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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?

#741

Post by upmind »

mememememememo wrote: post #493
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…

An extranordinary claim needs a bit more evidence than one datapoint where in his defense maybe he is scared of anyone he doesn't know trying to talk on the street.

Agreed, his two posts read really weirdly. He made a deliberately vague(?) initial post to get a response and I'm not sure how I feel about his story as you've said, if I was Sam Altman I'd be wary of anyone coming up to me too.

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

#742

Post by rkozik1989 »

baq wrote: post #611
arionhardison wrote: post #112

Hi @ronanfarrow — I have only had one interaction with Sam Altman in person, and I was advised to keep it to myself. I know this crowd may not care, but Altman is absolutely terrified of Black people — not in any contextual sense, but in a visceral, instinctive way. For someone who, as you put it, "controls our future," this should matter. FYI: I am by far not the only one to have experienced this and it 100% impacts…

The longer I live, the more secrets coming out I see, the less surprised I am with every next one.

Career ladders have a tendency to hoist up those among us with the worst personality traits.

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

#743

Post by AIorNot »

ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

As bad as altman might be he’s just another sociopathic Tech Bro

I’m far more concerned with the 25 million dollar personal bribe OpenAI president Greg Brockman gave Donald Trump for his reelection -

the fact that a tech company can influence the outcome of an election directly is evil

Far more evil than Altmans shenanigans

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

#745

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

hirako2000 wrote: post #566
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to find an advocate for Codex that can give a pretty good answer as to why they think it's better, go ask Eric Provencher. He develops https://repoprompt.com/ . He spends a lot of time thinking in this space and prefers Codex over Claude, though I haven't checked recently to see if he still has that opinion. He's pretty reachable on Discord if you poke around a bit.

Quite irrelevant what factions think. This or that model may be superior for these and those use cases today, and things will flip next week. Also. RLHF mean that models spit out according to certain human preference, so it depends what set of humans and in what mood they've been when providing the feedback.

On the contrary, I very much care about what the other factions think because I want to know if things have already flipped and the easiest way to do so is just ask someone who's been using the tool. Of course the correct thing to do is to set up some simple evals, but there is a subjective aspect to these tools that I think hearing boots on the ground anecdata helps with.

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

#746

Post by cm2012 »

taurath wrote: post #51
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

The statements around the sexual abuse allegations seemed to be the most puzzling to me - his sister’s allegations and claims of underage partners because he has a tendency to hook up with younger partners. It does seem like this piece gives him a pretty clean bill of health in that matter - I guess would you be able to talk about how you investigated? Did you do any extra investigations into Annie’s allegations? It…

False memories are much, much more common than actual recovered memories, unfortunately. OCD is a really common cause of it. People think of OCD as a physical thing, but for many people it presents as emotional rumination and can lead to false memories.

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

#747

Post by username223 »

eloisius wrote: post #565
red369 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find that interesting. And not intending to defend the motives of anyone involved, but I'm hoping we can not worry about literally all jobs being destroyed, and AI companies amassing all the wealth in the world. Don't we need at least some humans working and earning to buy these AI services? Am I not being imaginative enough? Is it possible for the whole economy to consist just of AI selling services to each o…

Why keep human consumers to buy your services when you could just amass all the wealth you desire, and have autonomous systems that can ensure your unassailable physical security? You would sit atop the most stratified dominance hierarchy ever achieved, and it would reduce other humans to mere pets or breeding stock. I don’t think normal humans would desire that kind of power, and I don’t believe LLMs will take us th…

Surely a Big Sur compound stocked with iodine and gold, protected by security goons fitted with exploding collars, is someone’s definition of paradise.

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

#748

Post by [deleted] »

Lerc wrote: post #395
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

From time to time I have been accused of being an apologist for Sam Altman, but I have always tried to assess information based upon what it says instead of whether it matches an existing narrative. You list a number of distortions in your article which show the problem. If you are a good person, bad stories about you may be fake. If you are a bad person, bad stories about you may still be fake. My prima facie view o…

[deleted]

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

#749

Post by cm2012 »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #525
mptest wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"how easy it is, for those of us who play no part in public affairs, to sneer at the compromises required of those who do" - robert harris Not making any value judgements, but I can see how one might value their interpretability research higher than what the ceo says in a time where the corrupt, criminal executive branch is muscling in to everything from what's written on currency, to journalistic sources. I generall…

They are a private company. They have zero obligation to sell anything to any part of the government or military. The only reason they are involved in "public affairs" is because they want to profit from the government. Moreover, long before this DoW controversy, they had plenty of nationalist and anti-China rhetoric in their press releases, more so than the other AI firms.

The other explanation besides profit is that they're true believers that democratic militaries should be stronger than the military of dictators around the world, including AI capabilities.
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