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OpenAI's tumultuous early years revealed in emails from Musk, Altman, and others

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21–26 of 26 posts

Re: OpenAI's tumultuous early years revealed in emails from Musk, Altman, and others

#21

Let's analyze these specific emails for manipulation patterns while being clear we're doing so to understand and prevent harm, not to learn manipulation: Key manipulative behaviors shown in the emails: 1. Using artificial urgency to force decisions: "Deepmind is going to give everyone massive counteroffers tomorrow to try to kill it" 2. Changing narratives to maintain control: Sam Altman's reasons for wanting CEO tit…

Someone thought they were funding a non-profit instead they gave money to a [trillion $ unicorn] startup for free. Foolish.

Re: OpenAI's tumultuous early years revealed in emails from Musk, Altman, and others

#22

Let's analyze these specific emails for manipulation patterns while being clear we're doing so to understand and prevent harm, not to learn manipulation: Key manipulative behaviors shown in the emails: 1. Using artificial urgency to force decisions: "Deepmind is going to give everyone massive counteroffers tomorrow to try to kill it" 2. Changing narratives to maintain control: Sam Altman's reasons for wanting CEO tit…

Yea. It’s called social dynamics and plays out in pretty much any situation. Please don’t think I’m a fan of the people at play here, I’m not. But it’s pretty standard stuff.

I‘d call this politics instead of social dynamics and argue that its importance differs across companies, but generally. I’d agree though that I also don’t find this out of the norm (in those specific circumstances)

Re: OpenAI's tumultuous early years revealed in emails from Musk, Altman, and others

#23
I have a theory that everything is BS politics now. (Maybe it always has been.)

Is Elon's new lawsuit still on?

Does Elon's new political situation affect it?

Altman recently wrote an X post showing an OpenAI model making a less left-leaning reply than Grok.

What I am really waiting for over the next couple of years is for someone to demonstrate real progress in scaling the next hardware paradigm. Probably something fairly different like a completely memory-focused type of computation. Built on memristors or something. There have been examples built by labs, but they had relatively tiny amounts of compute, albeit theoretically with the _potential_ for massive efficiency gains in some future form.

The next 100X or 1000X efficiency gain from a new hardware paradigm may make a lot of the current generation's infrastructure and bickering mostly irrelevant. And I think it will be a huge boost to open source AI.

In my opinion, what's relevant is not any particular deal or company, but that we develop and adapt to a nuanced cultural understanding of what types and levels of AI capability can help us and which will actually be dangerous sooner or later, and how to fairly deploy the beneficial and avoid the dangerous.

But I think it needs to be a broad understanding in society.

Re: OpenAI's tumultuous early years revealed in emails from Musk, Altman, and others

#24
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounded like that was directed at Elon not Sam? Or is it the other way? Ilya makes a good point, but I also wonder if he is also being naive. In order to get to the stage where AGI can be built outside of big tech, you probably do need a CEO with typical CEO powers. Maybe there can be some convoluted structure to avoid dictatorial control at the end but I also wonder if this is sort of an organizational distractio…

"is immune to firing by the board" is not a typical CEO power.

I agree with that. But I was not sure if that requirement was mentioned because of the unique and complicated structure, with the nonprofit board. The members of that board seemed to be mishandling the Sam Altman situation, at least from a public relations perspective. I think it would be difficult to accept a CEO role where the board appears to be incompetent. Of course, it is also possible that they were competent in rejecting Sam Altman, but simply inexperienced in handling the high stakes game of dealing with outside investors like Satya Nadella from Microsoft, or with very visible public relations crises.

Re: OpenAI's tumultuous early years revealed in emails from Musk, Altman, and others

#25
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before. I do not see why one would worry about AGI just because there is a rise in bot performance. What kind of performance are we talking about? I have written bots for various games myself but never once I thought I am creating "intelligence" or that it would ever lead to…

Im more worried of bots flooding all kinds of social media pushing public oppinion in the direction their owners want. I feel that this is already happening.

That was happening for many years before any AI, and now that AI is well known people are finally starting to be sceptical. A positive development.

Re: OpenAI's tumultuous early years revealed in emails from Musk, Altman, and others

#26
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before. I do not see why one would worry about AGI just because there is a rise in bot performance. What kind of performance are we talking about? I have written bots for various games myself but never once I thought I am creating "intelligence" or that it would ever lead to…

Im more worried of bots flooding all kinds of social media pushing public oppinion in the direction their owners want. I feel that this is already happening.

It's happening already at a large scale: https://www.cyber.gc.ca/en/news-events/russian-state-sponsor...
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