381–390 of 595 posts
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He is, but it is weird given the history he has. He was kicked out of Paypal because he wanted to use the MS tech stack instead of LAMP at the time. Now some decades later here he is.
You've got the story wrong. He wasn't kicked out because of the stack debate, but because he sold PP to eBay (making enough money in the process to fund Tesla and SpaceX).
This feels like manufactured outrage to me, I guess to capitalize on the AI anxiety people are feeling. open.ai doesn't actually owe everyone something. I get that we all wish they were better people, who would somehow usher in the AI age in a strictly principled and ethical way. It just seems false to me to demand or expect that they be better people than all the rest of us.
I think society can only benefit if we keep companies accountable for their misleading marketing. Same goes for all that green-washing BS going on these days.
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Seriously, is there anyone naive enough to have swallowed any of their trips? Corporations don't have ethical compasses, much less corporations founded by VCs aka professional salesmen.
I (parent commenter) may be naive but I actually believe the original intent was probably sincere; I suspect either political shenanigans, greed, gatekeeping or any number of other vices have come rushing with success and shedloads of money, and the original ethical stance was not accompanied by the significant moral courage needed to sustain purity under enormous pressure from either less principled stakeholders, or…
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OpenAI, if successful, will likely become the most valuable company in the history of the planet, both past and future.
It’s just an autocomplete engine. Someone else will achieve AGI and OpenAI falls apart very quickly when that occurs.
At the end of the day the "predict next word" training goal of LLMs is the ultimate intelligence test. If you could always answer that "correctly" (i.e. intelligently) you'd be a polymath genius. Focusing on the "next word" ("autocomplete") aspect of this, and ignoring the knowledge/intelligence needed to do WELL at it is rather misleading!
"The best way to combine quantum mechanics and general relativity into a single theory of everything is ..."
What I take away from listening to Sam talk is that in the beginning of Open AI, they didn’t think big compute would be as important as it has become. It becomes very hard to not have profit incentives when you need to run gigantic supercomputers to push the technology forward. This explains the MS partnership and need to generate profit to fund the training and running of future models. This doesn’t explain everythi…
I'm flabbergasted that someone would think that AI research wouldn't cost a lot in computer resources. Next Sam will tell that is that farmers need a lot of land to grow crops. I'm calling BS on this. It's an excuse not an explanation.
And nothing stops us from building more models in the open ... nor from pooling our resources and training something for the community.
Things are not so dire. We are okay.
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Really? I feel like they'll go the way of Docker, but faster: Right now super hot, nice tools/API, great PR. But it's build on open and known foundations, soon GPTs will be commodity and then something easier/better FOSS will arise. It may take some time (2-3 years?) but this scenario seems most likely to me. Edit: Ah didn't get the "reference", perhaps indeed it will be the last of the tech companies ever indeed, at…
Are there any companies like Docker? They feel like such a Black Swan to me; namely -- "billions" + very useful + pretty much "not evil " at all. I literally can't think of any others. I don't mean "literally evil" of course, I personally acknowledge the need to make money et al, but I mean it even seems like your most Stallman-esque types wouldn't have too much of a problem with Docker?
I find it a little odd that Elon seems to take a swipe at OpenAI any opportunity he gets. If he cares so much about them not making money, maybe he should have put his twitter cash there instead? It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy work at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely good humans. I've known Jack for 10 years…
"OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all." - Elon You can think what you want of Elon, but he is in the right here.
The only way this kind of research could be done "in the open" is if it was funded by taxpayers' money. Except we have global corporations with elite fiscal layer teams, but no global government (giant lizzards are always disappointing) - so some global corporation was going to own it in the end, it was a matter of "time" and "US or Chinese". The time is now, he winner is US. Moving on. The next move is for (some) go…
Things like "public goods" are an outdated concept, with a distinctly 19th and 20th century feel. In our postmodern world the very idea is almost taboo. The few things that remain, do because they have been grandfathered in. The hyper-capitalist global market owns everything and that is good.
Poe's Law strikes again...
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Among all the accepted threats to humanity's future, AI is one of the least founded at this point. We all grew up with this cautionary fiction. But unless you know something everyone else doesn't, the near term existential threat of AI is relatively low.
What strong evidence of existential threat are you expecting to see before it's already too late to avoid catastrophe?