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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#251
post #204
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.

> A shrewd plan considering he's not offering something beyond what another company with a large nvidia cluster could offer So why does Bard seem inferior to GPT-4?

It'll get better fast.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe humans will continue to be useful. You apparently do not. I have not missed anything.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#253

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…

If we could connect social responsibility with the stock, it would matter a great deal :-)

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#254

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'?

history is a simplified, prettified story that we tell ourselves about how things happened.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I’m afraid of is that he and Ilya are not as good and smart as they paint themselves. And that a lot of key people had left (i.e. to Anthropic). And that by pure inertia they have GPT-5 on their hands and not much control over where this technology is going. I can’t tell for certain, but it does look like one of their corner pieces, the ChatGPT system prompt which sits at the funnel of the data collection had de…

> ChatGPT system prompt which sits at the funnel of the data collection had degraded significantly from the previous version They purposely moved free users to a simpler/cheaper model. Depending on your setting and if you are paying, there are three models you might be inferencing with.

I’m not talking about GPT-3.5 vs GPT-4. I’m talking about a change to their system prompt.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self checkout machines put people out of a job. Have they, though? Is there good data on this? I haven’t seen anyone lose any jobs over this in my area. They either get reassigned to different departments or get better jobs doing the same thing in companies that refuse to use self-checkouts. And I read here just a month or so ago that Amazon closed many of their "no cashier" stores in NY and Trader Joe’s vowed to n…

I like that your first point asks for data on a common phenomenon. (Side note: Everyone was reassigned or got a better job? You sure about that?) Then your second point is a wild anecdote with zero data. (Side note: With zero additional data I can tell you that your “judging” of their profit is wildly inaccurate.)

Google is your friend. Candlemaking businesses run by sole proprietors are highly profitable with total revenue in the billions. I probably wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see the operation up close and personal for myself. It’s a lot of work for one person, and the the person who runs the business I saw works 12 hours a day.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#257

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…

Sure but in my country (USA) the government is hopelessly inept at regulating technology. We still don’t have privacy regulations and now to work around this they’re trying to ban specific foreign apps instead of protecting us from all apps! I’d honestly be horrified if they tried to regulate AI. They would be in bed with Facebook and Microsoft and they’d somehow write legislation that only serves to insulate those companies from legal repercussions instead of doing anything to protect regular people. As far as I can tell it is the view of congress that big tech can to whatever they want to us as long as the government gets a piece.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> altruistic motivations feel like trend among Silicon Valley companies and tech ‘genius’ personality about having altruism. some delusion that basing personality on this lie will make them untouchable and elevate their character, as if they not in this just to make ton of money like every other company and industry. and American media generally push this propaganda. SBF prime example.

> and American media generally push this propaganda. SBF prime example. Did they? I've only listened to one interview of SBF and that was done by Tyler Cowen. He seemed totally aloof to the seriousness of running an exchange. If anything we've been convinced that idiosyncratic individuals are our saviors.

Sbf constantly promoted in us media by news organization like nytime and celebrity before all the fraud became apparent.

once cat was out of bag they run story going easy on sbf. never apologizing for promoting this fraud and they wrote articles sympathetic to sbf, also giving him platform to visit each news show or talk show and give defense of himself as he knew nothing about what was happening, all part of legal defense strategy to say incompetence but not criminal negligent

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#259
post #243
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The more powerful your military is the less likely you will need to use it to defend yourself.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#260

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…

>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.

Will they really be determined by OpenAI? So far what Altman has accomplished with OpenAI is to push a lot of existing research tech out into the open world (with improvements, of course.) This has in turn forced the hands of the original developers at Google and Meta to push their own research out into the open world and further step up their internal efforts. And that in turn creates fierce pressure on OpenAI to move even faster, and take even fewer precautions.

Metaphorically, there was a huge pile of rocks perched at the top of a hill. Altman's push got the rocks rolling, but there's really no guarantee that anyone will have much say in where they end up.

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