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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

newyorker.com

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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#711

Post by kelvinjps10 »

philipallstar wrote: post #580
irishcoffee wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that the answer to your question, fantastic question, is that nobody knows. I remember having the same thoughts when Covid was first “arriving” if you will: we wanted people in the know to throw us a nugget of information, and they just didn’t know. As it turns out, and what I’m kind of going with for this LLM shit, is that it’ll play out exactly how you think it will. The companies are all too big to fai…

How would fraud help here? Don't they just need scale of lots of customers paying a little bit? How do you fraud your way into that?

they don't need customers, when the customers ere each others companies for example the deals openAI nvidia oracle made

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#712

Post by jonstewart »

ronanfarrow wrote: post #59
kmfrk wrote: post #48

Gobsmacking details about Altmans' time as Y Combinator president, in case anyone's wondering. Fantastic reporting.

As is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page.

This might be the major dilemma in the tech industry today, where the natural tendencies of literalism and optimism among technologists has turned into a form of defensive credulity. The real world rigor of The New Yorker’s editorial standards and concerns about defamation necessitate this circumscribed style that rewards close reading and skepticism, but those aren’t in favor in the tech industry currently.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#713

Post by ambicapter »

jjallen wrote: post #686
andrewrn wrote: post #407

“By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman’s behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he was resisting in practice” You can subtly see residue of this frustration in Dalton and Michael’s…

I do wonder exactly what he was doing to be considered a snake. I know he was working on other things, but what else was going on?

Read the article?

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#714

Post by jplusequalt »

RealityVoid wrote: post #466
stavros wrote: post #239

I found it very interesting that Altman et al were worried that AI will become supremely intelligent and China will make a supervirus or some AI drones or whatnot, but not a single person was worried about destroying all jobs because we wouldn't need humans any more. Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.

I think fundamentally, the concern is misplaced. The fact you need to work for wealth is a convention of our constraints. The change in constraints would lead to other means of distribution. It's easy to see if someone who believes more productivity is good would not see making jobs obsolete a real problem. Thew would see us adapting to the new conditions in a relatively short while.

>Thew would see us adapting to the new conditions in a relatively short while.

Say ~5 million jobs in the next 10 years are automated away, which industries do those people move to?

With college being exorbitantly expensive, that locks out many people from re-skilling in other fields.

As people race to other industries, that forces down wages because now there is a larger pool to select from.

How do we ensure people are taken care of when UBI is all but fiscally impossible in the US?

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#715

Post by laserlight »

whynotminot wrote: post #690
laserlight wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have experience in dealing with Sam Altman-like behavior. I hope to explain how their tactics unfold. > I can see people concluding that they have been lied to rather than accept that they had been intellectually beaten. There are two angles to this: from an individual perspective and from a collective one. One's interaction with such a manipulator isn't a single shot. There is not a single event that they are “bea…

[flagged]

I'm sorry that it wasn't clear. I didn't mean to imply that I was going to connect to Sam Altman. I specifically wanted to address why it wasn't the case that people were “intellectually beaten” by Sam Altman.

> except the one you imagine is true

I'm not sure what you mean. I told about an example of manipulation that I witnessed. I later learned that these were common tactics employed by con-artists, scammers, etc.

> Don’t project them on people you don’t know and seemingly have no actual first-hand experience with.

I don't need first-hand experience with someone to understand that they are a manipulator. I am comfortable forming my opinion based on reports.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#716

Post by keybored »

mptest wrote: post #392
k1m wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the US launched its attack on Iran, the ethical AI lab's CEO wrote: "Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences." - https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war

"how easy it is, for those of us who play no part in public affairs, to sneer at the compromises required of those who do" - robert harris Not making any value judgements, but I can see how one might value their interpretability research higher than what the ceo says in a time where the corrupt, criminal executive branch is muscling in to everything from what's written on currency, to journalistic sources. I generall…

“I was only following orders”—not a legitimate defense for some footsoldier.

“I had the burden of impacting public affairs through my wildly succesful corporation”—poor them.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#718

Post by jplusequalt »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #581
bkummel wrote: post #572

Without having read the article, reacting on the headline: no single person should be allowed to control our future. Democracy is a thing in large parts of the world, and we should try very hard to keep that functioning and even improve it.

People are voting with their wallets

>People are voting with their wallets

A handful of people's wallets are much deeper than vast swaths of the population. None of this AI shit would be happening without their funding.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#719

Post by UncleMeat »

druskacik wrote: post #594
stavros wrote: post #239

I found it very interesting that Altman et al were worried that AI will become supremely intelligent and China will make a supervirus or some AI drones or whatnot, but not a single person was worried about destroying all jobs because we wouldn't need humans any more. Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.

Altman is an advocate of Universal Basic Income, as far as I'm aware. That doesn't sound like he's not worried about massive job losses. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sam-altman-universal-basic-inco... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-wants-universal-ex...

Meaningfully?

Is there an advocacy arm of OpenAI pushing for legislation for UBI? Or is this like Musk's supposed support for UBI while also insisting that welfare payments to the poor are a bad thing?

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