Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

861–870 of 1001 posts

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

#861

Post by dugidugout »

devmor wrote: post #855
dugidugout wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be true I suppose, but equally I have a few friends who practically play characters as if they've resigned themselves to a role in a sitcom. For instance: one of my friends is late to just about everything and treats everyone as if we are on-call. We plainly note this repeatedly, the friend is, I hope, equally frustrated and embarrassed by it, and in spite of this nothing changes. This is obviously a critica…

I would say I didn't mean the statement that generally - it was contextual to the topic. i.e. If your friends wont remark on your penmanship, who cares? If they wont remark on how you treat service workers at a restaurant, that's probably concerning.

I should've edited my comment, on reflection my example doesn't fit! I think rincebrain had a nice way of wording what I now believe to be your intent!

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

#862

Post by dugidugout »

satvikpendem wrote: post #398
dugidugout wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be true I suppose, but equally I have a few friends who practically play characters as if they've resigned themselves to a role in a sitcom. For instance: one of my friends is late to just about everything and treats everyone as if we are on-call. We plainly note this repeatedly, the friend is, I hope, equally frustrated and embarrassed by it, and in spite of this nothing changes. This is obviously a critica…

Maybe they have ADHD because the symptoms fit, if they really do acknowledge the problem yet cannot fix it.

To be clear, I am ADHD (executive-type) and am empathetic to my friend. All considered I am quite fond of my time spent with them. But in regards to developing a model for ones character I don't think it is very helpful to allow disabilities to shape them. It is simply impossible to share the individual essence related and is better understood through the manifestation which is ultimately shared. And regardless I would hope they would seek this diagnosis as a function of their own introspection according to my account of the phenomenon, not some extrapolation. [0]

To engage with your curiosity of their situation though, they spend a lot of time at poker tables, sitting for 8+ hours. I would assume this is not a common enjoyment for most ADHD minds. From my experience as soon as I'm out the action for a string of hands I'm completely checked out of any rigid strategy. Now sit me at a blackjack table and I can crank hands until the morning! But here I am being fed action and drinks basically on demand.

[0] I'm just thinking out loud here, not accusing you of making any claim related

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

#863

Post by taco_emoji »

ipsum2 wrote: post #836
rupi wrote: post #498

Ronan Farrow, the write of this article, made a comment in this thread that is buried in all the comments, "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 th…

I don't get why writers do this. It makes sense for fiction, but why a factual, non-fiction article?

> I don't get why writers do this.

Do what, edit?

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

#864

Post by gambiting »

staticman2 wrote: post #657
gambiting wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Do they even have direct access to published works to use as reference material? I mean, clearly, given that it did answer my question eventually. Also wasn't it a whole thing that these models got trained on entire book libraries(without necessarily paying for that). >>I wouldn't expect any LLM to be able to respect such a request Why though? They seem to know everything about everything, why not this specifically…

I wouldn't expect an AI to know exactly what happens in every chapter of a book. Knowing the plot of Neuromancer isn't the same as being able to recite a chapter by chapter summary. I tried this Neuromancer query a few times and results greatly vary with each regeneration but "do not include spoilers" seems to make Gemuni give more spoilers, not less.

>>I wouldn't expect an AI to know exactly what happens in every chapter of a book.

Cool. I did - and turns out it can do it, just not without giving me some spoilers first.

>>vary with each regeneration but "do not include spoilers" seems to make Gemuni give more spoilers, not less.

I'm glad I'm not the only one experiencing this then.

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

#865

Post by MattGrommes »

profdevloper wrote: post #775
arionhardison wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but first I want to be very clear on some things. 1. I could have hidden my identify behind a throwaway. I did not feel that would be appropriate when making this calim. 2. I am not looking for anything, literally at all. Any follow ups for blogs; anything that would benefit I will not answer. 3. This is NOT a new account, I am very easy to find; I am 6'1 140lbs I was working for a company called NationBuilder a…

Maybe just Occam's Razor -- any time I've seen Sam talk in public he just seems to be a neurotic, anxious individual that would have a hard time interacting with people in any normal context. In a world of infinite variables it's hard to say that his aversion was due to your race -- there's really not much to go on here.

Why would you think Occam's Razor would not determine that racism is the reason? It's just as simple of an explanation as anxiety.

I'm not sure some people understand how "normal" racism is.

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

#866

Post by gambiting »

calf wrote: post #852
gambiting wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Do they even have direct access to published works to use as reference material? I mean, clearly, given that it did answer my question eventually. Also wasn't it a whole thing that these models got trained on entire book libraries(without necessarily paying for that). >>I wouldn't expect any LLM to be able to respect such a request Why though? They seem to know everything about everything, why not this specifically…

Why though? They seem to know everything about everything, why not this specifically. The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is unscientific. "They seem to" is not good enough for an operational understanding of how LLMs work. The whole point of training is to forget details in order to form general capability, so it is not surprising if they forget things about books if the system deemed other properties…

>> if they forget things about books if the system deemed other properties as more important to remember.

I will repeat for the 3rd time that it's not a problem with the system forgetting the details, quite the opposite.

>>The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is unscientific.

How do you scientifically figure out if the LLM knows something before actually asking the question, in case of a publicly accessible model like Gemini?

Just to be clear - I would be about 1000000x less upset if it just said "I don't know" or "I can't do that". But these models are fundamentally incapable of realizing their own limits, but that alone is forgivable - them literally ignoring instructions is not.

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

#868

Post by jedberg »

Hikikomori wrote: post #662
jedberg wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but not for the system that decided to bomb a school. That was a Palanter in house system.

Afaik the palantir system utilized ai.

Yes, their own in house AI. That system doesn't use Anthropic or OpenAI.

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

#869

Post by ronanfarrow »

dang wrote: post #366
ronanfarrow wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve really appreciated how substantive and polite the discourse here is, overall!

I'm a mod here and wanted to let you know 2 things: (1) I've marked your account with a beta feature that displays a colored line to the left of new comments (since you last viewed the page). It might help you keep track of this rather large thread.* (2) I'm sorry the post was downranked off the frontpage for a while this afternoon. A software penalty kicks in when the discussion seems overheated ("flamewar detector"…

Thank you so much. I’ll be answering more of them throughout the day as I have time.

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

#870

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

strgrd wrote: post #688

I remember reading these direct quotes from SA in 2016 from the New Yorker and thinking, yeah, this guy is just miserable: > “Well, I like racing cars. I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival. My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N…

Perhaps naive, but he sounds like an optimist to me. Because govt/social stuff can often negate technological advancements as it already has.
Post reply on HN