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Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#201

Post by BloondAndDoom »

tinyhouse wrote: post #177
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #155

Can someone help me to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic talks as if the future of humanity controlled by them? We have very strong open (weight) Chinese models possibly only 6 months behind of them, gene is out of the bottle, is 6 months of difference really that important? And they don’t have good reasons for that 6 months to stay that way. Am I missing something or are these just their usual marketing? I’m not a…

They own the best models and will probably keep owning the best models for a while. They have much more compute now and more data to keep improving their models on many tasks. Open source won't close the gap in 6 months. They are also trying to block other companies from distilling their models [0]. [0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

I need to check benchmarks on the models, I wonder what the benchmarks are saying in terms of how closely models tracking these frontiers. —on my mobile at the moment

When it downs compute power I assume you are referring to power to training and interference. Then is it more about training gap will get wider and wider ? Is that the assumption, I know there limited GPUs etc. But I’m having hard time to believe to the idea of China cannot catch up. Even if the gap is 12 months I’m struggling to see what that means in practice? Is that military advantage, economical, intelligence? It still doesn’t explain and whatever the advantage is, aren’t we supposed to see that advantage today? If so, where is it? What’s the massive advantage of USA because of OpenAI and Anthropic?

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#203

Post by isodev »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #155

Can someone help me to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic talks as if the future of humanity controlled by them? We have very strong open (weight) Chinese models possibly only 6 months behind of them, gene is out of the bottle, is 6 months of difference really that important? And they don’t have good reasons for that 6 months to stay that way. Am I missing something or are these just their usual marketing? I’m not a…

> just their usual marketing

I think that’s a very common element for most US tech corps. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, X etc - they’re all “making a dent in the universe”. It’s unfortunate when their employees and CEOs loose track of the line that separates marketing from reality

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#204

Post by GeoAtreides »

tempestn wrote: post #59
nslsm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's never OK to physically attack someone like this. Full stop. I agree. The French Revolution was really, really mean.

Are you familiar with the details of the French Revolution? Some of the eventual outcomes were indeed positive, but a lot of what actually went on was pretty horrific.

what are you arguing? that people should not violently overthrow their corrupt leaders? that the french should've let the Ancient Regime entrench and continue? That the serfs (slaves) in tsarist Russia should've stayed put and not revolt against the corrupt and incompetent Nicholas II? Or that the Hungarians and Czechoslovaks not revolt against the totalitarian regimes propped by the Russians? Should've the Romanians in 1989 stayed at home, in cold and hunger, and let Ceausescu regime continue to cruelly oppress them?

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#205

Post by stavros »

minimaxir wrote: post #127
velominati wrote: post #25

It's never OK to physically attack someone like this. Full stop. Separately; Sam's belief that "AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated." rings incredibly hollow. OpenAI has abandoned its open source roots. It is concentrating wealth - and thus power - into fewer hands. Not more.

I didn't think Hacker News needed an explicit "calls for violence are bad" guideline but the comments here have shown otherwise.

Are calls for violence bad when you're calling for throwing a molotov cocktail at a child? At an adult? At a serial killer? At someone who's about to shoot you unprovoked? At someone who murdered your family? At someone who's about to?

If you said "yes" to all of the above, I'd love to know your reasoning.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#206

Post by avs733 »

velominati wrote: post #25

It's never OK to physically attack someone like this. Full stop. Separately; Sam's belief that "AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated." rings incredibly hollow. OpenAI has abandoned its open source roots. It is concentrating wealth - and thus power - into fewer hands. Not more.

If we are going to say violence isn’t okay then it is important that we be clear about the boundaries of what we define as violence.

Theft is a nice analogy here. The default model of theft is property crime but the largest type of theft is wage theft.

If we fret about violence done against individuals but not violence against groups our attention is going to end up steered in a narrow direction.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#207

Post by lostlogin »

Waterluvian wrote: post #97
velominati wrote: post #25

It's never OK to physically attack someone like this. Full stop. Separately; Sam's belief that "AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated." rings incredibly hollow. OpenAI has abandoned its open source roots. It is concentrating wealth - and thus power - into fewer hands. Not more.

The thing about the rich is that they have access to sufficient levels of abstraction that they can commit terrible, disproportionate violence without it looking that way. And then fools who crave the simplistic safe comfort of moral absolutes come to their aid. Throwing a petrol bomb at a building with children inside is about as evil as murdering 150 students at an all-girls school. I'm obviously not defending that…

> Throwing a petrol bomb at a building with children inside is about as evil as murdering 150 students at an all-girls school. I'm obviously not defending that.

Really? I don’t know how many were in his house but at most it’s attempted murder of a few versus killing 150.

I see a difference.

US law sees a difference too. The person that threw the firebomb will get the full weight of the law if they are caught, and spent an awfully long time in prison.

Those that killed the school girls will never face punishment.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#208

Post by kelnos »

> AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated. Control of the future belongs to all people and their institutions. AI needs to empower people individually, and we need to make decisions about our future and the new rules collectively. I do not think it is right that a few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future.

What a bullshit thing for someone who is not actually democratizing access to AI to say.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#209

Post by pesus »

GMoromisato wrote: post #188
pesus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that Altman's fans seem to keep skipping past this fact. I'd love to hear their defense as to why one person potentially being responsible for hundreds or thousands of deaths is acceptable, but attacking that one person isn't. If violence is never the answer, they should be condemning Altman with even more vigor.

The entire purpose of government is to have a monopoly on violence. Democracies give their government the power to decide when and against whom to deploy violence. There is a real difference between giving a democratic government the tools to kill people vs attempting to kill people yourself. If you don’t believe this then you don’t believe in democracy.

I'm not sure the next batch of schoolgirls getting bombed will particularly care whether the choice was made "democratically" or not.

I also won't particularly care about the distinction when AI is inevitably used to enact violence on the US population.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#210

Post by imiric »

> We have to get safety right, which is not just about aligning a model—we urgently need a society-wide response to be resilient to new threats. This includes things like new policy to help navigate through a difficult economic transition in order to get to a much better future.

This might be the greatest example of cognitive dissonance I've seen in years. I can't understand how someone who's clearly highly intelligent can express this opinion, while doing the complete opposite. Does he think that everyone is a fool and that nobody will notice? Is this some form of gaslighting? Unbelievable.

Violence is not the answer, but it's easy to see how Sam's public persona would push someone to do this. There are certainly disturbed people who don't need any logical reason for violence, but maybe it would help if Sam stopped being so damn dishonest and manipulative. Even this post that is intended to gain sympathy ends up doing the opposite.

As a sidenote, I wish we would stop paying attention to these people. A probablistic pattern generator is far from the greatest technology humanity has ever invented. Get off your high horse, stop deluding people, and start working with organizations and governments to educate people in understanding and using this tech instead of hoarding power and wealth for you and your immediate circle of grifters.

> A lot of companies say they are going to change the world; we actually did.

Ugh.

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