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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?

#461

Post by pesus »

arionhardison wrote: post #167
edbaskerville wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give more details? It wouldn't particularly surprise me if Sam Altman were racist, but I'm curious what the specific incident you observed was.

Yes, but first I want to be very clear on some things. 1. I could have hidden my identify behind a throwaway. I did not feel that would be appropriate when making this calim. 2. I am not looking for anything, literally at all. Any follow ups for blogs; anything that would benefit I will not answer. 3. This is NOT a new account, I am very easy to find; I am 6'1 140lbs I was working for a company called NationBuilder a…

Thank you for sharing this. I 100% believe it, and it lines up with my experience with other people who came from similar backgrounds as Sam Altman - i.e. white, rich, privileged, and attending elite universities.

I will disagree with one part - I do believe it is racism. Most will never admit it publicly, but if they think you're one of them, it often comes out rather quickly, especially when alcohol is involved.

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

#462

Post by Bolwin »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #304
philip1209 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

> whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months. Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is ac…

I find it bizarre even the public image of Anthropic is seen as ethical after the Department of War debacle, in which they themselves admitted they had basically no qualms with their tech being used for war and slaughter at all except two very very thin lines, namely mass surveillance of American citizens and fully automated weaponry with their current models.

It only showed they were marginally more ethical than OpenAI and XAI which isn't saying much.

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

#463

Post by nixosbestos »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #254
dolebirchwood wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Struck a nerve? No need to be petty. They have a point. We did this with the words racist and fascist. Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in. I'm not sure debating who is and isn't a sociopath is as useful as, say, the degree to which Sam is a liar (versus visible).

I would be curious to hear you expand on that, walk me through it, maybe a small paragraph to explain what over inclusion happened with the weird fascist, what baddies you're vaguely referring to, and connect those dots?

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

#464

Post by davebren »

kortex wrote: post #458
davebren wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just the greed. The whole AI is so dangerous that we must be the ones to build it to save humanity, and then gaslighting yourself and everyone around you into believing that your language model is AGI. This is some weird detached from reality cult behavior.

Complete hearsay, but I struck up a convo with someone who had spent a few hours drinking around a campfire with him and a few others at burning man, prior to GPT3's popularity. Apparently he was utterly convinced in his pivotal role to shepherd in a new era with AI, to the point where it got really messianic and culty. He didnt recall much else other than just being really weirded out by the dude.

The AI CEOS and most of their employees are in the same place as that guy. They're just in a more professional context and will be careful not to let their delusions of grandeur look too insane.

I remember watching the fitness function improve while my neural net learned to recognize characters for a project I did in school, and there was something about it that felt powerful. I guess we've always had that with the machines we imbue that have any sort of decision making "intelligence", but mix that with taking psychedelics and you have an interesting cocktail.

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

#465

Post by kfarr »

satvikpendem wrote: post #400
swingboy wrote: post #123

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.

Well I'd hope they're transformative, they're using transformers after all. We just need to pay attention to them, that's all they need.

Do they need all our attention?

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

#466

Post by RealityVoid »

stavros wrote: post #239

I found it very interesting that Altman et al were worried that AI will become supremely intelligent and China will make a supervirus or some AI drones or whatnot, but not a single person was worried about destroying all jobs because we wouldn't need humans any more. Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.

I think fundamentally, the concern is misplaced. The fact you need to work for wealth is a convention of our constraints. The change in constraints would lead to other means of distribution. It's easy to see if someone who believes more productivity is good would not see making jobs obsolete a real problem. Thew would see us adapting to the new conditions in a relatively short while.

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

#467

Post by saxonww »

davebren wrote: post #402
saxonww wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 com…

The point I'm trying to make is that I don't think we know, so we can't say either way.

In your example, would the human have ever had contact with other humans, or would it be placed in the room as a baby with no further input?

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

#469

Post by aaa_aaa »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #81
cs702 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a] This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world. OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI ra…

Many of us prefer OpenAI's Codex, because we think it's a better product. No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in everything but UI/UX and conversation. It's better at quality code.

Shill talk

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

#470

Post by Ucalegon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #254
dolebirchwood wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Struck a nerve? No need to be petty. They have a point. We did this with the words racist and fascist. Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in. I'm not sure debating who is and isn't a sociopath is as useful as, say, the degree to which Sam is a liar (versus visible).

Racism and fascism have been used correctly, its just that people do not like to be have their beliefs associated with negative things and thus, rather than perform self-reflection about themselves, instead the problem exists elsewhere. I am sure you can come up with outliers that prove what you are saying is true, but across the vast majority of applications of the use of both words they are correct relative to definitions of both words.
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