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

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

#131
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.

I've noticed the disconnect between tech moguls and enthusiasts and the rest of the media in AI coverage. AI can invoke existential dread for writers, educators, and artists just as much as for software developers and engineers, although on perhaps a more delayed schedule. I think public sentiment among journalists will eventually catch up with the pros and cons of AI in a nuanced way, but it's a bit harder to apprec…

The value in building creative tools (esp writing) for writers and educators will be a rounding error compared to all the back office automation that is eating the lion shares of tokens. I just don’t think the media or mainstream thought is even aware of this because you don’t “see” it like that AI slop advertisement.

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

#132
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?

Exactly. Here I am sitting talking to my freaking computer, arguing with it, whatnot. And people just dismiss it as if it's not a science fiction. We were not there two, three years ago. Now we are. It's amazing and scary, scary mostly because the society that we operate in. I bet it's less scary in Norway or elsewhere where govt is more biased towards people not corps.

But what you and others have to understand is that real life is not simple and linear. There's no garauntee that things just continue to get better and better. I mean, it's not like we kept building cars and then eventually everyone was driving around at 800mph. We ran into limits - human limits, safety limits, physical limits.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone's disputing advantage and progress AI brings. What's at odds are corporate leeches bringing it on by leeching of everyone's work and giving back nothing for it except for a subscription service. That's where the soulless comes from, not teligious context. China and EU are somewhat doing the right thing though. Not at the scope yet.

Well, is it true that they give back nothing? What about the compute? Pay checks? The value of the subscription you pay for? What about actual examples of things they have given back for free, like Whisper, which used to be SOTA and is still extremely useful. Occasional excellent research papers, particularly from anthropic? My point about "moral panic" is that it leads to statements like "giving back nothing"... whi…

I mean, I get your point but you're making me more and more disagreeing with it, hah. Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, but I'll entertain the response.

Let's start with the fact that payroll and subscription tier can't be "giving back". That's just running a business. Whisper was a fig leaf when it was an open-everything era. Where are frontier weights now? Anthropic's papers describe how they did it, not who they did it to. That methods section isn't a royalty check for millions of people whose work is baked into those weights.

"Too hard to compensate fairly" is demonstrably false. If ASCAP figured out fractional royalties with paper ledgers, so can high tech. It's not _hard_, it's expensive which is _the actual reason_, but it's dressed up as logistics.

"Lizardbrain jealousy" bit is reducing critique to tribal envy and that's a move in the debate when your on the positive side of the curve and you'd prefer the conversation to end there. It's stupid, come on.

What I wanted to contrast it with is the non-capitalist version you kind of waived off. Publicly funded research, open initiatives, public private partnerships.. that's literally how we got transistor, the internet, GPS, mRNA, hell even math underneath the transformer. Capitalist layer didn't invent any of that, it wrapped subscription around it. The actual productive parts of the stack came from exactly the model you're mocking. OTOH, credit where it's due for Google's research arm that actually contributed back at the foundational level. An exception to the rule, if anything.

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

#134
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.

> AI is a "scam"

AI itself, the technology, isn't a scam

but the promotion of it certainly reeks of a pyramid scheme / scam

and the promises are pretty scammy in that they may be true at some point in time, but not today (one could say Tesla's FSD which some users paid for years ago, was/is a scam)

and there is one thing that is incontestable: AI, as wielded by large companies today, is a highly destructive force. you might be fine with that (one must tear down to rebuild approach), but many many other people are not.

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawsuit filed in 2024. Too late for it. AI boomed in 2023. And elon exited in 2021. I hate to say it but Elon lost. And we all lost.

What do you mean? Pandoras box has already been opened. Even if OpenAI disappears, there will be another one to take its marketshare. The tech is too useful to die

If open ai disappears… or is chained to a guideline, we would be ok.

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

#136
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> I remember when IP laws were looked at like a form of oppression in the tech community... This is not true. Otherwise, why is open source licensing so popular? Have you simply never read those licenses?

They are there for attribution and, depending on the license, preventing people from making money off something that is supposed to be free.

Attribution from an LLMs output is nearly as infeasible as attribution of where I learned the words I'm using to talk to you right now. I mean, AGI is incompatible with that kind of attribution, so saying we have to do it is equivalent to saying "AI not allowed".

It's a valid opinion, but, IMO kind of a wolf-in-sheeps-clothing argument.

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

#137
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

> obviously

If it was obvious I don't think there would be disagreement.

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

#138
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.

I remember the dot com boom.

One of my friends somehow convinced me to visit his friend who had a small startup that needed people.

...and it was in the extra bedroom of someone's dingy apartment. A bunch of folks were working on not-very-remarkable nonsense.

and the guy running the apartmen^h^h^h^h show said something to the effect of there's so much nonsense getting funded, why shouldn't I get in on it.

It was kind of depressing, I didn't get involved, got out quickly.

It's not that the dot com thing was a scam, it was that hype got money flooding into the market.

For every amazon or google or yahoo there were 1000 dumpster fires burning piles of cash.

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

#139
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.

A “weird fantasy”, huh? I’m pretty sure back here in reality, the majority of companies who are trying to integrate AI have very little to show for it in increased productivity or reduced real costs. Meanwhile, you claim we’re all in for a rude awakening. Who is living the weird fantasy? If you have evidence otherwise, post it.

Oh…you’re another “founder” at an “AI company”. One with a dead website on a Somalian TLD. Got it.

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

#140
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?

What they can do was not science fiction, these things are all based on papers that were written decades ago, with the caveat that there's simply not enough compute power. Now there is. That's what changed. Everything on top of that is an incremental improvement. It doesn't change the fact that LLMs are not, and never will be, AGI.

Who cares about AGI. That does not mean current LLMs are not massively useful.
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