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At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

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Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. We are still dealing with the consequences…

I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives

I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).

Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks. Looking around, I expect I'm not alone, but this may not be the default experience. And the LLMs certainly aren't perfect. They can hallucinate, they're often sycophantic, they're bad at judgment in a number of ways, probably others I'm missing.

Compared to actual people, they suck. Compared to social media as it exists today, they have orders of magnitude to fall before your comparison makes sense to me. And, at least for now, the LLMs are the ones getting better while the social networks are- AFAICT, universally- getting worse.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#192
post #68

Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs a…

What metric are you using to say the entire economy is betting on it?

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives

I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even commu…

> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks.

This is kind of making the parent's argument for them about the dangers...

> And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).

You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected. The world has conflict. Not all conflict is bad. Yes, social media weaponizes that conflict for ads, but I think the opposite is more dangerous in creating completely distorted realities. What you're describing sounds worse than the worst nightmare I've ever had, a world in which I'd be constantly disconnected from everyone else and would be disillusioned into thinking I'm not.

> Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks.

This is what therapy is for.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're reading into Amodei's propaganda as to why they should control AI. The information to make biological weapons for example is nothing new, it has been on the Internet for decades.

Should we control nuclear weapons? Is nuclear technology of the sort we’re fighting a war over right now a bigger technological advance than AI when it comes to war fighting capabilities? I suppose if you think ai is nothing big, it makes sense to not want to control it. Or, if you are all for widespread nuclear proliferation, then your position would make sense. ELSE: you’re totally illogical.

An LLM can't help you build a nuke. LLMs can't paper over hard engineering challenges like "You need to reinvent the centrifugal separator industry" and "rocket engineering is pretty difficult" and "you need really really good data to simulate things before you can actually build an implosion device" and less engineering challenges like "The CIA keeps murdering anyone who works on this"

There's never been an information access problem with nuclear weapons. The information was so public that most physicist realized everyone was building bombs from the sudden lack of published papers on how you could build bombs.

It's just silly how people seem to believe that if you just have a page worth of text saying something, you can suddenly do that thing.

Even a magical superintelligent AI could not do these things. It's going to tell you the exact same thing that has been known for nearly a century now:

"Hire 100 engineers and a couple physicists and 1000 very skilled machinists and laborers, and spend a billion dollars on plumbing, and then do that a second time if you need to deliver the device using a missile"

Meanwhile a dirty bomb is trivial.

These things don't happen because people who want to cause mass harm are generally poorly resourced.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#196

IMO we are in the era of “Final Companies” and the appeal of being a founder these days just isn’t great compared to the entrepreneurial boom of the 2010s and 2000s. The risk to reward ratio has never been worse.

Bootstrapped companies make more sense now

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even commu…

> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. This is kind of making the parent's argument for them about the dangers... > And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the p…

Jury, I direct you to exhibit A.

>You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected.

Incorrect. My interactions with LLMs simply don't look like this. I don't know where you got this idea from what I said. I have a prompt that begs the thing to call me out, and it currently does so too much, which is exactly what I prefer.

What it doesn't do is rub minor disagreements in my face, jump to conclusions about who I am based on pre-existing beliefs, or tell me to go to therapy when I earnestly admit my humanity.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives

I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even commu…

> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks

Social media felt this way in the early days, too.

> they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately)

This is dangerously untrue. LLMs will deliberately tell you the things you want to hear. They even "call you out" in exactly the ways that are most palatable to you. There is ample evidence that LLMs can be biased. The ability to broadly influence individual opinions, without even needing bot accounts on social media is exactly one of the reasons so many people who want power/money are flocking to control these LLMs.

> so many of my interactions are with jerks

This is one of the ways that the LLMs are "scarier" and more powerful than social networks. Real people are more likely to be obviously pushing agendas or otherwised easily dismissed.

> LLMs are the ones getting better

Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media. It's the reach and anonymity of social media without needing to control a feed algorithm, deal with content or people that doesn't fit your agenda, or produce fake content that does.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#200

Things from YC never really were independent companies, I think it's more clear to view all of YC as one company. The separate entity thing is mostly a trick so they can book revenue to themselves as real revenue. Look, we have 37 other YC companies paying for our product it's so popular and successful. Hits different if you view it as a single company, imagine AT&T promoting their internal customer service software,…

the only high iq kid in this comment section basides me is right
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