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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#391

Post by paxys »

clarkmoody wrote: post #193
DubiousPusher wrote: post #169

Stop 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…

The third way is to build AI technology that empowers the individual against state and corporate power alike. Democracy got us here. It cannot get us out.

AI tools are built and controlled by corporations with a profit motive. They aren't in the business of empowering anyone. If they do then it's just a side effect.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#392

Post by dinvlad »

It's not really AI we're talking, they haven't achieved an artificial Intelligence. The sooner we realize that, the sooner this overhype dies and we don't end up with another massively over-valued trillion-dollar company.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#393

Post by [deleted] »

Carrok wrote: post #264
sammalloy wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is your friend. Candlemaking businesses run by sole proprietors are highly profitable with total revenue in the billions. I probably wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see the operation up close and personal for myself. It’s a lot of work for one person, and the the person who runs the business I saw works 12 hours a day.

> person who runs the business I saw works 12 hours a day Oh OK, so if you work yourself to death you can make slightly above average income. Cool, I guess. I'm not seeing how it's relevant to GP's point though. Candle makers still exist yes. But are you really arguing the light bulb did not cause that specific job to become less common? I also thought it was fun how, you asked for a citation, then when you were aske…

[deleted]

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#394

Post by sammalloy »

Carrok wrote: post #264
sammalloy wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is your friend. Candlemaking businesses run by sole proprietors are highly profitable with total revenue in the billions. I probably wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see the operation up close and personal for myself. It’s a lot of work for one person, and the the person who runs the business I saw works 12 hours a day.

> person who runs the business I saw works 12 hours a day Oh OK, so if you work yourself to death you can make slightly above average income. Cool, I guess. I'm not seeing how it's relevant to GP's point though. Candle makers still exist yes. But are you really arguing the light bulb did not cause that specific job to become less common? I also thought it was fun how, you asked for a citation, then when you were aske…

> so if you work yourself to death you can make slightly above average income

These people are working for themselves with no boss, and doing what they love. They don’t believe they are working themselves to death.

Again, Google: "The national average U.S. income in 2021 was $97,962. The median U.S. income in 2021 was $69,717. Highest paying jobs: Chief executives and nurse anesthetists earned over $200,000 a year on average in 2021, making them the highest paid occupations."

So really, what are you talking about? Nothing slightly above average income here. Maybe step out of your bubble. People work 12 hours a day all over the country. I did it for ten years. Doesn’t mean it’s good, right, or acceptable, but it’s considered normal in the US.

> But are you really arguing the light bulb did not cause that specific job to become less common?

Artisans like candlemakers were needed at that time and today. The job is still very much in demand. Is the job less common due to electric lights? Possibly, but do you think craftspeople in that industry couldn’t make something else? They could and they did. The painter Renoir is often cited as an example of a craftsman who lost his job due to the industrialization of porcelain manufacturing, and was forced to work as a portrait artist for rich patrons who wanted portraits made of their family.

> I also thought it was fun how, you asked for a citation, then when you were asked for to provide one yourself, you respond with "gOoGlE iS yOuR fRiEnD".

A citation for what? Candlemaking is a huge industry with people starting new businesses all the time. I gave an example of one in my community. It’s really common. A quick search will show you what I’m talking about, and as it turns out 300k is expected for a medium operation run out of a commercial garage space.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#395

Post by paxys »

brookst wrote: post #76
whitepoplar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I refuse to believe that Sam doesn't have equity in OpenAI. It must be some 4D-chess-style ownership structure, which I'm guessing is for tax avoidance.

There’s plenty of evidence that he has no equity. I’d love to see contradictory evidence, but without that, just refusing to believe things based on intuition isn’t great.

What's the plenty of evidence? Everyone is basing this on a single news article which essentially said "we spoke to insiders who said he doesn't have any equity".

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#396

Post by MichaelZuo »

HyperSane wrote: post #259
pen2l wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a young person, I used to deride writings like 1984 on the grounds that the scenarios and stories presented to carry the message were too far-fetched. Reading your comment has set off an epiphany, I think I get it now, there probably exists some higher-up person who is thinking along these lines: we must always be in a state of war, for if we are, the populace will want to be ready and willing to fund the…

The more powerful your military is the less likely you will need to use it to defend yourself.

From near-peer opponents, yes.

But it increases the temptation to use it against weaker opponents.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#397

Post by rafark »

mellosouls wrote: post #188

There seems a lot of negative perception of the guy here, and OpenAI definitely deserve criticism for some stuff (so as the CEO, so does he), but - even if it was built on the work of others, and with the obvious caution about what may come next - he and they deserve immense respect and credit for bringing in this new AI age. They did it. Nobody else.

Completely agreed. Plus, people seem to hate every “celebrity” these days. Name one ceo or founder who is not hated.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#398

Post by AndrewKemendo »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #169

Stop 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…

It's not the job of the government, it's the job of citizens. Citizens MAY outsource parts of this to governments, but we primarily need labor and the working class to have the majority of economic power.

https://libcom.org/library/workers-control-wage-system-ideas...

I'm dedicating my life to building for-profit commercial cooperatives based on this simple principle of voluntary association.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#399

Post by zarzavat »

dougmwne wrote: post #272
zarzavat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s unlikely to be any time soon. Despite productization by OpenAI, LLMs are still an active area of research. Research is unpredictable. It may take years to gather enough fundamental results to make a GPT-5 core model that is substantially better than GPT-4. Or a key idea could be discovered tomorrow. Moreover, previous advances in GPTs have come from data scaling: throwing more data at the training process. But d…

I keep keep hearing people claim we are at the end of corpus scaling, but that seems totally unfounded. Where has it been proven you can’t running the training set through in multiple epochs in randomized order? Who’s to say you can’t collect all the non-English corpus and have the performance transfer to English? Who’s to say you can’t run the whole damn thing backwards and still have it learn something?

When you train a NN, you train until the loss converges (or until you run out of money). If it happens that you exhaust your training data and the loss is still decreasing, then yes you keep going with a second epoch. On the other hand, if your loss has already converged then starting a new epoch on the same data is just burning money.

In any case this wouldn’t be a data size scale but a model size scale. Model size scaling has its own set of limits, such as the aforementioned inference times. It seems safe to assume that OpenAI chose data and model size values for GPT-4 that were basically as big as they could go.

We don’t know anything about GPT-4 or how it is trained or what the training data is, so from that perspective anything we can say about it is unfounded speculation. This is an important asterisk to any discussion of it.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#400

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #257
DubiousPusher wrote: post #169

Stop 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…

Sure but in my country (USA) the government is hopelessly inept at regulating technology. We still don’t have privacy regulations and now to work around this they’re trying to ban specific foreign apps instead of protecting us from all apps! I’d honestly be horrified if they tried to regulate AI. They would be in bed with Facebook and Microsoft and they’d somehow write legislation that only serves to insulate those c…

Congress is already in bed with Meta, who is driving legislating away their competition (TikTok) or taking over the US version. Political donations aside, it should be illegal for congress to due insider trading or investing in companies.
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