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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#421

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

simonh wrote: post #82
brookst wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a good comparison. And once again tech enthusiasts are confused and outraged that the product people are getting credit for tech they didn’t invent. Once again missing the forest that people buy products, not tech.

There’s an awful lot of judgement, engineering and technique that goes into a really well thought out product. It’s often deeply underestimated, and culture makes a huge difference in execution. Bing/Sydney came out after ChatGPT, based on exactly the same tech, but was hot garbage.

There are three modes to Bing Chat, and at least two models involved. AFAIK only the "creative" mode uses GPT-4 (the other two some flavors of GPT-3.5). As far as I can see Bing/Creative is no different to ChatGPT+ (the non-free version) which is also GPT-4 based.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#422

Post by pffft8888 »

PostOnce wrote: post #337
okareaman wrote: post #206

This is a very fluid and chaotic situation so I'd be more concerned if he said one thing and stuck to it When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir? - John Maynard Keynes A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall - R…

That's all well and good, but it's not well and good to change what you say because the calculus of what will personally benefit you has changed. It's not the same as "new information coming to light", it is instead greed. We've already seen a charity robbed to no end other than Profit. Commercializing OpenAI was for one reason: to enrich the people commercializing it. Not to benefit society, and with nary a thought…

Altman is v2.0 of Zuckerberg, with 1000X more parameters.

I'm worried about v3.0

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#423

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

simonh wrote: post #201
FormerBandmate wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bing/Sydney is better than ChatGPT. It had serious bugs in beta testing

It’s a dramatically worse chat bot, but being able to search the internet does give it an additional useful capability, while limiting it to five interactions papers over its psychotic tendencies.

Try it again - seems very good now (and allows longer conversations too).

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#424

Post by femiagbabiaka »

PostOnce wrote: post #337
okareaman wrote: post #206

This is a very fluid and chaotic situation so I'd be more concerned if he said one thing and stuck to it When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir? - John Maynard Keynes A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall - R…

That's all well and good, but it's not well and good to change what you say because the calculus of what will personally benefit you has changed. It's not the same as "new information coming to light", it is instead greed. We've already seen a charity robbed to no end other than Profit. Commercializing OpenAI was for one reason: to enrich the people commercializing it. Not to benefit society, and with nary a thought…

The discourse about lost jobs is necessary but a little odd: leveraging VC money and software driven automation to take over sectors ripe for the picking is the startup model in a box.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#425

Post by whitemary »

okareaman wrote: post #206

This is a very fluid and chaotic situation so I'd be more concerned if he said one thing and stuck to it When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir? - John Maynard Keynes A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall - R…

> When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir? - John Maynard Keynes

I sure would love to hear Mr. Keynes acknowledge defeat. If he were alive today, I seriously doubt we (Marxists like myself) would have the pleasure.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#426

Post by flangola7 »

abirch wrote: post #350
jasonhansel wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if they tried, they would hobble the companies involved. Well, yeah, that's the point of regulation: to limit corporate behavior. There are plenty of other highly-regulated industries in the US; why shouldn't AI be one of them?

Define AI. Companies tend to find loopholes and the government is slow to regulate.

Broad enough laws don't have loopholes. GDPR for example had the wisdom not to define specific types of personal information (such as name, or IP address) but instead any data that could be correlated to identify a person. That puts the ball in the corporations' court to make sure they stay well clear of the dividing line.

Delegated councils (like the FDA, FTC, FCC, etc.) and courts can be used to make decisions about edge and individual cases, and do so much closer to real time than Congress can act.

Governments regularly successfully define things much more vague than "is this AI?"

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#427

Post by mrlambchop »

eternalban wrote: post #24
gardenfelder wrote: post #2

https://archive.ph/YTOeD

None of archive.* are working for me - cloudflare dns issues. Anyone else has access issues? [thanks to those who replied. strangely stopped working for me since yesterday [US]. can you post the ip you see? Cloudflare returns a 1001 error: "Ray ID: 7b128f151e4b0c90 • 2023-04-01 17:30:15 UTC" ]

Does not work here either. Cloudflare error page is all I get.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#428

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #322
ftxbro wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've already swooped in. I mean the conspiracy argument would be that the $10B isn't a normal investment. It's a special government project investment facilitated by OpenAI board member and former clandestine CIA operative and cybersecurity executive Will Hurd through his role on the board of trustees of In-Q-Tel the investment arm of the CIA. It's funneled through Microsoft instead of through Google in part becau…

Is it not enormously more likely that Microsoft decided to invest a small amount (to them) in a technology which is clearly core to their future business plans?

Let's also note that it is an investment with an expected return (capped at 7x), and gives Microsoft an ownership stake in OpenAI. It's not like MSFT is just throwing money away! Seems a very savvy move by Nadella, and a great partnership for OpenAI too - really a win-win.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#429

Post by BarryMilo »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #416
qudat wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the real breakthrough happened at google with “All you need is attention”

Perhaps, although it was never intended/expected to be a path to AI/AGI. It was just designed as a more efficient seq-2-seq model. An accidental breakthrough wrt AGI you might say!

It's clear that GPT4 still isn't AGI or close to it. But the same is true for humans, our language neurons aren't the only essential parts of our intelligence. So what else is there? Well, it just needs to want things, maybe have needs, probably perceptions (that one's easy). Automomy?

At some point, with all these systems interacting, sentience may emerge so that it too can participate debates whether it's an AGI!

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#430

Post by 876978095789789 »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #325
876978095789789 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if I should elaborate further, but in the last years of Loopt, it actually devolved into a hook-up app servicing the gay community, basically Grindr before Grindr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385178 I guess he was ahead of his time, in a way? Still, I've never forgotten that this silly "success" was the first big exit of the most touted YC founder, ever.

I think that's just being ahead of your time, no qualification needed.

I guess, but I remember even as far back as 2007, pg was excessively touting sama. During an interview, when asked which founder(s) impressed him most, he immediately replied, almost cutting the interviewer off, "Sam Altman." Which struck me as odd then since reddit (same batch) seemed much bigger, and Scribd and Justin.tv (later Twitch) had started to take off. Then there was that "Sam Altman for President" post, announcing him as the next YC president, but the subtext seemed to be that pg thought sama would make a good POTUS as well. Then there was actual talk that Sam would run for Governor: https://www.vox.com/2017/5/14/15638046/willie-brown-column-s...

It's as if his success was predestined. Loopt should have been a failure, but instead it ended up being a successful exit, made him rich(er), and became a stepping stone to greater things.

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