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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#311

Post by basisword »

philip1209 wrote: post #285
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

OP says they’ve been working on this for 18 months. Most of what you’ve said wasn’t the case until much more recently.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#312

Post by ronanfarrow »

fblp wrote: post #118
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

Hi Ronan appreciate you being here. what would help you and others continue to do journalism like this? (including commenting on HN?)

This is a vast and tricky question. The business model has basically fallen out from under journalism, and especially this kind of labor-intensive investigative reporting. The media landscape is increasingly dominated by moneyed individuals and companies essentially buying up the discourse.

I would really suggest subscribing to and finding ways to amplify independent outlets and journalists, and encouraging others to do so.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#313

Post by stonyrubbish »

chpatrick wrote: post #309
stonyrubbish wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many pa…

This is such a boring cliche by now. "thinking" and "knowing what it's doing" are totally vague statements that we barely understand about the human mind but in every comment section about AI people definitively state that LLMs don't do them, whatever they are.

They aren't so vague that you would argue the parrot is thinking.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#314

Post by hackable_sand »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #257
kevinqi wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is disappointing, but is it shocking that people most driven by gaining money/power are the ones the most successful at achieving it?

What sticks out to me most is that humanity consistently fails to weed these creatures out and regulate society. It's a bug in our social software; we seem to like these broken people rather than recognize that they're a liability.

Trust is not a bug

You need to accept that every generation some people are going to try and fuck things up.

Then you get to decide to stop or help them

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#315

Post by 40aKshl »

saeranv wrote: post #283

Greg Brockman honestly sounds like a psychopath: > In 2017, Amodei hired Page Hedley, a former public-interest lawyer, to be OpenAI’s policy and ethics adviser. In an early PowerPoint presentation to executives, Hedley outlined how OpenAI might avert a “catastrophic” arms race—perhaps by building a coalition of A.I. labs that would eventually coördinate with an international body akin to NATO, to insure that the tech…

[flagged]

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#316

Post by ronanfarrow »

rhlannx wrote: post #135
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

I have the feeling that if you write an article in that style, the subject of the story becomes the hero even if you insert a couple of negatives. In the same manner that Michael Corleone becomes the hero of The Godfather. I'm not pleased with the headline and the general framing that AI works. The plagiarism and IP theft aspects are entirely omitted. The widespread disillusion with AI is omitted. On the positive sid…

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the piece at all avoids key areas of disillusionment with the technology. Quite the contrary.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#317

Post by ronanfarrow »

felixgallo wrote: post #201
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

This is brilliant work, guys. Did you get any pressure to soften or spike the story?

I won’t get into behind-the-scenes specifics here but I think you can imagine how pressurized this topic was and the amount of heat that tends to generate. I’m used to getting a lot of blowback and it’s never fun. I just hope the work is meticulous and fair enough, and that enough people see the benefits of that, that I get to continue to do it.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#319

Post by [deleted] »

chromacity wrote: post #245
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #164

> Amodei, in one of his early notes, recalled pressing Brockman on his priorities and Brockman replying that he wanted “money and power.” Brockman disputes this. His diary entries from this time suggest conflicting instincts. One reads, “Happy to not become rich on this, so long as no one else is.” In another, he asks, “So what do I really want?” Among his answers is “Financially what will take me to $1B.” I can't im…

Eh. It doesn't start or stop with people like Altman, Zuckerberg, or Nadella. I think it's a symptom of a broader problem in tech. Half the people on this site made a decision to work at companies that do shady things, and they did that to maximize personal wealth. The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so…

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#320

Post by stavros »

stonyrubbish wrote: post #291
stavros wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning' If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ".

> "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ". It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin t…

If LLMs can come up with superhumanly intelligent solutions, then they're superhumanly intelligent, period. Whether they do this by magic or by stochastic whatever doesn't make any difference at all.
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