Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really cynical take. CEOs and companies can, and should, act ethically. Not just because it's the "right thing to do", but because it's the best way to guarantee the integrity of the brand in the long term.
CEO's and companies can act ethically while that aligns with the interest of the shareholders. Reality is that at some point, this becomes impossible even for those with the best intentions. "Do no evil" rings any bells?
The Contradictions of Sam Altman
371–380 of 564 posts
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paul Graham is his Les Wexner. "Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking 'Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19.'" "Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs…
If anyone has read "Wild Sheep Chase" by Haruki Murukami, there was the idea of being possessed by the sheep which turned one into a forceful business man. I have only met a couple people like this, but as in the quote it's immediately obvious, and you see why they are where they are.
What do you mean by this?
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#373Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#374How did he become so rich? His Wikipedia page does not have much details on this.
Parents were rich, sent their child to Stanford and used their connections to let him build connections to other rich people, founded a shitty startup in the middle of a period where any rich kid making a social media company would get bought out for dozens of millions, rest is history. He's always been rich.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#375Earlier 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
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
#376Imagine if this happened with OpenAI instead of Twitter.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#377Stop asking the market to look after collective interest. This is the job of the government. The ultimate effect of virtue wanking CEOs and corporate governance is to deceive people into thinking democracy is something that can be achieved by for profit organizations and that they can forsake the formal binding of collective interest through law. It's nice if people are nice but it is not a bulwark of the collective…
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…
This is not a good idea. There is a conflict of interest here. The fundamental goal of government is regulation, the fundamental goal of a business is profit.
Both the morals of government and corporations are therefore very different. I call them Guardian and Commercial Syndromes respectively. When you combine these two syndromes you create monstrous hybrids.
Allow me to elucidate:
An entity in the Guardian syndrome values honor and uses forceful tactics to maintain order and regulation.
An entity in the Commercial syndrome values money and tries to use whatever means possible to gain profits through trade agreements.
You don't want a commercial entity to have the power to enforce things and you don't want a government entity to desire profit. Both hybrids lead to bad things and it's the root of corruption in the world today.
You know how the old medieval English Nave formed? So many pirates lurked off the coasts of medieval England that London merchants went to the expense of financing a fleet of fighting ships and gave it to the Crown.
Why give it to the Crown? Because you don't want some commercial entity running the Navy using methodologies that circumvent trade agreements and violently funnel trade and profit to a singular commercial entity. You need an entity outside of the commercial sphere; An entity in the Guardian Syndrome. If a commercial entity controlled the Navy you get something similar to the Mafia or Yakuza; Basically organized crime.
Only the government should enforce the laws of AI because there is in theory no conflict of interest. But practically speaking the US government is pretty heavily hybridized already (See military industrial complex). Still it's the best option.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#378Earlier 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…
That’s quite the understatement, isn’t it? Neither Google nor Meta have been able to demonstrate something to the public that resonates even close the the altitude that OpenAI has.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#379He'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. 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.
Anyway, there have been several open source versions in the gpt3-3.5 range. Those are your base to build off of. Their's just little incentive to try to go participate in a moneysink competition with Google and Microsoft.
Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Basically my main point (or question really, I am not sure in it) is that we should resist thinking about government as an abstract entiry different in character from any org - really what it does or looks after is just, in the end, some small set of humans doing some actions that have some effect.
They're democratically elected yes, but that is a bit meaningless in the practical detail of any one given situation. In a sense it's not different, safer, or better, than some company led by some small set of individuals also makikg concrete decisons, for any one concrete decision.
Maybe democracy and policy has some aggregate influence over all decisions, making them lean in a certain way. But it's not like 'the government' as an entity is one thing led by a concrete conciousness or plan. Does that make more sense?