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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?

#931

Post by justinclift »

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…

> The higher your margins, the more attractive your market becomes to would-be competitors.

Only in very simplistic theory. :(

In practical terms, businesses with high margins seem able to afford government protection (aka "buy some politicians").

So they lock out competition, and with their market captured, price gouging (or close to it) is the order of the day.

No real sure why anyone thinks the playbook would be any different just because "AI" is used on the production side. It's still the same people making the calls, just with extra tools available to them.

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

#932

Post by elicksaur »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #543
elicksaur wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following the legal defense of these companies, the employees wouldn’t be distributing any words. They’re distributing a model.

Please just stop. It’s highly unlikely that any relevant part of any reasonably structured NDA has any material relevance to copyright. Why do developers think that they can just intuit this stuff? This is one step away from being a more trendy “stick the constitution to the back of my car in lieu of a license place” lunacy.

Actually, I’m a licensed attorney having some fun exploring tongue-in-cheek legal arguments on the internet.

But, I could also be a dog.

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

#933

Post by int_19h »

ein0p wrote: post #508
int_19h wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is definitely not superhuman or even above average when it comes to creative problem solving, which is the relevant thing here. This is seemingly something that scales with model size, but if so, any gains here are going to be gradual, not sudden.

I’m actually not so sure they will be gradual. It’ll be like with LLMs themselves where we went from shit to gold in the span of a month when GPT 3.5 came out.

Much of what GPT 3.5 could do was already there with GPT 3. The biggest change was actually the public awareness.

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

#934

Post by api »

concordDance wrote: post #891
api wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Those are mostly behaviors that violate others autonomy or otherwise do harm, and prohibiting those is what I meant by a social contract.

It’s really a pretty narrow spectrum of behaviors: killing, imprisoning, robbing, various types of bodily autonomy violation. There are some edge cases and human specific things in there but not a lot. Most of them have to do with sex which is a peculiarly human thing anyway. I don’t think we are getting creepy perv AIs (unless we train them on 4chan and Urban Dictionary).

My point isn’t that there are no possible areas of conflict. My point is that I don’t think you need a huge amount of alignment if alignment implies sameness. You just need to deal with the points of conflict which do occur which are actually a very small and limited subset of available behaviors.

Humans have literally billions of customs and behaviors that don’t get anywhere near any of that stuff. You don’t need to even care about the vast majority of the behavior space.

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

#935

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #930
lupire wrote: post #927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utterly spineless. Do something slimy and act surprised when you get got. Rinse and repeat.

<1% chance that Sam did not know what was in those exit docs

I've been disparaging Sam and OpenAI a fair amount in this thread, but I find it plausible that Sam didn't know.

I remember a job a few years ago where they sent me employment paperwork that was for a very different position than the one I was hired for. (I ended up signing it anyways after a few minor changes, because I liked it better than the paperwork I expected to see.)

If OpenAI is a "move fast and break things" sort of organization, I expect they're shuffling a lot of paperwork that Sam isn't co-signing on. I doubt Sam's attitude towards paperwork is fundamentally different from yours or mine.

If Sam didn't know, however, that doesn't exactly reflect well on OpenAI. As Jan put it: "Act with gravitas appropriate for what you're building." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391412 IMO this incident should underscore Jan's point.

Accidentally silencing ex-employees is not what safety culture looks like at all. They've got to start hiring experts and reading books. It's a long slog ahead.

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

#936

Post by riehwvfbk »

lucianbr wrote: post #491
riehwvfbk wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't even have to be a surprise. Pretty much startup employment agreement in existence gives the company ("at the board's sole discretion") the right to repurchase your shares upon termination of employment. OpenAI's PPUs are worth $0 until they become profitable. Guess which right they'll choose to exercise if you don't sign the NDA?

Who would accept shares as valuable if the contract said they can be repurchased from you at a price of 0$? This can't be it.

You are thinking of going up against an entity worth billions of dollars and somehow winning? That doesn't happen outside of movies. You'll accept whatever they decide, or end up like those Boeing whistleblowers if you make yourself enough of a nuisance.

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

#937

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #916
MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consent isn’t legally required. An admission, however, would upset a lot of extremely online people though. Seems lose lose.

"Consent isn't legally required"? I don't understand this point. If Google gave the data to OpenAI (which they surely haven't, right?), even then they'd not have consent from users. As far as I understand it, it's not a given that there is no copyright infringement here. I don't think even criminal copyright infringement is off the table here, because it's clear it's for profit, it's clear it's wilful under 17 U.S.C.…

The parent stated:

They will gain a lot of lawsuit if they admit they trained on youtube dataset because not everyone gave consent.

But a lawsuit fails if essential elements are not met. If consent isn’t required for the lawsuit to proceed, then it doesn’t matter whether or whether not consent was granted. QED.

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

#938

Post by xpe »

candiddevmike wrote: post #313
xpe wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to share your model? Or is this more like a hunch?

We need to cut emissions, but AGI research/development is going to increase energy usage dramatically amongst all the players involved. For now, this mostly means more natural gas power. Thus accelerating our emissions instead of reducing them. For something that will not reduce the emissions long term. IMO, we should pause this for now and put these resources (human and capital) towards reducing the impact of global…

It isn't a quantitative model unless you give a prediction of some kind. In this case, dates (or date ranges) would make sense.

1. When do you predict catastrophic global warming/climate change? How do you define "catastrophic"? (Are you pegging to an average temperature increase? [1])

2. When do you predict AGI?

How much uncertainty do you have in each estimate? When you stop and think about it, are you really willing to wager that (1) will happen before (2)? You think you have enough data to make that bet?

[1] I'm not an expert in the latest recommendations, but I see that a +2.7°F increase over preindustrial levels by 2100 is a target by some: https://news.mit.edu/2023/explained-climate-benchmark-rising...

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

#939

Post by a_victorp »

bamboozled wrote: post #555
borski wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all about freedom from government tyranny and censorship. Freedom from corporate tyranny is another matter entirely, and generally relies on individuals being careful about what they agree to.

America values money just as much as it values freedom. If there is any chance the money collection activities will be disturbed, then heads will roll, violently. See the assassination attempts on president Jackson.

Nah, it values money more

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

#940

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #937
ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Consent isn't legally required"? I don't understand this point. If Google gave the data to OpenAI (which they surely haven't, right?), even then they'd not have consent from users. As far as I understand it, it's not a given that there is no copyright infringement here. I don't think even criminal copyright infringement is off the table here, because it's clear it's for profit, it's clear it's wilful under 17 U.S.C.…

The parent stated: They will gain a lot of lawsuit if they admit they trained on youtube dataset because not everyone gave consent. But a lawsuit fails if essential elements are not met. If consent isn’t required for the lawsuit to proceed, then it doesn’t matter whether or whether not consent was granted. QED.

Right - sorry, yes. I think I was reading your point back to front!
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