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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many pa…

> Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." I've wondered about this. Do we really know enough about what the human brain is doing to make a statement like this? I feel like if we did, we would be able to model it faithfully and OpenAI, etc. would not be doing what they're doing with LLMs. What if human cognition turns out to be the biological equivalent of a really well-tuned prediction machine, and LLMs are j…

Yes, we do. Humans share the statistical association ability that LLMs possess, but also conscious meaning and understanding. This is a difference in kind and means that we can generalize beyond the statistical pattern associations that we've extracted from data, so we don't require trillions of examples to develop knowledge.

Theoretically a human could sit alone in a dark room, knowing nothing of mathematics and come up with numbers, arithmetic algebra, etc...

They don't need to read every math textbook, paper, and online discussion in existence.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That they relate to the common person and aren't overly snobby?

Exactly. They share the cultural sensibilities of the average person on the street, and yet they're making decisions that will shape the world for future generations. I think that's bad. I want those decisions being made by people who have a more extensive cultural education. Snobs, if you want to call them that.

Of course they're average people, why do you think tech or AI company employees are somehow above or beyond the average person? I'm not sure why you'd willingly say you'd want snobs controlling the world, that is somehow even worse and reeks of aristocracy which is why you see replies rejecting your thoughts, it is simply not a western ideal or one to strive towards.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#404

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

> in 2014, [Graham] had recruited Altman to be his successor as president.

> [Graham's] judgment was based not on Altman’s track record, which was modest, but on his will to prevail, which Graham considered almost ungovernable.

One thing I don't understand is why Paul Graham offered YC to Altman if he knew how slippery he was..

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#405

“By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman’s behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he was resisting in practice” This statement rings true. JL, PG has mentioned often, is his weapon to…

I don't think they were useful at all. If anything they pulled down YCs up to that point stellar reputation.

“Today’s news comes at an interesting time. Last week, Business Insider’s Jonathan Marino reported that YC is close to raising several billion dollars for a new fund, with the goal of possibly expanding its scope to later stage funding. It said it’s still in preliminary discussions for this new strategy, but if true, Thiel could definitely play a big role there.”

My recollection was Thiel was injecting cash, a money deal. [0] There was another less advertised play. An established path for the Thiel “Boy Wonder Fellows”. [1]

“In addition to founding PayPal and Palantir and being the first investor in Facebook, Peter has been involved with many of the most important technology companies of the last 15 years, both personally and through Founders Fund, and the founders of those companies will generally tell you he has been their best source of strategic advice. He already works with a number of YC companies, and we’re very happy he’ll be working with more.”

Guess who was involved in the Thiel / YC deal? [2] You are not the only one seeing this as a reputation hit for YC. [3] Even I, disconnected across the other side of the world could see this as an issue.

[0] https://www.inc.com/business-insider/peter-thiel-is-joining-...

[1] https://boingboing.net/2016/08/25/peter-thiel-y-combinator-f...

[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/welcome-peter/

[3] https://qz.com/810778/y-combinator-has-no-problem-with-partn...

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many pa…

This is such a boring cliche by now. "thinking" and "knowing what it's doing" are totally vague statements that we barely understand about the human mind but in every comment section about AI people definitively state that LLMs don't do them, whatever they are.

This is the epitome of learned helplessness, that you need a neuroscience paper to tell you what thinking and knowledge is when you experience it directly all the time, and can't tell that an LLM doesn't have it. Something is extremely evil about these ideologies that are teaching people that they are NPCs.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#407
“By 2018, several Y.C. partners were so frustrated with Altman’s behavior that they approached Graham to complain. Graham and Jessica Livingston, his wife and a Y.C. founder, apparently had a frank conversation with Altman. Afterward, Graham started telling people that although Altman had agreed to leave the company, he was resisting in practice”

You can subtly see residue of this frustration in Dalton and Michael’s videos when Sam Altman comes up. It’s only thinly veiled that Sam was a snake while at YC.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#409

It's really interesting reading about how these folks view LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that we're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon. So much "A.G.I" mentioned in the article.

I find it interesting how a lot of cyberpunk does not really include AI or does not present it in transformative way. There is a lot of mind uploading, implants, corpo fun and overall technology permeating all aspects of life, but often AI itself does not actually play a big role.

Counterexamples that come to mind are Neuromancer (AI driving the plot) and Blade Runner (AI antagonists.)

A compromise thesis might be that in cyberpunk media, AI is at never powerful or motivated to fundamentally reform the worldwide crapsack economic system. They don't abolish corporations, although they might take them over.

Of course, if there was a story about an AI taking over the world into a post-scarcity society, it probably wouldn't be filed under "cyberpunk" either...

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#410
post #394
post #86

https://archive.ph/hOYMn

I hope ronan farrow doesn't mind his article being shared like this

It’s also available via public libraries in USA via Libby if your local library system pays for a subscription, so it’s a way to support the magazine indirectly, since your local taxes pays for your library. The downside for weekly is you have to read it that week, no archive access.
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