why would I lie?
OpenAI and Elon Musk
741–750 of 1001 posts
Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk
#742They're both bad actors, and they both have good points. I hope they keep fighting each other -- it might distract them from us.
Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk
#743This is exactly like a plot from Silicon Valley. OA's "middle-out compression" will revolutionize the world! I agree with hackernews Habosa's starkly simple comment. These people are up their own ass.
Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk
#744This looks bad for OpenAI (although it's been pretty obvious that they are far from open for a long time). But it looks 10x worse for Elon. At least for the public image, he desperately try to maintain. > As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control. > In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a…
The difference is OpenAI had a reputation to protect, Musk can't sink any lower at this point, and his stans will persist. The fact that they slinging mud at each other just proves the mutual criticism though, and provides an edifying spectacle for the rest of us.
I was struggling to put words to my thoughts here, but you nailed it.
It doesn’t make sense to engage in a public spat with someone who has such a negative reputation. Staying silent would have made more sense.
Posting it publicly is an odd and very unprofessional move. I can imagine Satya doesn’t like this blog post.
Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk
#745Earlier quoted context omitted.
The really depressing thing is that the board anticipated exactly this type of outcome when they were going "capped profit" and deliberately restructured the company with the specific goal of preventing this from happening... yet here we are. It's difficult to walk away without concluding that "profit secondary" companies are fundamentally incompatible with VC funding. Would that be a pessimistic take? Are there bett…
How did they structure it to prevent this? Is it in the statutes of the company or smth?
It's actually a very clever structure! Please open the following image to follow along as I elaborate: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F_PGOPOacAApU8e.jpg
At the top level, there is the non-profit board of directors (i.e.: the ones Sam Altman had that big fight with). They are not beholden to any shareholders and are directly bound by the company charter: https://openai.com/charter
The top-level nonprofit company owns holding companies in partnership with their employees. The purpose of these holding companies is to own a majority of shares in & effectively steer the bottom layer of our diagram.
At the bottom layer, we have the "capped profit" OpenAI Global, LLC (this layer is where Sam Altman lives). This company is beholden to shareholders, but because the majority shareholder is ultimately controlled by a non-profit board, it is effectively beholden to the interests of an entity which is not profit-motivated.
In order to raise capital, the holding company can create new shares, sell existing shares, and conduct private fundraising. As you can see on the diagram, Microsoft owns some of the shares in the bottom company (which they bought in exchange for a gigantic pile of Azure compute credits).
Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk
#746Regardless of who is right here, I think the enormous egos at play make OpenAI the last company I’d want to develop AGI. First Sam vs. the board, now Elon vs. everyone … it’s pretty clear this company is not in any way being run for the greater good. It’s all ego and money with some good science trapped underneath.
The really depressing thing is that the board anticipated exactly this type of outcome when they were going "capped profit" and deliberately restructured the company with the specific goal of preventing this from happening... yet here we are. It's difficult to walk away without concluding that "profit secondary" companies are fundamentally incompatible with VC funding. Would that be a pessimistic take? Are there bett…
I think the fact that a number of top people were willing to actually leave OpenAI and found Anthropic explicitly because OpenAI had abandoned their safety focus essentially proves that this wasn’t a thing that had to happen. If different leaders had been in place things could have gone differently.
Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assume good intentions and nothing of substance being hidden: Is there any way to be transparent here that would have satisfied you or are you essentially asking for them to just keep to themselves or something else?
Oh, honey. Never assume good intentions when lawyers are involved
That wasn't the point of the question. The question was a hypothetical to test if there was any possible response that would've satisfied the original poster.
They're not suggesting to assume good intentions about the parties forever. They're just asking for that assumption for the purposes of the question that was asked
Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk
#748Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just pay OpenAI a relatively tiny fee and you can generate tonnes of plausible spam designed to promote your product or service or trick people into giving you money. That's the primary problem we're facing right now. Is content generation really the thing holding spammers back? I haven't seen a huge influx of more realistic spam so I wonder your basis for this statement.
There's a ton of LLM spam on platforms like Reddit and Twitter, and product review sites.
Everyone always says this, that there's "bots" all over Reddit but every time I ask for real examples of stuff (with actual upvotes) I never get anything.
If anything it's just the same regular spam that gets deleted and ignored at the bottom of threads.
Easier content generation doesn't solve the reputation problem that social media demands in order to get attention. The whole LLM+spam thing is mostly exaggerated because people don't understand this fact. It merely creates a slightly harder problem for automatic text analysis engines...which was already one of the weaker forms of spam detection full of false positives and misses. Everything else is network and behaviour related, with human reporting as last resort.
Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk
#749Their evidence does a nice job of making Musk seem duplicitous, but it doesn't really refute any of his core assertions: they still have the appearance of abandoning their core mission to focus more on profits, even if they've elaborated a decent justification of why that's necessary to do. Or to put it more simply: here they explain why they had to betray their core mission. But they don't refute that they did betra…
> They're probably right that building AGI will require a ton of computational power, and that it will be very expensive. Is that still true? LLMs seem to be getting smaller and cheaper for the same level of performance.
training isn't getting less intensive, its just that adding more GPUs is now more practical
Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science... Based on this line of reasoning, ANY company that builds any given technology and intends to share (sell) it to the world, but not divulge how it was done, can call itself OpenWhatever. They are clearly saying that the word “Open” in their name means nothing.
AI/AGI is a multiplier. There could have been a world where just Google builds that multipler and only uses it internally. Making that multiplier publicly available can be the "Open" part. I understand that this particular audience is very sensitive about the term, but why are we being so childish about it? Yes, you can name your company whatever you want within reason. Yes, it does not have to mean anything in parti…
> There could have been a world where just Google builds that multipler and only uses it internally.
Funny that you mention that, actually. Before OpenAI started generously... publicizing their models, Google was actually shipping their weights day-and-date with their papers. So honestly, I actually doubt that Google would do that.
> Making that multiplier publicly available can be the "Open" part.
Aw, how generous of them. They even let us pay money to generously use their "Open" resource.
> but why are we being so childish about it?
Why are you being so childish about it? "Open" means something - you can't contort OpenAI's minimalist public contributions into a defense of their "openness". You'd have better luck arguing that Apple and Microsoft support Open Source software ddevelopment.
The last significant contribution OpenAI open-sourced was GPT-2 in 2019. They are a net-negative impact on the world at-large, amassing private assets under the guise of public enrichment. If it was an option between OpenAI or nothing, I'd ask for nothing and pray for a better frontrunner. It's not the name, it's the way they behave and the apologism they garner.