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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

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people dont kill themselves because they dont have a good job. thats a weird and naive belief that upper class people have. people kill themselves because they are mentally unwell, fundamentally. except situations like terminal illness.

people dont kill themselves because they dont have a good job. Countless people have killed themselves upon losing a job. Jobs are fundamental to our identity in society and the ramifications of job loss are enormous. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9530609/

people kill themselves after lots of different stressful life events. the reason is that the stress induces depression/ mental dysfunction. the difference between people who do and dont, besides having the information or wisdom to put the situation in context and avoid the stress in the first place, is robustness of mental health. its a mental health issue not a jobs issue.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#402
post #331
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there something like this which is still maintained and isn't needlessly tied to crypto?

> Needlessly tied to crypto Let’s unpack that. By “crypto” you probably mean cryptocurrency, but let’s not forget it’s the same crypto as in cryptography. You absolutely want cryptography involved in something like this for obvious reasons. You’ve probably also heard the term blockchain and immediately think of speculative currency futures. So throw that to the wind for a second and imagine how useful a distributed l…

>This is an absolutely perfect use of Ethereum.

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through Outlook

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through Apple Mail

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through Proton Mail

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Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that is fine and good, but it comes down to your personal and non-universal moral intuition that suffering, abuse , etc. are bad. You make that an axiom and then judge moral systems based on that, using that axiom to build beautiful towers of “reasoning” (rationalization). We both feel that way because of the time and place we grew up, not because it is correct compared to the Ancient Greek or Piraha moral system…

> non-universal moral intuition that suffering, abuse , etc. are bad. You say it perhaps a bit weird, but imho you are stating that there do not exist universal moral values, which is a very non-universal stance. > not because it is correct compared to the Ancient Greek or Piraha moral systems - Well, the beauty is that we can make progress. - If X can only register that system A an B are morally equal, because both…

> You say it perhaps a bit weird, but imho you are stating that there do not exist universal moral values, which is a very non-universal stance.

It’s an observation, and a very old one. Darius of Persia famously made a very similar observation in Herodotus.

> Well, the beauty is that we can make progress.

There is no such thing as progress in this realm.

> - If X can only register that system A an B are morally equal, because both systems are a system, then X misses some fundamental human abilities. That X is dangerous, because for X there is nothing wrong with Auschwitz.

No, the point is that there is no basis of comparison, not in moral terms. Of course you and I feel that way, living when and where we did. There are no “fundamental human abilities” being missed, this is just the same argument that “we feel this is wrong, so it’s bad and dangerous.

> - Also, a good question would be if one would like to exchange their moral beliefs for the Greek moral system. If not, why have a preference for a moral belief if they are all equal.

Of course not. Morals are almost entirely socialized. Nobody reasons themselves into a moral system and they cannot reason themselves out of one. It’s an integral part of their identity.

> Not saying this is you, but I think the main fallacy people run into is that they are aware of shortcomings in their moral acting. Some might excuse themself with relativism -> nihilism, but that is not what a strong person does. Most of us are hypocrite some of the time, but it doesn't mean you have to blame your moral intuition.

I do my best to follow my moral intuitions, and I am sometimes a hypocrite, but the point is moral intuitions are socialized into you and contingent on your milieu, so when you’re discussing these issues with other people who did not share the same socialization, moral arguments lose all their force because they don’t have the same intuitions. So we have to find some other grounds to make our point.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#404
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 siz…

Don’t obfuscate, your view is that the stack overflow commentator, Quora answer writer, blog writer, in fact anyone who did not invent the knowledge he’s disseminating, is committing a small amount of evil. That is radical and makes no sense to me.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#405
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Needlessly tied to crypto Let’s unpack that. By “crypto” you probably mean cryptocurrency, but let’s not forget it’s the same crypto as in cryptography. You absolutely want cryptography involved in something like this for obvious reasons. You’ve probably also heard the term blockchain and immediately think of speculative currency futures. So throw that to the wind for a second and imagine how useful a distributed l…

there's literally no way to implement this on ethereum, smart contracts can't store secrets, all of their state is public.

But they can store hashes of SSS shards, and coordinate the revealing of secrets by individuals who don't have access to those secrets on their own.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#406
post #68

There are some pretty callous comments on this thread. This is really sad. Suchir was just 26, and graduated from Berkeley 3 years ago. Here’s his personal site: https://suchir.net/ . I think he was pretty brave for standing up against what is generally perceived as an injustice being done by one of the biggest companies in the world, just a few years out of college. I’m not sure how many people in his position would…

If I'm a whistleblower in an active case and I end up dead before testifying, I absolutely DO want the general public to speculate about my cause of death.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#407

http://suchir.net/fair_use.html When does generative AI qualify for fair use? by Suchir Balaji

It's also worth reading his initial tweet: https://x.com/suchirbalaji/status/1849192575758139733 > I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I'm skeptical "fair use" would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post ( https://suchir.net/fair_use.html ) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I believe this. > To give some conte…

> they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on.

If I'm an artist and copy the style of another artist, I'm also competing with that artist, without violating copyright. I wouldn't see this argument holding up unless it can output close copies of particular works.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#408

Normally the word "whistleblower" means someone who revealed previously-unknown facts about an organization. In this case he's a former employee who had an interview where he criticized OpenAI, but the facts that he was in possession of were not only widely known at the time but were the subject of an ongoing lawsuit that had launched months prior. As much as I want to give this a charitable reading, the only explana…

> but the facts that he was in possession of were not only widely known at the time but were the subject of an ongoing lawsuit that had launched months prior. That is an exceedingly charitable read of these lawsuits. Everyone knows LLMs are copyright infringement machines. Their architecture has no distinction between facts and expressions. For an LLM to be capable of learning and repeating facts, it must also be abl…

If we take the logic of your final paragraph to its ultimate conclusion, it seems companies can avoid having friends and family speak up about the harassment if they just hire a hitman.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#409
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 siz…

Don’t obfuscate, your view is that the stack overflow commentator, Quora answer writer, blog writer, in fact anyone who did not invent the knowledge he’s disseminating, is committing a small amount of evil. That is radical and makes no sense to me.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#410
post #151
post #140

Being this is ostensibly related to an AI company trying to make AGI reminds me of "Eagle Eye" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059786/

Curious why the downvote? Because someone actually died? It doesn't change the fact that "Eagle Eye" is about (spoiler) an AGI killing people both directly and indirectly (by manipulating others, AI "Swats" you, ...) and here is a company trying to make AGI. If the AGI actual existed it could certainly indirectly get people killed that were threatening it's existence. It could "swat" people. Plant fake evidence (mail…

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