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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#351

Post by paulryanrogers »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #273
josephg wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, p…

> Essentially it's a machine that can mimic human behaviours more convincingly than humans can.

Isn't this impossible by definition? Nothing can be more convincingly human than humans, or else it would be something else.

Perhaps you mean mimic charismatic or intelligent humans more than most, or the average, human?

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

Do you mean online only? Because I imagine we're still quite a ways from physical machines convincingly mimicking humans IRL.

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

If the machine makes inhuman mistakes the humans will likely notice and adapt.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#352

Post by ftxbro »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #304
ftxbro wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There used to be a team at Google called Google Brain and they all left to go to OpenAI after the employee protests against taking military AI contracts in 2018. Now Microsoft has those contracts and funneled $10B to OpenAI from the CIA. OK that's a little b…

>funneled $10B to OpenAI from the CIA Without some evidence to support it, this really sounds like a conspiracy theory.

I mean it is a conspiracy theory.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#353

Post by sebzim4500 »

endisneigh wrote: post #332
sebzim4500 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Without knowing the profit margin of OpenAI it’s anyone’s guess. Personally I’d be surprised if it’s profitable, azure subsidies aside

Who said anything about making a profit? If Google could make Bard work as well as GPT-4 they would do it, even if it had to operate at a significant loss to start.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#354

Post by Nasrudith »

nice_byte wrote: post #323
mellosouls wrote: post #188

There 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.

> he and they deserve immense respect and credit for bringing in this new AI age. Why? Who asked for it? I think that if openAI's breakthroughs never happened, we would not be any worse off (actually, we'd probably be better off).

You are basicallt demanding that parents obtain prior permission from their offspring for them being born before conception. That isn't just unreasonable but impossible. When has it ever worked that way with any technology? That they would just get every last interest to agree on what technology would do and its applications?

Besides, a world where prior permission must be asked before doing anything which may cause a change is better known as a tyranny.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#355

Post by sebzim4500 »

jprete wrote: post #239
sebzim4500 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, presumably they are at like 30x already?

I believe the Microsoft investment is around $10 billion, so they can get up to a trillion dollars of return under the cap.

The $10 billion had a 7x cap right? I'm pretty sure the 100x cap was only for the initial investments.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#356

Post by sanderjd »

mellosouls wrote: post #188

There 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.

Personally, I think it seems like they were only able to achieve what they have due to transparently published research, and are now pulling up the ladder behind them by refusing to publish in the same fashion. I don't think that deserves immense respect.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#357

Post by sebzim4500 »

shagie wrote: post #343
sebzim4500 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs that actually work. They are on GPT-4 and no one else is close to GPT-3.5.

If no one else has yet to create the same quality of product, is that really a monopoly? Does a given chef have a monopoly on their signature dish? It feels like people are tossing around "monopoly" whenever it feels like there's a company that has produced a quality product and people want to hobble it because no one else has committed the resources to producing something comparable.

I don't want to hobble it at all. To the contrary, I hope the competition pulls their heads out of their asses.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#358

Post by qudat »

mellosouls wrote: post #188

There 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.

It seems like the real breakthrough happened at google with “All you need is attention”

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#359

Post by endisneigh »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #353
endisneigh wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing the profit margin of OpenAI it’s anyone’s guess. Personally I’d be surprised if it’s profitable, azure subsidies aside

Who said anything about making a profit? If Google could make Bard work as well as GPT-4 they would do it, even if it had to operate at a significant loss to start.

If it doesn’t make a profit there’s no incentive to do it.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#360

Post by thefreeman »

zmmmmm wrote: post #204
mimd wrote: post #186

He'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 So why does Bard seem inferior to GPT-4?

I mean they’ve literally said they are using a much smaller parameter model at first to while testing. you can not believe it if you want but that’s the very obvious answer.
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