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The Contradictions of Sam Altman

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Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#71

Post by Robotbeat »

poopypoopington wrote: post #49
version_five wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really a fan of openAI, but I think we're seeing the classic mistake of confusing product with technology. Steve Jobs / Apple didn't anything you'd call new ideas either (obvious cliche but so is the criticism). It's execution and design once the tech reaches a certain level

I've heard Altman (on the Lex Friedman podcast) and Sundar Pichai (on the Hard Fork podcast) say things to this degree. The thing that OpenAI really managed to crack was building a great product in ChatGPT and finding a good product market fit for LLMs.

Well sure, but there still aren’t any other LLMs at the level of GPT3/3.5 let alone GPT-4. GPT3.5 just using the API returns fantastic results even without the ChatGPT interface (which isn’t terribly hard to replicate, and others have using the API).

There are dozens if not hundreds of companies that could’ve done something profound like ChatGPT if they had full access to GPT3/3.5. And honestly, OpenAI stumbled a lot with ChatGPT losing history access, showing other users’ history… but that doesn’t matter much as the underlying technology is so profound. I think this really is a case of the under-the-hood capability (GPT3/3.5/4) mattering more than productization and execution.

(Now I think there are not a ton of companies that could do what Microsoft is trying to do by expanding GPT4 to power office productivity… that is a separate thing and probably only about 3 companies could do that, at best: Microsoft, Apple, and Google… and theoretically Meta but their lack of follow through with making Metaverse useful makes me doubt it.)

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#72

Post by jasmer »

ftxbro wrote: post #41
mongol wrote: post #9

How did he become so rich? His Wikipedia page does not have much details on this.

Paul Graham is his Les Wexner. "Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking 'Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19.'" "Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs…

Loopt was a failure. Political skills. It's a stream of PR, not anything operationally applied, or performant.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#73

Post by brookst »

version_five wrote: post #29
tomlue wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of OpenAI, but this is nonsense. All of human existence is mostly other people's ideas. Among a ridiculously huge list of other things, OpenAI benefits from the mountains of labor that made scalable neural networks possible. Have they had their own good ideas? Definitely. Are they benefitting of ideas mostly invented elsewhere? Also Definitely, just like everybody else.

I'm not really a fan of openAI, but I think we're seeing the classic mistake of confusing product with technology. Steve Jobs / Apple didn't anything you'd call new ideas either (obvious cliche but so is the criticism). It's execution and design once the tech reaches a certain level

It’s a good comparison. And once again tech enthusiasts are confused and outraged that the product people are getting credit for tech they didn’t invent. Once again missing the forest that people buy products, not tech.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#74

Post by nomel »

ren_engineer wrote: post #55
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.

OpenAI acts like they are some underdog startup for PR purposes while actually having access to effectively unlimited resources due to their relationship with Microsoft, which rubs people the wrong way Plenty of other companies had released GPT powered chat bots like ChatGPT, they just couldn't offer it for free because they didn't have a sweetheart deal with Microsoft for unlimited GPUs. Google did drop the ball tho…

> to release their internal chatbot months ago

I’m not sure that would have been wise. Bard clearly isn’t ready.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#75

Post by jasmer »

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…

AI is not an abstraction. It's rational to be hand wavy about future value, it's already materialized. AI is basically an applied reseaarch project, he should be more like a Dean herding researchers and we should take him as that. In a previous era, that's what it would be: a PhD from Berkley in charge of some giant AT&T government funded research Lab thing. He'd be on TV with a suit and tie, they'd be smoking and discussing abstract ideas.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#76

Post by brookst »

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.

There’s plenty of evidence that he has no equity. I’d love to see contradictory evidence, but without that, just refusing to believe things based on intuition isn’t great.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#77

Post by FormerBandmate »

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…

Microsoft doesn’t have $10 billion from the CIA. They’re splitting military cloud contracts with Amazon and other startups, but it’s just the same thing as corporate contracts

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#78

Post by latency-guy2 »

efficientsticks wrote: post #53
sampo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lessons from Black Mirror and 1984 Those are works of fiction.

They’re dystopian fictions, ie. examples of what not to do. But experience has shown that the real-world often recreates dystopian visions by example. So trying to be the first to show something in a well-meaning way can nonetheless have unfortunate consequences once the example is copied.

Tell me, are the dystopian fictions that represent socialism or communism as bad, just as reasonable?

Then following up with whatever your answer is: Why are you picking and choosing which fictions are reasonable?

Let's dispel the notion that artists and writers are more aware and in tune with humanity than other humans.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#79

Post by nomel »

ThomPete wrote: post #21

Listening to Sam talking with Lex Fridman about the dangers and ethics of AI while his company destroys entire industries as a consequence of their decision to keep GPT4 closed source and spitting out an apex api aggregator is one for the history books. Well played :)

> destroys entire industries as a consequence of their decision to keep GPT4 closed source

Could you expand in that?

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#80

Post by atleastoptimal »

efficientsticks wrote: post #28

> The goal, the company said, was to avoid a race toward building dangerous AI systems fueled by competition and instead prioritize the safety of humanity. > “You want to be there first and you want to be setting the norms,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why speed is a moral and ethical thing here.” Clearly having either not learned or ignored the lessons from Black Mirror and 1984, which is that others will co…

The only issue is that in the real world, capitalism has a better track record than socialism.
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