not to have a telephone at all as I hate them with a passion, but I still want a bank account. But that's difficult because my bank requires 2FA and it's very hard to get out of it.
So, while I agree in prinicple that it's nice to make decisions on one's own, I think it would be also nice to have the choice to avoid certain technologies that become difficult to avoid due to their entrenchment.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Nobody decides, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss and figure out if there is an optimal point. Edit: And I think you might dislike automobiles if you were one of the people living right next to a tyre factory in Brazil, which outputs an extremely disgusting rubber smell on an almost daily basis. Especially if you bought your house before the factory was built, and you don't drive much. But you probably live…
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Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#35> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends. There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months. Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, gi…
Those that love the work they do don't burn out, because every moment working on their projects tends to be joyful. I personally hate working with people who hate the work they do, and I look forward to them being burned out
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#36Interesting how ChatGPT’s style of writing has made people start bolding so much text.
Possibly the dumbest, blandest, most annoying kind of cultural transference imaginable. We dreamed of creating machines in our image, and now we're shaping ourselves in the image of our machines. Ugh.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent much of my career working on open source software that helped other engineers ship code 10x faster. Should I feel bad about the impact my work there had on accelerating consumerism?
I don't know if you should feel bad or not, but even I know that I have a role to play in consumerism that I wish I didn't. That doesn't necessitate feeling bad because the reaction to feel good or bad about something is a side effect of the sort of religious "good and evil" mentality that probably came about due to Christianity or something. But *regardless*, one should at least understand that because our world has…
The TV show The Good Place actually dug into this quite a bit. One of the key themes explored in the show was the idea that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, because eventually the things you consume can be tied back to some grossly unethical situation somewhere in the world.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#38> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends. There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months. Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, gi…
My hot take is I don’t think burn out has much to do with raw hours spent working. I feel it has a lot more to do with sense of momentum and autonomy. You can work extremely hard 100 hour weeks six months in a row, in the right team and still feel highly energized at the end of it. But if it feels like wading through a swamp, you will burn out very quickly, even if it’s just 50 hours a week. I also find ownership has a lot to do with sense of burnout
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all." OK, if you're going to say things like this I'm going to insist you clarify which subset of "AI" you mean. Presumably you're OK with the last few decades of machine learning algorithms for things like spam detection, search relevance etc. I'll assume your problem is with the last few years of "generative AI" - a loose term for models that output t…
1. Here is the subset: any algorithm, which is learning based, trained on a large data set, and modifies or generates content. 2. I would argue that translation engines have their positives and negatives, but a lot of them are negative, because they lead to translators losing their jobs, and a loss in general for the magical qualities of language learning. 3. Predictive text: I think people should not be presented wi…
Thanks for this, it's a good answer. I think "generative AI" is the closest term we have to that subset you describe there.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#40"Safety is actually more of a thing than you might guess if you read a lot from Zvi or Lesswrong. There's a large number of people working to develop safety systems. Given the nature of OpenAI, I saw more focus on practical risks (hate speech, abuse, manipulating political biases, crafting bio-weapons, self-harm, prompt injection) than theoretical ones (intelligence explosion, power-seeking). That's not to say that nobody is working on the latter, there's definitely people focusing on the theoretical risks. But from my viewpoint, it's not the focus."
This paragraph doesn't make any sense. If you read a lot of Zvi or LessWrong, the misaligned intelligence explosion is the safety risk you're thinking of! So readers "guesses" are actually right that OpenAI isn't really following Sam Altman's:
"Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."[0]