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Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

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Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#401

Post by vintagedave »

throwaway911282 wrote: post #360
vintagedave wrote: post #304

I canceled my ChatGPT subscription today, and send support@openai.com a polite email saying why. I encourage you to do the same. Claude Desktop is better anyway -- and, as we have seen, Anthropic is a more ethical company.

you must be delirious to think anthropic is an ethical company! they are the ones to first partner with the govt.

I know. I feel troubled for all providers. (I have never used Grok, for example, for obvious ethical reasons.) But Anthropic seems, currently, better than OpenAI. I always want to encourage the better behaviour and discourage the worst.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#402

Post by msabalau »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #242
tmule wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oppenheimer? Really? Quoting a review of an Oppenheimer biography: “Oppenheimer was clearly an enormously charming man, but also a manipulative man and one who made enemies he need not have made. The really horrible things Oppenheimer did as a young man – placing a poisoned apple on the desk of his advisor at Cambridge, attempting to strangle his best friend – and yes, he really did those things – Monk passes off as…

The idea isn't that Oppenheimer was a saint, but that the government he served well and faithfully -- at the expense of his soul, some would argue -- turned on him viciously as soon as he dared to question their agenda. As you suggest, it is easy to imagine Altman in the same hot seat. Never mind his sexual orientation, which the Republican theocrats will eventually use against him as surely as the knives came out fo…

It's a bit simplistic to personify complex organizations of millions of people like "The Government" or "The Market" as if they were a living, breathing persons with a single mind.

There were people working in government who successfully attacked Oppenheimer for personal and/or policy reasons, people who stood by, and people who unsuccessfully supported him, voted to clear him, or condemned the proceedings.

Oppenheimer still paid the price, and arguably, the risks to someone like him today are considerably higher, as the current administration isn't exactly like Eisnehower's.

Nevertheless it's reductionist, reifying sentimentality to talk about "the government" turning "viciously" on someone who "served them well" because they are defying its agenda. The government isn't a character in Game of Thrones. The responsibility lies with the specific individuals who attacked him, and those who stood by.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#403

Post by genxy »

delaminator wrote: post #335
oscaracso wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should ask the language model that output this text the definition of 'whataboutism,' and if the comment you've posted responds meaningfully to the discussion at hand.

[flagged]

Everything I don't like is pretty broad brush. I have only used it with the Trump regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-su...

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#404

Post by mmooss »

raincole wrote: post #303
davidw wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By voting.

Voting changes the name of the department. It doesn't change if the government wants mass surveillance. See PRISM.

> Voting changes the name of the department.

You're conceding that the name has already changed, without voting.

> It doesn't change if the government wants mass surveillance.

That can be prevented by Congress with enough political will.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#405

Post by mmooss »

davidw wrote: post #383
raincole wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting changes the name of the department. It doesn't change if the government wants mass surveillance. See PRISM.

This is my Senator: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/issues/domestic-surveillance-re... He may not be perfect on everything, but elect more people like him and it starts moving the needle. Or elect some more that are even more opposed to some of these things. It doesn't happen overnight. Change is difficult.

> Change is difficult.

I agree, though notice that the GOP/MAGA have and continue to make enormous changes. The difference is that they believe they can do it while others sit around talking about hopelessness and powerlessness. The only difference is belief.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#406

Post by veidr »

Departed7405 wrote: post #362
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel so sad about snowden sometimes. I tried reading his book's first few pages on how when he was growing up, he could be anyone in a forum and there was this sense of anonymity and at the same time, just freedom. And later on when he saw just how much the overreach of govt. was etc., he did what others couldn't. It wasn't as if there weren't any other contractors like Snowden, but there were no other whistleblowe…

I agree. What people forget is Snowden didn't intend to end up in Russia. He wanted to go from Hong Kong (where he tought he would be safe, but realised extradition still was an option) to Ecuador. But he feared US would intercept his plane if he went over US/US allies sky. So his plan was to go from HK to Russia, then to Cuba and finally Ecuador. Russia stopped him because US had cancelled his passport.

That fear proved well-grounded. While it probably doesn't seem as big of a deal now — in this era when we just serially assassinate heads of state we don't like without any pretense otherwise — the US indeed did direct its European allies to intercept the plane of Bolivian president Evo Morales, based on the (incorrect, as it turned out) suspicion that Snowden was on board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#407

Post by solenoid0937 »

nickysielicki wrote: post #289
solenoid0937 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I have to say I loved your thoughtful & detailed comment. You have clearly considered this from the financial side; let me add some color from the perspective of someone working with frontier researchers. > As the "alignment" folks on the AI industry are likely to learn I will push back here. Dario & co are not starry-eyed naive idealists as implied. This is a calculated decision to maximize their goal (safe A…

> researchers are more valuable than any military spend or any datacenter. It does not matter how many hundreds of billions you have - if the 500-1000 top researchers don't want to work for you, you're fucked; and if they do, you will win because these are the people that come up with the step-change improvements in capability. This is a massive cope imo. The reason that the AI industry is so incestuous is just becau…

Sure the architecture is from 2017. But the gap between GPT-1 and frontier models today is not simply "more FLOPs" and as simple as "standing up PyTorch and vllm" - theres thousands of undocumented decisions about data, alignment, reward modeling, training stability, and inference-time strategies, and lots of tribal knowledge held by a small group of people who overwhelmingly do not want to work on weapons systems.

The dense model argument is self-defeating long term. Sparsity (MoE etc.) lets you build a smarter model at the same compute budget, so going dense because you can afford to waste FLOPs is how you fall behind b/c you never came up with the step function improvements needed.

Sure, the DoD invented HPC, but it also invented the internet, and then the private sector made it actually useful.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#408

Post by df2dfs »

Spooky23 wrote: post #62
df2dfs wrote: post #8

What's there to discuss? OAI is seeking a hand-out from the govt to save their asses. They (Sam + top-management) see the writing on the wall and need help.

This. The OpenAI grift is to make itself too big to fail. They are playing a game of chicken ahead of the election circus. Trump must keep the market alive until November. Nvidia, Micron, Oracle, Microsoft are cooked when and if they pop.

We need to create a special place where people who ‘get it’ congregate.

Sadly this place is full of noise and people who don’t get the big picture - leading to the down voting of posts and continual drowning out of stuff closer to the truth by noise and hysteria.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#409

Post by solenoid0937 »

louiereederson wrote: post #91

And they're reportedly back in talks with the DOW per the FT (below). They are not the exception, and are just as bloodlessly, shamelessly publicity hungry as any other tech co, if not more so. No surprise based on their conduct up until this fake event. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256452

This is a total non issue if they hold their red lines, which they clearly intend to if you've read the memo.

Also if you've ever actually chatted with anyone at the company you'd know that they are not all the same and Anthropic genuinely does stand apart here.

Re: Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’

#410

Post by veidr »

adriand wrote: post #129
oxdgd38 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know how this story will end for Dario. See Oppenheimer, Turing, Lavoisier, Galileo, Socretes etc. Power does not reside in the hands of people with knowledge or even wealth. And most technical people have not taken a political philosophy course or even a philosphy course. The Ring of Gyges story is 4000 years old.

I think Amodei is widely underestimated. The consensus viewpoint on the deal that OpenAI struck with the Pentagon is that Anthropic got played. I disagree. I'm certain that Amodei and his team gamed this out. In doing so, I think there's at least two conclusions they would have drawn: 1. Some other AI company would cut a deal with the Pentagon. There's no world in which all the labs boycott the Pentagon. So who? Choo…

Nobody gives a shit about jumping to #1 in the app stores, at this scale.

If US & A really goes full-Huawei on Anthropic, they can't IPO. It's an existential crisis for them. I think they can survive in some form, somehow, because their model is really good, probably the best.

And in other times, I would think the US government had sufficient intellectual horsepower to not cut off its own dick, and the golden goose's head, over some idiotic morning-drinker road-rage type beef. But these are not other times. These are these times.

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