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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months. Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is ac…
Yeah, every engineer in the bay area has a way of framing the business they work for as a benign force for good... Until they find themselves working somewhere else, then suddenly they have a lot to say about the unacceptable things going on there.
From the outside, I find Anthropic's hyperbolic marketing to be an indication that they are basically the same as every other bay area tech startup - more or less nice folks who are primarily concerned with money and status. That's not a condemnation, but I reject all the "do no evil" fanfare as conveniently self serving.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#353"Good luck, have fun, don't die."
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#354“By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman’s behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he was resisting in practice” This statement rings true. JL, PG has mentioned often, is his weapon to…
I don't think they were useful at all. If anything they pulled down YCs up to that point stellar reputation.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
When things reach a certain level of popularity they constitute "mental real estate". Your audience has heard of Groundhog Day, so there is an opening for a movie with that title to make money -- your film will start out already having name recognition and some understanding of what the movie is about. Thus it is a writer's job not to make references they find appealing to reveal their good taste, but to know what re…
The writers of this piece didn't make the reference.
No, but they chose to include it. Presumably there were a lot less apt references they chose not to include.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#356I found it very interesting that Altman et al were worried that AI will become supremely intelligent and China will make a supervirus or some AI drones or whatnot, but not a single person was worried about destroying all jobs because we wouldn't need humans any more. Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.
I also find that interesting.
And not intending to defend the motives of anyone involved, but I'm hoping we can not worry about literally all jobs being destroyed, and AI companies amassing all the wealth in the world.
Don't we need at least some humans working and earning to buy these AI services? Am I not being imaginative enough? Is it possible for the whole economy to consist just of AI selling services to each other?
I realise that even if AI destroys most jobs, or even just a lot of jobs, and amasses most wealth, or a lot of wealth, it would still be a terrible thing for humans. The word "all" could have just been hyperbole, and it is still a valid point. I just want to know people's thoughts on whether entire replacement is possible.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#357A bit of a feeling of "so what" here. Maybe he's less trustworthy than some. We have people of X trustworthiness running the government, crypto exchanges, a certain space exploration and satellite company, social media companies, and so on. We know their trustworthiness. Isn't the real issue how to cope?
Your point is that it's ok he's untrustworthy because lots of people in power are?
Not sure where I said it's OK? Please point it out.
We have to deal with it. Or are you suggesting we should purchase a controlling interest and vote him off the board?
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#358Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.
what model was used to create the visual at the top of the article?
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#359A bit of a feeling of "so what" here. Maybe he's less trustworthy than some. We have people of X trustworthiness running the government, crypto exchanges, a certain space exploration and satellite company, social media companies, and so on. We know their trustworthiness. Isn't the real issue how to cope?
What's the point of living in an advanced society if you just sit around watching it decay around you? Our ancestors fought for our indifference today, and with attitudes like yours we'll watch our children fight for it again tomorrow.
What's your proposal? We knew he's as trustworthy as the others, and it sounds like you agree. What are you doing about them? Legally or illegally?
Mostly we don't need 3,000 words on how untrustworthy he is. We could use 3,000 words on how to remove his influence.
Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
#360It's really interesting reading about how these folks view LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that we're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon. So much "A.G.I" mentioned in the article.
I find it interesting how a lot of cyberpunk does not really include AI or does not present it in transformative way. There is a lot of mind uploading, implants, corpo fun and overall technology permeating all aspects of life, but often AI itself does not actually play a big role.