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OpenAI and Elon Musk

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Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#581
post #196
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they are basically saying that they called themselves OpenAI as a recruitment strategy but they never planned to be open after the initial hires.

Why do tech people keep falling for this shtick? It's happened over and over and over with open source becoming open core becoming source available being becoming source available with closed source bits. How society organizes property rights makes it damn near impossible to make anything commons in a way that can't in practice be reversed when folks see dollar signs. Owner is a non nullable field.

Because the people that got recruited on those terms suddenly see what kind of dough they will be making, I suppose.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#582
post #479

> As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes). That is surprisingly greedy & selfish to be boasting about in their own…

I think you're misreading the intention here. The intention of closing it up as they approach AGI is to protect against dangerous applications of the technology. That is how I read it anyway and I don't see a reason to interpret it in a nefarious way.

Two things that jump out at me here.

First, this assumes that they will know when they approach AGI. Meaning they'll be able to reliably predict it far enough out to change how the business and/or the open models are setup. I will be very surprised if a breakthrough that creates what most would consider AGI is that predictable. By their own definition, they would need to predict when a model will be economically equivalent to or better than humans in most tasks - how can you predict that?

Second, it seems fundamentally nefarious to say they want to build AGI for the good of all, but that the AGI will be walled off and controlled entirely by OpenAI. Effectively, it will benefit us all even though we'll be entirely at the mercy of what OpenAI allows us to use. We would always be at a disadvantage and will never know what the AGI is really capable of.

This whole idea also assumes that the greater good of an AGI breakthrough is using the AGI itself rather than the science behind how they got there. I'm not sure that makes sense. It would be like developing nukes and making sure the science behind them never leaks - claiming that we're all benefiting from the nukes produced even though we never get to modify the tech for something like nuclear power.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#583
post #575
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they may be right that open sourcing AGI would lead to too much danger. I think this part is proving itself to be an understandable but false perspective. The hazard we are experiencing with LLM right now is not how freely accessible and powerfully truthy it's content is, but it is precisely the controls upon it which are trying to be injected by the large model operators which are generating mistrust and a poor und…

Nah, the harm from these LLMs are mostly in how freely accessible they are. Just pay OpenAI a relatively tiny fee and you can generate tonnes of plausible spam designed to promote your product or service or trick people into giving you money. That's the primary problem we're facing right now. The problem is... keeping them closed source isn't helping with that problem, it only serves to guarantee OpenAI a cut of the…

Pandora's box is already open on that one.. and none of the model providers are really attempting to address that kind of issue. Same with impersonation, deepfakes, etc. We can never again know whether text, images, audio, or video are authentic on their own merit. The only hope we have there is private key cryptography.

Luckily we already have the tools for this, NFT in the case of media and DKIM in the case of your spam email.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#584
Is there really that much of a distinction between OpenAI and Microsoft at this point? Not talking about on paper like tax documents but in the real world of interests, objectives and decision-making.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. AGI needs an interface to be useful. 2. Natural language is both a good and expected interface to AGI. 3. LLMs do a really good job at interfacing with natural language. Which one(s) do you disagree with?

The underlying premise that llms are capable of fully generalizing to a human level across most domains, i assume?

Where did you get that from? It seems pretty clear to me that language models are intended to be a component in a larger suite of software, composed to create AGI. See: DALL-E and Whisper for existing software that it composes with.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#586
post #520
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That seems good for society, even though it's bad for people employed in that specific job. Why? It inserts yet another layer of crap you have to fight through before you can actually get anything done with a company. The avoidance of genuine customer service has become an artform by many companies and corporations, its demise surely should be lamented. A chatbot is just another in the arsenal of weapons designed t…

Two things I disagree with: 1. It's not "an extra layer", at most it's a replacement for the existing thing you're lamenting, in the businesses you're already objecting to. 2. The businesses which use this tool at its best, can glue the LLM to their documentation[0], and once that's done, each extra user gets "really good even though it's not perfect" customer support at negligible marginal cost to the company, rathe…

It's an extra layer of "Have you looked at our website/read our documentation/clicked the button" that I've already done, before I will (if I'm lucky) be passed onto a human that will proceed to do the same thing before I can actually get support for my issue.

If I'm unlucky it'll just be another stage in the mobius-support-strip that directs me from support web page to chatbot to FAQ and back to the webpage.

The businesses which use this tool best will be the ones that manage to lay off the most support staff and cut the most cost. Sad as that is for the staff, that's not my gripe. My gripe is that it's just going to get even harder to reach a real actual person who is able to take a real actual action, because providing support is secondary to controlling costs for most companies these days.

Take for example the pension company I called recently to change an address - their support page says to talk to their bot, which then says to call a number, which picks up, says please go to your online account page to complete this action and then hangs up... an action which the account page explicitly says cannot be completed online because I'm overseas, so please talk to the bot, or you can call the number. In the end I had to call an office number I found through google and be transferred between departments.

An LLM is not going to help with that, it's just going to make the process longer and more frustrating, because the aim is not to resolve problems, it's to stop people taking the time of a human even when they need to, because that costs money.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email might already be 'culturally dead' though. I guess my nephew might have an email address for the occasional password recovery, but the idea of actually communicating over email with other humans might be completely alien to him ;) Similar in my current job btw.

Ok, I get how one might use a variety of other tools for informal communication, I don't really use e-mail for that any more either, but I'm curious, what else can you possibly use for work ? With the requirement that it must be easy to back up and transfer (for yourself as well as the organization), so any platforms are immediately out of question.

Unfortunately Slack is what is used at places I've worked at.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically all wrong, except the Ford switching to planes and tanks bit. And you are aware, that France was a major biligerent in WW1, stopped Germany at Verdun and held more than half the Western Front, sucessfully after the race to the sea ended, together with Britain, for years before the US showed up? Or that the Ententene, without significant US participation, won the strategic victory that defeated Germa…

You can choose to remember the past any way you wish. Don’t be surprised when people start ignoring you because of your warped view on the world.

He is right about the fact that the Central Powers were fatally spent by summer 1918, though.

Austria-Hungary alone was on the brink of collapse without ever engaging American troops in a large-scale battle, and its collapse would have brought the already weakened Kaiserreich down as well.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#590
post #13

Their evidence does a nice job of making Musk seem duplicitous, but it doesn't really refute any of his core assertions: they still have the appearance of abandoning their core mission to focus more on profits, even if they've elaborated a decent justification of why that's necessary to do. Or to put it more simply: here they explain why they had to betray their core mission. But they don't refute that they did betra…

This looks like one of the steps leading to the fulfilment of the iron law of bureaucracy. They are putting the company ahead of the goals of the company.

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#:~:text=Anothe....

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