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Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

reuters.com

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Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#341
post #18
post #10

Isn’t musk becoming a single point of failure risk?

I wrote this in 2021: Billionaires: Our Single Point of Failure https://metastable.org/billionaires/

It sounds like you are also libertarian, but you argue that even libertarian societies should have some form of public interest limitation, license or oversight. This is in line with traditional Thomas Jefferson thinking: "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."

That's a nice thought but the problem, as we've now shown, is that any organization of humans will by definition become corrupted, the state will grow unless constrained, and any system is imperfect and can be gamed.

What is the place of the state, traditionally empowered through a monopoly on violence, in a multinational world? Right now, it's just a tool to be abused by the wealthy, and by extension to confound and entrap the masses. Can you believe they still teach nationalism? Populism should have been excised from education after the 20th century's tragedies, but instead it seems to have redoubled.

In future perhaps we'll have a dictatorship of AI to keep the humans in check, but the clear danger is that such a system would present too much value not to be usurped and abused.

Democracy in the utopian theoretical sense was supposed to be based upon popular education and representation. We could work towards improving the former with AI and more effective (not child minding oriented) personalized education programs, and the latter with more frequent referendums. Right now we have the opposite: laziness, lack of education, active misinformation, and near zero viable means for meaningful representation even in self-labelled democractic societies. It is no wonder so many people self-medicate.

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#342
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1889059531625464090 , for those of us without an account.

FYI X has relaxed the login prompt (at least for me). You can again see the post without an account, but not the thread.

My firewall blocks all IPs belonging to Twitter ASN. Have to use Tor Browser.

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I typically like Elon about 70% of the time, but I need to agree here. I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.

I liked Elon until about 2018. Since then he's gradually degraded from "interesting founder" to "guy who picks fights about weird topics on the internet" to "absurdist oligarch actively working to destroy institutions which support average Americans." I certainly suspect that there were always elements of what he's become that just weren't as publicly apparent.

What did you like about him until 2018? He is not some visionary or genius or even smart. Neither is/was he a decent person to deal with (read up on his PayPal days). He is however, extraordinarily ruthless and thin skinned.

So what is it that you saw in him that you liked him?

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#345

"The bid is being backed by Musk's AI company xAI, which could merge with OpenAI following a deal, according to the Wall Street Journal which first reported Musk's offer earlier on Monday." xAI is not making any money - it's a money furnace, so what does it mean the bid is backed by xAI ? The leverage and 'creativity' in the US is off the charts. Dotcom bubble starts to look reasonable.

If they merge two money furnaces, then they can make up for the losses with the higher volume :)

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I typically like Elon about 70% of the time, but I need to agree here. I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.

I liked Elon until about 2018. Since then he's gradually degraded from "interesting founder" to "guy who picks fights about weird topics on the internet" to "absurdist oligarch actively working to destroy institutions which support average Americans." I certainly suspect that there were always elements of what he's become that just weren't as publicly apparent.

Yep, hard to respect a guy who spent how many years screaming that full self driving will be out by next quarter!?

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#347

> "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was," Musk said in the press release. "We will make sure that happens."" From the creator of Grok, this is such an insane thing to say

And Tesla, who (in)famously doesn't regularly publish their GPL-derived codebases.

What’s the background here? How can we know they use GPL licensed code? Was there some leak?

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

was looking for a musk margin call in 2023, no such luck, now he’s VP and markets are still fake

We'll see. After throwing out a few Nazi salutes, Tesla sales have been tanking in Europe.

And Australia. Musk drove everyone in BYD's arms.

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#349

> "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was," Musk said in the press release. "We will make sure that happens."" From the creator of Grok, this is such an insane thing to say

Didn't X have to ban Grok output due to what their own users were making?

Re: Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I typically like Elon about 70% of the time, but I need to agree here. I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.

I liked Elon until about 2018. Since then he's gradually degraded from "interesting founder" to "guy who picks fights about weird topics on the internet" to "absurdist oligarch actively working to destroy institutions which support average Americans." I certainly suspect that there were always elements of what he's become that just weren't as publicly apparent.

I stopped liking Musk when his first wife's tell-all "I Was a Starter Wife" came out in Marie Claire in 2010. Yes, penned by a disgruntled former spouse, it felt nonetheless authentic and immediately believable, and all the events since have generally confirmed her characterization of him.

As so often, it's how they treat the women around them that tells you a lot about men.

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