Altman "hadn’t been to a grocery store in four or five years". He is so out of touch with real world, people needs and desires, and fantasies about the future world based on the assumption that most people want to be free "to pursue more creative work."
I think most people don't actually dream about pursuing creative work. Being absolutely "free" of work doesn't make one more creative. Real problems and constraints force people to come up with creative solutions.
The Contradictions of Sam Altman
311–320 of 564 posts
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
The absence of government just leads to a situation in which some group takes control of a given area. In effect government will then exist again. During the absence of government there will be chaos and rampant crime.
I'd take a local firm offering to protect me for money over one that manages the large part of a continent. The small one will redistribute my money where I live at least. Besides, there is an alternative model where there are competing groups of people and I can pick the best among them based on price and services.
>Besides, there is an alternative model where there are competing groups of people and I can pick the best among them based on price and services.
In the absence of government, what's stopping these groups from simply joining forces into a cartel, getting some armed thugs and making you an offer you can't refuse? History suggests that to be a far more likely scenario. Oligarchy, rather than competition, is the natural state of capitalism.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#313I think there are some interesting questions: - Sam does not have equity in OpenAI. Does this mean he can potentially be removed at any point in time? - OpenAI's profit arm will funnel excess profit to its non-profit wing. If this is the case, who determines excess profit? - OpenAI's founding charter commits the company to abandoning research efforts if another project nears AGI development. If this happens, what hap…
>OpenAI's founding charter commits the company to abandoning research efforts if another project nears AGI development. If this happens, what happens to the profit arm? I think the definition of AGI is sufficiently vague that this will never happen. And if it did happen, abandoning research efforts could take the form of selling the for-profit arm to Microsoft.
I think you have a point there. AGI doesn't have a straight-forward litmus test.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#314Stop 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…
It’s all about risk and rewards, nobody who owns openai is going say let’s pause. It also never stopped the country that first invented nuclear bomb, sure they could paus and then Russia would have done it and would have it first, and then said “thanks for pausing”
I don't know why people think nukes are a good example here. Nukes were outright birthed within the government within that government at its height of intervention into the market, at the height of its reach into the daily lives of every American, at the height of American civic engagement.
Policy makers spent a huge amount of time creating a framework for them. Specifically there was a huge debate about whether they should be under the direct control of the military. The careful decision to place them in civilian control under the Department of Energy is probably part of the reason they haven't been unleashed since.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#315Earlier 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…
> to release their internal chatbot months ago I’m not sure that would have been wise. Bard clearly isn’t ready.
Yeah but if they released earlier that fact wouldn't have been so embarassing.
As it was, they intially just claimed that releasing a competitor was irresponsible, then they eventually did it anyway (badly).
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#316How did he become so rich? His Wikipedia page does not have much details on this.
He was in the first batch of YC startups with a feature phone location-aware app called Loopt. Once smartphones came along, it became largely obsolete, and started to become irrelevant, but still got acquired under questionable circumstances anyway, enough for Altman to get rich: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3684357 From there he became a VC and ultimately president of YC.
I'm not sure if I should elaborate further, but in the last years of Loopt, it actually devolved into a hook-up app servicing the gay community, basically Grindr before Grindr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385178
I guess he was ahead of his time, in a way? Still, I've never forgotten that this silly "success" was the first big exit of the most touted YC founder, ever.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#317There 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.
Ha! To be fair though, Isaac Newton is not a bad person to be implicitly compared to. :)
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#318He'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.
It's been 4 months, no one has released anything nearly as good as the initial release of ChatGPT. Meanwhile OpenAI has released GPT-4 and is trialing plugins and 32k context.
Either their competition is incompetent or OpenAI is doing something right.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#319He'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.
The odds that is the end game of the AI ethics movement is pretty likely: A mega-monopoly AI firm with a wall of gov policy that will cripple any upstart who can't jump through "safety" hoops written for and by the parent company. So any talented dev who wants to do great AI work either has to work for parent company or build a startup designed to get acquired by them (aka don't rattle the cage).
I think that's the goal but there is a reasonable chance that they completely fail and no serious regulation ever gets passed.
That's the thing with technology, people get used to it and then trying to ban/control it makes you look ridiculous. It's like how now that Tesla has made it normal to have driving assistance (and calling it FSD) there is little appetite outside of contrarian circles for serious regulation. If, however, regulation was proposed before Tesla shipped then it might have passed.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. The US has backslidden since the 20th century back towards an elitest Republic and away from democracy. But even in the US, collective action has a better track record than "altruism".
Sometimes I wonder if the back slide narrative is really accurate, or if we’re looking back at the myth of history rather than the facts. When the country was founded, only white men could vote and people of color were legally property with no rights. That’s obviously not democracy, so I question at what point after that but before today we really had democracy to have slid back from.
When we realize it’s really only about from the 1970s that we had full enfranchisement and political participation of all citizens, this becomes more obvious. “Coincidentally,” this enfranchisement was followed by the Volker shock and then the Reagan administration, both of which led to the decimation of labor’s political power and share of the economic pie.