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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?

#801

Post by citruscomputing »

Terr_ wrote: post #409
m4rtink wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting how a lot of cyberpunk does not really include AI or does not present it in transformative way. There is a lot of mind uploading, implants, corpo fun and overall technology permeating all aspects of life, but often AI itself does not actually play a big role.

Counterexamples that come to mind are Neuromancer (AI driving the plot) and Blade Runner (AI antagonists.) A compromise thesis might be that in cyberpunk media, AI is at never powerful or motivated to fundamentally reform the worldwide crapsack economic system. They don't abolish corporations, although they might take them over. Of course, if there was a story about an AI taking over the world into a post-scarcity so…

Well yeah, that's what "alignment" means...

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

#803

Post by arcfour »

jcgrillo wrote: post #734
arcfour wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 so…

In order to get to space, you must first be capable of flight through the atmosphere. That should be apparent to anyone even then because the atmosphere is in between space and the ground.

Regardless of whether spaceflight is still 1000 or 100 or 50 years away, you are still closer than you were before you demonstrated the ability to fly.

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

#804

Post by noir_lord »

hnbad wrote: post #616
Terr_ wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterexamples that come to mind are Neuromancer (AI driving the plot) and Blade Runner (AI antagonists.) A compromise thesis might be that in cyberpunk media, AI is at never powerful or motivated to fundamentally reform the worldwide crapsack economic system. They don't abolish corporations, although they might take them over. Of course, if there was a story about an AI taking over the world into a post-scarcity so…

Rampant capitalism is kinda genre-defining for Cyberpunk so Cyberpunk without corporations wouldn't really be Cyberpunk. _The Matrix_ only qualifies as Cyberpunk because within the matrix the machines effectively control the capitalist power structures to exert their influence. Abundance/scarcity isn't really about availability, it's more about access. You can have a cyberpunk story in a "post-scarcity" setting in th…

Agreed, which is why The Culture (series) isn't cyberpunk but The Polity (by Neal Asher) kinda skirts the line, in many ways they are similar except resource inequality still exists on a wide/policy scale in the latter.

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

#805

Post by LoganDark »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #769
LoganDark wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't configure your software when you first start using it, I don't know what to tell you. This shouldn't be "out of your way". You should have set this when you first started using your browser. If you didn't for whatever reason, don't be surprised when autoplaying videos exist.

Dunno man, NOBODY likes auto playing videos, yet creators keep using them for reasons unknown. This is starting to sound a lot like victim blaming. Auto playing videos should not exist, period. End of story.

I don't like them either...

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

#806

Post by CamperBob2 »

davebren wrote: post #694
saxonww wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point I'm trying to make is that I don't think we know, so we can't say either way. In your example, would the human have ever had contact with other humans, or would it be placed in the room as a baby with no further input?

They grew up in a tribe that hasn't discovered numbers yet.

Those who argue that AI is like human cognition don't know much about AI or human cognition.

Those who argue that AI is like a parrot don't know much about anything at all.

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

#807

Post by giancarlostoro »

keepamovin wrote: post #598
ronanfarrow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this, very much appreciate the thoughtful response. The piece captures some of the anxieties within OpenAI right now about their competitive position. This obviously ebbs and flows but of late there has been much focus on Anthropic's relative position. We of course mention the allegations of "circular deals" and concerns about partners taking on debt.

If you were in charge of the deciding what should be done with Sam Altman, what would you choose?

I mean, its a fair question, though it does make some wonder how extreme the answers could be, so I could see why you're being downvoted.

The problem is sometimes on paper everything people like Sam Altman do is legal, despite it harming so many. We've literally had a major RAM producer pull off the consumer RAM market. I feel like Sam Altman should be investigated and heavily scrutinized. He kind of is the biggest bubble in the AI bubble, we're letting him fester too far into it too, and these circular deals have seemingly somewhat stopped for now, but it might only get worse.

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

#809

Post by r721 »

wyldfire wrote: post #250
ronanfarrow wrote: post #5

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

Dang, can you substantiate that this is actually Mr. Farrow like he claims? Or Mr Farrow can you post some evidence somewhere we can see?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663895

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

#810

Post by throwaway132448 »

jjallen wrote: post #685
throwaway132448 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think Amodei is significantly different you’re going to be disappointed. There is nothing he has done that can’t be adequately explained as furthering his own interests. Remember how Musk doesn’t like Altman too? It’s because they’re all the same people, competing for the same thing.

I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company, founded another one, that one’s models refused to do things that the previous company would do, then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it. Not small differences to me.

> I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company

Problematic why though? For the reasons publicly stated? Then why isn’t Anthropic just what OpenAI was “supposed” to be then? We know what that was from their charter, and Anthropic is not that.

> then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it

You’re sure about that are you? I don’t see how you possibly could be, unless you’ve taken the PR at face value, before it was all quietly swept away under the next headline.

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