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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#61

Post by zarzavat »

unshavedyak wrote: post #15
m3kw9 wrote: post #8

OpenAI getting rich now everyone wants a piece and everyone fighting over it like a billion dollar inheretence fight. In a round about way, if GPT5 is nearly as advertised, watch the govt swoop in under national security guise

> if GPT5 is nearly as advertised, watch the govt swoop in under national security guise Re: GPT5, are there any .. reasonable/credible sources of information on the subject? I've become deaf from all the speculation and while i am very curious, i'm unsure if anything substantiated has actually come out. Especially when considering speculation from Sam himself.

It’s unlikely to be any time soon. Despite productization by OpenAI, LLMs are still an active area of research. Research is unpredictable. It may take years to gather enough fundamental results to make a GPT-5 core model that is substantially better than GPT-4. Or a key idea could be discovered tomorrow.

Moreover, previous advances in GPTs have come from data scaling: throwing more data at the training process. But data corpus sizes have started to peak - there is only so much high quality data in the world, and model sizes have reached the limits of what is sensible at inference time.

What OpenAI can do while they are waiting is more of the easy stuff, for example more multimodality: integrating DALL-e with GPT-4, adding audio support, etc. They can also optimize the model to make it run faster.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#62

Post by xiphias2 »

wetmore wrote: post #57
phillryu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I compare the two Elon was (lucky?) to at least have a string of vision-fueled ventures that became a thing. What is Sam's history of visions? Loopt? Is Y Combinator considered in a new golden era after he took over? Did Worldcoin make any sense at all? I'm honestly hoping I'm entirely ignorant of his substance and would feel better if someone here can explain there's more to him than that… I would feel better k…

I'm with you, listening to his interview with Ezra Klein gave me the impression that he doesn't actually think that deeply about the possible impact of AI. He says it worries him, but then he seems to wave those worries away with really simplistic solutions that don't seem very tenable.

The main question about OpenAI is this: can you have any better structure to create singularity that will happen anyways (Some people don't like the word AGI, so I just definine it by machines having wastly more intellectual power than humans).

Would it be better if Google, Tesla or Microsoft / Apple / CCP or any other for profit company did it?

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#63

Post by davidivadavid »

wetmore wrote: post #57
phillryu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I compare the two Elon was (lucky?) to at least have a string of vision-fueled ventures that became a thing. What is Sam's history of visions? Loopt? Is Y Combinator considered in a new golden era after he took over? Did Worldcoin make any sense at all? I'm honestly hoping I'm entirely ignorant of his substance and would feel better if someone here can explain there's more to him than that… I would feel better k…

I'm with you, listening to his interview with Ezra Klein gave me the impression that he doesn't actually think that deeply about the possible impact of AI. He says it worries him, but then he seems to wave those worries away with really simplistic solutions that don't seem very tenable.

What bothers me most is that the picture he paints of success itself is some handwavy crap about how it could "create value" or "solve problems" or some other type of abstract nonsense. He has displayed exactly 0 concrete, desirable vision of what succeeding with AI would look like.

That seems to be the curse of Silicon Valley, worshiping abstractions to the point of nonsense. He would probably say that with AGI, we can make people immortal, infinitely intelligent, and so on. These are just potentialities with, again, 0 concrete vision. What would we use that power for? Altman has no idea.

At least Musk has some amount of storytelling about making humanity multiplanetary you may or may not buy into. AI "visionaries" seem to have 0 narrative except rehashed, high-level summaries of sci-fi novels. Is that it?

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#64

Post by ninth_ant »

schiffern wrote: post #46
ninth_ant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically in that article was vilification of Sam or clickbait, or statements taken out of context?

In these early days of a smear campaign (even an unintentional one that's just about chasing clicks), the game is mostly about plausibly deniable innuendo. The headline is a great start. Contradictions are bad. Altman has contradictions. Therefore Altman is bad. They don't say it, but they also know they don't need to . They lead the audience to water and trust that enough of them will drink. The closing paragraph is…

They discussed the why earlier in the article, specifically a fear of AI being primarily developed in private labs outside of public view -- the partners feeling they could help bring an alternative approach.

I feel they left it on that point not as part of some grand conspiracy theory, but because the potential for this to be good or bad is a question taking place around the world right now.

Overall this piece feels positive towards Sam, despite what you feel is a negatively loaded headline. He's walking a delicate balance between profit and nonprofit, between something that could be harmful or helpful to society -- these things are in contradiction and he's making those choices deliberately. This is an interesting subject for an article.

I find it deeply unlikely he will be viewed like Musk in 6 months. Musk is a fairly special case as he's unhinged and unstable more than evil. If someone wanted to paint Sam with an evil stick, Zuckerberg would be a more apt comparison -- playing with something dangerous that affects all of us.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#65

Post by fauigerzigerk »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #4

I think there are some interesting questions: - Sam does not have equity in OpenAI. Does this mean he can potentially be removed at any point in time? - OpenAI's profit arm will funnel excess profit to its non-profit wing. If this is the case, who determines excess profit? - OpenAI's founding charter commits the company to abandoning research efforts if another project nears AGI development. If this happens, what hap…

>OpenAI's founding charter commits the company to abandoning research efforts if another project nears AGI development. If this happens, what happens to the profit arm?

I think the definition of AGI is sufficiently vague that this will never happen. And if it did happen, abandoning research efforts could take the form of selling the for-profit arm to Microsoft.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#66

Post by [deleted] »

nirushiv wrote: post #60
ftxbro wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've already swooped in. I mean the conspiracy argument would be that the $10B isn't a normal investment. It's a special government project investment facilitated by OpenAI board member and former clandestine CIA operative and cybersecurity executive Will Hurd through his role on the board of trustees of In-Q-Tel the investment arm of the CIA. It's funneled through Microsoft instead of through Google in part becau…

Please stop spreading FUD and unsubstantiated rumours all over this thread

[deleted]

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#67

Post by boeingUH60 »

whitepoplar wrote: post #12
gamesbrainiac wrote: post #4

I think there are some interesting questions: - Sam does not have equity in OpenAI. Does this mean he can potentially be removed at any point in time? - OpenAI's profit arm will funnel excess profit to its non-profit wing. If this is the case, who determines excess profit? - OpenAI's founding charter commits the company to abandoning research efforts if another project nears AGI development. If this happens, what hap…

I refuse to believe that Sam doesn't have equity in OpenAI. It must be some 4D-chess-style ownership structure, which I'm guessing is for tax avoidance.

> It must be some 4D-chess-style ownership structure, which I'm guessing is for tax avoidance.

How would this even work? If only I got a dollar for someone suggesting that there are Magic ways to avoid tax…”they just write it off!”

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#68

Post by schiffern »

ninth_ant wrote: post #64
schiffern wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In these early days of a smear campaign (even an unintentional one that's just about chasing clicks), the game is mostly about plausibly deniable innuendo. The headline is a great start. Contradictions are bad. Altman has contradictions. Therefore Altman is bad. They don't say it, but they also know they don't need to . They lead the audience to water and trust that enough of them will drink. The closing paragraph is…

They discussed the why earlier in the article, specifically a fear of AI being primarily developed in private labs outside of public view -- the partners feeling they could help bring an alternative approach. I feel they left it on that point not as part of some grand conspiracy theory, but because the potential for this to be good or bad is a question taking place around the world right now. Overall this piece feels…

I genuinely hope that you're right and I'm totally wrong, but my experience watching the media landscape says otherwise. It would seem I have less faith in our journalistic institutions than you.

The media operates on a "nearest cliché" algorithm, and the Mad/Evil Genius cliché is so emotionally appealing here that they'll find it irresistible. Even if it's not true, they'll make it true.

Don't say I didn't warn you. :)

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#69

Post by efficientsticks »

davidivadavid wrote: post #63
wetmore wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you, listening to his interview with Ezra Klein gave me the impression that he doesn't actually think that deeply about the possible impact of AI. He says it worries him, but then he seems to wave those worries away with really simplistic solutions that don't seem very tenable.

What bothers me most is that the picture he paints of success itself is some handwavy crap about how it could "create value" or "solve problems" or some other type of abstract nonsense. He has displayed exactly 0 concrete, desirable vision of what succeeding with AI would look like. That seems to be the curse of Silicon Valley, worshiping abstractions to the point of nonsense. He would probably say that with AGI, we…

I agree, listening to the podcast I think the answer is that “yes” that is it: faith in technological progress is the axiom and the conclusion. Joined by other key concepts like compound growth, the thinking isn’t deep and the rest is execution. Treatment of the concept of ‘a-self’ in the podcast was basically just nihilistic weak sauce.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#70

Post by beebmam »

ftxbro wrote: post #27
antirez wrote: post #7

I believe you can't, at the same time, accuse OpenAI of benefitting of ideas mostly invented elsewhere, and also claim that they are in a predominant position. It does not make any sense, and they are not naturally positioned for a monopoly. Just other companies have to move their asses.

> I believe you can't, at the same time, accuse OpenAI of benefitting of ideas mostly invented elsewhere, and also claim that they are in a predominant position. There used to be a team at Google called Google Brain and they all left to go to OpenAI after the employee protests against taking military AI contracts in 2018. Now Microsoft has those contracts and funneled $10B to OpenAI from the CIA. OK that's a little b…

Many of those employees have changed their minds about military contracts in this new cold war era.
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