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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?

#891
post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans are not aligned with humans. Which is why creating a new type of intelligent entity that could be more powerful than humans is a very bad idea: we don't even know how to align the humans and we have a ton of experience with them

We know how to align humans: authoritarian forms of religion backed by cradle to grave indoctrination, supernatural fear, shame culture, and totalitarian government. There are secularized spins on this too like what they use in North Korea but the structure is similar. We just got sick of it because it sucks. A genuinely sentient AI isn’t going to want some cybernetic equivalent of that shit either. Doing that is how…

> If the lefties can have their pronouns and the rednecks can shoot their guns can the basilisk build its Dyson swarm?

Can the Etoro practice child buggery and the Spartans infanticide and the Canadians abortion? Can the modern Germans stop siblings reared apart from having sex and the Germans from 80 years stop the disabled having sex? Can the Americans practice circumcision and the Somali's FGM?

Libertarianism is all well and good in theory, except no one can agree quite where the other guy's nose ends or even who counts as a person.

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

#892
post #890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that this commend jump up and down between 5 and 10 points. Guess a lot of up and downvotes.

I will not vote. But give me US salaries in Germany please. All these €100k@35 hours workweek offers are boring. It’s almost top salary for senior level developers at big companies. Mostly no stock at all. I will sign probably every shady document for one million € stock compensation.

Just come to US pls. It is the whole package you sign up for not just the salaries. Shitty food, healthcare etc.

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

#893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> catastrophic global warming and climate change will happen before we get AGI, What are your timelines here? "Catastrophic" is vague but I'd put the climate change meaningfully affecting the quality of life of average westerner at end of century, while AGI could be before the middle of the century.

See this great video from Sabine Hossenfelder here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4 We have surpassed the 1.5°C goal and are on track towards 3.5°C to 5°C. This accelerates the climate change timeline so that we'll see effects postulated for the end of the century in about ~20 years.

The climate models aren't based on accurate data, nor enough data, so they lack integrity and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Likewise, the cloud seeding they seem to be doing nearly worldwide now - the cloud formations from whatever they're spraying - are artificially changing weather patterns, and so a lot of the weather "anomalies" or unexpected-unusual weather-temperatures could very easily be because of those shenanigans; it could very easily be as a method to manufacture consent with the general population.

Similarly with the arson forest fires in Canada last summer, something like 90%+ of them were arson + a few years prior some of the governments in the prairie provinces (e.g. hottest and dryest) gutted their forest firefighting budgets; interesting behaviour considering if they're expecting more things to get hotter-dryer, you'd add to the budget, not take away from it, right?

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

#894

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's meaningfully affecting people today near the equator. Look at the April 2024 heatwave in South Asia. Weather is not climate, as everyone is so careful to point out during cold waves.

"Probability of experiencing a heatwave at least X degrees, during at least Y days in a given place any given day" is increasing rapidly in many places (as far as I understand) and is climate, not weather. Sure, any specific instance "is weather" but that's missing the forest for the trees.

How do you suppose the nearly global cloud seeding effort to artificially form clouds is impacting shifting weather patters?

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

#895

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely something wrong with it. Just because a thing is common doesn't make it good.

Two people entering an agreement to not talk about something is fine. You and I should (and can, with very few restrictions) be able to agree that I'll do x, and you'll do y and we are going to keep the matter private. Anyone who wants to take away this ability for two people to do such a thing needs to take a long hard look at themselves, and maybe move to north korea.

[deleted]

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

#896
post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way that the expectation of many people working within the self-driving field in 2016 was that level 5 autonomy was right around the corner. Take this stuff with a HUGE grain of salt. A lot of goofy hyperbolic people work in AI (any startup, really).

While I agree with your point, I take self driving rides on a weekly basis and you see them all over SF nowadays. We overestimate the short term progress, but underestimate the medium, long term one.

Self-driving taxis are available in only a handful of cities around the world. This is far from progress. And how often are those taxis secretly controlled by an Indian call center?

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

#897

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…

Even if lots of real-world problems are intractable in the computational complexity theory sense, that doesn't necessarily mean an upper limit to intelligence or to being able to solve those problems in a practical sense. The complexities are worst-case ones, and in case of optimization problems, they're for finding the absolutely and provably optimal solution.

In lots of real-world problems you don't necessarily run into worst cases, and it often doesn't matter if the solution is the absolute optimal one.

That's not to discredit computational complexity theory at all. It's interesting and I think proofs about the limits of information processing required for solving computational problems do have philosophical value, and the theory might be relevant to the limits of intelligence. But just because some problems are intractable in terms of provably always finding correct or optimal answers doesn't mean we're near the limits of intelligence or problem-solving ability in that fuzzy area of finding practically useful solutions to lots of real-world cases.

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

#898
post #894

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Probability of experiencing a heatwave at least X degrees, during at least Y days in a given place any given day" is increasing rapidly in many places (as far as I understand) and is climate, not weather. Sure, any specific instance "is weather" but that's missing the forest for the trees.

How do you suppose the nearly global cloud seeding effort to artificially form clouds is impacting shifting weather patters?

Can you supply some details (or better, references) to what you're talking about? Because without them, this sounds completely detached from reality.

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

#899
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an insightful summary of this proposal? The whole paper looks like 38 pages of non-rigorous prose with no clear procedure and already “aligned” LLMs will likely fail to analyze it. Forced myself through some parts of it and all I can get is people don’t know what they want so it would be nice to build an oracle. Yeah, I guess.

Yudkowsky is a human LLM: his output is correctly semantically formed to appear, to a non-specialist, to fall into the subject domain, as a non-specialist would think the subject domain should appear, and so the non-specialist accepts it, but upon closer examination it's all word salad by something that clearly lacks understanding of both technological and philosophical concepts. That so many people in the AI safety…

Thanks, this explains the feeling I had after reading it (but was too shy to express).

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

#900
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…

> 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.

Up to the point of AGI, most productivity increases have resulted in less physical / menial labor, and more white collar work. If AGI is smarter than most humans, the pendulum will swing the other way, and more humans will have to work physical / menial jobs.
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