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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#271

Post by DubiousPusher »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #261
davnicwil wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

The more we remember the possibility of true collective self determination, the more likely we are to survive all this mess we're making. These days we are constantly bombarded by this contradiction of individualism being primary and desirable, but at the same time impotent in the face of the world this individualism has wrought. And its all a convenient way to demoralize us and let us forget how effective motivated…

Yes. There is a reason that when Britain felt threatened by the turmoil in France they didn't just bar unions or political clubs. They banned "combination" almost entirely in general.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#272

Post by dougmwne »

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…

I keep keep hearing people claim we are at the end of corpus scaling, but that seems totally unfounded. Where has it been proven you can’t running the training set through in multiple epochs in randomized order? Who’s to say you can’t collect all the non-English corpus and have the performance transfer to English? Who’s to say you can’t run the whole damn thing backwards and still have it learn something?

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#273

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

josephg wrote: post #240
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…

They'll be decided by AI, not by governments, corporations, or individuals.

There's still a kind of wilful blindness about AI really means. Essentially it's a machine that can mimic human behaviours more convincingly than humans can.

This seems like a paradox, but it really isn't. It's the inevitable end point of automatons like Eliza, chess, go, and LLMs.

Once you have a machine that can automate and mimic social, political, cultural, and personal interactions, that's it - that's the political singularity.

And that's true even the machine isn't completely reliable and bug free.

Because neither are humans. In fact humans seem predisposed to follow flawed sociopathic charismatic leaders, as long as they trigger the right kinds of emotional reactions.

Automate that, and you have a serious problem.

And of course you don't need sentience or intent for this. Emergent programmed automated behaviour will do the job just fine.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#274

Post by anileated »

cvalka wrote: post #267
anileated wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deserve…

>Because this tech is somehow >inherently a good thing Without technology humans are just unworthy bugs.

It is generally accepted that some applications of technology are good and some are not, or at least not self-evidently so (weapons of mass destruction, environmentally disastrous things like PFAS, packaging every single product into barely-recyclable-once plastics, gene editing humans, addictive social media/FB/TikTok, etc.)

Is this particular application of technology good, and even self-evidently so?

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#275

Post by sacnoradhq »

jackblemming wrote: post #177
sacnoradhq wrote: post #132

Sama He stuck to the 99.9% gamble of setting money on fire that were startups and navigated to the big time(tm). Also, he helped lift Clerky, Triplebyte, YC, and may others pre, during, and post Loopt. Not many people (or no one) "deserves" success, but Sama brings a healthy dose of goodwill wherever he goes.

Are you kidding? He had one startup that was more or less a flop, then for some reason was appointed to a high position at y combinator, got lucky allocating capital (plenty of idiots can and have gotten lucky or were at the right place at the right time) and now is the CEO of OpenAI. This man is the definition of it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and that’s not a good thing.

Even with the best ideas, execution, and teams 99.99% of startups are. That's okay. They're assumed to be experiments.

There is no such thing as self-made. And there's nothing wrong with friends and networking, especially as some particular help or chance encounter could be pivotal to nudging onto something great.

It's the trying and learning that are the gold to try again. Timing, honest perspective, persistence, and a measure of prepared luck seem to be more of it. There is no magic formula. I wish success to all who want it.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#276

Post by pjohri »

slickdork wrote: post #194
the_doctah wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to go through all the things Liberals labeled a conspiracy in the last 5 years that actually became true, but I don't have that kind of time today

I'd settle for three examples with sources.

Well at least one: in the year 2000, I used to work for Verizon and a picture from one of the local networks hubs was circulated showing a bunch of thick cables tapping into the network and alleging that the government was listening to all calls Americans made. People made a lot of fun of that photo until Snowden brought the details to light.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#277

Post by matthewdgreen »

antirez wrote: post #7

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. It does not make any sense, and they are not naturally positioned for a monopoly. Just other companies have to move their asses.

There have been many examples of companies inventing new technology, then failing to take it to market until a competitor copied the ideas. The classic example is Apple and Xerox PARC. The criticism in this case is that while icons and GUIs are obviously harmless (so it's good we got them out of the lab!), maybe AI is the kind of tech we should have let researchers play with for a while longer, before we started an arms race that puts it in everyone's house.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#278

Post by felix318 »

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.

Such techno-utopianism... political power belongs to people who control the guns. There is no way around it.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#279

Post by merlinoa »

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…

This is socialist nonsense. The government won't protect anything outside of their interests[0]. Free markets are good and necessary for human flourishing[1].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserv... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Human-Action-Ludwig-Von-Mises/dp/1614...

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