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OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

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Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#381

Post by 8note »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #332
mwigdahl wrote: post #290

The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI, train an LLM on that text, and then release it. Based on these companies' arguments that copyrighted material is not actually reproduced by these models, and that any seemingly-infringing use is the responsibility of the user of the model rather than those w…

Clever, but no. The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet ", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case,…

The scale of two people should be large enough to make it ambiguous who spilled the beans at least

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#382

Post by omeid2 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #339
TeMPOraL wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clever, but no. The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet ", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case,…

Seems absurd that somehow the scale being massive makes it better somehow You would think having a massive scale just means it has infringed even more copyrights, and therefore should be in even more hot water

It may not make a lot of sense but it follows the "fair use" doctrine. Which is generally based on the following 4 factors:

1) the purpose and character of use.

2) the nature of the copyrighted material.

3) the *amount* and *substantiality* of the portion taken, and.

4) the effect of the use upon the *potential market*.

So in that regard, if you're training a personal assistance GPT, and use some software code to teach your model logic, that is easy to defend as fair use.

But the extent of use matters, and if you're training an AI for the sole purpose of regurgitating specific copyrighted material, it is infringement, if it is copyrighted, but in this case, it is not copyright issue, it is contracts and NDAs.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#383

Post by tadfisher »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #332
mwigdahl wrote: post #290

The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI, train an LLM on that text, and then release it. Based on these companies' arguments that copyrighted material is not actually reproduced by these models, and that any seemingly-infringing use is the responsibility of the user of the model rather than those w…

Clever, but no. The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet ", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case,…

To definitively prove this either way, they'll have to make their source code and model available (maybe under subpoena and/or gag order), so don't expect this issue to be actually tested in court (so long as the defendants have enough VC money).

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#384

Post by comp_throw7 »

wruza wrote: post #377
thorum wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in how CEV, one framework proposed for superalignment, addresses that concern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligen... > our coherent extrapolated volition is "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfe…

Is there an insightful summary of this proposal? The whole paper looks like 38 pages of non-rigorous prose with no clear procedure and already “aligned” LLMs will likely fail to analyze it. Forced myself through some parts of it and all I can get is people don’t know what they want so it would be nice to build an oracle. Yeah, I guess.

It's not a proposal with a detailed implementation spec, it's a problem statement.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#385

Post by edanm »

romwell wrote: post #347
jbernsteiniv wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He gets my respect for that one both publicly acknowledging why he was leaving and their pantomime. I don't know how much the equity would be for each employee (the article suggests millions but that may skew by role) and I don't know if I would just be like the rest by keeping my lips tight for fear of the equity forfeiture. It takes a man of real principle to stand up against that and tell them to keep their money…

>It takes a man of real principle to stand up against that and tell them to keep their money if they can't speak ill of a potentially toxic work environment. Incidentally, that's what Grigory Perelman, the mathematician that rejected the Fields Medal and the $1M prize that came with it, did. It wasn't a matter of an NDA either; it was a move to make his message heard (TL;DR: "publish or perish" rat race that the acad…

I think, when making a gesture, you need to consider its practical impact, which includes whether and how it will be understood (or not).

In the OpenAI case, the gesture of "forgoing millions of dollars" directly makes you able to do something you couldn't - speak about OpenAI publicly. In the Grigory Perelman case, obviously the message was far less clear to most people (I personally have heard of him turning down the money before and know the broad strokes of his story, but had no idea that that was the reason).

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#386

Post by [deleted] »

staticautomatic wrote: post #368
eru wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the consideration for this contract? Consideration is almost meaningless as an obstacle here. They can give the other party a peppercorn, and that would be enough to count as consideration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(law) There might be other legal challenges here, but 'consideration' is unlikely to be one of them. Unless OpenAI has idiots for lawyers.

Ok but peppercorn or not, what’s the consideration?

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#387

Post by concordDance »

candiddevmike wrote: post #266
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading that thread it’s really interesting to me. I see how far we’ve come in a short couple of years. But I still can’t grasp how we’ll achieve AGI within any reasonable amount of time. It just seems like we’re missing some really critical… something… Idk. Folks much smarter than I seem worried so maybe I should be too but it just seems like such a long shot.

Personally, I think catastrophic global warming and climate change will happen before we get AGI, possibly in part due to the pursuit of AGI. But as the saying goes, yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

> catastrophic global warming and climate change will happen before we get AGI,

What are your timelines here? "Catastrophic" is vague but I'd put the climate change meaningfully affecting the quality of life of average westerner at end of century, while AGI could be before the middle of the century.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#388

Post by renewiltord »

mwigdahl wrote: post #290

The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI, train an LLM on that text, and then release it. Based on these companies' arguments that copyrighted material is not actually reproduced by these models, and that any seemingly-infringing use is the responsibility of the user of the model rather than those w…

To be honest, you can just say “I don’t have anything to add on that subject” and people will get the impression. No one ever says that about companies they like so you know when people shut down that something was up.

“What was the company culture like?” “Etc. platitude so on and so forth”

“And I heard the CEO was a total dickbag. Was that your experience working with him?” “I don’t have anything to add on that subject”

Of course going back and forth on that won’t really work but to different people you can’t be expected to not say the nice things and then someone could build up a story based on that.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#389

Post by KennyBlanken »

thorum wrote: post #37

Extra respect is due to Jan Leike, then: https://x.com/janleike/status/1791498174659715494

People very high up in a company / their field are not treated remotely the same as peons.

1)OpenAI wouldn't want the negative PR of pursuing legal action against someone top in their field; his peers would take note of it and be less willing to work for them.

2)The stuff he signed was almost certainly different from what rank and file signed, if only because he would have sufficient power to negotiate those contracts.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#390

Post by concordDance »

ndriscoll wrote: post #139
ihumanable wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alignment in the realm of AGI is not about getting everyone to agree. It's about whether or not the AGI is aligned to the goal you've given it. The paperclip AGI example is often used, you tell the AGI "Optimize the production of paperclips" and the AGI started blending people to extract iron from their blood to produce more paperclips. Humans are used to ordering around other humans who would bring common sense and…

Right and that's why it's a farce. > Whoa whoa whoa, we can't let just anyone run these models. Only large corporations who will use them to addict children to their phones and give them eating disorders and suicidal ideation, while radicalizing adults and tearing apart society using the vast profiles they've collected on everyone through their global panopticon, all in the name of making people unhappy so that it's…

A corporate dystopia is still better than extinction. (Assuming the latter is a reasonable fear)
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