Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

791–800 of 1001 posts

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#791

Post by bigyabai »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #491
bigyabai wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT is the product-ified version of text transformers, which OpenAI didn't invent or really even contribute to the discovery of. The world changed with Attention is All You Need , and OpenAI was just an early adopter. The biggest thing OpenAI contributed to the broader industry was their API schema.

The researcher in me appreciates you pointing that out. Still, the people who invented a technology often aren't the ones to make it widespread. The people who make it widespread deserve at least some of the credit, just like Apple got with Xerox's UI. https://blog.prototypr.io/how-xerox-invented-ux-ui-design-ap...

OpenAI can slake themselves tumescent with credit, for all I care. I'm mostly alarmed by how many people think the LLM is OpenAI's invention, and completely misunderstood outside of their walls.

Sam's "we must control AGI" narrative in this post seemingly stems from an egoist attachment to the brand, and not any world-changing executive decisions that he could take credit for.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#792

Post by dang »

voidhorse wrote: post #760
dang wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope the worst for sam and his family. WTF? You can't post this viciously to HN, no matter who it is you're being vicious towards. Normally I would ban any account that posted like this, but this thread is a mob and mobs have a deranging effect on people. So I'm going to cut you some slack and not ban you. Just please don't do anything like this on HN again.

Thanks, dang, I appreciate the slack. I let emotion get the better of me in the moment, and I'll refrain from that in the future.

Thanks for the kind reply - it helps a lot.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#794

Post by unethical_ban »

klik99 wrote: post #49

Genuinely surprised at the extreme comments against sama here. I don’t think he’s a good steward of the technology, but I don’t think violence is funny or justified. I also don’t think it’s justified for him to use it to say that a negative article about him is correlated to this event. Seems to imply that an “incendiary article” led to this and that criticism is tantamount to calls to violence. He drives the convers…

I think Sam and people like him are *spoilers* like Jules Pierre Mao and Dresden on The expanse.

I think that he may genuinely believe that ai will produce a net benefit for humanity in the long term, but I am increasingly worried that they are absolutely fine testing their creation on the world without any consideration to the harm it can do to millions of individuals.

The assertion that he is benign would be more believable if he spent a shred of time lobbying for universal economic rights of citizens, or some model for redistribution of wealth in a world where most people don't need to work to provide the necessities of society.

Oh, and he's willing to let the government use his technology to mass-spy on Americans and to create autonomous lethal AI.

Pearl-clutching about ambivalence to his fate and comparing it to the barbarism of a mob gets shrugs from me.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#795

Post by survirtual »

testing22321 wrote: post #748
survirtual wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Attacking Sam and his family will only cause harm to one family. What Sam is doing with ICE, DoW, etc is harming tens of millions around the globe.

Which is why this narrative of caring about his family is so absurd.

A defense contractor is in the business of war. In supplying the war machine, you should be living in a fortress. Tall walls, check your drink for poison, live in paranoia. Every person in the business of war knows what they are getting in to, and how to protect their family.

How is someone that is near the face of AI this naive about such an ancient thing?

The business of war is fine. It is ancient. It is part of humanity. Making some morality plea towards family and "violence is never the answer" while in the business of violence is NOT okay.

Everyone in the defense industry knows the risks. Blood money is not free. You sacrifice a peaceful life for the wealth.

To keep your family safe you have to use a meager sum of that money to have tall walls, guards, and security. DoD contractor 101.

Alternatively, live in obscurity, don't talk about your work, and it is usually fine.

A world-wide known CEO doesn't have this luxury so again, use a small portion of unfathomable wealth to protect your family. I have a feeling this war is just starting.

When in the business of death, you no longer get to live with the rules of peace.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#796

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #575

I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News*. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community. * Edit: It would have been clearer to say "I've never seen a mob dynamic this bad on Hac…

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#797

Post by jmull »

rustystump wrote: post #482
jmull wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violence is an extreme failure state. If your goal is to improve the system then you always want to move away from it. Probably a reasonable justification would be self-defense, committing violence to stop worse violence. (Preemptive violence is not self-defense.)

But that is the kicker. As the sister comment said it matters a great deal what others do. At some point a broken system enacts soft violence on people. So it isnt surprising people act out when they think survival is at stake. With healthcare, it really can be. But where is the line? When someone you know dies? 10 people? It is messy.

It's not surprising that violence begets violence, in an escalating cycle. But it doesn't end with a better system.

If your goal is a better system, you'll be looking hard for ways to move away from violence, not justifications to escalate it.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#798

Post by snark_attack »

itsyonas wrote: post #671
klik99 wrote: post #49

Genuinely surprised at the extreme comments against sama here. I don’t think he’s a good steward of the technology, but I don’t think violence is funny or justified. I also don’t think it’s justified for him to use it to say that a negative article about him is correlated to this event. Seems to imply that an “incendiary article” led to this and that criticism is tantamount to calls to violence. He drives the convers…

> but I don’t think violence is funny or justified Well, that's okay, because even Sam Altman disagrees with you. He absolutely believes that violence, including deadly violence, is justified - hence his contract with the US Department of War to use their systems in kill chains. Perhaps the problem is that whoever threw the cocktail didn't use AI to select him as a target, or maybe he didn't receive payment for throw…

[flagged]

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#799

Post by bigyabai »

cal_dent wrote: post #459

An interesting thing about one facet of how society as developed over the past decade and a half, I think, is that a byproduct of more people being conscious of the quest to monetise almost anything is that it has also raised the level of general scepticism on whether something is marketing or real. So you have increasingly more scenarios where an objectively bad thing can happen to someone but any public response is…

> any public response is scrutinised and questioned within a hint of its life sometimes rightly sometimes not.

This is a fairly healthy response from the public - better than accepting everything at face-value. Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a warning against accepting random information in a vacuum to assess your surroundings. Observation and response is not enough to be a critical thinker, even back in the ancient ages.

From where I'm standing, the public at-large is traumatized from flubbed coverups like the Snowden leak, Epstein files, and Abu Ghraib. The myth of American exceptionalism has been threatened for a long time, and people rightfully question whether or not executive leadership can write-off their involvement in politics. Sam Altman has put on an extremely dangerous pair of boots, and while it doesn't justify attacks on his person, we all know that speculation will continue as new events come to light. Right or wrong, this is what the public is conditioned for now.

Re: Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

#800

Post by smoyer »

dang wrote: post #575

I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News*. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community. * Edit: It would have been clearer to say "I've never seen a mob dynamic this bad on Hac…

You make this corner of the world better dang!
Post reply on HN