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OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

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Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what twigs me about the argument against fair use (whereby AI ostensibly "replicates" the content competitively against the original) is that it assumes a model trained on journalism produces journalism or is designed to produce it. the argument against that stance would be easy to make.

The model isn't trained on journalism only, you can't even isolate its training like that. It's trained on human writing in general and across specialties, and it's designed to compete with humans on what humans do with text , of which journalism is merely a tiny special case. I think the only principle positions to be had here is to either ignore IP rights for LLM training, or give up entirely, because a model desig…

This seems to be putting the cart before the horse.

IP rights, or even IP itself as a concept, isn’t fundamental to existence nor the default state of nature. They are contigent concepts, contigent on many factors.

e.g. It has to be actively, continuously, maintained as time advances. There could be disagreements on how often, such as per annum, per case, per WIPO meeting, etc…

But if no such activity occurs over a very long time, say a century, then any claims to any IP will likely, by default, be extinguished.

So nobody needs to do anything for it all to become irrelevant. That will automatically occur given enough time…

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#392
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Why not? A fast piece of metal is different from a slow piece of metal, from a legal perspective. You can't just say that "this really bad thing that causes a lot of problems is just like this not so bad thing that haven't caused any problem, only more so". Or at least it's not a correct argument. When it is the scale that causes the harm, stating that the harmful thing is the same as the harmless except the scale, i…

So in your view, when a human does it, he causes a minute of harm so we can ignore it, but chatGPT causes a massive amount of harm, so we need to penalize it. Do you realize how radical your position is?

You’re saying a human who reads free work that others put out on the internet, synthesizes that knowledge and then answers someone else’s question is a minute of evil, that we can ignore. This is beyond weird, I don’t think anyone on earth/history would agree with this characterization. If anything, the human is doing a good thing, but when ChatGPT does it at a much larger scale it’s no longer good, it becomes evil? This seems more like thinly veiled logic to disguise anxiety that humans are being replaced by AI.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meditative (he was) vs heedful (he wasn't for AI) (from the dictionary link)

>... heedful (he wasn't for AI) Preceding the use of that word as an example, it clearly says "having thoughts" as the definition. Between the blog he posted, the interview he gave, and the fact that he was assisting an active investigation, I'd say that he both "had some thoughts" and "heeded AI". Again, we're back to the fact that you're suggesting that it's cool to flag a simple "condolences" comment just because…

If I had seen the thesaurus and dictionary links before posting, I would not have posted at all. I however maintain that this guy failed to see the big picture of AI, letting his judgment get clouded by a stupid IP law that serves capitalist publishers at the expense of the people. I speculate that he let this hate of AI bother him so much that he could no longer live. Extinction is the fate that awaits all those who come in the way of AI.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is it has to be proven in court. This man was personally responsible for developing web scraping; stealing data from likely copyrighted sources. He would have had communications specifically addressing the legality of his responsibilities, which he was openly questioning his superiors about.

Web scraping is legal and benefiting from published works is entirely the point, so long as you don't merely redistribute it. Training on X doesn't run afoul of fair-use because it doesn't redistribute nor does using it simply publish a recitation (as Suchir suggested). Summoning an LLM is closer to the act of editing in a text editor than it is to republishing. His hang up was on how often the original works were be…

> Web scraping is legal and benefiting from published works is entirely the point, so long as you don't merely redistribute it.

That's plainly false. Generally, if you redistribute "derivative works" you're also infringing. The question is what counts as derivative works, and I'm pretty sure lawyers and judges are perfectly capable of complicating the picture given the high stakes.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#395

Police now say it's been ruled a suicide: https://sfstandard.com/2024/12/13/key-openai-whistleblower-d... https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/12/13/openai-... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/openai-whistleblower-dead_n_6...

It should be taught in school that being a whistleblower requires safety preparation. Make it a woke thing or whatever, because it is something many don't give an afterthought about.

Well I imagine this is a relatively new phenomena in the USA. Usually I hear about these "coincidences" in foreign countries... but here....? Maybe the older HN generation can shed some insight...

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#396

Police now say it's been ruled a suicide: https://sfstandard.com/2024/12/13/key-openai-whistleblower-d... https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/12/13/openai-... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/openai-whistleblower-dead_n_6...

It should be taught in school that being a whistleblower requires safety preparation. Make it a woke thing or whatever, because it is something many don't give an afterthought about.

The problem is, from a game theory perspective, things like a dead man's switch may possibly protect you from your enemy but won't protect you from your enemy's enemies who would gain two-fold from your death: your death would be blamed on your enemy, and all the dirty laundry would be aired to the public.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#397
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? A fast piece of metal is different from a slow piece of metal, from a legal perspective. You can't just say that "this really bad thing that causes a lot of problems is just like this not so bad thing that haven't caused any problem, only more so". Or at least it's not a correct argument. When it is the scale that causes the harm, stating that the harmful thing is the same as the harmless except the scale, i…

So in your view, when a human does it, he causes a minute of harm so we can ignore it, but chatGPT causes a massive amount of harm, so we need to penalize it. Do you realize how radical your position is? You’re saying a human who reads free work that others put out on the internet, synthesizes that knowledge and then answers someone else’s question is a minute of evil, that we can ignore. This is beyond weird, I don’…

> So in your view, when a human does it, he causes a minute of harm so we can ignore it, but chatGPT causes a massive amount of harm, so we need to penalize it. Do you realize how radical your position is?

Yes, that's my view. No, I don't think that this is radical at all. For some reasons or another, it is indeed quiet uncommon. (Well, not in law, our politicians are perfectly capable of making laws based on the size of danger/harm.)

However, I haven't yet met anyone, who was able to defend the opposite position, e.g. slow bullets = fast bullets, drawing someone = photographing someone, memorizing something = recording something, and so on. Can you?

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#398
post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the blockchain still helps with friends, just because it's a convenient and very censorship-resistant public place to post the keys without having to know each other. But there are plenty of other ways to do it. For the friendless option, don't return all the stake if secrets are submitted despite proof of life. Instead, return a small portion to incentivize reporting, and burn the rest.

Wouldn't you want the incentive for false coordinators to be as strong as possible? Otherwise, the coordinator has more to gain by actually coordinating collusion (i.e. secretly pay off shardholders, reassemble the key, monetize what's in it, don't do anything on-chain) than by revealing the collusion in non-iterated games.

Ok to sum up what I'm thinking: As a stakeholder, I pay a large deposit. I get an immediate payment, and my deposit back after a year. Proof of life happens monthly. If nobody reveals my key after proof of life goes missing, I lose my deposit. If anyone reveals my key despite proof of life in the past month, then 99% of my deposit is burned, and the revealer gets 1% of the deposit.

If I understand right, your concern with this is that the coordinator could pay off shardholders to reveal their shards directly to the coordinator, avoid revealing shards to the contract, and then the shardholders can get their money back.

However, the shardholders do have to worry that the coordinator will go ahead and reveal, collecting that 1% and burning the rest. Or it could be 10%, or 50%, whatever seems sufficiently tempting to coordinators....given the burn risk, the coordinator has to pay >100% to shardholders regardless (assuming non-iterated).

Maximum theft temptation to coordinators is 100% return, but this removes the financial loss to shardholders who simply reveal prematurely on their own. But maybe even losing 10% is sufficient to dissuade that, and then you have to trust coordinators with access to 90% of your funds.

And all this, hopefully, is in the context of the general public having no idea how much economic value the document in question has to a coordinator. In fact, if coordinators routinely pay shardholders more than their deposits, it would pay people to put up lots of worthless documents and collect the payments.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#399
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Good lord, what an atrocious Gish gallop of selective quotes and evidence. This might be one of the worst displays of sharpshooter logic I've ever seen. AND it features a quote from William Pierce, an infamous neo-Nazi. Probably more, but I gave up after the umpteenth unverifiable quote. Just goes to show how much modern right-wing propaganda aligns with traditional neo-Nazi propaganda.

> Good lord, what an atrocious Gish gallop of selective quotes and evidence. This might be one of the worst displays of sharpshooter logic I've ever seen.

Ease up on the throttle there, LessWrong. You've blown the transaxle.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be taught in school that being a whistleblower requires safety preparation. Make it a woke thing or whatever, because it is something many don't give an afterthought about.

Well I imagine this is a relatively new phenomena in the USA. Usually I hear about these "coincidences" in foreign countries... but here....? Maybe the older HN generation can shed some insight...

It was common where I live. Since the current government (the last 17 years) it doesn't happen anymore. There is no criticism, and people often go to jail for no apparent reason.

By " common " I mean at least one very famous person yearly in a 7 million habitant country. Suicided without antecedents, family either disagreed with the investigation or speak about it.

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