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OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

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Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#161
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a DMS as a service anywhere? I know it’s very easy to setup but wondering if anyone is offering this.

I use deadmansswitch.net - it sends you an email to verify that you are still alive, but you can also use a Telegram bot. In this case I have it set to send a passphrase to an encrypted file with all of my information to trusted individuals.

If your enemy knows how your switch works it is more feasible to disable it. In this case taking control of either that service or your email should do the trick.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#162
"No evidence of foul play." What about the evidence that he's only 26 and has a successful career in the booming Ai industry? He doesn't seem a likely candidate for suicide.

Fair use hasn't been tested in court. He has documents that show OpenAI's intention and communications about the legal framework for it. He was directly involved in web scraping and openly discussing the legal perspectives with his superiors. That is damning evidence.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#163
post #20

Anyone who's a whistleblower should compile key docs and put it in a "dead man's switch" service that releases your testimony/docs to multiple news agencies in the event of your untimely demise. The company you're whistle blowing against and their major shareholders should know this exists. Also, regularly post public video attesting to you current mental state.

> The company you're whistle blowing against and their major shareholders should know this exists.

They'll just get out the $5 wrench then

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#165
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The GP comment seems innocuous to me. Taking the thread on a generic tangent about copyright law, spiced with personal putdowns, is clearly not ok.

My right to flag comments was previously unfairly taken away from me. Maybe if I still had this right, I would've just flagged and moved on, but I didn't have this right. I don't even know why it was taken away.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#166
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would that accomplish? Are you saying they won't kill you because then the documents would be released? So you would never release the documents if they never kill you? Or are you saying you'll do this so the documents are guaranteed to be released, even if you're killed? In that case, why not just publish them right now?

The scenario I described is to ensure the whistleblower being alive or dead has minimal change in impact to the company. If there's a pending case that could wipe billions off a company's market cap and 1 person is a key witness in the outcome...well lots of powerful people now have an incentive if that witness were no longer around. Why not just publish immediately? Publishing immediately likely violates NDA and cou…

If the information is going to be released in full though, and I'm a murderous executive, then why not kill you immediately?

(1) How do you prove you have a deadman switch? How do you prove it functions correctly?

(2) How do you prove it contains any more material then you've already shown you have?

(3) Since you're going to testify anyway, what's the benefit in leaving you alive when your story can discredited after the fact, and apparently it is trivially easy to get away with an untraceable murder?

which leads to (4): if the point is to "send a message" then killing you later is kind of pointless. Let the deadman switch trigger and send a message to everyone else - it won't save you.

People concoct scenarios where they're like "oh but I'll record a tape saying 'I didn't kill myself'" as though thats a unique thing and not something every deranged person does anyway, including Australia's racist politician (who's very much still alive, being awful).

The world doesn't work like a TV storyline, but good news for you the only reason everyone's like "are they killing whistleblowers?" is because you're all bored and want to feel clever on the internet (while handily pushing the much more useful narrative: through no specific actions, don't become a whistleblower because there's an untraceable, unprovable service which has definitely killed every dead whistleblower you heard of. Please ignore all the alive ones who kind of had their lives ruined by the process but didn't die and are thus boring to talk about).

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#167

"No evidence of foul play." What about the evidence that he's only 26 and has a successful career in the booming Ai industry? He doesn't seem a likely candidate for suicide. Fair use hasn't been tested in court. He has documents that show OpenAI's intention and communications about the legal framework for it. He was directly involved in web scraping and openly discussing the legal perspectives with his superiors. Tha…

I mean in the last week a guy with a similar profile shot and killed the United Healthcare CEO.

But frankly this is a "oh that person seemed so happy, how could they have been depressed!?" line of thinking. The 2021 suicide death rate in the US population for the 26 to 44 age bracket is 18.8 per 100,000[1]. It is literally the highest rate (second is 18-25), and it is wildly skewed in favor men (22.8 / 100,000 vs 5.7 per 100,000).

[1] https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/a-look-at-the-...

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#168
post #167

"No evidence of foul play." What about the evidence that he's only 26 and has a successful career in the booming Ai industry? He doesn't seem a likely candidate for suicide. Fair use hasn't been tested in court. He has documents that show OpenAI's intention and communications about the legal framework for it. He was directly involved in web scraping and openly discussing the legal perspectives with his superiors. Tha…

I mean in the last week a guy with a similar profile shot and killed the United Healthcare CEO. But frankly this is a "oh that person seemed so happy, how could they have been depressed!?" line of thinking. The 2021 suicide death rate in the US population for the 26 to 44 age bracket is 18.8 per 100,000[1]. It is literally the highest rate (second is 18-25), and it is wildly skewed in favor men (22.8 / 100,000 vs 5.7…

I get what you're saying but statistics aren't evidence of an individual's behavior.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#169
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and to me it's one of the reasons it's hard to argue that generative AI violates copyright. At least in the US, a derivative work is a creative (i.e. copyrightable) work in its own right. Neither AI models nor their output meet that bar, so it's not clear what the infringing derivative work could be.

Non-derivative doesn't mean the same as non-infringing though. For example, suppose if I photograph a copyrighted painting, and then started selling copies of the slightly-cropped photo. The output wouldn't have enough originality to qualify as a derivative work (let alone an original work) but it would still be infringement against the painter.

If you added something to the painting then you're selling a derivative work, and if you didn't then you're selling a copy of the work itself - but either way an expressive work is being used, which is what copyright law regulates. IANAL, but with LLM models and outputs that seems not to be the case.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anytime someone potentially possesses information that is damning to a company and that person is killed… the low probability of such an even being a random coincidence is quite low. You're running into the birthday paradox here. The probability of a specific witness dying before they can testify in a lawsuit is low. The probability of any one of dozens of people involved in a lawsuit dying before it's resolved is…

Right, so given the paradox, consider both possibilities rather then dismiss one like the parent is implying here.

Or you could just look at the facts of the case (currently: no foul play suspected). Are the cops in on it? The morgue? The local city? How high does this go?

This isn't something which happened in isolation. This isn't "someone died". It's "someone died, and dozens of people are going to sign off that this obviously not a suicide was definitely a suicide".

Like, is that possible? Can you fake a suicide and leave no evidence you did? If you can then how many suicides aren't actually suicides but homicides? How would we know?

You're acting like it's a binary choice of probabilities but it isn't.

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