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Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

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Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.

people like to say this like they’re apples to apples but this comparison isn’t remotely how the brain actually works - and even if it did, the brain does it automatically without direction and at an infitesimal percentage of the power required. And we’re just talking about cognition - it completely ignores the automatic processes such as maintaining and regulating the body and it’s hormones, coordinating and maintai…

Thank you, this comparison has been a huge annoyance of mine for the past 3 years of... this same debate over and over.

I think it's the hubris that I find most offensive in this argument: a guy knows one complex thing (programming) and suddenly thinks he can make claims about neuroscience.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#642

The main animated picture reminded me of evil king Ravan from Ramayan with 10 heads. Not sure it is intentionally done that way.

This is the problem with propaganda, you have been told that he was evil as most Indians are led to believe but for people in Sri Lanka he was a great leader.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#643
post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but first I want to be very clear on some things. 1. I could have hidden my identify behind a throwaway. I did not feel that would be appropriate when making this calim. 2. I am not looking for anything, literally at all. Any follow ups for blogs; anything that would benefit I will not answer. 3. This is NOT a new account, I am very easy to find; I am 6'1 140lbs I was working for a company called NationBuilder a…

[flagged]

The irony in your comment is that you accuse the OP of interpreting the world based on his own warped view of it rather than what’s actually in front of him, yet you’re doing precisely that. The OP did not call Altman racist and made a point to draw the distinction. He also claims his is not the only example of this and is effectively encouraging an investigative journalist and the rest of HN to look into it and verify for ourselves.

Some degree of skepticism is healthy here. An online comment is not definitive proof, and it’s all too easy to pile accusations as part of a comment thread that’s already critical of someone. But the way you readily armchair psychoanalyze and dismiss the OP tells me you’re not engaging in an honest way.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#644
post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would deny that AI poses any such threat. There are actors who would use the tool in ways that threaten as you described, but that is a threat from said actor, not AI Of course, it is popular to deny it. People constantly tell themselves "it is people, not tech". They make valid, yet banal and inconsequential statement. This distinction has no bearing on reality.

So you're saying that if people hadn't invented weapons, there would be no violence? The claim that AI is itself dangerous has no merit.

> So you're saying that if people hadn't invented weapons, there would be no violence?

If anything, if people hadn't invented weapons, they would not use weapons to enact violence, and this in turn will impact the practical nature of violence.

> The claim that AI is itself dangerous has no merit.

My claim is that considering any technology by itself is pointless. There is no such thing as thing by itself. Technology always exists in structural setting, and in turn shapes this structure.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#645
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, we did what with the word "racist"?

> we did what with the word "racist"? “Overinclusion diluted the term and gave cover for the actual baddies to come in.” The next sentence.

While I agree that the word has been misused by some bad actors in the "Woke 1.0 era", it's worth pointing out that this isn't what most people complaining about the word being "diluted" are referring to as these are mostly people flat-out upset by any suggestion that they themselves might hold racist beliefs.

That said, anyone using "racist" as a noun isn't worth your time, nor is anyone who's genuinely upset about people calling concepts, systems or ideologies "racist".

Specifically, the "Woke 1.0 era" culture war arose from two conflicting meanings of the word "racist" largely aligning with two different segments of the population: 1) "racist" as a bad word you call people who are extremely bigoted against people along racial lines and 2) "racist" as a descriptor for systems and ideologies downstream from racialization (i.e. labelling people as racialized - e.g. Black - or non-racialized - i.e. "white") as a mechanism of asserting a power structure. "Wokists" would often conflate the two by applying the word as broadly as the latter definition necessitates while still attempting to use it with the emotional weight and personal judgement of the former definition.

I think a lot of this can be blamed on "pop anti-racism" just as a lot of the earlier "boys are icky" nonsense can be blamed on pop feminism because fully adopting the latter definition requires a critique of systems, which is much more dangerous to anyone benefiting from those systems than merely naming and shaming individuals. Anti-racism (and feminism) ultimately necessitates challenging hierarchical power structures in general and thus necessarily leads to anti-capitalism (which isn't to say all anti-capitalists are anti-racist and feminist - there are plenty of "anti-capitalist" movements that still suffer from racism and sexism just as there are "anti-racists" who hold sexist views or "feminists" who hold racist views). But you can't use that to sell DEI seminars to corporations and corporations can't use that to promote themselves as "woke" - as some companies like Basecamp found out when their internal DEI groups suddenly started taking themselves seriously during the BLM protests, resulting in layoffs and "no politics" policies and a general rightwards shift among corporate America leading up to and into the second Trump presidency (which reinforced this shift, resulting in the current state of most US corporations and their subsidiaries having significantly cut down on their previously omnipresent shallow "virtue signalling").

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#646

Reading this makes me even happier to pay for Anthropic. Amodei and his sister saw through the behavior and called it out. " “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.) Amod…

If you think Amodei is significantly different you’re going to be disappointed. There is nothing he has done that can’t be adequately explained as furthering his own interests. Remember how Musk doesn’t like Altman too? It’s because they’re all the same people, competing for the same thing.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#647
post #563
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing this. I 100% believe it, and it lines up with my experience with other people who came from similar backgrounds as Sam Altman - i.e. white, rich, privileged, and attending elite universities. I will disagree with one part - I do believe it is racism. Most will never admit it publicly, but if they think you're one of them, it often comes out rather quickly, especially when alcohol is involved.

[flagged]

What was racist about the comment you responded to?

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#648
post #595
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone founds a company, grows it and owns $1bn of its stock, they don’t have $1bn in cash to distribute. They have a degree of control over the economic activity of that company. Should that control be taken away from them? Who should it be given to? I can see an argument when it comes to cashing out, but I’m not clear how that should work without creating really weird incentives. Some sort of special tax?

> Some sort of special tax? Well yeah. After some amount, you get 100% taxes. So that instead of having billionaires who compete against each other on how rich they are or on the first one to go contaminate the surface of Mars or simply on power, maybe we would end up with people trying to compete on something actually constructive :-). Who knows, maybe even philanthropy!

So, who owns and runs the companies? How do new companies get formed?

I'm not against higher taxation of the wealthy. I think inequality is a serious problem. The issue is what the wealth of these people isn't a big pile of cash they are wallowing in, it's ownership of the companies they build and operate. Is that what we want to take away? How, and what would we do with it?

I think it makes more sense to tax it as that power is converted into cash. I'm not clear how a wealth tax should work.

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#649
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve really appreciated how substantive and polite the discourse here is, overall!

I'm a mod here and wanted to let you know 2 things: (1) I've marked your account with a beta feature that displays a colored line to the left of new comments (since you last viewed the page). It might help you keep track of this rather large thread.* (2) I'm sorry the post was downranked off the frontpage for a while this afternoon. A software penalty kicks in when the discussion seems overheated ("flamewar detector"…

>beta feature that displays a colored line to the left of new comments (since you last viewed the page)

Can't wait until this is released!

Re: Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

#650
post #29

This whole situation goes to show that yesterday's conspiracy theorists are today's realists. What's happening to USA's leadership and as a country and what's happening with with their top companies is really scary for the rest of us. If this trend continues we're all definitely gonna end up in a kleptocracy.

End up? It already is.
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