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Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#441

Post by [deleted] »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #440
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amongst people who think probabilistically, this isn't a weird statement. It's a very low precision guestimate. There is a qualitative difference between 50-50, 90-10, 99-1 etc, and it's only their best guess anyway.

Just because you can generate numbers between 0 and 1 doesn't make them meaningful probabilities. Are these based on data? No, they're rhetorical tools used to sound quantitative and scientific. Nobody will be applying the calculus of probability to these meaningless numbers coming out of someone's ass. And most importantly, is he himself willing to bet a significant fraction of his fortune based on these socalled pr…

[deleted]

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#443

Post by recursivecaveat »

SaberTail wrote: post #294
lyu07282 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

perhaps the "not dying on earth industry" after climate catastrophy hits

There's no climate scenario in which Mars is more habitable than Earth. Even if a Texas-sized asteroid crashed into Earth, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars.

I think this is true in almost any scenario. A Mars base is a second chance in the same way that a single potted orchid, suspended by a gossamer thread over a roiling vat of acid is a second chance for your lawn. If you humanity completely wiped itself out on easy mode, it will not last long on Mars after that.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#444

Post by CamperBob2 »

ks2048 wrote: post #403
agnosticmantis wrote: post #297

It's amusing how Sutskever kept musking Musk over the years (overpromising with crazy deadlines and underdelivering): In 2017 he wrote "Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs, and there should be convincing chatbots (though no one should pass the Turing test)." "We will completely s…

That’s embarrassing and should be noted when he’s treated as a guru (as in today when I guess he gave a talk at Neurips conference) Of course, he should be listened to and treated as a true expert. But, it’s becoming more clear in viewing public people that extreme success can warp people’s perspective.

I mean, he wasn't that far off. The Turing test is well and truly beaten, regardless of how you define it, and I sure wouldn't want to go up against o1-pro in a programming or math contest.

Robotics being "solved" was indeed a stupid thing to assert because that's a hornet's nest of wicked problems in material science, mechanical engineering, and half a dozen other fields. Given a suitable robotic platform, though, 2020-era AI would have done a credible job driving its central nervous system, and it certainly wouldn't be a stumbling block now.

It's been a while since I heard any revealing anecdotes about adversarial examples in leading-edge GPT models, but I don't know if we can say it's a solved problem or not.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#445

Post by niceice »

lsy wrote: post #58

I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…

Would you have disagreed with Ilya about AGI? Or do you just disagree with the cost and timeline?

Ilya reiterated on July 12, 2017, “Each year, we'll need to exponentially increase our hardware spend, but we have reason to believe AGI can ultimately be built with less than $10B in hardware.”

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#446

Post by niceice »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #134
AlanYx wrote: post #34

Ignoring all the drama, this part is interesting: "On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."

This made me laugh but also made me think, "...that's it? That's all it takes?"

SpaceX started with a small faction of that, just $100 million.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#448

Post by jjulius »

Uptrenda wrote: post #353

Why are they airing their dirty laundry like this? None of what they've said makes either side look good. In fact it makes OpenAI look like the money-obsessed hypocrites we always knew them to be.

I've vented in previous comments this year about how weird it is that we've collectively become okay with corporations, politicians, public figures, yadda yadda, putting out statements that everyone knows to be bullshit. It's the norm, and it's fucking weird.

So, strictly in that sense, I'm appreciating this level of "openness".

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#449

Post by CamperBob2 »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #437
samatman wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This month, a computer solved the first Advent of Code challenge in eight seconds. Everyone on Hacker News was saying "well of course, you can't just feed it to a chatbot, that's cheating! the leaderboard is a human competition!" because we've normalized that. It's not surprising, it's just obvious, oh yeah you can't have an Advent of Code competition if the computers get to play as well. Granted it took seven years.…

I think the achievements in the past couple of years are astonishing, bordering on magic. Yet, confidently promising AGI/self-driving/mars landing in the next couple of years over and over when the confidence is not justified makes you a conman by definition. If the number 3 means nothing and can become 7 or 17 or 170 why keep pulling these timelines out of their overconfident asses? Did we completely solve robotics…

Self-driving is not so much a technological problem as it is a political problem. We have built a network of roads that (self-evidently) can't be safely navigated by humans, so it's not fair to demand better performance of machines. At least, not as long as they have to share the road with us.

'AI' landings on Mars are the only kind of landings possible, due to latency. JPL indisputably pwned that problem long before anyone ever heard of OpenAI.

Theorem-proving seems to require a different toolset, so I don't know what made him promise that. Same with robotics, which is more an engineering problem than a comp-sci one.

Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

#450

Post by niceice »

hn1986 wrote: post #233
vineyardmike wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s certainly in response to Elon getting more involved in the government. Recently the CFO basically challenged him to try and use his influence against competition “I trust that Elon would act completely appropriately… and not un-American [by abusing his influence for personal gain]”. The best thing they can do is shine as much light on his behavior in the hope that he backs down to avoid further scrutiny. Now tha…

It's naive for anyone to think that Elon won't use his influence in government to empower his companies and weaken his competitors.

That would be out of character for someone that opened Tesla's patents and lets competitors use the supercharger network.
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