Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Contradictions of Sam Altman

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 564 posts

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#241

Post by whiddershins »

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 problem is that I don’t believe we have any organization in government currently staffed and active that I trust to take any action that will benefit the public at large.

The problem space is too confusing, and the people making decisions are too incompetent. It’s a huge skills and knowledge gap.

And that’s without factoring in corruption and bad intentions.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#242

Post by BarryMilo »

mellosouls wrote: post #188

There seems a lot of negative perception of the guy here, and OpenAI definitely deserve criticism for some stuff (so as the CEO, so does he), but - even if it was built on the work of others, and with the obvious caution about what may come next - he and they deserve immense respect and credit for bringing in this new AI age. They did it. Nobody else.

The expression "on the shoulders of giants" has never been so relevant.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#243

Post by pen2l »

beebmam wrote: post #70
ftxbro wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe you can't, at the same time, accuse OpenAI of benefitting of ideas mostly invented elsewhere, and also claim that they are in a predominant position. There used to be a team at Google called Google Brain and they all left to go to OpenAI after the employee protests against taking military AI contracts in 2018. Now Microsoft has those contracts and funneled $10B to OpenAI from the CIA. OK that's a little b…

Many of those employees have changed their minds about military contracts in this new cold war era.

When I was a young person, I used to deride writings like 1984 on the grounds that the scenarios and stories presented to carry the message were too far-fetched.

Reading your comment has set off an epiphany, I think I get it now, there probably exists some higher-up person who is thinking along these lines: we must always be in a state of war, for if we are, the populace will want to be ready and willing to fund the instruments of war. And we always want to be ready for war, because if ever we are not, we lose our capability to win a potential future war. For our very survival we must contribute our efforts to build these instruments of war. War is constant. War is peace.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#244

Post by rhcom2 »

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.

> AI technology that empowers the individual against state and corporate power alike

What does this even mean though? Seems like hand waving that "AI" is just going to fix everything.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#245

Post by whiddershins »

mafuy wrote: post #228
nateabele wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the main roles of government is to step in where markets fail. Because that's worked out great so far? In every case I can think of, the government (usually because it's already captured) only ever serves to further exacerbate the issue.

Seriously? You can't think of how it was useful that the government mandated that factory door must remain open to help prevent human deaths in case of a fire? You can't think of the advantages of governmental food and medicine safety obligations?

The government has had some wins, and it would be naive to say they haven’t.

They have also had many catastrophic failures.

It’s unclear whether in the end regulations trend towards net benefit, but it does seem likely that the more nebulous a problem, the harder it is for government to get it right. Or anyone, for that matter. But especially government because the feedback loop is so slow and bad.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#246

Post by mimd »

skybrian wrote: post #221
mimd wrote: post #186

He's begging for regulatory capture. "I can destroy the world but I won't. My competitor's will, so regulate them." A shrewd plan considering he's not offering something beyond what another company with a large nvidia cluster could offer.

All that may be true, but it doesn't help us decide whether more AI regulation is a good idea or not. As with most things, it probably depends on how it's done.

That's a difficult question. I'm just pointing out that Sam's "contributions" are unhelpful to solving that question.

You're limited by two prisoners and separate, sometimes antagonistic, countries. For example, we have little agreement on nuclear weapons, at best we've gotten concessions on testing, a few types of missiles, and so on. Same with current climate legislation. So getting global agreement is hard outside of the bare minimum. Most of the inner county approaches seem to be either panic, political distraction, or like Sam, regulatory capture, as they are ignoring that it means nothing if another country pursues it.

So I'd focus on what simple agreements we could get worldwide.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#247

Post by anileated »

mellosouls wrote: post #188

There seems a lot of negative perception of the guy here, and OpenAI definitely deserve criticism for some stuff (so as the CEO, so does he), but - even if it was built on the work of others, and with the obvious caution about what may come next - he and they deserve immense respect and credit for bringing in this new AI age. They did it. Nobody else.

I for one have nothing against Sam as a person (not knowing him well enough), but I question the sentiment that he and the company deserve respect for what they’re doing—much less by default, for some self-evident reason that doesn’t even require explanation.

Do people mean it in a sarcastic sense—and if not, why does OpenAI deserve respect again?

— Because it is non-trivial (in the same way, say, even Lenin deserves respect by default—even if the outcome has been disastrous, the person sure had some determination and done humongous work)?

— Because this particular tech is somehow inherently a good thing? (Why?)

— Because they rolled it out in a very ethical way with utmost consideration for the original authors (at least those still living), respecting their authorship rights and giving them the ability to opt in or at least opt out?

— Because they are the ones who happen to have 10 billions of Microsoft money to play with?

— Because they don’t try to monetize a brave new world in which humans are verified based on inalienable personal traits like iris scans, which they themselves are bringing about[0]?

This is me stating why they shouldn’t have respect by default and counting to get a constructive counter-argument in return.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35398829

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#248

Post by madmask »

NickBusey wrote: post #119
dclowd9901 wrote: post #91

Are there any employees of OpenAI around? I had a question: Does anyone in the office stop to contemplate the ramifications of developing technology that will likely put most people out of a job, which will have a whole host of knock-on effects?

Self checkout machines put people out of a job. Cars put stable boys out of jobs. Light bulbs put candlemakers out of jobs. Are the people who made them also morally culpable? Let’s just make no progress ever in the name of employment I guess. /s

I think these comparisons always miss that humans are still useful because they are the control system in the end. Even if at very high level. When AGI comes along, humans will have to compete with it in the market, and there may be very little actual need for humans.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#249

Post by jamaliki »

simonh wrote: post #94
ren_engineer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI acts like they are some underdog startup for PR purposes while actually having access to effectively unlimited resources due to their relationship with Microsoft, which rubs people the wrong way Plenty of other companies had released GPT powered chat bots like ChatGPT, they just couldn't offer it for free because they didn't have a sweetheart deal with Microsoft for unlimited GPUs. Google did drop the ball tho…

I think you’re missing how much of a profound difference the intensive RLHF training OpenAI did makes in ChatGPT. Microsoft’s Sydney seems to also be GPT 3.5 based, came out after ChatGPT, and it was an utter dumpster fire on launch in comparison. Meanwhile nobody has even caught up to ChatGPT yet, not even Microsoft whose resources are the secret sauce you think is the game changer, and now 4.0 is out and even more…

No, actually. Microsoft's Sydney is GPT 4 [1].

1 - https://blogs.bing.com/search/march_2023/Confirmed-the-new-B...

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#250

Post by Mezzie »

davnicwil wrote: post #225
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…

I don't know, isn't history really just a series of specific people doing concrete actions? Do you think on some level the idea of some abstract 'government' taking care of things is just a narrative we apply to make ourselves feel better? Sure individual decision makers in that government can concretely affect reality, but beyond that are we just telling a story and really nobody is 'in control'?

> beyond that are we just telling a story and really nobody is 'in control'?

Basically. Or at least that's the impression I'm left with after spending a couple of years in politics work.

I had a nice long breakdown.

Post reply on HN