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OpenAI and Elon Musk

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Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#801

Post by mort96 »

dmix wrote: post #748
mort96 wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

There's a big market for high reputation, old Reddit accounts, exactly because those things make it easier to get attention. LLMs are a great way to automate generating high reputation accounts.

There are articles written on LLM spam, such as this one: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697218/ai-generated-spa.... Those are probably going to substantiate this problem better than I would.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#802

Post by FeepingCreature »

Amezarak wrote: post #597
FeepingCreature wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but China is already honestly more careful than America: the CCP really doesn't want competitors to power. They're very open to slowdown agreements. And NK, Iran and Russia honestly have nothing. The day we have to worry about NK ASI takeoff, it'll already long have happened in some American basement. So we just need active monitoring for US/EU data centers. That's a big ask to be sure, and definitely an invasi…

> The whole point is to play for time in the hopes that somebody comes up with a good idea for safety and we manage an actually aligned takeoff, at which point it's out of our hands anyways. Given "aligned" means "in agreement with the moral system of the people running OpenAI" (or whatever company), an "aligned" GAI controlled by any private entity is a nightmare scenario for 99% of the world. If we are taking GAI s…

Agreed. If we cannot get an AGI takeoff that can get 99% "extrapolated buy-in" ("would consider acceptable if they fully understood the outcome presented"), we should not do it at all. (Why 99%? Some fraction of humanity just has interests that are fundamentally at odds with everybody else's flourishing. Ie. for instance, the Singularity will in at least some way be a bad thing for a person who only cares about inflicting pain on the unwilling. I don't care about them though.)

In my personal opinion, there are moral systems that nearly all of humanity can truly get on board with. For instance, I believe Eliezer has raised the idea of a guardian: an ASI that does nothing but forcibly prevent the ascension of other ASI that do not have broad and legitimate approval. Almost no human genuinely wants all humans to die.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#803

Post by lanstin »

delichon wrote: post #616
AlienRobot wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." I can't believe this went all the way to AI...

Civilization is an artifact of thermodynamics, not an exception to it. All life, including civilized life, is about acquiring energy and creating order out of it, primarily by replicating. Money is just one face of that. Ads are about money, which is about energy, which fuels life. AI is being created by these same forces, so is likely to go the same way. You might as well bemoan gravity.

We might question the structural facets of the economy or the networking technology that made spam I mean ads a better investment than federated/distributed micropayments and reader-centric products. I would have kept using Facebook if they let me see the things my friends took the trouble to type in, rather than flooding me with stuff to sell more ads, and seeing the memes my friends like, which I already have too many cool memes, don't need yours.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#804

Post by daveguy »

chaorace wrote: post #745
derelicta wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

Except Altman has the political capital to have the entire board fired if they go against him, which makes the entire structure irrelevant. The power is where the technology is being developed -- at the bottom where they can threaten to walk out with plush jobs from the major shareholders at the bottom. The power is not where the figureheads sit at the top.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#805

Post by foofie »

habosa wrote: post #716

Regardless 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.

> First Sam vs. the board, now Elon vs. everyone

Elon Musk is renowned for being an attention seeker and doing these stunts as a proxy to relevance. It's touring Texas borders wearing a hat backwards, it's messing with Ukraine's access to starlink alongside making statements on geopolitics, it's pretending that he discovered railway and the technology for digging holes in the ground as a silver bullet for transportation problems, it's making bullshit statements on cave rescue submarines followed by attacking actual cave rescuers who pointed out the absurdity of it of being pedophiles... Etc etc etc.

I think it makes no sense at all to evaluate the future of an organization based on what stunts Elon Musk is pulling. There must be better metrics.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#806

Post by ClarityJones »

theptip wrote: post #731
ClarityJones wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're probably right that without making a profit, it's impossible to afford... This doesn't begin to make sense to me. Nothing about being a non-profit prevents OpenAI from raising money, including by selling goods and services at a markup. Some sell girl-scout cookies, some hold events, etc. So, you can't issue equity in the company... offer royalties. Write up a compensation contract with whatever formula the…

There is no way OpenAI could have raised $10B as a non-profit.

Would you please try to explain why?

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#807

Post by foofie »

ethanbond wrote: post #783
troyvit wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AGI is as transformative as its proponents make it out to be, would it both attract and create those enormous egos though?

Which is why one might create a mechanism, say a non-profit, that has an established, codified mission to combat such obviously foreseeable efforts.

OpenAI clearly rejected Elon Musk's advances and kept him out. Isn't it working already in its current form?

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#808

Post by skissane »

username332211 wrote: post #777
chaorace wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

And what was this structure supposed to achieve? At the top we have board of directors not accountable to anyone, except, as we recently discovered, to the possibility of a general rebellion from employees. That's not clever or innovative. That's just plain old oligarchy. Intrigue and infighting is a known feature of oligarchies ever since antiquity.

> That's not clever or innovative

Whether or not it is “clever”, the idea of a non-profit or charity owning a for-profit company isn’t original. Mozilla has been doing it for years. The Guardian (in the UK) adopted that structure in 1936

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#809

Post by brindlejim »

habosa wrote: post #716

Regardless 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 funniest part of the OpenAI post is where someone comes in breathlessly and says "hey have you read this ACX post on why we shouldn't open source AGI" to the guy who's literally been warning everybody about AGI for decades and Elon is like: "Yup." Someone was murdered that day. There is nothing for dismissive than a yup.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#810

Post by FeepingCreature »

lupire wrote: post #615
FeepingCreature wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world we live in is the result of a gray goo scenario causing a global genocide. (Google Oxygen Holocaust.) So it kinda makes a poor argument that sudden global ecosystem collapses are impossible. That said, everything we have in natural biotech, while advanced, are incremental improvements on the initial chemical replicators that arose in a hydrothermal vent billions of years ago. Evolution has massive path depe…

So the AGI holocaust would be a good thing for the advancement of life, like the Oxygen Holocaust was. Anyway, the Oxygen Holocaust took over 300,000,000 years. Not quite "sudden".

As I understand the Wikipedia article, nobody quite knows why it took that long, but one hypothesis is that the oxygen being produced also killed the organisms producing it, causing a balance until evolution caught up. This will presumably not be an issue for AI-produced nanoswarms.
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