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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#541

Post by PostOnce »

jstummbillig wrote: post #528
PostOnce wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of exactly zero other reasons to have engineered the privatization of a charity, other than greed. The balance of probabilities indicates to me that the attempt at regulatory capture is also based in greed, but if you have a different view, I'd love to hear your logic. After all, if AI proliferation were as dangerous as Altman seems to claim, then why is the answer "OpenAI should continue to provide unfet…

> I can think of exactly zero other reasons to have engineered the privatization of a charity, other than greed. The question has recently been asked by Lex Fridman and answered by Sam Altman. This is the clip: https://youtu.be/qQdqFZFZQ6o To quote: "We learned early on that were gonna need far more capital than we were able to raise as a non-profit" (you can listen in on it being expanded over 3 Minutes) Now, since…

I watched the video.

I'll preface this by saying I am neither judge nor prosecutor, and we are not at trial.

Where we are is in a position of considering, before it is too late, the honesty and motives of a man who has taken a charity private because they "needed money".

Needed money for what, exactly? Well, the mission of OpenAI, according to https://openai.com/about their mission is Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

So how does this newfound capital help that mission? By hiding the details of GPT4, so that no one outside of OpenAI can benefit. I don't even know how many parameters the damn thing has or what kind of growth trajectory we are on, and neither does anyone outside of OpenAI.

Here's a man who stands to control a large part of what resembles AGI, financially benefit to an almost indescribable degree, and control, arguably, a large part of the direction of society (given the number of jobs this will cost), especially if the regulators limit access by Mere Mortals. They won't even tell us the basics of their new models (and newfound powers). So much for "Open" and "benefiting all of humanity".

If someone stands to gain this kind of money and power, and does things that on their face seem dishonest and inimical to society at large, and to the goals of the very charity he privatized, should he be immune to questioning and suspicion?

I am suspicious. I think his actions merit suspicion. I think you all should be suspicious too, based on the events so far.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#542

Post by dclowd9901 »

NickBusey wrote: post #119
dclowd9901 wrote: post #91

Are there any employees of OpenAI around? I had a question: Does anyone in the office stop to contemplate the ramifications of developing technology that will likely put most people out of a job, which will have a whole host of knock-on effects?

Self checkout machines put people out of a job. Cars put stable boys out of jobs. Light bulbs put candlemakers out of jobs. Are the people who made them also morally culpable? Let’s just make no progress ever in the name of employment I guess. /s

Self checkout machines, light bulbs and cars are all capable of one thing, which is each respective to their built purpose. AI is currently capable of a lot and with a seeming end goal of removing the human completely from the equation. We’re not talking about a small cabal of candle makers or carriage drivers having to learn new manufacturing processes or how to drive a car. We’re talking about upending humans working entirely. I fail to see any non-physical job a sufficiently trained AI won’t be able to do better than their human counterpart.

At that point, it won’t be “what kinds of jobs can AI perform?” It’ll be “what use are humans in the workplace?”

For at least a while, humans will have some usefulness in the trades, since producing functional robots who will come over and fix your plumbing or take down a wall is probably a ways off, but who knows how long it’ll take for AI to figure out ways to produce cheap and efficient robots?

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#543

Post by MichaelZuo »

HyperSane wrote: post #448
MichaelZuo wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From near-peer opponents, yes. But it increases the temptation to use it against weaker opponents.

Offensive use of a military is a very different thing.

In the real world there are no clear cut boundaries like that so it’s military action either way.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#544

Post by reducesuffering »

polycaster wrote: post #366
jstx1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any evidence for this, or are you just assuming that it's the case?

Don’t now about the DoD, but one of the board members of the nonprofit is Will Hurd, who appears to have had a 9 year career in the CIA before turning to politics. No hard evidence of anything of course, but enough to raise an eyebrow imho.

Will Hurd is/was a managing director at Allen & Company, who runs the Sun Valley conference where this article talked about Satya Nadella and Sam Altman "bumping into each other" to secure the deal. It's looking more and more like OpenAI is the Manhattan project as AGI is to nuclear weapons.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#545

Post by mistermann »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #306
mistermann wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the substantial effectiveness of propaganda, and the fact that it is essentially impossible to know if one's beliefs/"facts" have been conditioned by it. That most discussions on such matters typically devolve rapidly into the regurgitation of unsound memes doesn't help matters much either.

Sure, but it is equally likely that your old perspective was the result of propaganda and your new one is a rational adjustment in the face of new information. Or that both are propaganda, I suppose.

That's the standard loop, but there are ways out.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#546

Post by [deleted] »

MaxHoppersGhost wrote: post #453
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s like 100k people going to undergrad at schools of that caliber at any given time and none of the rest of them founded OpenAI, so this is pretty underdetermined as an account of how sama got where he did.

And there are probably millions just as smart as him but not as connected and middle or lower class so they’re going to unheard of state schools. This dude had every advantage handed to him + hard work so of course he’s the guy.

[deleted]

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#547

Post by zarzavat »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #529
zarzavat wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a big difference between being indirectly dependent on the government to maintain society, and being hand-to-mouth dependent on the government for food/welfare. As most people who have been in the latter situation can attest (at least outside of super rich countries like Norway), it is a distinctly less dignified existence. You live in constant uncertainty that your source of food, source of existence could b…

Current state of the world: You live in constant uncertainty that your source of food, source of existence could be withdrawn at any time by corporate whim Question: Who do you think the police work for? Hint: It's neither "citizens" nor is it "the government" They work for corporations. Go look at how they act. The whole goal is to provide security for private property holders (aka not you) and increasingly they are…

If your job stops paying you then you can find a new job.

If your government stops paying you, you can’t find a new citizenship.

A world where work is replaced by UBI is not a utopia. It’s a dystopia where the government controls if you can eat today. In which politicians divide and conquer by differentially giving and denying nutrition to different groups in order to gain votes. Give me a corporate hellscape any day of the week over that.

UBI is one of those “semantic stop signs” where people just stop thinking whenever it is mentioned. The term is a stand-in for whatever utopian society the user has in mind. But the implications of UBI as a policy are completely contrary to the stated goals of the users of the term.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#548

Post by JenrHywy »

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.

I'm not an American. I'm also quite a fan of Marx (or, at least his analysis of the inherent flaws on capitalism). But Keynesian economics essentially runs the world. Marxism... does not.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#549

Post by JenrHywy »

t-3 wrote: post #495
hluska wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t need this kind of garbage here.

They're not wrong though. Marx is so influential even the people who abhor him have adopted his terminology (where do you think the word "capitalism" comes from?). Meanwhile, Keynes' ideas are pretty much forgotten, only coming up in fringe conversations about CBDCs.

Um, no. Keynesian economics is still predominately what is taught as "economics", and is a huge influence on how governments make economic decisions.

It's a bit like Freud - people only remember him for his kookier ideas, but his basic thinking has permeated all of psychology.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#550

Post by noduerme »

vasco wrote: post #505
Raptor22 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a simplified version of the argument, but basically: right now, I am dependent on an employer for my survival. Keeping a roof over my head depends on my being competent at my job, AND my employer not deciding to fire me. One of those I can control - the other is completely outside of my control. If instead I was dependent on a democratic government for my survival and keeping a roof over my head, at the very…

You are not dependent on your employer. You're dependent on society having enough employers at any point that would match with the skills you can provide in exchange for salary, you can switch employers at any time you want. It's not 1-1, it's 1-many right now. By moving that to the government you're actually going from 1-many to 1-1 and getting a way worse deal. Worse deal because the many employers are in competiti…

This really got to the heart of what I was trying to say. I find the concept that we all live by the grace of our employers to be alien, coming as I do from a culture and society that prides itself on mobility, advancement, and self-sufficiency. I find the concept of living by the grace of government (or relying on government for more than services rendered in exchange for the taxes I pay from my own labor) to be odious morally and terrifying in practice. Many Americans, even ones on the left of the social spectrum, feel this way. Particularly ones with roots in the Soviet Union or other totalitarian states. But it probably isn't a natural revulsion or posture for people formed under mildly socialist Western European standards, and it seems to have been lost on the youngest generation in the US.

I went to a wealthy enough private school to have had an up-close look at what children do when they never have to work in their lives if they don't want to. It's not pretty. My father made all his kids start working full time at 14.

As far as the one-to-many vs one-to-one argument, you're absolutely right; the connection between having choices in work and having freedom is only not apparent to people who've developed a conveniently conspiratorial view of the world, in which corporations are acting in concert as opposed to presenting endless opportunities and edges to anyone with ambition in the faces they present. As you said, with a monolithic actor like government, it's just a single bureaucrat's opinion of you that matters, with no chance to prove yourself. This is obvious to everyone I've ever met who has lived under a dictatorship. And ultimately a dictatorship must be the ultimate arbiter of any form of UBI, because one way or another, people will be made to work to support people who don't want to work. And that can only be accomplished by force in measure to how offensive it is to the working group.

Whereas I have quit great jobs to work some incredibly shitty jobs and become good, then great at them, and I think I've become a slightly better human being at each iteration. I quit coding to be a taxi driver - I worked 16 hour days and wrote several novels in my taxi. There is your time to make art. I don't think either part of that would have been possible in a world with UBI or the control structures it would imply.

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