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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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281–290 of 564 posts

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#281

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 don…

Your post ignores the existence of democracies. Governments fail all the time. In a democracy failures of government will often yield a total collapse and complete replacement. If a failure is spectacular enough, these failure often come with constitutional reforms or even revolutions.

In addition, democratic governments (and even many autocratic governments) have some levels of distribution of power. Your small municipal government may very well end up being absorbed into you neighboring municipality because it is more efficient. Maybe an intermediate judicial step is introduced at a county, or even country level.

Governments do try, and often succeed into making your freedom and your interaction with society at large as efficient as possible, while trying to maximize your happiness. (Although I’ll admit way to often democratic governments do act in a way that maximized the profits of the wealthy class more then your happiness).

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#282

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 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

Sam Altman says the opposite of what you're insinuating, if by "virtue wanking CEO deceiving people" you are referring to the subject of the article, Sam Altman. He says he wants a global regulatory framework enacted by government and decided upon democratically.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#283

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 market should absolutely be looking after the collective interest. That’s what the we the collective created the market for in the first place!

The market will follow its inceotives. You shape those incentives with laws. If you want a market that allows people to take risks, you do that by inventing the limit liability corporation not by telling people to be nice and to not pursue their debts unto their debtors' personal property. If you want a market that discourages monopoly you do that by regulating combination not by writing articles about how "good businessmen" don't act anticompetitively.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#284

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 a really cynical take.

CEOs and companies can, and should, act ethically. Not just because it's the "right thing to do", but because it's the best way to guarantee the integrity of the brand in the long term.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#286

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…

> Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. One of the main roles of government is to step in where markets fail.

That's literally my point. When you want behavior that is contrary to market incentive you need laws not guilt ridden editorials.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#287

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…

You are missing the scaling on context size.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#288

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…

chatGPT, like Google search has essentially democratized knowledge and wisdom to every human on planet earth.

OTOH, it's the governments that have banned it.

Do you think the citizen's of Italy are better off because of chatGPT?

Corporations are more benevolent than government

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#289

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 a really cynical take. CEOs and companies can, and should, act ethically. Not just because it's the "right thing to do", but because it's the best way to guarantee the integrity of the brand in the long term.

If unelected CEOs have more power than the democratically elected government, we aren't in a democracy. That's the problem.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#290

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 a really cynical take. CEOs and companies can, and should, act ethically. Not just because it's the "right thing to do", but because it's the best way to guarantee the integrity of the brand in the long term.

CEO's and companies can act ethically while that aligns with the interest of the shareholders. Reality is that at some point, this becomes impossible even for those with the best intentions. "Do no evil" rings any bells?
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