Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

971–980 of 1001 posts

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#971

Post by concordDance »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #862
concordDance wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like speculation on very thin grounds to me.

What would you need to consider this point as less speculative? Direct proof? Is motive not relevant at all?

In general I'm extremely skeptical of people ascribing motives to other people that they don't know personally or havent spent at least 100 hours studying. The reasons for this skepticism are a bit hard to elucidate in a quick post but include things like information sampling bias issues, having seen people make motive inferences I know to be incorrect and the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#972

Post by concordDance »

csomar wrote: post #951
concordDance wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like speculation on very thin grounds to me.

He already has precedent with OpenAI and pivoting from Open to fully Close overnight once the tech kind of worked. We know the guy is a piece of work, let’s not give him any benefit of doubt.

> We know the guy is a piece of work

No, we do not. And the same is true of any person who we know of mostly from news stories. News you read is NOT an unbiased sampling of information about a person due to all the selection effects.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#973

Post by ChatGTP »

shswkna wrote: post #952
nico wrote: post #143

This is quite incredible Could you imagine if MS had convinced the govt back in the day, to require a special license to build an operating system (this blocking Linux and everything open)? It’s essentially what’s happening now, Except it is OpenAI instead of MS, and it is AI instead of Linux AI is the new Linux, they know it, and are trying desperately to stop it from happening

What‘s incredible to me is how humans [in this case Sam Altman] have that tendency to fulfil their given role [CEO of OpenAI] with such a singleminded purpose, that they are able to block out the bigger picture entirely and rationalise away the wider consequences of their actions. It is as if most humans lack an inner compass, a set of principles, a solid value system. It is as if humans are robots, that fulfil their…

I honestly just see the whole company as a lightning rod for crazy ass problems. Anywhere from copyright issues to state sponsored hacking.

I get they're excited they can make money off it, but wow, what a nightmare. I feel if they just stuck to their principles and kept it "Open" they'd still be better off in general.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#974

Post by daniel_iversen »

pg_1234 wrote: post #634
nonethewiser wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the definition of regulatory capture. Altman should be invited to speak so that we understand the ideas in his head but anything he suggests should be categorically rejected because he’s just not in a position to be trusted. If what he suggests are good ideas then hopefully we can arrive at them in some other way with a clean chain of custody. Although I assume if he’s speaking on AI they actually intend on c…

There is also growing speculation that the current level of AI may have peaked in a bang for buck sense. If this is so, and given the concrete examples of cheap derived models learning from the first movers and rapidly (and did I mention cheaply) closing the gap to this peak, the optimal self-serving corporate play is to invite regulation. After the legislative moats go up, it is once again about who has the biggest…

If “peaked” means impact and “bang for buck” means per dollar then its only peaked if the example is allowing the population at large to use these free tools like chatbots, for fun and minimal profits. but if we consider how they can be used to manipulate people at scale with misinformation then that’s an example where I think we’ve not yet seen the peak. So we should at least thoroughly discuss or think of it of to see if we can in any way mitigate certain negative societal outcomes.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#976

Post by fennecfoxy »

Ahaha, so Google were right. Except their internal response was to be like "hey guys, we're behind and we're not going to be able to compete with open source, we need to join forces with and support them if we want to compete" whereas OpenAI's response to open source models is...this, apparently.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#977

Post by dTal »

brookst wrote: post #680
nonethewiser wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the definition of regulatory capture. Altman should be invited to speak so that we understand the ideas in his head but anything he suggests should be categorically rejected because he’s just not in a position to be trusted. If what he suggests are good ideas then hopefully we can arrive at them in some other way with a clean chain of custody. Although I assume if he’s speaking on AI they actually intend on c…

I'm not following this "good ideas must come from an ideologically pure source" thing. Shouldn't we be evaluating ideas on the merits and not categorically rejecting (or endorsing) them based on who said them?

I think what they are trying to say is that Sam Altman is very smart, but misaligned. If we assume that he is 1) sufficiently smart and 2) motivated to see OpenAI succeed, then his suggestions must be assumed to lead to a future where OpenAI is successful. If that future looks like it contradicts a future we want (for instance, user-controlled GPT-4 level AIs running locally on every machine), his suggestions should therefore be treated as reliably radioactive.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#978

Post by iNic »

rockemsockem wrote: post #940

Since no one here watched the actual hearings, I feel like I should point out that he said that nothing at the level they've created today should be eligible for any "licensing". If you did watch the hearings it would have been pretty clear that the goal of any such licensing would be to prevent the runaway AI scenario or AGI from being unknowingly being created. It's obvious that some sort of agency would need to be…

Having also watched the hearing I was pretty surprised at all the negativity in the comments. My view of Sam Altman has improved after watching the hearings. He seems to sincerely believe that he is doing the right thing. He owns zero equity in OpenAI and has no financial incentive. Of course, if you don't buy the AI might be dangerous argument then this seems just like theatrics. But there are clear threats with the existing models [1], and I believe there will be even greater threats in the future (see Superintelligence or The Precipice or Human Compatible). Also this [2], and this master list of failures [3].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.06972 [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01790 [3]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3Hs...

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#979

Post by ben_w »

jlawson wrote: post #754
AlexandrB wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Woke is a specific ideology that it places every individual into a strict hierarchy of oppressor/oppressed according to group racial and sexual identity. It rose to prominence in American culture from around 2012, starting in universities. It revolves around a set of core concepts including privilege, marginalization, oppression, and equity. Now that we've defined what woke is, I hope we can move on from this 'you ca…

That's one definition, sure.

> Now that we've defined what woke is, I hope we can move on from this 'you can't define woke' canard I keep seeing.

Trouble is, I said "[not] coherent enough to be tested" rather than "you can't define it"; and the comment you're replying to gives another definition that is a better pattern match for the following headlines:

"The woke mob can rant for all they're worth, but I'll keep adding Worcester sauce to my spag bol" - Daily Mail, 22 April 2021

"UK builders go WOKE: Study finds three quarters of tradesmen discuss their feelings with colleagues while two thirds shun the fried breakfasts and nearly half say they are history buffs" - Daily Mail, 18 June 2022

Here's another definition of "woke":

"alert to racial prejudice and discrimination" — c. 1930s AAVE

But again, here's a completely different one, one that doesn't directly touch on race issues at all:

"to be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures." — David Brooks, 2017

When a word means everything, it means nothing; when it shifts meaning under your feet as fast as "woke" has, it's as valuable for communicating as the Papiermark in the Weimar Republic was for trading.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#980

Post by ben_w »

selimthegrim wrote: post #937
ben_w wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, except in so far as that's parochial. A government-controlled… never mind artificial god, a government-controlled story teller can be devastating. I don't buy Musk's claim ChatGPT is "woke" (or even that the term is coherent enough to be tested), but I can say that each government requiring AI to locally adhere to national mythology, will create self-reinforcing cognitive blind spots, because that a…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35872321

I'd forgotten that headline (and still haven't read the content), but yes, that's one example of how it can go wrong.
Post reply on HN