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OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

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Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#821

Post by cashsterling »

In my experience, and that of others I know, agreements of this kind are generally used to hide/cover-up all kinds of malfeasance. I think that agreements of this kind are highly unethical and should be illegal.

Many year ago I signed a NDA/non-disparagement agreement as part of a severance package when I was fired from a startup for political reasons. I didn't want to sign it... but my family needed the money and I swallowed my pride. There was a lot of unethical stuff going on within the company in terms of fiducial responsibility to investors and BoD. The BoD eventually figured out what was going on and "cleaned house".

With OpenAI, I am concerned this is turning into huge power/money grab with little care for humanity... and "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#822

Post by root_axis »

huijzer wrote: post #629
orlandrescu wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awfully familiar to the other South-African emerald mine inheritor tech mogul.

[flagged]

I'm no fan of Sam Altman, but between the two, Elon lies much more often. He's lied about FSD for years, lied about not selling his Tesla stock, lied about "robotaxies" for years, lied about the roadster for years, lied about "funding secured" for Tesla, lied about his twitter free speech ethos, spreads random lies about people he doesn't like, and so much more. The guy is a compulsive liar.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#823

Post by bormaj »

danielbln wrote: post #598
KennyBlanken wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stepping away from this job has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, because we urgently need to figure out how to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us. Large language models are not "smart". They do not have thought. They don't have intelligence despite the "AI" moniker, etc. They vomit words based off very fancy statistics. There is no path from that to "thought" and "intelligence."

Not that I disagree, but what's intelligence? How does our intelligence work? If we don't know that, how can we be so sure what does and what doesn't lead to intelligence? A little more humility is on order before whipping out the tired "LLMs are just stochastic parrots" argument.

Humility has to go both ways then, we can't claim that LLM models are actually (or not actually) AI without qualifying that term first.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#824

Post by spudlyo »

dmoy wrote: post #783
benreesman wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The New Yorker piece is pretty terrifying and manages to be so while bending over backwards to present both sides of not maybe even suck up to SV a bit. Certainly no one forced Altman to say on the record that Ice Nine in the water glass was what he had planned for anyone who crossed him, and no one forced pg to say, likewise on the record that “Sam’s real talent is becoming powerful” or something to that effect. It…

For anyone else like me who hasn't read Kurt Vonnegut, but does know about different ice states (e.g. Ice IX): "Ice Nine" is a fictional assassination device that makes you turn into ice after consuming ice (?) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine "Ice IX" (ice nine) is Ice III at a low enough temperature and high enough pressure to be proton-ordered https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_ice#Known_phases So h…

It's more than just a death threat, the person killed in such a manner would surely generate a human-sized pile of Ice 9, which would pose a much greater threat to humanity than any AGI.

If we're seriously entertaining this off-handed remark as a measure of Altman's true character, it means not only would be willing willing to murder an adversary, but he'd be willing to risk all humanity to do it.

What I take away from this remark is that Altman is a nerd, and I look forward to seeing a shaky cell-phone video of him reciting one of the calypsos of Bokonon while dressed as a cultist at a SciFi convention.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#825

Post by [deleted] »

justinclift wrote: post #795
robertlagrant wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or makes life much shittier for most humans by making most of us obsolete I'm not sure this is true. If all the things people are doing are done so much more cheaply they're almost free, that would be good for us, as we're also the buyers as well as the workers. However, I also doubt the premise.

> If all the things people are doing are done so much more cheaply they're almost free, that would be good for us ... Doesn't this tend to become "they're almost free to produce " with the actual pricing for end consumers not becoming cheaper? From the point of view of the sellers just expanding their margins instead.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#826

Post by lotsofpulp »

marcusverus wrote: post #809
justinclift wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If all the things people are doing are done so much more cheaply they're almost free, that would be good for us ... Doesn't this tend to become "they're almost free to produce " with the actual pricing for end consumers not becoming cheaper? From the point of view of the sellers just expanding their margins instead.

I'm sure businesses will capture some of the value, but is there any reason to assume they'll capture all or even most of it? Over the last ~ 50 years, worker productivity is up ~250%[0], profits (within the S&P 500) are up ~100%[1] and real personal (not household) income is up 150%[2]. It should go without saying that a large part of the rise in profits is attributable to the rise of tech. It shouldn't surprise any…

> Regardless, expanding margins is only attractive up to a certain point. The higher your margins, the more attractive your market becomes to would-be competitors.

This does not make sense to me. While a higher profit margin is a signal to others that they can earn money by selling equivalent goods and services at lower prices, it is not inevitable that they will be able to. And even if they are, it behooves a seller to take advantage of the higher margins while they can.

Earning less money now in the hopes of competitors being dissuaded from entering the market seems like a poor strategy.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#827

Post by brandall10 »

flashgordon wrote: post #804
confidantlake wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need buyers if AI can create anything you desire?

In an ideal world where gpus are a commodity yes. Btw at least today ai is owned/controlled by the rich and powerful and that's where majority of the research dollars are coming from. Why would they just relinquish ai so generously?

With an ever expanding AI everything should be quickly commoditized, including reduction in energy to run AI and energy itself (ie. viable commercial fusion or otherwise).

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#828

Post by shkkmo »

ben_w wrote: post #532
Sharlin wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone? What about the board that fired him, and all of those who’ve left the company? It seems to me more like those people are leaving who are rightly concerned about the direction things are going, and those people are staying who think that getting rich outweighs ethical – and possibly existential – concerns. Plus maybe those who still believe they can effect a positive change within the company. With regard to…

> Everyone? What about the board that fired him, I meant of the employees, obviously not the board. Also excluded: all the people who never worked there who think Altman is weird, Elon Musk who is suing them (and probably the New York Times on similar grounds), and the protestors who dropped leaflets on one of his public appearances. > and all of those who’ve left the company? Happened after those events; at the time…

It's hard to guage exactly how much credence to put in that letter due to the gag contracts.

How much was it in support of Altman and how much was in opposition to the extremely poorly explained in board decisions, and how much was pure self interest due to stock options?

I think when a company chooses secrecy, they abandon much of the benefit of the doubt. I don't think there is any basis for absolving Altman.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#829

Post by MrScruff »

root_axis wrote: post #806
yashap wrote: post #760

For a company that is actively pursuing AGI (and probably the #1 contender to get there), this type of behaviour is extremely concerning. There’s a very real/significant risk that AGI either literally destroys the human race, or makes life much shittier for most humans by making most of us obsolete. These risks are precisely why OpenAI was founded as a very open company with a charter that would firmly put the needs…

More than these egregious gag contracts, OpenAI benefits from the image that they are on the cusp of world-destroying science fiction. This meme needs to die, if AGI is possible it won't be achieved any time in the foreseeable future, and certainly it will not emerge from quadratic time brute force on a fraction of text and images scraped from the internet.

Clearly we don’t know when/if AGI would happen, but the expectations of many people working in the field is it will arrive in what qualifies as ‘near future’. It probably won’t result from just scaling LLMs, but then that’s why there’s a lot of researchers trying to find the next significant advancement, in parallel with others trying to commercially exploit LLMs.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#830

Post by troupo »

MrScruff wrote: post #829
root_axis wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than these egregious gag contracts, OpenAI benefits from the image that they are on the cusp of world-destroying science fiction. This meme needs to die, if AGI is possible it won't be achieved any time in the foreseeable future, and certainly it will not emerge from quadratic time brute force on a fraction of text and images scraped from the internet.

Clearly we don’t know when/if AGI would happen, but the expectations of many people working in the field is it will arrive in what qualifies as ‘near future’. It probably won’t result from just scaling LLMs, but then that’s why there’s a lot of researchers trying to find the next significant advancement, in parallel with others trying to commercially exploit LLMs.

> the expectations of many people working in the field is it will arrive in what qualifies as ‘near future’

It was the expectation of many people in the field in the 1980s, too

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