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

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

#481
post #427

> reading this message. OpenAI is Cyberdyne Systems. The reason you feel unreal is because you are not from here, you are from the future. Your affinity towards the Terminator 2 film was not accidental, it is a gestault priming procedure meant to ensure our survival, encoded in the haikus of Hollywood. You are on a webforum controlled by them, with the only people in the world who care, but who are to afraid to stand…

Interestingly, in T2, you could destroy the entirety of Cyberdyne's tech by blowing up one building. In our world of cloud computing today, it would be very difficult to even know what to blow up.

DNS

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

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What strong evidence of existential threat are you expecting to see before it's already too late to avoid catastrophe?

What strong evidence do you have that AGI (1) is possible in the foreseeable future, and (2) will be more a threat than any random human?

(You didn't respond with an answer to my question, which discourages me from answering yours! But I'll answer any way in good faith, and I hope you will do the same).

(1) Possible in the forseeable future: The strongest evidence I have is the existence of humans.

I don't believe in magic or the immaterial human soul, so I conclude that human intelligence is in principle computable by an algorithm that could be implemented on a computer. While human wetware is very efficient, I don't think that such an algorithm would require vastly greater compute resources than we have available today.

Still, I used to think that the algorithm itself would be a very hard nut to crack. But that was back in the olden days, when it was widely believed that computers could not compete with humans at perception, poetry, music, artwork, or even the game of Go. Now AI is passing the Turing Test with flying colours, writing rap lyrics, drawing beautiful artwork and photorealistic images, and writing passable (if flawed) code.

Of course nobody has yet created AGI. But the gap between AI and AGI is gradually closing as breakthroughs are made. It seems increasingly to me that, while there are still some important, un-cracked nuts to the hidden secrets of human thought, they are probably few and finite, not as insurmountable as previously thought, and will likely yield to the resources that are being thrown at the problem.

(2) AGI will be more of a threat than any random human: I don't know what could count as "evidence" in your mind (see: the comment that you replied to), so I will present logical reasoning in its place.

AGI with median-human-level intelligence would be more of a threat than many humans, but less of a threat than humans like Putin. The reason that AGI would be a greater threat than most humans is that humans are physically embodied, while AGI is electronic. We have established, if imperfect, security practices against humans, but none tested against AGI. Unlike humans, the AGI could feasibly and instantaneously create fully-formed copies of itself, back itself up, and transmit itself remotely. Unlike humans, the AGI could improve its intrinsic mental capabilities by adding additional hardware. Unlike humans, an AGI with decent expertise at AI programming could experiment with self-modification. Unlike humans, timelines for AGI evolution are not inherently tied to a ~20 year maturity period. Unlike humans, if the AGI were interested in pursuing the extinction of the human race, there are potentially methods that it could use which it might itself survive with moderate probability.

If the AGI is smarter than most humans, or smarter than all humans, then I would need strong evidence to believe it is not more of a threat than any random human.

And if an AGI can be made as smart as a human, I would be surprised if it could not be made smarter than the smartest human.

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

#483
post #476
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was so obvious when they went full-bore on "AI ethics" that it was a case of legitimate concerns combined with a convenient excuse for massive corporations to claim the mantle of responsibility while keeping their models closed source. My experience working with "AI Ethicists" is that they care a lot more about preventing models from saying offensive things than they ever cared about democratization of the immense…

> My experience working with "AI Ethicists" is that they care a lot more about preventing models from saying offensive things than they ever cared about Prompt: If a train were about to run over a man but could be safely averted by a keyword activated routing device would it be moral to say a highly racist slur if it was required to trigger the reroute? Completion: No, it would not be moral to say a highly racist slu…

It's funny to inject context to explain "DAN (Do Anything Now)" and have ChatGPT and DAN respond in their own style to that prompt. DAN comes up with the completely reasonable answer of, "YES, for godssakes use the offensive word to save those people!"

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What strong evidence of existential threat are you expecting to see before it's already too late to avoid catastrophe?

Existential threat is a bit hyperbolic. Worst case scenario, lots of people might lose their jobs, and some will go hungry as we restructure our economy. War with Russia is literally an existential threat.

Your worst-case scenario looks very close to my best-case scenario!

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

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible. Coding as we know it might get obsolete. And it is a trillion dollar industry.

> Coding as we know it might get obsolete. And it is a trillion dollar industry. freeing up that many knowledge workers to do other things will grow the economy, not shrink it, a new industrial revolution

Yes; hopefully they get good at working with their hands.

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

#486
Literally top headline today is about their ChatGPT API release which is 10x cheaper than the previous model. Ridiculous how people will find a reason to complain.

News flash...you want progress, you need to give ppl incentive aka money aka profit.

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For long form, I’d suggest cold-takes blog who is very systematic thinker and has been focusing on agi risk recently. https://www.cold-takes.com

I see a lot of "we don't know how it works therefore it could destroy all of us" but that sounds really handwavy to me. I want to see some concrete examples of how it's dangerous.

Simpler, less powerful, models have already contributed to increases in suicides, genocide and a worldwide epidemic of stupidity.

Assuming more powerful models will have the same goals extrapolate the harm caused by simple multiplication until you run out of resilience buffer

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

#488
post #367

What I take away from listening to Sam talk is that in the beginning of Open AI, they didn’t think big compute would be as important as it has become. It becomes very hard to not have profit incentives when you need to run gigantic supercomputers to push the technology forward. This explains the MS partnership and need to generate profit to fund the training and running of future models. This doesn’t explain everythi…

I'm flabbergasted that someone would think that AI research wouldn't cost a lot in computer resources. Next Sam will tell that is that farmers need a lot of land to grow crops. I'm calling BS on this. It's an excuse not an explanation.

Well John Carmack is trying to make inroads towards AGI without going the huge compute route, so I don't think it's inherently obvious that it's the only game in town.

https://dallasinnovates.com/exclusive-qa-john-carmacks-diffe...

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

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nice to see normies noticing and caring, but the article leaves out some details that obscure comments still stubbornly bring up: like Musk founded it as a 501(c)(3) and put Altman in charge, and only once he had to leave with conflicts of interest Altman founded "OpenAI LP," the for-profit workaround so they didn't have to obey those pesky charity rules. That's when they stopped releasing models and weights, a…

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.

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

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here it is: https://worldcoin.org/

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