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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?

#831
post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I’ve heard first hand accounts that would make it impossible for me to trust him. He’s very good at the game. But I’d not want to touch him with a barge pole.

Any stories or events you can talk about? It sounds interesting

The story of the "YC mafia" takeover of Conde Nast era reddit as summarized by ex-ceo Yishan who resigned after tiring of Altman's constant Machiavelli machinations is also hilarious and foreshadowing of future events[0]. I'm sure by the time Altman resigned from the Reddit board OpenAI had long incorporated the entire corpus into ChatGPT already.

At the moment all the engineers at OpenAI, including gdb, who currently have their credibility in tact are nerd-washing Altman's tarnished reputation by staying there. I mentioned this in a comment elsewhere but Peter Hintjens' (ZeroMQ, RIP) book called the "Psychopath Code"[1] is rather on point in this context. He notes that psychopaths are attracted to project groups that have assets and no defenses, i.e. non-profits:

If a group has assets and no defenses, it is inevitable [a psychopath] will invade the group. There is no "if" here. Indeed, you may see several psychopaths striving for advantage...[the psychopath] may be a founder, yet that is rare. If he is a founder, someone else did the hard work. Look for burned-out skeletons in the closet...He may come with grand stories, yet only by his own word. He claims authority from his connections to important people. He spends his time in the group manipulating people against each other. Or, he is absent on important business...His dominance is not earned, yet it is tangible...He breaks the social conventions of the group. Social humans feel fear and anxiety when they do this. This is a dominance mask.

A group of nerds that want to get shit done and work on important problems, who are primed to be optimistic and take what people say to their face at face value, and don't want to waste time with "people problems" are susceptible to these types of characters taking over.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

[1]https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/psychopathcode/content/chapter4...

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

#832
post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive speeder-up of a lump of lead." "Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive hot water bottle that turns a crank." "Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive rock where neutrons hit other neutrons." The point isn't how it works, the point is what it does.

which is what?

Whatever it is, over the last couple of years it got a lot smarter. Did you?

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

#833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but there is the old nature versus nurture debate. If you're raised in a home with a parent who has zero qualms about exploiting human suffering for profit, that's probably going to have an impact, right?

What are you implying here? The answer to the nature vs. nurture debate is "both", see "epigenetics" for more. When considering the influence of a parent with morally reprehensible behavior, it's important to recognize that the environment a child grows up in can indeed have a profound impact on their development. Children raised in households where unethical behaviors are normalized may adopt some of these behaviors…

> However, it is equally possible for individuals to reject these influences.

The crux of your thesis is a legal point of view, not a scientific one. It's a relic from when Natural Philosophy was new and hip, and fundamentally obviated by leaded gasoline. Discussing free will in a biological context is meaningless because the concept is defined by social coercion. It's the opposite of slavery.

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

#834
post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you’ll see that he cares a lot about the truth. Didnt he call the cave diver, a pedo and the guy who attacked Pelosi's husband they were in a gay relationship.

He doesn't seem have much of a filter because of his aspergers, but I think he genuinely believed those things. And they are more on the level of calling people names on the playground anyway. In the grand scheme of things, those are pretty shallow "lies".

He's 52. And running multiple companies. Aspergers is not a justification for his shitty behavior (and blaming this behavior on Aspergers harms perception of people with Aspergers)

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

#835

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…

Wait what? I was just listening to the former chief economist of Banknof England going on about how terrible productivity (in the UK) is.

So who is right?

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

#836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could work like academia or finance: poisonous environment (it is said), but ambitious enough people still go in to try their luck.

"finance": A bit of a broad brush, don't you think? Is working at a Landsbank or Sparkasse in Germany really so "poisonous"?

Yes, of course, narrow that down to the crazy wolf-of-wall-street subset.

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

#837
post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

> 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.

Oh okay, I didn't really grok that implication from my brief scan of the wiki page. Didn't realize it was a cascading all-water-into-Ice-Nine thing.

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

#838
post #578

It probably would be better to switch the link from the X post to the Vox article [0]. From the article: “““ It turns out there’s a very clear reason for [why no one who had once worked at OpenAI was talking]. I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, fr…

> Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it. This should not be legal.

It doesn't even make logical sense. If someone asks you about the NDA what are you supposed to say? "I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of said NDA" is pretty much confirmation of the NDA!

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

#839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There’s a very real/significant risk that AGI either literally destroys the human race > If this were true, intelligent people would have taken over society by now The premise you're replying to - one I don't think I agree with - is that a true AGI would be so much smarter, so much more powerful, that it wouldn't be accurate to describe it as "more smart". You're probably smarter than a guy who recreationally huff…

>You're probably smarter than a guy who recreationally huffs spraypaint, but you're still within the same class as intelligence. Both of you are so much more advanced than a cat, or a beetle, or a protozoan that it doesn't even make sense to make any sort of comparison. This is pseudoscientific nonsense. We have the very rigorous field of complexity theory to show how much improvement in solving various problems can…

[deleted]

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

#840
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has difficulties with middle school mathematical problems.

1.5 year old GPT-4 is getting 4/5 on an AP Calculus test, better than 95% of humans. Want to guess how much better at all educational tests GPT-5 is going to be than people?

I think the kind of problems we do in italy aren't just "solve this", they are more "understand this text, then figure out what you have to solve, then solve it"
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