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Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

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Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#121
post #78
post #71

What happened with the ranking? Were there people who flagged all the stories, even the first (obviously newsworthy) one?

The 30 or so submissions of this story all set off a bunch of software penalties that try to prune the most repetitive and sensational stories off the front page. Otherwise there would be a lot more repetition and sensationalism on the fp, which is the opposite of what HN is for (see explanations via links below if curious). The downside is that we have to manually override the penalties in the case of a genuinely im…

Sometimes I wish you'd prune the users (at least from submission privileges) who can't be bothered to search first, which is how you get these n-fold submissions.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#122

This is good news. OpenAI's recent decision to dive into the secretive military contracting world makes a mockery of all its PR about alignment and safety. Using AI to develop targeted assassination lists based on ML algorithms (as was and is being done in Gaza) is obviously 'unsafe and unethical' use of the technology: https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/perspective/20231212-un...

Note that the France24 story on Gaza is about an unrelated technology, there's no claim that OpenAI was involved.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#123

Has there been a successful suit against a company for "abandoning their founding mission"? Does anyone think that this suit will succeed? Another article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/01/elon-musk...

But in this case, it wasn’t a company, but a nonprofit.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#124
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI was a 501C3. This meant donors could give money to it and receive tax benefits. The advantage is in the unique way it can reduce the funders tax bill.

A donation is a no strings attached thing, so these donors basically funded a startup without getting any shares?

Unless the donors were already owners.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a donor to the OpenAi non-profit organization.

A donor usually is only able to say how his donation will be used. For example, if you donate to Harvard University, you can say the money will be earmarked for scholarships, but you don't get a say on how the university is managed. You can at best say you will no longer donate based on how the university is managed.

> but you don't get a say on how the university is managed.

Depends on how big and important of a donor you are. If you are a billionaire donor, not only do you have a say in how the university is managed, you have a say on who does the managing.

> You can at best say you will no longer donate based on how the university is managed.

Tell that to the former presidents of harvard, upenn, etc.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#126

I do wonder if OpenAI is built on a house of cards. They aren’t a nonprofit, aren’t open, and stole a huge quantity of copyrighted material to get started. But, by moving fast and scaling quickly, are they at the Too Big to Fail stage already? The attempted board coup makes me think so.

Openai isn't even close to too big to fail. Bank of America fails the entire banking system collapses and the entire real economy grinds to a halt. If GM fails hundreds of thousands lose their jobs and entire supply chains collapse. If power utilities fail then people start actually dying within hours or days. If OpenAI fails nothing actually important happens.

you cannot erase that much value and say "nothing important happens", market cap is largely a rough proxy for the amount of disruption if something went under

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#127

Has there been a successful suit against a company for "abandoning their founding mission"? Does anyone think that this suit will succeed? Another article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/01/elon-musk...

Maybe the discovery process will benefit Musk and/or harm OpenAI sufficiently to consider it a "win" for Musk. Or perhaps it's just Musk wanting to make a statement. Maybe Musk doesn't expect to actually win the suit.

I wonder if the lawsuit will simply be dismissed.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#128
post #23

I do wonder if OpenAI is built on a house of cards. They aren’t a nonprofit, aren’t open, and stole a huge quantity of copyrighted material to get started. But, by moving fast and scaling quickly, are they at the Too Big to Fail stage already? The attempted board coup makes me think so.

Why would OpenAI be "too big to fail"? They seemed pretty close to failing just some months ago.

I think that is actually quite illustrative of the opposite point.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#129
post #121
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 30 or so submissions of this story all set off a bunch of software penalties that try to prune the most repetitive and sensational stories off the front page. Otherwise there would be a lot more repetition and sensationalism on the fp, which is the opposite of what HN is for (see explanations via links below if curious). The downside is that we have to manually override the penalties in the case of a genuinely im…

Sometimes I wish you'd prune the users (at least from submission privileges) who can't be bothered to search first, which is how you get these n-fold submissions.

That's impossible. We'd have to prune human nature.

Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

#130
post #13

AI is going to continue to have incremental progress, particularly now in hardware gains. No one can even define what AGI is or what it will look like, let alone be something that OpenAI would own? Features progress is too incremental to suddenly pop out with "AGI". Fighting about it seems a distraction.

Progress is definitely not inremental, it's exponential. The same performance (training an LLM with a given perplexity) can be achieved 5x cheaper next year while the amount of money deep learning infrastructure gets increases exponentially right now. If this method is able to get to AGI (which I believe but many people are debating), human intelligence will just be mostly ,,skipped'', and won't be a clear point.

how long do you think the "exponential" (that looks very linear to me) growth in funding can continue?

until it's more than US GDP? world GDP? universe GDP?

either way you're close to the point it will have to go logistic

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