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Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

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81–90 of 159 posts

Re: Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jargon isn't a scam. I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer. People using dumb terms to describe this doesn't make it less true.

> I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an…

why would anthropic do that?

Re: Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

#82
post #68
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nowhere near AGI, and LLMs are not going to lead to it either. Nevermind what they can do was pure science fiction just 3 years ago?

Are you claiming they have AGI or are "close" to it?

Yes. I think cutting-edge LLM products obviously have what nearly anyone in 2020 would have called "artificial general intelligence".

The shape of the intelligence frontier has turned out to be much more jagged than anyone at the time expected, so I can imagine reasonable objections from someone who has a specific, concrete benchmark of AGI that wasn't invented 6 months ago and isn't yet met. If someone just has a subjective sense that they're not smart enough, I think they're wrong.

Re: Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

#83
post #58
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaked emails I think showed the open source part at the heart of the concept of OpenAI was never serious and was just to help recruit.

I don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?

These are Dr. Doom morals.

Re: Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

#84
post #19

This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them away and then everything will be right in the world. Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant to them. Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.

On a certain level it is a scam. AI slop, vibe coding, tokenmaxxing, blaming employee layoffs on AI, pretty much any comment CEOs make about AI, etc.

Well yes, there is tons of AI bullshit about and all sorts of scammy behavior, but I don’t think that says anything at all either way about whether the core technology is a “scam”, theranos-style. In fact I’m not sure how it could be otherwise: of course there’s going to be all sorts of hype and scamming around a novel, rapidly-progressing and potentially transformative tech like this, even if it works.

If you want an analogy, look at the history of the early railroads. Full of hype, bullshitters, scammy investments, robber-barons, unrealistic promises, and with their own legion of naysayers at the time. Yet the core technology worked and it did transform the world in the end.

Re: Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

#85
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the marketing material, LLMs are still just using probabilities to guess what the next token is.

you think it should be deterministic?

If LLMs were configured to be deterministic, instead of the current "small amount of randomness to provide the illusion of a thinking machine", they would be much more useful in exchange for being less exciting to laypeople.

In other words, scam.

Re: Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

#86
post #32

[flagged]

Did an elon stan invoke being obedient to billionaires? Besides the one we all know, there is no other billionaire dickridden harder than elon. There's no terrible behavior that can't be justified as long as the memes keep flowing I guess. Although in this particular round sama is worse...

Re: Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you think it should be deterministic?

If LLMs were configured to be deterministic, instead of the current "small amount of randomness to provide the illusion of a thinking machine", they would be much more useful in exchange for being less exciting to laypeople. In other words, scam.

you know you can set the temperature to zero and get exactly that, right?

Re: Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

#88

"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. They're fighting over who gets to wield the dick that is going to screw us all.

> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle.

his name is Luigi Mangione :)

Re: Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

#89
post #19

This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them away and then everything will be right in the world. Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant to them. Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.

Using unlicensed intellectual property to build a plagiarism machine that is wrong 10% of the time, could be interpreted as a scam by many folks.

Is there anyway to build intelligence that doesn't meet the definition of plagiarism you are using here?

I remember when IP laws were looked at like a form of oppression in the tech community...

Re: Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost

#90
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, I think the article makes an interesting observation that suggests it actually doesn't matter whether these people are intentionally trying to screw everybody or not--the actual problem is much bigger even than that: To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes,…

It’s ridiculous to accuse someone of having a “somewhat loose relationship with the truth” when Elon Musk is sitting right across from him, accusing him of dishonest behavior.

There is nothing implausible about two known liars accusing each other of lying and both being truthful this one time - though extremely hypocritical, of course.
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