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Evolving OpenAI's Structure

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Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#631

Post by torginus »

stego-tech wrote: post #159
drewbeck wrote: post #82

I see OpenAI's original form as the last gasp of a kind of liberal tech; in a world where "doing good" was seen as very important, the non-profit approach made sense and got a lot of people on board. These days the Altmans and the pmarcas of the world are much more comfortable expressing their authoritarian, self-centered world views; the "evolving" structure of Open AI is fully in line with that. They want to be the…

That world never existed. Yes, pockets did - IT professionals with broadband lines and spare kit hosting IRC servers and phpBB forums from their homes free of charge, a few VC-funded companies offering idealistic visions of the net until funding ran dry (RIP CoHost) - but once the web became privatized, it was all in service of the bottom line by companies. Web 2.0 onwards was all about centralization, surveillance,…

I think it did and still does today - every single time an engineer sees a problem an starts an open-source project to solve it - not out of any profit motive and without any monetization strategy in mind, but just because they can, and they think the world would be better off.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#632

Post by whoisthemachine »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #293
lanthissa wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI can't really be a winner take all market. The 'reward' for general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly and it accelerates productivity. Not only is there infinite incentive to compete, but theres decreasing costs to. The only world in which AGI is winner take all is a world in which it is extremely controlled to the point at which the public cant query it.

> AGI can't really be a winner take all market. The 'reward' for general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly and it accelerates productivity The first-mover advantages of an AGI that can improve itself are theoretically unsurmountable. But OpenAI doesn't have a path to AGI any more than anyone else. (It's increasingly clear LLMs alone don't make the cut.) And the market for LLMs, non-general AI, is very much not w…

I find these assumptions curious. How so? What is the AGI going to do that captures markets? Even if it can take over all desk work, then what? Who is going to consume that? And further more (and perhaps more importantly), with it putting everyone out of work, who is going to pay for it?

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#633

Post by torginus »

jimbokun wrote: post #248
drewbeck wrote: post #82

I see OpenAI's original form as the last gasp of a kind of liberal tech; in a world where "doing good" was seen as very important, the non-profit approach made sense and got a lot of people on board. These days the Altmans and the pmarcas of the world are much more comfortable expressing their authoritarian, self-centered world views; the "evolving" structure of Open AI is fully in line with that. They want to be the…

They deeply believe in the Ayn Rand mindset that the system that brings them the most individual wealth is also the best system for humanity as a whole.

The problem with that mindset is that money is a proxy for the Marxist idea of inherent value. The distinction does not matter when you are just an average dude, doubling your money doubles the amount of material wealth you have access to.

But once you control a significant enough chunk of money, it becomes clear the pie doesn't get any bigger the more shiny coins you have, you only have more relative purchasing power, automatically making everyone else poorer.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#634

Post by computerthings »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #616
somenameforme wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Differentiating between AGI and non-AGI, if we ever get remotely close, would be challenging, but for now it's trivial. The defining feature of AGI is recursive self improvement across any field. Without self improvement, you're just regurgitating. Humanity started with no advanced knowledge or even a language. In what should practically be a heartbeat at the speed of distributed computing with perfect memory and com…

I mostly agree with you. But if you think about it mimicry is an aspect of intelligence. If I can copy you and do what you do reliably, regardless of the method used, it does capture an aspect of intelligence. The true game changer is a reflective AI that can automatically improve upon itself

[dead]

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#635

Post by bonoboTP »

ReptileMan wrote: post #275
paulddraper wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You saying —- with a straight face —- that post 2020 LLM AIs have made only incremental progress?

Yes. But they have also improved a lot. Incremental just means that the function is going up without breaking points. We haven't seen anything revolutionary, just evolutionary in the last 3 years. But the models do provide 2 or 3 times more value. So their pace of advancement is not slow.

The better you know a field the more it looks incremental. In other words, incrementalness is more a function of how much attention you pay or how deep you research it. Relativity and quantum mechanics were also incremental. Copernicus and Kepler were incremental. Deep learning itself was incremental. Based on almost identical networks from the 90s (CNN), which were using methods from the 80s (backprop) on architectures from the 70s (neocognitron) using activation functions from the 60s and the basic neuron model from the 40s (McCullough and Pitts), which was just a mathematization of observations in biology via microscopy integration with mathematical logic and electrical logic gates developed around the same time (Shannon), so it's just logic as formalized by Gödel and others and it goes back to Hilbert's program, which can be extrapolated from Leibniz etc. etc. It's not hard to say that "it's really just previous thing X plus previous thing Y, nothing new under the sun" to literally anything.

"It just suddenly appeared out of nowhere" is just a perception based on missing info. Many average people think ChatGPT was a sudden innovation specifically by OpenAI seemingly out of nowhere. Because they didn't follow it.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#636

Post by digbybk »

CorpOverreach wrote: post #539
pants2 wrote: post #21

It's somewhat odd to me that many companies operating in the public eye are basically stating "We are creating a digital god, an instrument more powerful than any nuclear weapon" and raising billions to do it, and nobody bats an eye...

I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI. The intersection of the two seems to be quite hard to find. At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output. This isn't a nuclear weapon. We're not going to ac…

> I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI.

Any of the signatories here match your criteria? https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk#signatories

Or if you’re talking more about everyday engineers working in the field, I suspect the people soldering vacuum tubes to the ENIAC would not necessarily have been the same people with the clearest vision for the future of the computer.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#637

Post by wrsh07 »

amelius wrote: post #608

> We did not really know how AGI was going to get built, or used (...) Altman keeps on talking about AGI as if we're already there.

I don't agree with Tyler on this point (although o3 really is a thing to behold)

But reasonable people could argue that we've achieved AGI (not artificial super intelligence)

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/o3...

Fwiw, Sam Altman will have already seen the next models they're planning to release

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#638

Post by wrsh07 »

A_Duck wrote: post #374

This is the moment where we fumble the opportunity to avoid a repeat of Web 1.0's ad-driven race to the bottom Look forward to re-living that shift from life-changing community resource to scammy and user-hostile

For all of the skepticism I've seen of Sam Altman, listening to interviews with him (eg by Ben Thompson) he says he really does not want to create an ad tier for OpenAI.

Even if you take him at his word, incentives are hard to ignore (and advertising is a very powerful business model when your goal is to create something that reaches everyone)

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#640

Post by lossolo »

Muromec wrote: post #451
lossolo wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AGI is already here Last time I checked, in an Anthropic paper, they asked the model to count something. They examined the logits and a graph showing how it arrived at the answer. Then they asked the model to explain its reasoning, and it gave a completely different explanation, because that was the most statistically probable response to the question. Does that seem like AGI to you?

That's exactly what I would expect from a lot of people. Post factum rationalization is a thing.

There is no post factum rationalization here. If you ask a human to think about how they do something before they do it, there's no post factum rationalization. If you ask an LLM to do the same, it will give you a different answer. So, there is a difference. It's all about having knowledge of your internal state and being conscious of your actions and how you perform them, so you can learn from that knowledge. Without that, there is no real intelligence, just statistics.
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