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Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

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Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#262
post #182
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.

> why one person potentially being responsible for hundreds or thousands of deaths is acceptable I am not sure who exactly is that one person ? Is it Altman, who is according to many people not that knowledgeable in AI in the first place; the scientist who found a breakthrough (who is it ?); is it the president of the United States who is greenlighting the strikes; the general who is choosing the target (based on AI…

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#263

In all seriousness, what is the game plan for society moving forward as AI takes more jobs? The government doesn't seem to care. The AI labs don't seem to care. What happens when more and more people can't afford housing, kids, food, health insurance, etc.? Nothing more dangerous than a man who has no reason to live... I don't advocate for violence, but I do foresee more headlines like this as things get worse.

I think, like other disruptive inventions of the past, there will be pain for many, but it will pass. Society will grow and adapt. There's some statistic somewhere I will paraphrase and/or botch that goes like: 90% of the jobs people have today didn't exist 50 years ago. I think no one can imagine what possible opportunities will manifest in the future. It's a lot easier to imagine everything that might go wrong because we evolved to see a sabertooth in the rustling leaves.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#264

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.

An oligarch who promotes “democracy”. Is trying to cynically ingratiate himself, or is he really that deaf to the irony?

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#266
>“Once you see AGI you can’t unsee it.” It has a real "ring of power” dynamic to it, and makes people do crazy things. I don’t mean that AGI is the ring itself, but instead the totalizing philosophy of “being the one to control AGI”. The only solution I can come up with is to orient towards sharing the technology with people broadly, and for no one to have the ring.

The analogy has 2 simple rules and you can't even follow them:

#1 It MUST be destroyed.

#2 SOMEONE has to have the ring until then.

Without BOTH of those things you have no meaningful analogy. If we're being super charitable, "For no one to have the ring" is Frodo sitting at the council, with the ring on the table, naively thinking that it can stay right there in that spot forever, safe in Rivendell, about to have the horrifying revelation that there are 2.5 more books in the story. More realistically, it's Boromir moments later arguing that Denethor has the mandate to use it to fight on Gondor's behalf.

Fuck. I'm so past the point of caring about the extinction of our species, or your role in enslaving us to our robot overlords or whatever... but SELLING US SPECIOUS RING ANALOGIES IS WHERE I DRAW THE FUCKING LINE

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#268

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…

Especially when Google is in the far better position to come out ahead…imo.

Edit: so as not to simply spout an opinion, the reasoning I believe this is that Google has a real business already and were already deep into ML and AI research long before they had competitors — they just botched making it a product in the beginning. Anthropic and OpenAI meanwhile are paying hand over fist to subsidize user acquisition. Also, “Deepmind”. I don’t think much more needs to be said regarding that team, and Google has been working on AI since before either Altman or Amodei applied to go to college. They have a vast amount of researchers and resources, their own hardware and data centers (already, not “planned”) and it appears to be showing more recently (in my opinion).

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese models are distilled from GPT and Claude, so it's not like China would pull ahead if those companies went away for six months. They really are at the forefront of innovation right now, as much as I hate to think of the consequences of this (a single company owning a superintelligence is basically a nightmare scenario for me).

Don't worry, if someone truly achieves superintelligence it won't be controlled by anyone for long.

There will be a blinding flash which signals the superintelligence singularity. When the smoke clears, you'll see a 50-foot tall Altman/Borg hybrid. He is about to destroy humanity with his death ray. Suddenly, a 50-foot tall Musk/Borg hybrid appears out of nowhere, and stops Altman just in time. Then they work together to destroy all humans.
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