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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#461

Post by josephg »

robbomacrae wrote: post #299
josephg wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why must you be loud about changing your mind? Why not just quietly realise you were wrong, have conversations with friends about it and move on? That’s what I’d do. My life is a story. I’m under no obligation to share.

Not the op but the quotes from John Maynard etc made me think… if I listen to your original thesis and you convince me (maybe you have some authority) and I go on believing you, is it not harmful to me if you realize your error and don’t inform me? Boss: “why did you do X?” Me: “But sir you told me doing X was good!” Or to put it differently, if you spread the wrong word then don’t equally spread the correction then…

Maybe for someone you know in person. But the people who quit google in response to defence contracts aren't your boss. And they aren't your friends. You're a stranger to them. So its a bit of a long bow to draw to claim they owe you a followup.

It wouldn't surprise me if some of them did blog about changing their mind after the Ukraine war started. We must still have no idea because it just didn't make the front page anywhere.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#462

Post by edgyquant »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #454
selestify wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What indications are there that the US will start preparing for this anytime soon? We’ve had decades to share the cost savings from outsourcing to China and failed to do so. On the other hand, unemploying a large enough segment of society at once might finally force some change in the system, rather than letting it continue limping on in a slow burn where 1-2% of jobs get automated a year.

>On the other hand, unemploying a large enough segment of society at once might finally force some change in the system, rather than letting it continue limping on in a slow burn Proof of employment required to vote.

This shows how little you understand the actual source of power in the world. The vote is a way to keep that source from changing governments, not the actual source.

This mindset is prevalent today, as if people are incapable of changing government without its permission

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#464

Post by logicchains »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #190
dantheman wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general governments have done far more harm to individuals than anyone in the market. The job of the government is to protect your individual rights not the collective interest.

I don’t know that this is true. At very least they both share immense responsibility for causing individual harm. Sure the government may start a war, but that war can’t happen without bombs and bullets, and in America at least those factories aren’t run by the government. There is an intermediate step oftentimes, but I don’t think that necessarily disconnects companies from responsibility. If you work at a guided bo…

>I don’t know that this is true.

In the 20th century governments slaughtered wholesale around 100 million of their own citizens (China, Russia, Cambodia), let alone those of other countries they killed in war. There's no measure by which the market comes anywhere near that amount of murder.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#465

Post by davidatbu »

csomar wrote: post #410
dinvlad wrote: post #392

It's not really AI we're talking, they haven't achieved an artificial Intelligence. The sooner we realize that, the sooner this overhype dies and we don't end up with another massively over-valued trillion-dollar company.

It's funny how no one sees it. Sam Altman is a "successful" entrepreneur, yet he never had a successful company. He made loopt, a defunct company which raised serious money at the time, and then he suddenly made it to YC as a partner. He, then, quickly rose through the ranks to become president of YC. Think of that for a second. OpenAI is a company that can barely ship a functioning website, or have proper security f…

> OpenAI is a company that can barely ship a functioning website, or have proper security for basic stuff. You'd not expect this company to be the future of AI, do you?

In case you didn't know: ML researchers are infamous for being bad at traditional software engineering.

That's why, I personally don't think whether a company can "proper security for basic stuff" has much correlation with probability of achieving AGI.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#466

Post by hluska »

whitemary wrote: post #456
JenrHywy wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keynes is probably the most influential economist of all time. I disagree with some of his ideas (for likely different reasons than you do), but I can't see any basis for him "admitting defeat" - he's many things, but defeated is not one of them.

Karl Marx is not only the most influential economist of all time; he is many orders of magnitude more influential than Keynes. Only an American could be clueless enough to think this is up for discussion.

We don’t need this kind of garbage here.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#467

Post by whitemary »

hluska wrote: post #466
whitemary wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karl Marx is not only the most influential economist of all time; he is many orders of magnitude more influential than Keynes. Only an American could be clueless enough to think this is up for discussion.

We don’t need this kind of garbage here.

Facts?

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#469

Post by bryanrasmussen »

edgyquant wrote: post #462
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the other hand, unemploying a large enough segment of society at once might finally force some change in the system, rather than letting it continue limping on in a slow burn Proof of employment required to vote.

This shows how little you understand the actual source of power in the world. The vote is a way to keep that source from changing governments, not the actual source. This mindset is prevalent today, as if people are incapable of changing government without its permission

Thanks brilliant person on HN for correcting me! I see now that repressive measures are never passed in order to deal with what people in power consider destabilizing or problematic issues.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#470

Post by starik36 »

mimd wrote: post #379
sebzim4500 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A shrewd plan considering he's not offering something beyond what another company with a large nvidia cluster could offer. It's been 4 months, no one has released anything nearly as good as the initial release of ChatGPT. Meanwhile OpenAI has released GPT-4 and is trialing plugins and 32k context. Either their competition is incompetent or OpenAI is doing something right.

DeepMind could no doubt argue the same for openAI failing to play go and to not pursuing protein folding. Their several years behind on that one. :) Anyway, there have been several open source versions in the gpt3-3.5 range. Those are your base to build off of. Their's just little incentive to try to go participate in a moneysink competition with Google and Microsoft.

Not really. I tried several fine tuned iterations of LLaMa and none of them are even close to ChatGPT.
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