Why are people surprised that openAI is closed since we know they don’t share anything since chatGPT was launched and they got billion in investments
replies(4):
At this point it is just Microsoft's AI division and is no better than another Google Deepmind.
Stabilty is the true 'Open AI' and at least Meta gives most of their AI research out in the open with papers, code, architecture, etc. Unlike O̶p̶e̶n̶ClosedAI.
The surprise is more at the (EDIT: brazen) pathological lying.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810...
The press is absolutely addicted to blame, and any nuance that gets in between blame and the headline is relegated to the bottom of the article, far after the pay-wall. Oh well - I’m sure in a few more years this sort of tactic will be applied to Altman as well.
It's gotten so bad that when I read a headline implying hypocrisy, I'm actually more inclined to think the opposite, which is just as horrible a mental handicap as assuming it's correct!
#1 is whether it's free and open in the ESR sense, the more traditional FOSS banter we're familiar with. You're right to question why people would be surprised that it's not FOSS. Clearly isn't even close, in any form.
#2 is about a hazy pseudo-religious commitment, sort of "we will carry the fire of the gods down from the mountain to benefit all humanity".
It was seemingly forgotten and appears to be a Potemkin front.
This is an important step-forward in establishing that publicly, as opposed to just back-room tittering, seeing through the CEO stuff, or if you know the general thrust of, say, what the internal arguments were in 2018.
It’s popular in the AI space to claim altruism and openness; OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI (the new Musk one) all have a funky governance structure because they want to be a public good. The challenge is once any of these (or others) start to gain enough traction that they are seen as having a good chance at reaping billions in profits things change.
And it’s not just AI companies and this isn’t new. This is art of human nature and will always be.
We should be putting more emphasis and attention on truly open AI models (open training data, training source code & hyperparameters, model source code, weights) so the benefits of AI accrue to the public and not just a few companies.
[edit - eliminated specific company mentions]
It would be different, maybe, if everybody else in the industry stood aside and let OpenAI monopolize development of transformer-style-AI (or whatever it is we're calling this) for the common good. But nobody did that; the opposite thing happened. This space has been a Gem Saloon knife fight just waiting to pop off for the entirety of OpenAI's existance.
I see this type of question a lot when something is considered common knowledge in whatever online bubble someone is part of.
But the only way to go from “everybody knows” to documented fact is through investigative journalism and reporting. The point of these stories is not to say “wow we are so surprised”, the point is to say “this company is in fact lying and we have the documentation to prove it.”
Conflict of interest rules in particular might, as the article says, help clarify the ??? of last year's… thing… with firing Altman.
Possibly.
I mean, still I can't see how all the interim CEOs (chosen by the board themselves!) each ultimately deciding to side with Altman, works for almost any scenario other than the board itself having been blackmailed by some outside entity… but that may just be a failure of imagination on my part.
This is only the 2nd or 3rd thing that seems to me even a little incoherent with their initially stated position, the other certain one being the mystery of why the board couldn't find anyone to replace Altman who didn't very quickly decide to take his side, and the other possible one being asking for a profit making subsidiary to raise capital (though at the time all the criticism I remember was people saying they couldn't realistically reach x100 and now it's people ignoring that it's limited to only x100).
How is this different than, “I read a scientific paper, and unlocked millions of dollars of value, and all it cost was $250 for 8 pages of text. So I guess Axel-Springer is a public good.”?
Just buying and selling something doesn’t make it a public good. Valuable sure, but selling something for a profit makes it by definition not a public good.
It's honestly kind of frustrating to me how the tech space continues to just excuse this. Every major new technology since I've been paying attention (2004 ish?) has gone this exact same way. Someone builds some cool new thing, then dillholes with money invest in it, it becomes a product, it becomes enshittified, and people bemoan that process while looking for new shiny things. Like, I'm all for new shiny things, but what if we just stopped letting the rest become enshittified?
As much as people have told me all my life that the profit motive makes companies compete to deliver the best products, I don't know that I've ever actually seen that pan out in my fucking life. What it does is it flattens all products offered in a given market to whatever set of often highly arbitrary and random aspects all the competitors seem to think is the most important. For an example, look at short form video, which started with Vine, was perfected by TikTok, and is now being hamfisted into Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube despite not really making any sense in those contexts. But the "market" decided that short form video is important, therefore everything must now have it even if it makes no sense in the larger product.
They state something publicly, but are headed to completely different trajectory in reality.
This is enough for me.
In fact, I would consider changing goals publicly to be better than not following the goals.
Relying on a system to say that you are not charging correctly sounds rather like UK's Post Office Horizon system and we know that ChatGPT will hallucinate things,
This article is just pointing out that OpenAI went back on their promises of financial transparency.
More seriously, this is both an obvious outcome, and also feels a bit shady?
It's true that OpenAI needs A LOT of money/capital, and so needs funding and partnerships which leads to this kind of thing.
But it's also true that the only reason they got exist in the first place and got to this point, is by pitching themselves as an 'open', almost public good kind of company and took donations based on this.
Wired claims OpenAI’s “reports to US tax authorities have from its founding said that any member of the public can review copies of its governing documents, financial statements, and conflict of interest rules.” That was apparently a lie.
> Changing their goals is also not lying
Changing a forward-looking commitment is. Particularly when it changes the moment it’s called.
The article doesn't say that. It says they launched OpenAI to be transparent but now it isn't. Maybe your "they" is ambiguous, does it refer to OpenAI or wealthy entrepreneurs including Musk?
In the article the they isn't ambiguous, but it says something different overall:
>Wealthy tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk launched OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab that they said would involve society and the public in the development of powerful AI, unlike Google and other giant tech companies working behind closed doors. In line with that spirit, OpenAI’s reports to US tax authorities have from its founding said that any member of the public can review copies of its governing documents, financial statements, and conflict of interest rules.
They refers to the entrepreneurs, but it says they said OpenAI would be transparent. In your rewording they presumably refers to the entrepreneurs, but now you make it sound like it says the entrepreneurs now aren't transparent, rather than OpenAI.
What supports this? In Column B are conventionally-structured AI projects.
Whatever has been written can be unwritten and if that fails, just start a new company with the same employees.
It seems like this situation is serious enough that we cannot let this kind of work be privatized.
Not interested in entertaining all the "this is the norm" arguments, that's just an attempt at getting people to normalize this behavior.
Does anyone know if the Center of AI Safety acting for the public good and is this on their radar?
Sure? It’s like the folks who write $MSFT instead of Microsoft. I know what they mean. But it’s going to cheapen their argument for anyone who doesn’t already agree with them.
OpenAI is making people rich and America look good, all while not doing anything obviously harmful to the public interest. They’re not a juicy target for anyone in the public sphere. If any one of those changes, OpenAI and possibly its leadership are in extremely hot water with the authorities.
The only way the public would benefit from these organizations is if the public are owners and there isn’t really a mechanism for that here anywhere.
What if we just made it illegal for corporate entities (including nonprofits) to lie? If a company promises to undertake some action that's within its capacity (as opposed to stating goals for a future which may or may not be achievable due to external conditions), then it has to do with a specified timeframe and if it doesn't happen they can be sued or prosecuted.
> But then they will just avoid making promises
And the markets they operate in, whether commercial or not, will judge them accordingly.
The only organizations for which that is a persistent requirement are typically things like priest hoods
Yeah, gonna have to challenge that:
1. We don't really if what they are doing is harming public interest, because we dont have access to much information about whats happening behind the scenes.
2. And there is enough information about this tech that leads to the possibility of it causing systemic damage to society if its not correctly controlled.
That’s potentially harmful.
> is enough information about this tech that leads to the possibility of it causing systemic damage
Far from established. Hypothetically harmful. Obvious harm would need to be present and provable. (Otherwise, it’s a political question.)
As for "too important to privatize"... practically all the important work in the world is done by private companies. It wasn't the government who just created vaccines for Covid. It isn't the government producing weapons for defense. It's not Joe B producing houses or electricity or cars or planes. That's not to say the government doesn't do anything but the idea that the dividing line for government work is "super important work" is wildly wrong and it's much closer to the inverse.
What's needed is closer to a government agency like NASA, with multiple independent inspectors like IAEA empowered by law to establish guardrails, report to congress, and pump the brakes if needed. Think Gibson's "Turing Agency."
They could mandate open sourcing the technology that is developed, maintain feedback channels with private and public enterprises, and provide the basis for sensible use of narrow AI while we collectively fund sensible safety, cognition, consciousness, and AGI research.
If we woke up tomorrow to aliens visiting us from a distant galaxy, and one alien was 100 times more intelligent and capable than the average human, we would be confronted with something terrifying.
Stuart Russell likens AI to such an alien giving us a heads up that it's on the way, and we may be looking at several years to several decades before the alien/AI arrives. We have a chance to get our shit together sufficient to meet the challenges we may face - whether or not you believe AI could pose an existential threat, or that it could destabilize civilization in horrible ways, it's probably unarguably rational to establish institutions and frank discussions now, well before any potential crisis.
Heck, it's not like we hold our governments to account for spending at the scale of NASA - even a few tens of billions is a drop in the bucket, and it could also be a federal jobs program, incentivizing careers and research in a crucial technology sector.
Allowing self-regulated private sector corporations operating in the tech market to be the fundamental drivers of AI is probably a recipe for dystopian abuses. This will, regardless of intetions, lead to further corrosion of individual rights to free expression, privacy, intellectual property, and so on. Even if a majority of the negative impact isn't regulatory or "official" in nature, allowing these companies to impose cultural shifts on us is a terrible thing.
Companies and corporations should be subject to humans, not infringe on human agency. Right now we have companies that are effectively outside the control of any individual human, even the most principled and respectable CEOs, because the legal rules we operate them by are not aligned with the well-being of society at large, but the group of people who have invested time and/or money in the legal construct. It's worked pretty well, but at the speed and scale of the modern Tech industry, it's very clear that our governmental and social institutions are not equipped to mitigate the harms.
NASA and the space race are probably the most recent and successful analogy to the quest for AGI, so maybe that's a solution worth trying again.
I'm not an FSF hippie or anything (meant that in an endearing way), but even I know if it's missing these it can't be called "open source" in the first place.
> Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
How many of those conventionally structured AI projects existed before ChatGPT?
Maybe the donations aren't the ONLY reason, maybe they could have done a normal rounding of funding and got here, but they didn't.
I do think it's fair to say that while they got $130m in donations they needed A LOT more money, and so they need to raise somewhere, somehow. To me it's a big gray area though.
I don't know if I'd put this in terms of a "lie" or not, but OpenAI's stated principles and goals are not backed up by their actions. They have mined other people's works in order to build something that they purport as being for the benefit of mankind in some way, when their actions actually indicate that they've mined other people's work in order to build something for the purpose of massively increasing their own power and wealth.
I'd have more respect for them if they were at least honest about their intentions.
Treat AI (or AGI(?) more specifically) as global Utility which needs us to put ALL our Technology Points into the "Information Age Base Level 2" skill points and create a new manner in dealing with the next layer in Human Society, as is rapidly gestating. https://i.imgur.com/P1LBKFL.png
I feel this is different than what is meant by Alignment?
It seems as though general Humanity is not handling this well, but it appears that there is an F-ton of opaque behavior amongst the inner circle of the AI pyramid that we all will just be involuntarily entangled in?
I don't mean to sound bleak - just that feels as though that the reality coming down the conveyor....
Honestly? The people. Calculate the distance to (American) venture capital and the chance they go bad is the inverse of that. Linus, Guido, Ian, Jean-Baptiste Kempf of VLC fame, who turned down seven figures, what they all have in common is that they're not in that orbit and had their roots in academia and open source or free software.
The "Defense of Marriage Act" comes to mind. There was one so bad that a judge ordered the authors to change it, but I can't find it at the moment.
The only open question is do we want the company that creates AGI to be American or Chinese? Government intervention by people that know nothing about technology (watch any congressional hearing) is not going to help anyone and will only serve to ensure China wins the race.
People are not interchangeable.
Most employees may have bills to pay, and will follow the money. The ones that matter most would have different motivation.
Of course, of your sole goal is to create a husk that milks the achievement of the original team as long as it lasts and nothing else — sure, you can do that.
But the "organizational desires" are still desires of people in the organization. And if those people are the ducks that lay the golden eggs, it might not be the smartest move to ignore them to prioritize the desires of the market for those eggs.
The market is all too happy to kill the ducks if it means more, cheaper eggs today.
Which is, as the adage goes, why we can't have the good things.
That's what some people assert, but there's no solid reason to assume that's true. We don't even know if it's in the realm of the possible.
> The only open question is do we want the company that creates AGI to be American or Chinese?
That's far from the only question. I don't even think it's in the top 10 of the list of important questions.
That's only under the assumption that the split with Altman was due to the doomers vs bloomers conflict and not just a dirty move from OpenAI board member Adam D'Angelo, trying to protect his investment in Quora's AI Poe.
"That's what some people assert, but there's no solid reason to assume that's true. We don't even know if it's in the realm of the possible"
True, but there are a lot of very smart people getting handed huge amounts of money by other very smart people that seem to think it is.
"string theory breakthrough to unify relativity and quantium mechanics"
"The future will have flying cars and robots helping in the kitchen by 2000"
"Agi is going to happen 'soon'"
We got a rocket that landed like it was out of a 1950's black and white B movie... and this time without strings. We got Star Trek communicators. The rest of it is fantasy and wishful thinking that never quite manages to show up...
Lacking a fundamental undemanding of what is holding you back from having the breakthrough, means you're never going to have the breakthrough.
Credit to the AI folks, they have produced insights and breakthroughs and usable "stuff" unlike the string theory nerds.
The comment about all the important work in the world being done by private companies was indeed a global comment. You may not realize this, but covid vaccines were made by astrazeneca (UK), BioNTech (Germany), several US companies and others. Defense companies are located in every major economy. Most countries have power systems which are privately owned. Commercial planes are mostly built by one large French company and one large US company. All the large producers of cars around the world are private companies - big ones exist in the US, Japan, various European countries, Korea and China.
https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=39123056
---
Has the following already been addressed, or even generally broached;
Treat AI (or AGI(?) more specifically) as global Utility which needs us to put ALL our Technology Points into the "Information Age Base Level 2" skill points and create a new manner in dealing with the next layer in Human Society, as is rapidly gestating. https://i.imgur.com/P1LBKFL.png
I feel this is different than what is meant by Alignment?
It seems as though general Humanity is not handling this well, but it appears that there is an F-ton of opaque behavior amongst the inner circle of the AI pyramid that we all will just be involuntarily entangled in?
I don't mean to sound bleak - just that feels as though that the reality coming down the conveyor....
So let the fleas look at their feet...
Seriously - AI isnt the demise if Humanity - greed.ai is.
EDIT:
I plugged in the following prompt to my local thingy... It spit this out:
-
>>>P: "AI is not the demise of Humanity, greed.ai is. Show how greedy humans in charge of AI entanglements are holding the entire of earth." - https://i.imgur.com/OmGLYrj.jpg
Suppose there was a country where collectivism was prioritized. Harmony, conformity and agreeing with others is a point of pride.
Suppose both countries have similar government structures that allow ~everyone to vote. Would it really be surprising that the first country regularly has 50-50 splits, and the second country has virtually unanimous 100-0 voting outcomes? Is that outcome enough basis to judge whether one is "democratic" or not?
Yes, you have; you're just misidentifying the product. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. do not make products for you and I, their users. We're just a side effect. Their actual products are advertising access to your eyeballs, and big data. Those products are highly optimized to serve their actual customers--which aren't you and I. The profit motive is working just fine. It's just that you and I aren't the customers; we're third parties who get hit by the negative externalities.
The missing piece of the "profit motive" rhetoric has always been that, like any human motivation, it needs an underlying social context that sets reasonable boundaries in order to work. One of those reasonable boundaries used to be that your users should be your customers; users should not be an externality. Unfortunately big tech has now either forgotten or wilfully ignored that boundary.
tl;dr: You're allowed to lie, as a person or a corporation, as long as the lie doesn't meet pretty high bars for criminal behavior or public harm.
Heck, you can even shout fire in a crowded theater, despite the famous quote that says you can't.
λ>:t ( $ ) . ( $ )
( $ ) . ( $ ) :: (a -> b) -> a -> b
Isn't there entire processes about "We suspect they doing something illegal behind the scenes so lets go and check"? Isn't that what search warrants for example is all about? Or senate/congress inquiry or whatever they're called?
Defense of Marriage Act is actually an exception. The people supporting it honestly thought it was defending marriage, and the supportive public knew exactly what it did.
It passed with a veto proof majority a few weeks before a presidential election, received tons of press, and nobody was confused about what it did.
Whereas the Inflation Reduction Act had absolutely nothing to do with reducing inflation.
> Maybe your "they" is ambiguous, does it refer to OpenAI or wealthy entrepreneurs including Musk?
The wealthy entrepreneurs have launched it and, by implication, control it. Thus, OpenAI is opaque solely by the choice of the wealthy entrepreneurs.
do they actually want to be a public good or do they want you to think they want to be a public good?
The point is that it's disingenuous to lead with Elon Musk by name, and no other founders or executives by name, when he presumably had nothing to do with the policy change.
I think the point is it would be good to investigate future hypothetical harm before it becomes present and provable, at which point it’s too late.
We know it's possible, because you typed it. Unless you believe in the metaphysical, then it is proven possible, with physical systems. The question is then, can the fundamental aspects of intelligence, in the biological systems, be practically emulated in other systems?
With respect to inquries - if congressman X asks Sam Altman for the details of an algorithm at a congressional hearing, he is not obliged to answer. He can get his lawyer and argue the case - this happens and cases go to the supreme court to decide whether the question is in scope of the powers granted to congress under the consitution. The question has to be directly applicable to one of the responsibilities of congress, which are enumerated in the constitution. In practice redacted documents, limiting of question scope etc are discussed and worked around. Also in practice it's a bit of a political circus where most questions are for show rather than substance and you'll not really see them ask questions that would result in confidential information been given.
I don't actually take the stance as you stated it -- but if I did, I'd say that would mean it doesn't matter at all what nation develops it because the consequences would be disastrous no matter who did it first.
> a lot of very smart people getting handed huge amounts of money by other very smart people that seem to think it is.
Ignoring whether or not the people funding this are "very smart" (I don't know if they are or not), there are also a lot of very smart people who think that it isn't. Just the fact that some very smart people think such a thing isn't evidence that they're correct.
You also have to keep in mind that the more intelligent a person is, the easier it is for them to convince themselves of pretty much anything.
Right now, it's all just a battle of opinions.
However, I am a curious observer of the technology industry and I read the article above to understand how this company is behaving in this new spring of its life.
Ain’t nothing wrong with keeping up some news, eh?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestine/comments/18mvigw/openai_h...
[2] https://twitter.com/ArarMaher/status/1736519079102476766
Market forces are broad and operate at every level of power, hard and soft.
If you hire people who want to cash out then you’ll get people who prioritize prospects for cashing out
Set another way they did not focus on the theoretical public mission enough that it was core to the every day being of the organization much like it is for Medicins San Frontiers etc.
that’s the real lesson here. we can want to redo OpenAI all we want but the people will not use their discretion in funding it until they can make a return
I believe that's what your parent comment was actually talking about. I read it saying the people in power on paper was the previous board, and the people actually in power were the employees (which by the way is an interesting inversion of how it usually is)
All the employees wanted to simply get rich and support Sam Altman's and his mission to get them there (why else would be a revolt upon his firing?) so with that in mind, I can't help but to think that self-deception is the best weapon people have to use a facade for their greed.
I frankly have more respect for scammers, at least they know firmly where they stand on a moral spectrum.
But the structure is expensive and risky, tossing it aside once traction is made is the plan.
[1] RIP "they switched everyone to prepaid billing!!!11!" I ate probably -10 saying "no, you got that email saying it was available because it was a feature announced at devday as coming soon"
OpenAI etc have to reign in how much they abuse their lead because after some price point it becomes better to take the quality hit and use an open source model. Similarly, new competitors are forced to treat the Facebook models as a baseline, which increases their costs.
See also: "Digital Versatile Disc"
The precursor form (training data etc) is only needed if you want to recreate it from scratch. Which is too expensive to bother with.
Sure. That’s why we have the fourth estate. We don’t have anything close to what it would take to launch inquiries.
“The public” in this case refers to all people irrespective of their ability to pay
It only takes 51% of the vote to outlaw opposition.
Just recently, the US democratic convention stripped all the voters in New Hampshire from their votes the presidential candidates.
String theory is waste of time and has been for awhile now. The best and brightest couldn't make it map onto reality in any way, and now the next generation of best and brightest are working either on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.
The robots are also coming sooner than we think. They won't be like Rosey from the Jetsons, but they'll get there.
AGI may or may not happen soon, it's too early to tell. True AGI is probably 100 years away or more. Lt. Cmdr. Data isn't coming any time soon. A half-ass approximation that "appears" mostly human in it's reasoning and interaction is probably 3-10 years off.
Yeap... you get it, the guy above you doesn't.
George Carlin said it best, "It's a big club... AND YOU AIN'T IN IT!"
Liberal means less intervention from the state, it has literally changed its meaning to soft-socialism.
Democratic is not when you’re elected as part of Boris Johnson on a program to leave the EU, and 16% of elected MPs left his party after the vote and rejoined the Libdems (withouth giving a choice to electors, nor resigning as MP) to fight to stay in EU, coining the phrase “What voters really meant was stay in the EU with conditions.”
I focussed on England, but lib’dems in every EU country have the same betrayal.
It’s not just that there are billions to be made (they always believed that) it’s that people are making billions right now turning them into a paper tiger
When only the tech sector cares about a company it’s fairly straightforward for them to be values driven - necessary even. Engineers generally, especially early adopters, are thoughtful & ethical. They also tend to be fact driven in assessing a company’s intentions.
Once a company exits the tech culture bubble, misinformation & political footballs are the game. Defending against it is something every company learns quick. It is existential & the playing field is perpetually unfair.
This didn’t happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_British_politi...
I think what you are referring to is the tory MPs who defied the government and voted with the opposition on a single vote.
At that time literally one of them permanently defected, very visibly crossing the floor. Many of the rest were booted out of the parliamentary party by Boris, only to be readmitted later (including my MP, who I do not vote for).
There were two or three who joined minor parties, and a handful ended up in the Lib Dems afterwards, but there was never a mass defection to the lib dems, who only have 15 MPs now; 15% of the 2019 Tories would be over 50.
Either way I think your summary misunderstands the reasons all of that happened, and the principles behind it.
Blaming "human nature" is an excuse that is popular among egomaniacs, but on even brief inspection it is transparently thin: Human nature includes plenty of non-profits and people who did great things for humanity for little or no gain (scientists, soldiers, public servants, even some sofware developers). It also includes people who have done horrible things.
Human nature really is that we have a choice. It's both a very old and fundamental part of human nature:
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your
eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing
good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and
that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be
desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof,
and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her;
and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that
they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and
made themselves aprons.
Our communities don't work on their own; they don't work only by government action; it takes all of us. When we forget that, our communities fall apart, if you haven't noticed yet.
I don't find it hard to believe that they in fact wanted to build something new and innovative AND get rich in the process. Which is not unreasonable and no "self-deception" needs to be involved in the process. OpenAI would be dead in the war if they stuck to their principles.
> I frankly have more respect for scammers, at least they know firmly where they stand on a moral spectrum.
Why? You need massive amounts of money and resources to build something useful. Especially in tech private for profit enterprises seem to be best positioned to achieve that (the same applies to opensource, Linux etc. would be a niche project with limited usefulness without corporate backing).
Except that's not really true. Almost everyone on the board were either VCs themselves or had very strong ties to the them. In any case OpenAI would be irrelevant without significant investments from organizations/people who want a return on them. So it's basically a moot point: no VCs/big corporations = no fancy,extremely expensive to train & develop LLMs.
It always rubs me the wrong way when people justify going for more money as "having bills to pay". No they don't, this makes it seems as if they're down on their luck and have to hustle to pay bills which is far from reality. I am not shaming people for wanting more money of course, but after a certain threshold, framing it as an external necessity is dishonest.
IF people hated him he would've been dropped. Microsoft and everybody else only moved forward because they knew they wouldn't get public backlash. Seems everyone fails to remember their own mob mentality. People here on HN were practically worshipping the guy.
Statistically most people commenting here right now were NOT supporting his firing and now you've all flipped and are saying stuff like: "yeah he should've been fired." Seriously?
I don't blame the governance. They tried their best. It's the public that screwed up. (Very likely to be YOU, dear reader)
Without public support the leadership literally only had enemies at every angle and they have nowhere to turn. Imagine what that must have felt like for those members of the board. Powerful corporations threatening aspects of their livelihoods (of course this happened, you can't force a leader to voluntarily step down without some form of a serious threat) and the entire world hating on them for doing such a "stupid" move as everyone thought of it at the time.
I'm ashamed at humanity. I look at this thread and I'm seriously thinking, what in the fuck? It's like everyone forgot what they were doing. And they still twist it to blame them as if they weren't "powerful" enough to stop it. Are you kidding?
Seems arbitrary. There is nothing about that act that even borders on defending marriage, and people supporting it know that. It's a comic misnomer.
In lesser known places such as Wall St, practices like self dealing are considered illegal. In venture they’re often celebrated. Go figure.
I think there’s a general distaste towards setting up networks of companies B, C, D, planning to profit from a success of another company A where a single person controls all the companies and there’s a reasonable expectation of plans to divert business from A towards B, C, D.
I don’t know the details but there seems to be some gripe about it. I’m speculating.
Since open source has been a successful business model in software, we might see another closed vs open battle in AI: Facebook and Google publish their models open source now.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
I don't even think the distinction is important. The "system" should be open, and that includes data central to the system's operation within certain bounds.
You can open source parts of a system at whichever fine slice you wish, you just have the part which is open A and the part which isn't B.
It's the value of A and B being open that matters, not what A and B are composed of.
The things I saw didn't make any sense, so I can't say that it proves anything other than the existence of hidden information.
The board fired him, and they chose a replacement. The replacement sided with Altman. This repeated several times. The board was (reportedly) OK with closing down the entire business on the grounds of their charter.
Why didn't the board do that? And why did their chosen replacements, not individually but all of them in sequence, side with the person they fired?
My only guess is the board was blackmailed. It's just a guess — it's the only thing I can think of that fits the facts, and I'm well aware that this may be a failure of imagination on my part, and want to emphasise that this shouldn't be construed as anything more than a low-confidence guess by someone who has only seen the same news as everyone else.
It makes no sense to me.
I don't mean that God, supposedly all good and all knowing, didn't know about the serpent and intervene at the time — despite Christian theology being monotheist, I think the original tales were polytheistic, and the deity of the Garden of Eden was never meant to have those attributes[0].
I mean why was it appropriate to punish them for something they did in a state of naivety, and which was, within the logic of the story, both prior to and the direct cause of gaining knowledge of the difference between good and evil? It's like your parents suing you to recover the cost of sending you to school.
[0] Further tangent: if they're al the same god, why did it take 6 days to make the world (well, cosmos) and all the things in it, but 40 days to flood the Earth to cleanse it of all human and animal life except for the ark? It's fine if they're different gods, a creator deity with all that cosmic power doesn't need to care so much about small details like good and evil, and a smaller and more personal god that does care about good and evil doesn't need to have such cosmic power.
It is a metaphor that they are still working class. You can earn 500k-1M/year in salary and be working class. Your monthly expenses may be > than your salary and you need it to keep working to get at the same QOL.
Back to reality on this topic. There is nothing wrong with OpenAI employees voting to keep the company for profit and maximizing their own personal gains.
I don't see how this can be anything close to "Evil".
The bible isn't a book by an author (Like the Quran claims to be). It is a mix/match of stories over long periods of time from different people. You read it as parables from the times, not as a history lesson.
Never claim financial statements are accurate! Point to the auditor’s opinion. That being said, who audits OpenAI? I’m having difficulty finding the information online.
But to characterize it as something other then overwhelming support to reinstate Sam altman would be false.
Hence why I said most people (key word: most) are just flip flopping with the background trends. Mob mentality.
He was fired from y combinator and the entire board wanted to fire his ass too.
Therefore by this logic he should have universal support for reinstatement and the entire board should be vilified? Makes no sense. But this is exactly the direction of the Mob and was the general reaction on HN.
It was ambigiuose whether Sam was a problem and that makes ambigiuose treatment and investigation warranted. The proper reaction is: "wtf is going on? Let's find out" Instead what he got was hero worship. The public was literally condemning the board and worshipping the guy with no evidence.
And now with even more ambiguous and suspicious facts everyone here is suddenly "level headed." Yeah that's bs. What's going on is mostly everyone here is just going with the flow and adopting the background trends and sentiments. Mob mentality all the way.
PrivatePropery <- was a website in South Africa setup in a market where all real-estate sales was controlled and gate kept by real-estate agents (assisted by Lawyers, various government bodies and even legislation), and its purpose was to allow "Private" individuals to put up their own properties for rent or sale.
Predictably, it eventually got take over by real-estate agents that posed as "private" sellers, and then that caused the entire site to support "Agents" as a concept and here we are. Today, you will hardly ever find a private individual on there and the company makes no effort at all to root them out. The agents just spam all their listings, lie on the metadata for properties, add duplicates, make zero-effort postings and use skew photos, the works.
Another example if you will, AirBnB. Taken over (I exaggerate a bit) by management companies that own many many properties and allocate an "agent" to oversee each property. At least here in South Africa, that is. Might not be that true in other countries, but it's on its way there. Mark my words.
Or more:
Pricecheck <-- Another South African website. Still claims to be a price-comparison website, but is really just like Google shopping, that doesn't do any scraping of prices, but simply "partners" with websites that give it a kickback after a user purchases something.
I live in an exurb of DC, in one of the highest cost of living areas with one of the highest median income in the world.
I have 3 kids who are all in middle and early high school (the most expensive time) and a mortgage and literally just did the math on what my MINIMUM income would need to be in order to maintain a extremely comfortable lifestyle and it’s between $80-100k a year.
Anyone making more than ~100k a year isn’t living paycheck to paycheck unless they are spending way more than their means - which is actually most people
Why do you think I'm reading it like that? I thought me saying "nah, polytheism" might have been a hint that I don't take it at all literally.
Likewise that I was referring to the internal logic of the story.
A basic education in economics (and manners) might be in order.
I think they had no choice at that point but to fire Sam and remove him from the board. When that turned into a shitshow and they faced personal threats, they resigned to let a new board figure out a way out of this mess.
Also, I am not surprised the new board isn't being completely open because they are still probably trying to figure out how to fix their governance problems.
Correct!
> I think they had no choice at that point but to fire Sam and remove him from the board. When that turned into a shitshow and they faced personal threats, they resigned to let a new board figure out a way out of this mess.
As someone with no experience with non-profit governance, this does not seem coherent with (1) they didn't just say that, (2) none of their own choices for replacement CEO were willing to go along with this, and this happened with several replacements in a row.
For (1) I'd be willing to just assume good faith on their part, even though it seems odd; but (2) is the one which seems extremely weird to the point that I find myself unable to reconcile.
It would also not be compatible with the reports they were willing to close the company on grounds of it being a danger to humanity, but I'm not sure how reliable that news story was.
The goal of AGI is not to emulate a human. AGI will be an alien intelligence and will almost immediately surpass human intelligence. Looking for an android is like asking how good a salsa verde a pizza restaurant can make.
Maybe you should explain your blackmail theory and we could see which idea makes the most sense.
To some extent but it's much more egregious in companies like OpenAI where they promoted themselves as being founded for a specific purpose which they then did a complete U-turn on.
It's more like a non-profit saying they're being founded to provide free water to children in Africa and then it turns out that they're actually selling the water to the children. (Yeah, scamming is maybe part of human nature too, but thankfully most people don't resort to that.)
If it had been called the “Support Healthcare for Veterans Act” or even “Interstate Marriage Consistency Act” it would have been dubious.
But the 70% of Americans who opposed gay marriage correctly understood its meaning, as did the gay rights activists who saw gay marriage as unobtainable.
This wasn’t a confusing or misleading title, as is evidenced by the fact that nobody was confused or misled.
that's because most of those people did not work for the mission-focused parent OpenAI company (which the board oversaw) but it's highly-profit-driven-subservient-to-Microsoft child company (who were happy to jump to Microsoft if their jobs were threatened; no ding against them as they hadn't signed up to the original mission-driven company in the first place).
it's important to separate the two entities in order to properly understand the scenario here
Yes, the public was to blame, but inherently the board was doomed because OpenAI had morphed from a public benefit mission-driven company to a profit-driven one heavily funded by MSFT which expected its due return. Once the for-profit "sub"-company, the parent mission-driven company was doomed, because most people were going to be working for the profit-driven child company and therefore had different goals (i.e., salary, options) than the mission-driven parent company (scientific breakthroughs, responsible creation/development of AI). This is why the employees (of the child company) revolted and supported Sam (who had reneged on OpenAI's mission and gone full capitalist like any other tech mogul out there). The only question in my mind was whether "Open"AI was always a scam from the start to get attention or a genuine pivot (which the board unsuccessfully tried to stop).
And now responsible AI development is gone and everyone is chasing the money, just like the social media companies did, and well, we know how that ended up (Facebook, Twitter).
Sad day indeed.
OpenAI was explicitly founded to NOT do that.
I hope it succeeds, but after decades of research there is still no demonstrable breakthrough in fusion (that outputs more energy than required as input)
it turned out that AI research required $ billions to run the LLMs, something that was not originally anticipated; and the only way to get that kind of money is to sell your future (and your soul) to investors who want to see a substantial return
Oh, I apologize. I have idiotism allergies.
>"practically all" was the initial statement
Yeah, and my original statement still stands.
Go open a history book or something. Or find out what "N" in "NSF" stands for, or realize that China exist.
In a political direct action context a really effective way to take over an organization from the inside is called “salting.”
I believe that’s what Altman very effectively did and while a few people called it out at the time, Altman was able to realign the org by amplifying and then exploiting everyones greed.
1. Some party, for some reason, wants to slow down AI development. There are many people motivated to do this. Assume one of them had means and opportunity.
2. The board members wake up to a malicious message ordering them to do ${something} "or ${secret} will be revealed!" (this ${something} could have been many things, so long as it happened to be compatible with firing Altman).
3. The board fires Altman.
4. The board cannot reveal the true reason why they fired Altman, because that would reveal the thing(s) they're being blackmailed over, so they have to make up a different excuse to give to the CEOs they've named as a replacement. As this is done in a hurry under high stress, the story the board arrives at is fundamentally not very good.
5. The replacement CEO does not buy the story given by the board because it's not very well thought-out, and sides with Altman. This repeats a few times.
6. When it becomes clear the board is not capable of winning this battle, because none of the CEOs they hire will carry out their orders, the blackmailer becomes convinced there's no point even trying to hold the board to this threat (there doesn't need to be communication between the board and the blackmailer for this to work, but it's not ruled out either).
While it does seem to fit the observables, I do want to again emphasise that I don't put high probability on this scenario — it's just marginally less improbable than the other ones I've heard, which is a really low bar because none made sense.
There is something wrong if it harms others. For example, if AI is a risk to other people outside the company, and their vote increases that risk, then it's wrong (depending on the amount of risk).
Maximizing personal gains, despite recent hype, does not at all make something right. In fact, it's possibly the leading cause of doing wrong.
> Back to reality
Maybe you can come up with some better ideas than just offhand dismissal of ideas that have been embraced, examined, and followed by a great many humans for thousands of years. That's reality.
That's the problem. I think the first question is interesting (and a fundamental theological question - similar to why does God make people 'harden their hearts' and do evil at times), it's applying the Bible to the outside world.
The second question just seems purely internal - how does that affect our external reality?
It's like Trump. Is trump really a snake? depends on who you ask but there's controversy around trump and in direct parallel there's controversy about Sam as well.
It doesn't have to — I can say a plot item in Star Trek makes no sense just as easily.
That said, I guess I am curious what this story might have meant to be, at one time? How could it be reinterpreted in a way that isn't immediately self-defeating?
And I really don't get how people take this literally, given apparent contradictions like this, but biblical literalists are too alien to my world view for any explanation to really help me understand how they perceive things.
> It doesn't have to — I can say a plot item in Star Trek makes no sense just as easily.
We can say anything we like, but my question is really, what does it matter? Internal consistency matters much more to Star Trek, an adventure and grist for geeking-out, than the Bible, which provides material to help us spiritually. The point of the Biblical story is, what can we learn?
Of the people, by the people, for the people.
a written grant by a country's legislative or sovereign power, by which a body such as a company, college, or city is founded and its rights and privileges defined. "the town received a charter from the Emperor"
The legislative process for a charter says otherwise. We, the people, define what the government is and by extension what the rights a company has. The fact that states don't enforce the revocation of a company's charter doesn't mean that the power, given by the people, to the government doesn't exist.
Intel does everything in it's power to stymie AMD in the late 80s, all of the 90s, and the early 2000s - that's an established fact on record. It wasn't a "grand conspiracy", it was just the dominant power exerting it's force.
I am not sure if that's accurate based on the researchers I read and listen to.
> AGI will be an alien intelligence
Possibly. Remains to be seen.
> and will almost immediately surpass human intelligence.
There's no proof that will be the case, we just assume that because of the advancement of technology in the past 50 years. It may well be an accurate assumption, then again it may not be. This is very much a case of, "We won't know until it happens."
That Christians worship an unreasonable, malicious or mad, god with unreasonable standards. "Even when you were a gullible idiot and faced an influence I'd not accounted for despite being all knowing, I'm still going to punish you and all your offspring forever for what you did wrong, especially the woman and that's why childbirth hurts."
That, even as literature, it shows the human condition is one of the vibes of a story without paying attention to details, one where just-so stories which get written backwards from observables don't need to make logical sense when read forwards in order to convince people.
Like I said, the difference world view is alien. I assume the same is true in reverse, and that True Believers (and perhaps not even casual holiday-only believers) can't understand how I might not see things the way they do.
You were using the NSF budget as a measure of importance of its work.
You also compared it to the GDP, which only makes sense if you think that all work done is equally important. How very socialist of you.
>Add reading comprehension 101 to econ 101 and then it will compute
What you say "computes" only after adding Dunning-Kruger to the mix.
See now after a few rounds we see your real thoughts come out. I'm old enough to have had this thought and many more about God/Religion and why humans need it in their lives.
I don't have the time to go into it but perhaps as you get older and dig into this more it will start to make sense.
To calculate a %, both the numerator and denominator have to be the same units.
Analytic jurisprudence (which is what I think you are talking about) is something that people think is more important (a belief, codified in law) than Natural Law. But Common Law, derives from Natural Law and it still has a place in this area of focus even though people believe that it doesn't, or it shouldn't. The actual harms in society are caused by the belief that laws can be legislated though power dynamics. Analytic jurisprudence cannot contend with the idea that all law, stems from natural law, and when you deviate from it, it cause harms for society. Plus it's at the whim of people in power. Just because it happens, doesn't make it right or required.
They are sources of inspiration. Don't look for the flaws, look for the benefits. Imagine you go to an art museum or you play a computer game. Do you look for the worst paintings? Scour the museum for mistakes in the paintings? Do you read the game's code for bugs and poor coding practices? When you go to a bookstore, do you look for the worst book? What a waste of time that would be - you want the best, the most enjoyable and inspiring, not the worst.
> That Christians worship an unreasonable, malicious or mad, god with unreasonable standards. "Even when you were a gullible idiot and faced an influence I'd not accounted for despite being all knowing, I'm still going to punish you and all your offspring forever for what you did wrong, especially the woman and that's why childbirth hurts."
FWIW, that passage is part of all Abrahamic religions.
Great, you're simply saying that pretty much all of science has the same importance as 10% of all other work being done. And you consider budget as a measure of output.
All that in the context of a conversation about technological breakthroughs, mind you.
By that metric, someone like Richard Feynman has produced less important work than your average run-of-the-mill engineer with a slightly higher salary.
Did you time-travel here from the USSR? The leadership there had similar ideas back in the day.
This is becoming very entertaining at this point.
What reality do you live in?
I'm a software engineer with Google on my resume (among others); my wife is a software engineer in the chipmaking industry; we both have PhDs and work in Silicon Valley, and have no children.
We work because we have bills to pay. We can't afford to not work. Our largest expenses are still housing, groceries, transportation, medical, etc. - i.e., bills.
We are paying a mortgage on a 3B townhouse, which is also our home office, and where my mother-in-law is living too as a war refugee from Kyiv, Ukraine. I'm helping my mother with her bills too (she's renting a studio in San Diego).
When I don't work, our savings start draining.
It would be nice to get to the point where paying the bills is not something I ever think about. But we haven't reached that threshold.
Neither have most of our friends (also engineers with PhDs). I haven't spoken to my friend in OpenAI in a while, so I hope they've crossed that threshold; but it's not something I know for sure.
It took you this long? I wasn't hiding anything.
> I'm old enough to have had this thought and many more about God/Religion and why humans need it in their lives.
> I don't have the time to go into it but perhaps as you get older and dig into this more it will start to make sense.
I was born and raised Catholic, then I found Wicca and realised that not all the gods and religions work like Christianity.
Then, sometime around 10-20 years ago but gradually rather than as a single event, I realised I could get stuff out of stories without believing them.
The ancient Greeks got on well with their very flawed pantheon. Those old tales put me very much in mind of the modern comic-book heroes (and anti-heroes), which I suspect is mainly due to where comic books get their inspiration from rather than the other way around. But I can be inspired by Miles Morales' struggles without needing to think he's real.
For most, indeed. And that's good! But I have met people who claim to think they must be absolute truth, then put a huge asterisk around all the bits I point out and say those don't count for whatever reason.
There was a meme back in the UK, that amongst Anglicans, only extremists actually believe in God. No idea how true that is.
> Do you look for the worst paintings?
Only when they're put on a pedestal and held to be amazing. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt)
Widely regarded as beautiful and romantic. To me, it looks like the guy has a broken neck, and the woman has been decapitated at the base of her neck, her head rotated 90° and re-attached to her torso by the ear.
Likewise, movies. The plot holes in Independence Day annoyed me so much that when the sequel came out, I started (and still have not finished) writing a book that takes the opposite road with all the mistakes the film made.
So, while I've played the Eye Of Argon game, I never even tried to finish reading it once my friends and I stopped playing, and I've never bothered watching whatever the film is that has the line "you're tearing me apart Lisa".
> FWIW, that passage is part of all Abrahamic religions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashthi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hera
I don't limit myself to just Abrahamic myth and legend :)
All I know is that the first time that the authority of the board was used to make an unpopular decision in what presumably the board members thought was in the interest of protecting the values of OpenAI, there was an insurrection that succeeded in having the board reverse the decision. The board exists to make unpopular decisions that further the core mission of OpenAI as opposed to furthering the bottom line. But the second that the core mission and the bottom line came into conflict with one another, it became clear which one actually controls OpenAI.