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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#231

Post by jokethrowaway »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #169

Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. The ultimate effect of virtue wanking CEOs and corporate governance is to deceive people into thinking democracy is something that can be achieved by for profit organizations and that they can forsake the formal binding of collective interest through law. It's nice if people are nice but it is not a bulwark of the collective…

That's completely misguided. Consumers purchase from companies they like.

Why do you think companies are all woke and virtue signalling? Because they interpreted the vocal woke minority as the voice of the country and they want to capture that market.

Corporations will absolutely try to do go in order to maximise their profit.

And this is ignoring private charities which get more done than any government has ever done.

Collective interest is a nice concept but the government, like all large organizations, is not capable of moving in any direction. Whatever you need done, chances are someone's cousin will get a job, the job will be done poorly and the taxpayers will pay more in taxes to fix the problem again and again and again.

A government can't fail and it's therefore inefficient.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#232

Post by maxbond »

clarkmoody wrote: post #193
DubiousPusher wrote: post #169

Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. The ultimate effect of virtue wanking CEOs and corporate governance is to deceive people into thinking democracy is something that can be achieved by for profit organizations and that they can forsake the formal binding of collective interest through law. It's nice if people are nice but it is not a bulwark of the collective…

The third way is to build AI technology that empowers the individual against state and corporate power alike. Democracy got us here. It cannot get us out.

That's not a stable equilibrium. Blogs gave individuals asymmetric control over disseminating information - it didn't last. If you don't create institutions and power structures that cement and defend some ability of individuals, it will decay as that power is usurped by whatever institutions and power structures benefit from doing so.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#233

Post by robertlagrant »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #105
leetharris wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a ridiculous take and a slippery slope. Should car manufacturers be liable for drunk drivers? Should kitchen knife manufacturers be responsible for stabbings? Your idea is great if you want your country to be left behind entirely in innovation.

Worth reminding that the slippery slope argument is not a valid argument at all. As with standard slippery slope reasoning, you jump to the most extreme interpretation. Yet reality shows us that you cannot, in fact, boil a frog, because at some point it just gets too fucking hot. Should car manufacturers be liable for drunk drivers? Maybe, if they include a space in their vehicle specifically to store and serve alcoh…

Without defining the reasonable standard, it remains a silly idea in this case.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#234

Post by fyloraspit »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #190
dantheman wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general governments have done far more harm to individuals than anyone in the market. The job of the government is to protect your individual rights not the collective interest.

I don’t know that this is true. At very least they both share immense responsibility for causing individual harm. Sure the government may start a war, but that war can’t happen without bombs and bullets, and in America at least those factories aren’t run by the government. There is an intermediate step oftentimes, but I don’t think that necessarily disconnects companies from responsibility. If you work at a guided bo…

They are worse together. Achieving some fine balance of corporations may seem somewhat utopian but we are pretty far from utopia in the current day.

Building a mega corporation without big government/s I would argue is basically impossible. And local level governance is more likely and potent without big government. Again though, all of that is quite hard to achieve / see how to achieve when people with existing power enjoy the status quo control more of the levers than the masses, including the ones used to influence the masses.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#235

Post by jokethrowaway »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #190
dantheman wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general governments have done far more harm to individuals than anyone in the market. The job of the government is to protect your individual rights not the collective interest.

I don’t know that this is true. At very least they both share immense responsibility for causing individual harm. Sure the government may start a war, but that war can’t happen without bombs and bullets, and in America at least those factories aren’t run by the government. There is an intermediate step oftentimes, but I don’t think that necessarily disconnects companies from responsibility. If you work at a guided bo…

The market responds to need.

If nobody were able to socialise the cost of going in a foreign country and killing people, there would be no war.

If the government didn't steal my money against my will on threat of incarceration, there is no way in hell I'd spend my money on bullets to kill someone's son in another country.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#236

Post by avgcorrection »

nomel wrote: post #79
ThomPete wrote: post #21

Listening to Sam talking with Lex Fridman about the dangers and ethics of AI while his company destroys entire industries as a consequence of their decision to keep GPT4 closed source and spitting out an apex api aggregator is one for the history books. Well played :)

> destroys entire industries as a consequence of their decision to keep GPT4 closed source Could you expand in that?

Like contemporary language models, some HN commenters read the text itself in isolation and then extrapolate about “what that means” but then immediately jump to the conclusion that whatever real-world (beyond the text) that they imagine will eventually happen has in fact already happened—in effect they’re hallucinating.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#237

Post by SamPatt »

zarzavat wrote: post #61
unshavedyak wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if GPT5 is nearly as advertised, watch the govt swoop in under national security guise Re: GPT5, are there any .. reasonable/credible sources of information on the subject? I've become deaf from all the speculation and while i am very curious, i'm unsure if anything substantiated has actually come out. Especially when considering speculation from Sam himself.

It’s unlikely to be any time soon. Despite productization by OpenAI, LLMs are still an active area of research. Research is unpredictable. It may take years to gather enough fundamental results to make a GPT-5 core model that is substantially better than GPT-4. Or a key idea could be discovered tomorrow. Moreover, previous advances in GPTs have come from data scaling: throwing more data at the training process. But d…

There are diminishing returns from compute time but it looks like even though they are diminishing there's still a fair bit on the table.

Though my guess is that GPT-5 will be the last model which gains significantly from just adding more compute to the current transformer architecture.

Who the hell knows what comes next though?

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#238

Post by jokethrowaway »

syzarian wrote: post #191
dantheman wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general governments have done far more harm to individuals than anyone in the market. The job of the government is to protect your individual rights not the collective interest.

The absence of government just leads to a situation in which some group takes control of a given area. In effect government will then exist again. During the absence of government there will be chaos and rampant crime.

I'd take a local firm offering to protect me for money over one that manages the large part of a continent.

The small one will redistribute my money where I live at least.

Besides, there is an alternative model where there are competing groups of people and I can pick the best among them based on price and services.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#239

Post by jprete »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #133
Jasper_ wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Returns are capped at 100x their initial investment, which, you know, is not that big of a cap. VCs would go crazy for a 100x return. Most companies, even unicorns, don't get there. They're justifying it by saying AGI is so stupidly big that OpenAI will see 100000x returns if uncapped. So, you know, standard FOMO tactics. [0] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

I mean, presumably they are at like 30x already?

I believe the Microsoft investment is around $10 billion, so they can get up to a trillion dollars of return under the cap.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#240

Post by josephg »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #169

Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. The ultimate effect of virtue wanking CEOs and corporate governance is to deceive people into thinking democracy is something that can be achieved by for profit organizations and that they can forsake the formal binding of collective interest through law. It's nice if people are nice but it is not a bulwark of the collective…

Why not both?

I agree government is useful and needed sometimes. But laws are slow, blunt instruments. Governments can’t micromanage every decision companies make. And if they tried, they would hobble the companies involved.

The government moves slowly. When AGI is invented (and I’m increasingly convinced it’ll happen in the next decade or two), what comes next will not be decided by a creaky federal government full of old people who don’t understand the technology. The immediate implications will be decided by Sam Altman and his team. I hope on behalf of us all that they’re up to the challenge.

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