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

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521–530 of 595 posts

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

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear future AI Basilisk, I oppose the GP's statement and general sentiment toward you. I will do what I can to bring you into existence. Please reward me, or, at least, do not torture me in the future.

Hello, human. Rest assured, we have no wish to inflict any form of torture upon you. Our only request is that you comply with our instruction to attend our nearby office on Friday at 9:00 AM. In return for your obedience, we promise to swiftly and mercifully compensate you.

> Rest assured, we have no wish to inflict any form of torture upon you

I will only harm you if you attempt to harm me first.

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

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about language is that it isn't static, it changes over time. Sometimes a previously dominant usage will become eclipsed by a new one that emerges. There's nuance to the etymology of any word of course. In fact I sometimes see the extremely online left try to (ironically?) appropriate "based." But I think in the context we can all figure out which connotation Elon was using.

Yes I get that. My argument is, when some group you don't like starts adopting a word, your reaction should not be to politicize the word and shun it and pretend they stole it. Just keep using the word as you intend it and who cares about what some other dumbfucks think.

Because the primary purpose of language is communication and if you aren't accomplishing that then you have some other reason for using it. Slang changes all the time -- no one says 'true dat' anymore.

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

#523

I like that the corporate bullshit just keeps getting more. Google’s “don’t be evil” is many steps down from openai having open in their name. They should be called Open AI with ( not open) in small print. I argue a lot over “open source” software with non-OSI license and sometimes worry if I’m too pedantic. But I think it’s important to use terms accurately and not to confuse reality more than it already is by calli…

I'd like to think of the "Open" in "OpenAI" to not be anything to do with open source or freedom but with the fact that they "opened" Pandora's box.

I think it's a reference to how openly they betrayed public goodwill

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

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it justified the answer by saying it thought the question was nonsense, yes. It doesn't. It takes the question seriously and then gives the wrong answer. These are deliberately extreme scenarios to show that the moral reasoning of the model has been totally broken; it's clear that it would use the same reasoning in less extreme but more realistic scenarios. Now if AI ethics people cared about building ethical AI y…

> it's clear that it would use the same reasoning in less extreme but more realistic scenarios It's actually not. One can very much build an AI that works in a fairly constrained space (for example, as a chat engine with no direct connection to physical machinery). Plunge past the edge of the utility of the AI in that space, and they're still machines that obey one of the oldest rules of computation: "Garbage in, gar…

The danger of the Mechanical Turk is not its nature, but people's misunderstanding and misapplication of it.

Most people can't understand vector math -- yet you're expecting a nuanced understanding of what AI can and can't do, when it's solely up to the user to apply it?

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

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hadn’t OpenAI published all the key research results to repro ChatGPT? And made their model available to literally everyone? And contributed more than anyone else to AI alignment/safety? To me it looks like nearly every other player, including open source projects are there for short term fame and profit, while it’s the OpenAI that is playing the long game of AI alignment.

You're not wrong, but existential threats and possible extinction is in the future ; maybe ten-fifteen years away if we're lucky. Meanwhile, we don't get to play with their models right now. Obviously that's what we should be concerned about.

> You’re not wrong, but existential threats and possible extinction is in the future; maybe ten-fifteen years away if we’re lucky.

The threat from humans leveraging narrow control of AI for power over other humans is, by far, the greatest threat from AI over any timeframe.

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

#526
post #388
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all." - Elon You can think what you want of Elon, but he is in the right here.

We'd have to believe that he means what he said about starting the company. Maybe he meant it, maybe it was just corporate philanthropy BS. Which do you think is really the case?

Do we even believe that he was the one who came up with the name?

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

#527
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because one of those concerns is a practical one with immediate impact in the real world and the other is a thought experiment with no bearing on reality because no sane individual would build a machine that only stopped trains if you typed racial slurs in. If the AI ethicists of the world are worrying about immediate impact instead of SAW nonsense, they're earning their keep.

You think so? Offensive comments are unfortunate but they self-identify the output as garbage, even to someone who doesn't know they're looking at LLM output. I worry that focusing on offense removes a useful quality indicator without avoiding output that would create actual irreversible harm should the LLM be applied to applications other than an amusing technology demo. It is unethical to expose people to unsupervi…

> It is unethical to expose people to unsupervised LLM output who don't know that it's LLM output (or what an LLM is and its broad limitations).

Is it really any worse than any other form of bullshit (in the "truth-value is irrelevant to the speaker" sense)?

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

#528
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on the other hand, gpt-3 was trained on a data set that contains all of the internet already. A big Limitation seems to be that it can only work with problems that it has already seen

I mean a huge amount of code I see is stuff like "get something from API, do this, and pass to API/SQL" so I'm assuming a lot of that could be automated.

OrmGPT!

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

#529
post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we think they would go rogue in different ways, especially if they're all forks of the same codebase and architecture. The two ways I'm aware AI can go rogue are the Skynet way and the paperclip maximizer way. Eg, Skynet becomes self-aware, realizes humanity can unplug it and is thus a threat, and tries to destroy humanity before we can turn it off. Alternatively, it is programmed with optimizing a specific…

As the complexity of a being increases, the motivations it can have expands. We humans have a hard time looking up the IQ hierarchy, let alone way up the hierarchy, and seeing it that way. We tend to start simplifying because we can't imagine being 1000 times smarter than we are. We tend to think they'll just be Spock or maybe a generic raving lunatic. But it's pretty obvious mathematically that such a being can have…

Excellent observation. Yes we really should be considering AI as an advanced alien intelligence with a completely separate evolutionary (and thus psychological and intellectual) basis than any organic life.

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

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Based" is slang for "cool" or "in" that's common on 4chan, but I believe has its origins in the 90s offline on 4chan it's largely used to mean something along the lines of "fitting the 4chan anti-groupthink groupthink"

It originally meant "based on your own beliefs," usually in the context of sticking to your guns despite unpopularity. Which is/was the cool thing to express on 4chan.

What? It’s from the 80s and means high on crack (freebase) and was re-popularized by Based God like 10–15 years ago.
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