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

newyorker.com

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

#731

Post by ethbr1 »

taurath wrote: post #516
gowld wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a fair assessment. "False memory syndrome" and "repressed/recovered memory" are both outside scientific mainstream consensus.

Correct, because there truly isn’t a great way to answer with certainty - there was evidence in the 80s of suggestive techniques being used by poorly trained psychologists, and there are many people who remember and then find corroboration. There’s a lot more who remember and may not have corroboration more than with themselves and among their close friends or healthcare provider. Part of CSA is usually there is very…

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

#732

Post by intothemild »

ronanfarrow wrote: post #294
philip1209 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

For what it’s worth, the story, while focused on OpenAI, is not uncritical of Anthropic. It explores whether there is a wider race to the bottom in terms of safety, and erosion of even some of Anthropic’s commitments.

I think you might be surprised that more and more Software Engineers are souring on Anthropic (the company) and the decisions the company has made recently. Not the whole drama with the US Government, but them locking down the usage of plans to their own tooling.

That really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, as ultimately one might have a favorite tool, then suddenly they are forced to use another tool.

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

#733

Post by cableshaft »

cs702 wrote: post #30
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

Ronan Farrow here. Andrew Marantz and I spent 18 months on this investigation. Happy to answer questions about the reporting.

Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a] This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world. OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI ra…

Personally, I prefer Claude for coding, but I still prefer ChatGPT for hashing out ideas for my projects (which tend to be game designs). So I use both.

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

#734

Post by jcgrillo »

arcfour wrote: post #500
davebren wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the whole fearmongering is clearly just marketing at this point. Your LLM isn't going to suddenly gain sentience and destroy humanity if it has 10x more parameters or trains on 10x more reddit threads. I'm not even sure we're any closer to AGI than we were before LLMs. It's getting more funding and research, but none of the research seems very innovative. And now it's probably much more difficult to get funding…

> I'm not even sure we're any closer to AGI than we were before LLMs. I mean this is very obviously untrue. It'd be like saying we aren't any closer to space flight after watching a demonstration of the Wright Flyer. Before 2022-2023 AI could barely write coherent paragraphs; now it can one-shot an entire letter or program or blog post (even if it's full of LLM tropes). Just because something is overhyped doesn't mea…

In hindsight there's an obvious evolutionary pathway from the Wright Flyer to Gemeni/Apollo/Soyuz.. but at the time in 1903 there absolutely was not, and anyone telling you so would be a crank of the highest degree. So it may turn out that LLMs have some place on the evolutionary path to AGI, or it could turn out they're a dead end like Cayley's ornithopters. Show me AGI first, then we can discuss whether LLMs had something to do with it.

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

#735

Post by olalonde »

locust101 wrote: post #605

It’s hard to know what’s the new information here. Altman’s history has been reported on exhaustively. Few people have left openai over the year - safety abandonments, non profit status change, deception etc. but there is too much money involved. Here lies the actual rub. A lot of people involved and named in the article are reprehensible, kushners, saudis, Emiratis, PayPal mafia, vc folks with god complexes. But as…

I still don't understand how the transformation from non-profit to for-profit was possible legally.

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

#736

Post by qotgalaxy »

ed wrote: post #141
cs702 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a] This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world. OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI ra…

It's worth noting Codex has 2x more stories than Claude https://hn.algolia.com/?query=codex

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

#737

Post by mplanchard »

pch00 wrote: post #729
mplanchard wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insure

That M-W entry literally says they're different words with different meanings: > They are in fact different words, but with sufficient overlap in meaning and form as to create uncertainty as to which should be used when. > We define ensure as “to make sure, certain, or safe” and one sense of insure, “to make certain especially by taking necessary measures and precautions,” is quite similar. But insure has the additio…

Definition 2: "to make certain especially by taking necessary measures and precautions"

From the article:

> He sent the final memos to the other board members as disappearing messages, to insure that no one else would ever see them.

> Others were uncomfortable sharing concerns about Altman because they felt there was not a sufficient effort to insure anonymity.

> [...] to insure that the technology was deployed safely

All of these work just fine with that definition of "insure." Your comment that it's "incorrect use of English" is wrong.

The bit you quoted says there’s substantial overlap between the two. The New Yorker style is to prefer “insure” in cases where either could work.

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

#738

Post by ethbr1 »

surajrmal wrote: post #710
Bolwin wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it bizarre even the public image of Anthropic is seen as ethical after the Department of War debacle, in which they themselves admitted they had basically no qualms with their tech being used for war and slaughter at all except two very very thin lines, namely mass surveillance of American citizens and fully automated weaponry with their current models. It only showed they were marginally more ethical than Ope…

The idea that it's not okay to arm the military is a position of privilege. The ethical issues are around how the military chooses to use its abilities, not around giving them the tools to do their jobs. We're talking about folks who are willing to give their lives up for others. If you're not going to serve yourself you should at least be willing to help them live. This has nothing to do with whether or not you supp…

Yes and... that's a position of privilege that anyone in the position should ethically take.

It's unfair to sweep provision of methods to the military under a "respect the service" catch-all justification.

Two things can simultaneously be true: (1) individuals serving in the military are making sacrifices (in terms of pay, family life, personal safety) that deserve respect and (2) the military as a political institution will amorally deploy whatever capabilities it has access to, to achieve political aims.

There's a reason the US stopped offensive chemical, biological warfare, and tactical nuclear device research and production -- effective capabilities will be used if they exist.

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

#739

Post by frollogaston »

pesus wrote: post #461
arionhardison wrote: post #167

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…

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.

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

#740

Post by victorevector »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #304
philip1209 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We talk about Sam Altman a lot. At this point he has a Hollywood movie in post-production, a book ("The Optimist"), and a seemingly endless stream of profiles. It feels intellectually lazy to keep researching the same guy when the industry is moving beyond him. All evidence today suggests Anthropic is passing OpenAI in relative and absolute growth. So where's the critical reporting? The DOD coverage was framed around…

> whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months. Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is ac…

Im curious — how do ethical and safety conscious manifest themselves there? Is it more cultural or process driven? Do you have any examples?
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