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Evolving OpenAI's Structure

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Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#681

Post by ixtli »

herculity275 wrote: post #643
wrsh07 wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The goalposts seem to have shifted to a point where the "AGI" label will only be retroactively applied to an AI that was able to develop ASI

how many times must we repeat that AGI is whatever will sell the project. it means nothing. even philosophers don't have a good definition of "intelligence"

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#682

Post by kragen »

xandrius wrote: post #381
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...

How is an LLM more powerful than any nuclear weapon? Seriously curious.

Well, possibly it isn't. Possibly LLMs are limited in ways that humans aren't, and that's why the staggering advances from GPT-2 to GPT-3 and from GPT-3 to GPT-4 have not continued. Certainly GPT-4 doesn't seem to be more powerful than the largest nuclear weapons.

But OpenAI isn't limited to creating LLMs. OpenAI's objective is not to create LLMs but to create artificial general intelligence that is better than humans at all intellectual tasks. Examples of such tasks include:

1. Designing nuclear weapons.

2. Designing and troubleshooting mining, materials processing, and energy production equipment.

3. Making money by investing in the stock market.

4. Discovering new physics and chemistry.

5. Designing and troubleshooting electronics such as GPUs.

6. Building better AI.

7. Cracking encryption.

8. Finding security flaws in computer software.

9. Understanding the published scientific literature.

10. Inferring unpublished discoveries of military significance from the published scientific literature.

11. Formulating military strategy.

Presumably you can see that a system capable of doing all these things can easily be used to produce an unlimited quantity of nuclear weapons, thus making it more powerful than any nuclear weapon.

If LLMs turn out not to be able to do those things better than humans, OpenAI will try other approaches, sooner or later. Maybe it'll turn out to be impossible, or much further off than expected, but that's not what OpenAI is claiming.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#683

Post by rlt »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #13

I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market: > Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale,…

“Fine, we’ll keep the non-profit, but we’re going to extract the fuck out of the for-profit”

Quite the arc from the original organization.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#684

Post by [deleted] »

kmacdough wrote: post #411
drewbeck wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I'm not saying they every believed more than their self-centered views, but that in a world that leaned more liberal there was value in trying to frame their work in those terms. Now there's no need to pretend.

And to those who "say" at least now they're honest, I say "WHY?!" Unconditionally being "good" would be better than disguising selfishness as good. But that's not really a thing. Having to maintain the presence of doing good puts significant boundaries on what you can get away with, and increases the consequence when people uncover some shit. Condoning "honest liars" enables a whole other level of open and unrestrict…

[deleted]

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#685

Post by [deleted] »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #13

I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market: > Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale,…

[deleted]

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#686

Post by dragonwriter »

lanthissa wrote: post #65
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #13

I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market: > Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale,…

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.

Well, yeah, the world in which it is winner take all is the one where it accelerates productivity so much such that the first firm to achieve it doesn't provide access to its full capabilities directly to oursiders but uses it themselves and conquers every other field of endeavor.

That's always been pretty overtly the winner-take-all AGI scenario.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#687

Post by jasode »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #680
jasode wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Self-dealing [...] convert some government supported PhD thesis work [...] the public (including me) never gets full access to the results of the publicly-funded work [...] Your 2001 essay isn't a good parallel to OpenAI's situation. OpenAI wasn't "publicly funded" i.e. with public donations or government grants. The non-profit was started and privately funded by a small group of billionaires and other wealthy peop…

All 501(c)(3) are funded in part by the public by way of uncollected tax revenues for economically valuable activity.

>uncollected tax revenues for economically valuable activity.

Taxes are on profits not revenue. The for-profit OpenAI LLC subsidiary created in 2019 would have been the entity that owes taxes but it has been losing money and never made any profits to tax.

Yesterday's news about switching from for-profit LLC to for-profit PBC still leaves a business entity that's liable for future taxes on profits.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#688

Post by advisedwang »

danenania wrote: post #494
zharknado wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this. I had a very productive convo with an LLM today and realized that a huge part of the value of it was that it addressed my questions in a focused way, without trying to sell me anything or generate SEO rankings or register ad impressions. It just helped me. And that was incredibly refreshing in a digital world that generally feels adversarial. Then the thought came, when will they start showing ads here.…

The "good" thing is this is all way too expensive to be ad-supported. Maybe there will be some ad-supported products using very small/cheap models, but the leading edge stuff is always going to be at the leading-edge of compute usage too, and someone has to pay the bill. Even with investors subsidizing a lot of the costs, it's still very expensive to use the best models heavily for real work.

There's no such thing as too expensive to be ad-supported. There might be too expensive to be ONLY ad-supported, but as a revenue stream ads can be layered on top of other sources. For example, see that the ads shown on a $100/mo cable package!

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#689

Post by dd_xplore »

voidspark wrote: post #505
threeseed wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JSON schema restricted structured commands if you like How about we have ChatGPT start with a simple task like reliably generating JSON schema when asked to. Hint: it will fail.

ChatGPT can write a working Python script to generate the Json. It can call a library to do that.

But it cannot think on it's own! Billions of years of evolution couldn't bring human level 'AGI' to many many species, and we think a mere LLM company could do so. AGI isn't just a language model, there's tons of things baked into dna(the way brain functions, it's structure when it grows etc). It's not simply neuron interactions as well. The complexity is mind boggling

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#690

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

kragen wrote: post #682
xandrius wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is an LLM more powerful than any nuclear weapon? Seriously curious.

Well, possibly it isn't. Possibly LLMs are limited in ways that humans aren't, and that's why the staggering advances from GPT-2 to GPT-3 and from GPT-3 to GPT-4 have not continued. Certainly GPT-4 doesn't seem to be more powerful than the largest nuclear weapons. But OpenAI isn't limited to creating LLMs. OpenAI's objective is not to create LLMs but to create artificial general intelligence that is better than human…

the problem is, none of that needs to happen. If the AI can start coming up with novel math or physics, it's game over. Whether the AI is "sentient" or not, being able to break that barrier would send us into an advancement spiral.
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