Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Contradictions of Sam Altman

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 564 posts

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#361

Post by jonathanwallace »

Mezzie wrote: post #321
trendroid wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible to Elaborate?

tl;dr: Nobody is steering the ship because they don't know they're on a ship. Or that the ocean exists. It's hard without doxxing myself or calling out specific people and organizations which I'd rather not because I'm a nobody and can't afford lawsuits, but for various reasons I ended up political education and marketing for civics advocacy. Ish. To be semi on topic, I know some people who are published in the WSJ (…

As a software developer who found myself elected to state level public office and had to spin-up my education around the legislative process and all of politics, I concur.

Their are only a couple of things I'd add.

As much knowledge as I brought in about technology and the idea of being aware of system thinking, I also brought in a great amount of ignorance about all the other areas that are legislated (healthcare, interplay between local, state, and fedearl issues, budgetary concerns, tax policy, banking, etc.). Good legislation is truly collaborative.

Sadly, for the second part, good legislation is rarer than it should be as much of legislation is about politics and perception of the voters. And voter perceptions are not necessarily logical or reasoned.

This makes it all the more important, IMHO, that everyone who is reasonable, logical, and educated spend their precious, valuable time involving themselves to advocate for elected officials who behave similar in what is essentially a zero-sum game.

p.s. Have faith. I saw enough during my time that gave me reason for that faith. (But that faith requires time and effort -- we don't get good government or democracy for free.) I'm glad to hear you're getting better.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#362

Post by s1gsegv »

jasonhansel wrote: post #293
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…

> And if they tried, they would hobble the companies involved. Well, yeah, that's the point of regulation: to limit corporate behavior. There are plenty of other highly-regulated industries in the US; why shouldn't AI be one of them?

The emergent behavior from this however is not that we get healthy competition, it's that the big guys have the money, connections, and understanding of the process to still do everything they want, while the little guys can't get off the ground and compete.

This is a necessary evil in the case of an industry like aviation where there's a massive and immediate risk to human life if you get it wrong.

If you see AGI as life threatening (in a physical sense) it's an understandable stance to take. However if AGI is threatening moreso in a social sense I don't think concentrating the power behind it is going to be a societal good.

I genuinely believe we as a society will get fucked by corporations for everything we can give if we don't either radically socially reform for incoming AGI, or have competitive open developments in the area not beholden to corporate interests.

For my money, the latter seems at least possible.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#363

Post by polycaster »

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

According to Reuters [1] in 2022 they projected $200 million revenue in 2023 and $1 billion revenue in 2024.

In 2019 they Planned to spend the then 1 bn funding within the next 5 years or so.

So I suppose they’re not far away from net zero at least.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/chatgpt-owner-openai-projec...

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#364

Post by startupsfail »

jstummbillig wrote: post #155
startupsfail wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I’m afraid of is that he and Ilya are not as good and smart as they paint themselves. And that a lot of key people had left (i.e. to Anthropic). And that by pure inertia they have GPT-5 on their hands and not much control over where this technology is going. I can’t tell for certain, but it does look like one of their corner pieces, the ChatGPT system prompt which sits at the funnel of the data collection had de…

There are some vague ideas and fears here. Understandable. Trying find a silver lining from where to get somewhere: Where would GPT4 and onwards be better housed? Is there a setup -- an individual, a company, an institution, a concept, license -- where the whole thing would clearly better fit, than with OpenAI? Note, I am not suggesting that they are particularly un/qualified or un/trustworthy. I am just trying to fi…

I think that a mix of public-private ownership is likely a good idea.

And there should be some serious oversight. The decisions at the level of proliferation of plutonium and building atomic bombs should not be done solely by a startup founder under a pressure to deliver, to keep the hype, to not let the team be headhunted, etc.

I also don’t know about your familiarity with Ycombinator, but they are successful partially because they are pretty brutal. They are not the peace-time CEOs. And I’m not sure, if you want the AGI to be developed in a ways of a war-time CEO. And this is exactly what is going on now.

I’d probably call for organizing a consortium of US-Government-Microsoft-Google-Intel-Nvidia-OpenAI to lead the decision making process and to relieve the pressure on OpenAI to some degree.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#365

Post by nice_byte »

Nasrudith wrote: post #354
nice_byte wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You are basicallt demanding that parents obtain prior permission from their offspring for them being born before conception.

Are you sure you replied to the right thread?

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#366

Post by polycaster »

jstx1 wrote: post #90
oldstrangers wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Undoubtedly OpenAI already has some very close ties and/or contracts with the DoD.

Any evidence for this, or are you just assuming that it's the case?

Don’t now about the DoD, but one of the board members of the nonprofit is Will Hurd, who appears to have had a 9 year career in the CIA before turning to politics. No hard evidence of anything of course, but enough to raise an eyebrow imho.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#368

Post by mimd »

endisneigh wrote: post #359
sebzim4500 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a stunt now for both companies as it's a proxy for both search, AI capabilities for sale, and clouds. But eventually they will reach a limit of payoff. But 4 months is short for product development, especially as it sounds like google was caught off guard by the public interest in interacting with chatgpt.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#369

Post by DubiousPusher »

davnicwil wrote: post #336
DubiousPusher wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actions that idnoviduals take on behalf of government are a direct reflection of the "abstract" policies and laws of that government. If you cannot discern this from 20th century history I don't know what to tell you.

Policies and laws aren't abstract, they're a good example in fact of what I said - things that have a concerete effect on reality typically authored by a small number of specific individuals within a government.

1) You are the one who implied some abstract meta-conversation. I did not.

2) In a democracy, you get the policies you want through organization and direct action.

Maybe I'm somehow entirely missing your point.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#370

Post by startupsfail »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #260
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…

>The immediate implications will be decided by Sam Altman and his team. I hope on behalf of us all that they’re up to the challenge. Will they really be determined by OpenAI? So far what Altman has accomplished with OpenAI is to push a lot of existing research tech out into the open world (with improvements, of course.) This has in turn forced the hands of the original developers at Google and Meta to push their own…

What if I told you, there is this startup that is working on really effective ways of proliferating plutonium. And that it is under pressure to keep the hype, so there isn’t much time to organize the storage of proliferated materials. And the thinking is that even if it explodes, since startup is not building a bomb, it can’t really make that much damage.

Oh, and also imagine that nobody really knows what plutonium is, there is just one startup that had figured out how to turn uranium to plutonium.

Also that understanding of uranium for now is at the level when it was just discovered. So people are still handling it by bare hands. And trying to sell shiny uranium toys.

Post reply on HN