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OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

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Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#261

Post by scotty79 »

ribadeo wrote: post #252
sssilver wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single developed country today touting moral rights has its foundation in those "wrongs". Its citizens gleefully consuming the resources those "wrongs" have created, so they can preach morality online. It is the nature of life itself to "kill and perform violence", children and otherwise. "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must". Death is, as of now, life's only mechanism for iteration…

Thanks for summarizing so eloquently what is WRONG with the precept that might equals right. If she floats she's a witch, if she drowns she must have been innocent is the flip side fallacy, but what you just outlined amounts to: "i am bad on purpose, what are YOU gonna do about it?" I am disgusted that this is still proferred as a valid moral philosophical principle. No. A thousand times no. The answer is A SYSTEM. T…

That SYSTEM that enables modern enligtened society is called "monopoly on violence".

There's no way out of violence, your system needs to be founded on it.

And I wouldn't say that the what previous poster described is akin to witch trials. It's rather akin to painting the bullseye labelled "right" after taking the shot and hitting something other than your foot. And that was what all human cultures were doing since the beginning of time. Recent western trend to paint the bullseye labelled "wrong" at their hit is novel but equally disingenious.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#262

Post by A1kmm »

bluescrn wrote: post #254
IAmGraydon wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you give it to anyone? That’s not how a dead man’s switch works.

A 'human dead mans switch' may well be more reliable than technology, so long as you pick the right person.

And you could even use SSS (Shamir's Secret Sharing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing) to split the key to decrypt your confidential information across n people, such that some k (where k Then, for example, consider n = 5, k = 3 - if any 3 of 5 selected friends decide the trigger has been met, they can work together to decrypt the information. But a group of 2 of the 5 could not - reducing the chance of it leaking early if a key share is stolen / someone betrays or so on. It also reduces the chance of it not being released when it should, due someone refusing or being unable to act (in that case, up to 2 friends could be incapacitated, unwilling to follow the instructions, or whatever, and it could still be released).

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#263

Post by kremi »

maeil wrote: post #258
Fnoord wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you'd die from a genuine accident?

I'd love to see a statistical analysis of whistleblower deaths on the US over the last 15 years. I'd be extremely susprised if it wasn't enormously anomalous.

It’d be hard to draw any conclusion. A whistleblower must be under extreme stress and pressure which in itself in some way or other will increase the risk of death — so that has to be taken account before saying the plausible cause for the excess deaths is assassination.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#264

Post by withinboredom »

A1kmm wrote: post #262
bluescrn wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'human dead mans switch' may well be more reliable than technology, so long as you pick the right person.

And you could even use SSS (Shamir's Secret Sharing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing ) to split the key to decrypt your confidential information across n people, such that some k (where k Then, for example, consider n = 5, k = 3 - if any 3 of 5 selected friends decide the trigger has been met, they can work together to decrypt the information. But a group of 2 of the 5 could not - reducing th…

Then you just make those friends a target. They only need to buy-off or kill 3. It is unlikely the general public would know of them, so it likely wouldn’t be reported on.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#265

Post by scotty79 »

DevX101 wrote: post #20

Anyone who's a whistleblower should compile key docs and put it in a "dead man's switch" service that releases your testimony/docs to multiple news agencies in the event of your untimely demise. The company you're whistle blowing against and their major shareholders should know this exists. Also, regularly post public video attesting to you current mental state.

Correct me if I'm wrong but all he was whiltleblowing is that OpenAI trained on copyrighted content, which is completely normal and expected although its legality is yet to be determined.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#266

Post by rollcat »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #256
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #224

RIP. Suchir was a man of principles, he probably had to give up his OpenAI options as a result of his stance - OpenAI is reported to have a very restrictive offboarding agreements [1] " It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it. If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can…

Ha, that gives a pretty good picture how "open" Openai is. They want to own their employees, enslave them in a way. One might even think the cause of that whistleblower's death is contagious upon publishing. Really ridiculous how afraid Openai is of criticism. Acting like a child that throws a tantrum, when something doesn't go its way, just that one needs to remind oneself, that somehow there are, with regard to age…

> Ha, that gives a pretty good picture how "open" Openai is.

"Any country with 'democratic' in its name, isn't".

The fight to claim a word's meaning can sometimes be fascinating to observe. We've started with "Free Software", but it was easily confused with "freeware", and in the meantime the meaning of "open source" was being put to test by "source available" / "look but do not touch" - so we ended up with atrocities like "FLOSS", which are too cringe for a serious-looking company to try to take over. I think "open" is becoming meaningless (unless you're explicitly referring to open(2)). With the advent of smart locks, even the definition of an open door is getting muddy.

Same for "AI". There's nothing intelligent about LLMs, not while humans continue to supervise the process. I like to include creativity and self-reflection in my working definition of intelligence, traits which LLMs are incapable of.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#267

Post by [deleted] »

hanspeter wrote: post #223
snovv_crash wrote: post #205

Given the outcomes of the Facebook mood experiments and how I've seen people put together very targeted ads, I'm wondering whether it's possible to induce someone (who's already under a lot of pressure) to commit suicide simply via a targeted information campaign. I'm speculating less on what happened here, and more on the general "yes that would be possible" situation. How would one protect themselves from something…

In theory, but not without including a larger target group as your audience. Back in the day an audience on Facebook needed a size of at least 20, but I'm unsure what the limit is now. Your ads would still need to be reviewed and would likely not pass the filters if they straight up encourage self harm.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#268

Post by TeMPOraL »

motohagiography wrote: post #179
bsenftner wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an applied AI developer and CTO at a law firm, and we discuss the fair use argument quite a bit. It grey enough that whom ever has more financial revenues to continue their case will win. Such is the law and legal industry in the USA.

what twigs me about the argument against fair use (whereby AI ostensibly "replicates" the content competitively against the original) is that it assumes a model trained on journalism produces journalism or is designed to produce it. the argument against that stance would be easy to make.

The model isn't trained on journalism only, you can't even isolate its training like that. It's trained on human writing in general and across specialties, and it's designed to compete with humans on what humans do with text, of which journalism is merely a tiny special case.

I think the only principle positions to be had here is to either ignore IP rights for LLM training, or give up entirely, because a model designed to be general like human will need to be trained like a human, i.e. immersed in the same reality as we are, same culture, most of which is shackled by IP claims - and then, obviously, by definition, as it gets better it gets more competitive with humans on everything humans do.

You can produce a complaint that "copyrighted X was used in training a model that now can compete with humans on producing X" for arbitrary value of X. You can even produce a complaint about "copyrighted X used in training model that now outcompetes us in producing Y", for arbitrary X and Y that are not even related together, and it will still be true. Such is a nature of a general-purpose ML model.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#269

Post by A1kmm »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #114
Terr_ wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the output side: Perhaps outputs of generative AI should be ineligible for copyright.

That is the current position, weirdly enough.

Although the model weights themselves are also outputs of the training, and interestingly the companies that train models tend to claim model weights are copyrighted.

If a set of OpenAI model weights ever leak, it would be interesting to see if OpenAI tries to claim they are subject to copyright. Surely it would be a double standard if the outcome is distributing model weights is a copyright violation, but the outputs of model inference are not subject to copyright. If they can only have one of the two, the latter point might be more important to OpenAI than protecting leaked model weights.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#270

Post by red_trumpet »

ulfw wrote: post #245
red_trumpet wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russians living in Empire of Evil can see all internet including US and EU news. That's just not true, e.g. Russia also blocked the German propaganda channel dw.com (Deutsche Welle).

Ah yes calling DW a propaganda channel. We found the Russian state actor account here.

DW is literally the only German state owned media, financed directly by tax money. And they don't even have a German broadcast anymore.

Compare this to the other German public broadcasting (ARD and ZDF), who are financed by their own (obligatory) dues ("Rundfunkbeitrag"), which is set by politics, but cannot be easily taken away from them.

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