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OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

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411–420 of 595 posts

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#411

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This is the problem in my view with people that use social media to post everything too much, who overshare. Elon could have been this guy that was doing cool stuff, super smart and doing some good stuff for the world, but now most people think he is a jerk. People that get known for their work, it's not really a good look for them to wade into politics or controversial topics they have no expertise or right to start…

> now most people think he is a jerk Do they? I don’t. I also know many people with many differing views and they don’t either. This looks again like you are projecting you opinion on the majority of people with no data to support it.

I’m assuming you thought you were responding to me here, but that is someone else.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#412
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty plainly obvious to anyone who has been a Twitter user throughout this whole thing. I was (was) a daily user for the last ~8 years. Then a few months ago all of the sudden like half my timeline was either elons tweets or tweets about elon. I don’t follow him and never have. But there he was, all over my timeline.

I have been using Twitter for 12 years and this has not been "obvious" to me at all. You shouldn't assume that your opinions are obvious or even shared by the majority of people you mention.

“My opinions are my own and not that of my employer or the entire world” yadda yadda. I’m not the only person to notice this..

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#413
post #215

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>How do you think Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk were in a position to found OpenAI in the first place? Wage theft, embezzlement of public funds, socially destructive practices, immoral and downright dangerous behaviors, lies and being children of already wealthy and well connected individuals ? Capitalism didn't give you OpenAI. Money and talented people working on it gave you OpenAI (hint: none of the peopl…

You should probably be little careful about accusing named individuals of embezzlement.

It's absurdly funny to me that out of all the list of actually harmful things that they're doing, you choose to focus on the one that is the most socially accepted.

And no, I'll keep that comment there with names, thanks.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#414

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You're not wrong, but existential threats and possible extinction is in the future ; maybe ten-fifteen years away if we're lucky. Meanwhile, we don't get to play with their models right now. Obviously that's what we should be concerned about.

Among all the accepted threats to humanity's future, AI is one of the least founded at this point. We all grew up with this cautionary fiction. But unless you know something everyone else doesn't, the near term existential threat of AI is relatively low.

>Near term relatively low

Precisely. Above 1% so in the realm of possible, but definitely not above 50% and probably not above 5% in the next 10-15 years. My guesstimate is around 1-2%.

But expand the time horizon to the next 50 years and the cognitive fallacy of underestimating long-term progress kicks in. That’s the timescale that actually produces scary high existential risk with our current trajectory of progress.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem in my view with people that use social media to post everything too much, who overshare. Elon could have been this guy that was doing cool stuff, super smart and doing some good stuff for the world, but now most people think he is a jerk. People that get known for their work, it's not really a good look for them to wade into politics or controversial topics they have no expertise or right to start…

> now most people think he is a jerk Do they? I don’t. I also know many people with many differing views and they don’t either. This looks again like you are projecting you opinion on the majority of people with no data to support it.

The average person on the street seems to think so, I don't for the record.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#416

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I almost feel like Elon's story is the ultimate one about someone getting addicted to popularity and social media, I've seen so many 'smart', respected people get onto platforms and then slowly but completely fall from grace. The difference with Elon is he had real power, money and influence, so in the end he used that to actually buy Twitter, that's the ultimate social media addiction right there. Much like Social m…

I think most geniuses are flawed. Yes Elon is a genius of sorts. I can't say what exactly but he definitely is smart to have gotten as far as he has. Luckily for geniuses of yesteryear social media didn't exist so they couldn't spread their flaws to a 100 million people at the click of a button. We just get anecdotes and the odd book from people close to the likes of Edison that he wasn't such a nice man.

Indeed, I think by the very definition, people that do such things, need to have something a little different about them, that difference can manifest in both genius and madness, perhaps both in the same person, social media just gives them a megaphone and an audience to amplify both.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#417

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People keep forgetting we're talking about Sam Altman, someone who believed that scanning the world's population retinas in exchange for some crappy digital coin was a great idea and not a creepy spinoff of a shoddy sci-fi novel.

Oh wow. I forgot that was even a thing. Is that project dead? I assume it is, but would love to be surprised that it still exists, just for the novelty of the entire thing.

It's still around afaik

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#418
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony here is that Musk resigned in order to pursue his own closed-source for profit AI businesses and is now complaining about OpenAI being closed-source and for profit AI. If people are feeling conflicted about who the asshole is in this situation, don't be, they are all morally bankrupt assholes who all already have many lifetimes of unimaginable wealth yet must take ever more. These are not people who should…

The difference is that Tesla isn't claiming to be open about AI.

And resigning because he was working on a competitor was completely the right thing to do. It would have been a conflict of interest. How often does that type of integrity even happen nowadays?

The whole "ELON MUSK BAD NOW" change to the zeitgeist is alarming to me. He was the darling of the left for years because of Tesla and SpaceX, but now he's completely persona non grata for...reasons?

It smacks of excommunication for heresy.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is pedantic, but the parent comment was conjugating "to have" to "had" via the subjunctive, not via the past tense

He's right tho

oh yeah of course, no question there

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the doomsday scenario is one AI going rogue because of misaligned goals, then having lots of AIs going rogue in various different ways seems indeed preferable, because the AIs will compete with each other and neutralize each other to some extent.

Why would we think they would go rogue in different ways, especially if they're all forks of the same codebase and architecture. The two ways I'm aware AI can go rogue are the Skynet way and the paperclip maximizer way. Eg, Skynet becomes self-aware, realizes humanity can unplug it and is thus a threat, and tries to destroy humanity before we can turn it off. Alternatively, it is programmed with optimizing a specific…

> Why would we think they would go rogue in different ways

Their prompts would differ, depending on their use case. For ChatGPT, even a few words can effect a huge change in the personality it shows.

> Are there any others?

Both scenarios are vague enough for lots of uncertainty. If many AIs are around, perhaps they would see each other as bigger threats and ignore mankind. And different optimizing tasks might conflict with each other. There could be a paperclip recycler for every paperclip maker.

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