Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 1001 posts

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#611

Post by verdverm »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #605
elil17 wrote: post #129

This is the message I shared with my senator (edited to remove information which could identify me). I hope others will send similar messages. Dear Senator [X], I am an engineer working for [major employer in the state]. I am extremely concerned about the message that Sam Altman is sharing with the Judiciary committee today. Altman wants to create regulatory roadblocks to developing AI. My company produces AI-enabled…

What's the point of these letters? Everyone knows this is rent-seeking behavior by OpenAI, and they're going to pay off the right politicians to get it passed. Dear Senator [X], It's painfully obvious that Sam Altman's testimony before the judiciary committee is an attempt to set up rent-seeking conditions for OpenAI, and to snuff out competition from the flourishing open source AI community. We will be carefully mon…

If you want to influence the politicians without money, this is not the way.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#612

Post by whimsicalism »

johnyzee wrote: post #552

The mainstream media cartel is pumping Sam Altman hard for some reason. Just from today (CNBC): "Sam Altman wows lawmakers at closed AI dinner: ‘Fantastic…forthcoming’" [1]. When was the last time you saw MSM suck up so hard to a Silicon Valley CEO? I see stories like this all the time now. They always play up the angle of the geeky wizzkid (so innocent!), whereas Sam Altman was always less a technologist and more of…

> True to form, these articles also work hard at planting the idea that Sam Altman created OpenAI, when in fact he joined rather recently, in a business role. Are these articles being planted somehow? I find it very likely. Don't forget that this approach is also straight out of the YC playbook, disclosed in great detail by Paul Graham in previous writings [3].

Is this true? I've been working in the industry for a while and Sam Altman has long been mentioned in reference to OpenAI along with Ilya.

I agree with the crux of your comment that everyone is scrambling to build narratives, but I think I would also put your comment "AI is busy cozying up with The Establishment" as just another narrative (and one that we saw in this hearing from people like Hawley).

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#613

Post by biggoodwolf »

thrway345772 wrote: post #317
brenns10 wrote: post #234

Reminds me of SBF calling for crypto regulations while running FTX. Being seen as friendly to regulations is great for optics compared to being belligerently anti-regulation. You can appear responsible and benevolent, and get more opportunity to weaken regulation by controlling more of the narrative. And hey, if you get end up getting some regulatory capture making competition harder, that's a great benefit too. Open…

FWIW, OpenAI and FTX leadership share the same ideology

This is disappointing, I expected a bit more from OpenAI than to fall for the nerd snipe that is EA.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#614

Post by hollasch »

skybrian wrote: post #551
bioemerl wrote: post #451

Open AI lobbying for regulation on common people being able to use AI, isn't it wonderful.

There are all sorts of dangerous things where there are restrictions on what the common people can do. Prescription drugs and fully automatic machine guns are two examples. You can't open your own bank either. For anyone who really believes that AI is dangerous, having some reasonable regulations on it is logical. It's a good start on not being doomed. It goes against everyone's egalitarian/libertarian impulses, thou…

I move hundreds of thousands of my dollars around between financial institutions just using text.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#615

Post by precompute »

dahwolf wrote: post #584

It's easy to tell if an AI head genuinely cares about the impact of AI on society: they only talk about AI's output, never its input. They train their models on the sum of humanity's digital labor and creativity and do so without permission, attribution or compensation. You'll never hear a word about this from them, which means ethics isn't a priority. It's all optics.

Yep. No page on OpenAI's website about the thousands of underpaid third-world workers that sit and label the data. They will try and build momentum and avoid the "uncomfortable" questions at all costs.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#616

Post by whimsicalism »

dmreedy wrote: post #117
lm28469 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this, I don't get how even on this website people are so clueless. Give them a semi human sounding puppet and they think skynet is coming tomorrow. If we learned anything from the past few months is how gullible people are, wishful thinking is a hell of a drug

I don't think anyone reasonable believes LLMs are right now skynet, nor that they will be tomorrow. What I feel has changed, and what drives a lot of the fear and anxiety you see, is a sudden perception of possibility, of accessibility. A lot of us (read: people ) are implicit dualists, even if we say otherwise. It seems to be a sticky bias in the human mind (see: the vanishing problem of AI). Indeed, you can see a w…

> A lot of us (read: people) are implicit dualists, even if we say otherwise.

Absolutely spot on. I am not a dualist at all and I've been surprised to see how many people with deep-seated dualist intuition this has revealed, even if they publicly claim not to.

I view it as embarrassing? It's like believing in fairies or something.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#617

Post by precompute »

reducesuffering wrote: post #125

It's very sad that people lack the imagination for the possible horrors that lie beyond. You don't even need the imagination; Hinton, Bengio, Tegmark, Yudkowsky, Musk, etc. are spelling it out for you. This moment, 80% of comments are derisive, and you actually have zero idea how much is computer generated bot content meant to sway opinion by post-GPT AI industry who see themselves as becoming the next iPhone-era bil…

Couldn't agree more.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#618

Post by nvegater »

abeppu wrote: post #376
nvegater wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think by "widespread use" he means the reach of the AI System. Dangerous analogy but just to get the idea across: In the same way there is higher tax rates to higher incomes, you should increase regulations in relation to how many people could be potentially affected by the AI system. E.G a Startup with 10 daily users should not be in the same regulation bracket as google. If google deploys an AI it will reach Bill…

But the "reach" is _not_ just a function of how many users the company has, it's also what they do with it. If you have only one user who generates convincing misinformation that they share on social media, the reach may be large even if your user-base is tiny. Or your new voice-cloning model is used by a single user to make a large volume of fake hostage proof-of-life recordings. The problem, and the reason for guar…

Good point. As non native speaker I thought reach was related to a quantity but that was wrong. Thanks for the clarification.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#619

Post by whimsicalism »

lm28469 wrote: post #75
digbybk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m open minded about this, I see people more knowledgeable than me on both sides of the argument. Can someone explain how Geoffrey Hinton can be considered to be clueless?

He doesn't talk about skynet afaik > Some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”, he told the BBC, warning they could become more intelligent than humans and could be exploited by “bad actors”. “It’s able to produce lots of text automatically so you can get lots of very effective spambots. It will allow authoritarian leaders to manipulate their electorates, things like that.” You can do bad things with it b…

Maybe do some research on the basic claims you're making before you opine about how people who disagree with you are clueless.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#620

Post by titzer »

hkt wrote: post #500
Pet_Ant wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of elected representatives is to represent the views of their constituents, not to obtain special advantages for their constituents. That is painfully naive, a history of pork projects speaks otherwise.

To the best of my knowledge this doesn't happen so much in more functional democracies. It seems to be more of an anglophone thing.

Corruption is a kind of decay that afflicts institutions. Explicit rules, transparency, checks and balances, and consequences for violating the rules are the only thing that can prevent, or diagnose, or treat corruption. Where you find corruption is where one or more of these things is lacking. It has absolutely nothing to do the -acry or -ism attached to a society, institution, or group.
Post reply on HN