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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

#171

Post by OutOfHere »

tivert wrote: post #93
OutOfHere wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nothing like vaccines. Zero. I can easily imagine a thriving world without copyrights, but I cannot without vaccines.

> It is nothing like vaccines. Zero. I can easily imagine a thriving world without copyrights, but I cannot without vaccines. For the record, the world can and did thrive before vaccines were invented, so you don't have to imagine it. Sure there was more sickness and death, but we have plenty of that now, and I doubt you'd consider today's world "not thriving." But ok, then. Imagine that world without copyrights for…

Regarding life without vaccines, the life expectancy could then be very low. Whether this qualifies as "thriving" is subjective. The population as a whole could still thrive, but individuals may not.

Regarding your other points:

1. That is a bad argument. Imagine that some people called collectors get to collect royalties from you every time you post a HN comment. Such collectors are paid for moderating comments. Some such collectors are wildly successful. Imagine that "commentright" law protects such people. If commentright law were to go away, how do such people get paid? (It's a fake problem, and copyright law is similarly no different.) In essence, if you love to write, go write, but don't expect artificial laws to save you.

2. To my knowledge, Amazon is not known to violate a preexisting GPL license. Amazon forks only things that were open in the past, but are now no longer open. In doing so, Amazon ensures the fork stays open. There is no license violation. If Amazon is making tons of money, it's probably because the software wasn't AGPL licensed in the first place.

3. This has already happened twice to me, and frankly, I am not worried. I can still carve out my limited focused niche.

I try to look at the bigger picture which is the picture of AGI, of the future of humanity, not of artificial protections or even of individual success. Your beliefs are shaped by the culture you were exposed to as an adolescent. If you had grown up in Tibet, or if you had tried LSD a few times in your life, or were exposed to say Buddhism, your beliefs about individual greed would be very different.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#172

Post by jillyboel »

cbracketdash wrote: post #164

Police now say it's been ruled a suicide: https://sfstandard.com/2024/12/13/key-openai-whistleblower-d... https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/12/13/openai-... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/openai-whistleblower-dead_n_6...

[flagged]

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#173

Post by XorNot »

neuroelectron wrote: post #168
XorNot wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but as soon as someone says "what are the odds someone with X features kills himself" - well I didn't invoke the statistical argument did I?

The answer is: it's right within the profile. You don't get to say "what are the odds!?" and then complain about the actual statistics - as noted elsewhere in this thread, the Birthday Paradox[1] is also at play.

What are the odds of any individual whistleblower dying? Who knows. What are the odds of someone, somewhere, describable as a whisteblower dying? Fairly high if there's even a modest number of whistleblowers relative to the method of death (i.e. Boeing has dozens of whistleblower cases going, and OpenAI sheds an employee every other week who writes a critique on their blog about the company).

This same problem turns up with any discussion of vaccines and VAERS. If I simply go and wave my hand over the arm of 1,000 random people then within a year it's virtually guaranteed at least 1 of them will be dead, probably a lot more[2]. Hell, at a standard death rate of 8.1/1000, OpenAI's standing number of employees of 1,700[3] means in any given year it's pretty likely someone will die - and since "worked for OpenAI" is a one-way membership, year over year "former OpenAI employee dies" gets more and more likely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

[2] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/death-rate/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#174

Post by benreesman »

BillFranklin wrote: post #60

There are some pretty callous comments on this thread. This is really sad. Suchir was just 26, and graduated from Berkeley 3 years ago. Here’s his personal site: https://suchir.net/ . I think he was pretty brave for standing up against what is generally perceived as an injustice being done by one of the biggest companies in the world, just a few years out of college. I’m not sure how many people in his position would…

It seems most are expressing sadness and condolences to the family and friends around what is clearly a great loss of both an outstanding talent and a uniquely principled and courageous person.

There will always be a few tacky remarks in any Internet forum but those have all found their way to the bottom.

RIP.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#175

Post by IAmGraydon »

typeofhuman wrote: post #104
DevX101 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm a whistleblower in an active case and I end up dead before testifying, I absolutely DO want the general public to speculate about my cause of death.

I would also most certainly have a dead man's switch releasing everything I know. I would have given it to an attorney along with a sworn deposition.

Why would you give it to anyone? That’s not how a dead man’s switch works.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#177

Post by princevegeta89 »

nialv7 wrote: post #43
dgfitz wrote: post #22

I wonder who called to ask about his well-being. The Boeing guy killed himself, this guy apparently killed himself. The pattern of David vs Goliath, where David kills himself, is almost becoming a pattern.

> this guy apparently killed himself. where did you get that? this article doesn't say a cause of death.

There is confirmed news now that he killed himself

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#178

Post by smeeger »

neuroelectron wrote: post #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. Tha…

people dont kill themselves because they dont have a good job. thats a weird and naive belief that upper class people have. people kill themselves because they are mentally unwell, fundamentally. except situations like terminal illness.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#179

Post by motohagiography »

bsenftner wrote: post #101
minimaxir wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth reading his initial tweet: https://x.com/suchirbalaji/status/1849192575758139733 > I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I'm skeptical "fair use" would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post ( https://suchir.net/fair_use.html ) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I believe this. > To give some conte…

I'm an applied AI developer and CTO at a law firm, and we discuss the fair use argument quite a bit. It grey enough that whom ever has more financial revenues to continue their case will win. Such is the law and legal industry in the USA.

what twigs me about the argument against fair use (whereby AI ostensibly "replicates" the content competitively against the original) is that it assumes a model trained on journalism produces journalism or is designed to produce it. the argument against that stance would be easy to make.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#180

Post by _cs2017_ »

BillFranklin wrote: post #60

There are some pretty callous comments on this thread. This is really sad. Suchir was just 26, and graduated from Berkeley 3 years ago. Here’s his personal site: https://suchir.net/ . I think he was pretty brave for standing up against what is generally perceived as an injustice being done by one of the biggest companies in the world, just a few years out of college. I’m not sure how many people in his position would…

As a reader, I prefer not to be misled by articles linked from the HN front page. So I do want to know whether someone is or is not a whistleblower. This has nothing to do with respect for the dead.
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