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Isn't it also possible that Sam is being genuine about his concerns and his statements because he wants what is best for humanity?

igxitxiyxiyc 3y ago
possible, absolutely. just like it's possible every asshole who did it before him was due to a genuine desire for the good of humanity. aw heck, let's go so far as to say anyone willing to testify if front of congress primarily does so because they want to protect the best interests of others. Would be a fucking swell world to live in.
- bostonsre 3y ago
  > just like it's possible every asshole who did it before him was due to a genuine desire for the good of humanity. So.. you're saying that every person that testifies before congress has bad intentions just because they testify before congress? Say he did want what was best for humanity, how should he have acted differently in front of congress? To me, from every interview I've heard from him, he doesn't seem like a Zuckerberg.
  - igxitxiyxiyc 3y ago
    My point is that there is no room for granting leeway on either side. "But what if they really want to help the world" is the cry of founders who haven't been shown to be assholes yet. Don't assume they're they're to help. Don't assume they're there to hurt. They are there to cover their own asses and nothing more.
    - bostonsre 3y ago
      > Don't assume they're they're to help. Don't assume they're there to hurt. Why is the assumption that they are only there to cover their own asses ok to make but other assumptions are not? We don't know what he is actually thinking. It is entirely plausible that he is not a sociopath and actually wants to minimize negative impacts on society through regulation because he thinks that is the best path forward.
malermeister 3y ago
Possible, yes. But coming from the guy that wants to scan everyone's irises, unlikely.
rjbwork 3y ago
It may be so, but given the switcheroo that happened with "Open" AI, he and the entire company is untrustworthy on this particular front.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  When OpenAI started I don't think anyone would have thought that AI this powerful was around the corner.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    This is just more openAI marketing at work. ChatGPT is a chatbot, and it’s good at language for sure, but it isn’t some huge breakthrough that people were expecting would take a century. Its literally just a fancy RNN which we’ve had for awhile
    - famouswaffles 3y ago
      No offense but this comment just shows a lack of understanding of the development that's happened with transformers. "Fancy RNN" is a pretty ridiculous assertion. And no, researchers didn't expect what GPT-3/4 has been shown to do to be around the corner at all. GPT's aren't chatbots. That's just a neat natural consequence that's happened. They're machines that reason, understand and follow instructions in plain language. And their abilities go far beyond what any expected language modelling to provide.
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        Nah not really, there’s just a lot of hyperbole going around right now. They are RNNs, the difference is they have a layer/layers being fed back instead of a single neuron. That’s a fancy recurrent network. They are not machines that reason, they are approximators. It’s all just token matching based on data we’ve fed it. Further it didn’t happen over night but through successive improvements and at no point was the next improvement considered some infeasible thing. Seems to me maybe you’ve bought into the hype here, and are confusing that with reality.
mxkopy 3y ago
No. In situations like this the best you can hope for is that his incentives aren't at odds with the rest of humanity.
- boringPragma 3y ago
  Exacerbating ecological disaster building more and more resource and energy hungry data centers does not seem aligned with the rest of humanity I have been running ML on my personal data and modeling worlds for the last few years. There’s no reason to keep OpenAI around given open source. My own data does not need a river water cooled data center. OpenAIs ONLY moat is a government one so governments can keep up the free market ruse but have OpenAI in its back pocket for military and intelligence applications
- bostonsre 3y ago
  Wouldn't it be an almost comical level of supervilliany for him to believe that agi is coming and to only care about his company profitting? It seems pretty plausible that agi terrifies him, that he knows it can be done by a lot of different players, and that he wants it to happen as gracefully as possible. If I put myself in his shoes, I would be terrified and asking for some guardrails too. He seems musk like where he has enough money to not care about making more money.
  - mxkopy 3y ago
    If you do work in AI you're not worried about AGI, period. It's fine that the average layman feels like they're in Terminator but anyone who's written and trained models knows that it's just silly. We shouldn't really expect Sam Altman to do any better than perpetuating fear and hype because of the amount of money on the line. It's nice to think that you can have so much money you stop caring about it but it doesn't really make sense. You don't get to personally keep billions of dollars without caring about money.
    - bostonsre 3y ago
      I've seen a lot of people that work in AI express concerns about the impact on society as we progress towards AGI. We don't need to reach AGI for there to be a huge impact on society whether its negative or positive. OpenAI's tool is already having an impact on jobs, it seems straight forward to extrapolate that there will be larger impacts on society as models improve. I would still assert that it would be a comical level of supervillainy for Sam to only care about his companies profits over any potential negative impacts on society. It seems highly plausible that he could not be a sociopath and have empathy and actually cares about limiting negative impacts of these tools. > It's nice to think that you can have so much money you stop caring about it but it doesn't really make sense. You don't get to personally keep billions of dollars without caring about money. It is definitely not every billionaire that thinks like this but there are some that seem to not care too much about material possessions like Musk or Sam. Their endeavors seem to be the things that they care about the most and they don't seem to be doing it to attain the most amount of money possible.
somesortofthing 3y ago
Maybe he sincerely believes the line OpenAI's PR department is pushing, but that's an even better reason not to listen to him.
JohnFen 3y ago
It's certainly possible. I can't read minds. But his statements on these issues sound more to me like "Yes, this is really dangerous stuff and we're taking a huge risk in developing it, but too bad! You can't stop us."
- NumberWangMan 3y ago
  His point of view, that he's stated on the Lex Friedman podcast, is that AGI is potentially dangerous and inevitable, but safer to develop as soon as possible and try to make it safe by studying real-world models empirically, rather than waiting until computing power is much greater and risking a "fast takeoff". I don't know that I agree with this strategy, but I can respect that it's a consistent viewpoint. So what I hear from him is "Yes, this is dangerous stuff, and we're trying our hardest to make it safe, but we can't control everyone, so we need regulation ASAP because market forces are going to push everyone to race and release unsafe AIs".
  - njarboe 3y ago
    Seems like a reasonable point of view from Sam. Better to have some kind of AGI catastrophe when some kind of Butlerian Jihad is still possible.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yes, I know his point of view, but it doesn't really help answer the question. > I can respect that it's a consistent viewpoint. I don't think I agree that there's a great deal of consistency between that stated perspective and what OpenAI is actually doing. It's also, conveniently, a point of view that allows him to keep doing what he wants to do, and making bank by doing it. Understand, I'm not saying he's a bad actor. I'm saying that it's hard to rule that out. From his WorldCoin stuff to this, there is plenty of reason to be suspicious of his motives.
tarboreus 3y ago
Isn't it possible that Sam is actually a lizard person with a really good disguise?

igxitxiyxiyc 3y ago

possible, absolutely. just like it's possible every asshole who did it before him was due to a genuine desire for the good of humanity. aw heck, let's go so far as to say anyone willing to testify if front of congress primarily does so because they want to protect the best interests of others. Would be a fucking swell world to live in.

bostonsre 3y ago
> just like it's possible every asshole who did it before him was due to a genuine desire for the good of humanity. So.. you're saying that every person that testifies before congress has bad intentions just because they testify before congress? Say he did want what was best for humanity, how should he have acted differently in front of congress? To me, from every interview I've heard from him, he doesn't seem like a Zuckerberg.
- igxitxiyxiyc 3y ago
  My point is that there is no room for granting leeway on either side. "But what if they really want to help the world" is the cry of founders who haven't been shown to be assholes yet. Don't assume they're they're to help. Don't assume they're there to hurt. They are there to cover their own asses and nothing more.
  - bostonsre 3y ago
    > Don't assume they're they're to help. Don't assume they're there to hurt. Why is the assumption that they are only there to cover their own asses ok to make but other assumptions are not? We don't know what he is actually thinking. It is entirely plausible that he is not a sociopath and actually wants to minimize negative impacts on society through regulation because he thinks that is the best path forward.

malermeister 3y ago

Possible, yes. But coming from the guy that wants to scan everyone's irises, unlikely.

rjbwork 3y ago

It may be so, but given the switcheroo that happened with "Open" AI, he and the entire company is untrustworthy on this particular front.

chpatrick 3y ago
When OpenAI started I don't think anyone would have thought that AI this powerful was around the corner.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  This is just more openAI marketing at work. ChatGPT is a chatbot, and it’s good at language for sure, but it isn’t some huge breakthrough that people were expecting would take a century. Its literally just a fancy RNN which we’ve had for awhile
  - famouswaffles 3y ago
    No offense but this comment just shows a lack of understanding of the development that's happened with transformers. "Fancy RNN" is a pretty ridiculous assertion. And no, researchers didn't expect what GPT-3/4 has been shown to do to be around the corner at all. GPT's aren't chatbots. That's just a neat natural consequence that's happened. They're machines that reason, understand and follow instructions in plain language. And their abilities go far beyond what any expected language modelling to provide.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      Nah not really, there’s just a lot of hyperbole going around right now. They are RNNs, the difference is they have a layer/layers being fed back instead of a single neuron. That’s a fancy recurrent network. They are not machines that reason, they are approximators. It’s all just token matching based on data we’ve fed it. Further it didn’t happen over night but through successive improvements and at no point was the next improvement considered some infeasible thing. Seems to me maybe you’ve bought into the hype here, and are confusing that with reality.

mxkopy 3y ago

No. In situations like this the best you can hope for is that his incentives aren't at odds with the rest of humanity.

boringPragma 3y ago
Exacerbating ecological disaster building more and more resource and energy hungry data centers does not seem aligned with the rest of humanity I have been running ML on my personal data and modeling worlds for the last few years. There’s no reason to keep OpenAI around given open source. My own data does not need a river water cooled data center. OpenAIs ONLY moat is a government one so governments can keep up the free market ruse but have OpenAI in its back pocket for military and intelligence applications
bostonsre 3y ago
Wouldn't it be an almost comical level of supervilliany for him to believe that agi is coming and to only care about his company profitting? It seems pretty plausible that agi terrifies him, that he knows it can be done by a lot of different players, and that he wants it to happen as gracefully as possible. If I put myself in his shoes, I would be terrified and asking for some guardrails too. He seems musk like where he has enough money to not care about making more money.
- mxkopy 3y ago
  If you do work in AI you're not worried about AGI, period. It's fine that the average layman feels like they're in Terminator but anyone who's written and trained models knows that it's just silly. We shouldn't really expect Sam Altman to do any better than perpetuating fear and hype because of the amount of money on the line. It's nice to think that you can have so much money you stop caring about it but it doesn't really make sense. You don't get to personally keep billions of dollars without caring about money.
  - bostonsre 3y ago
    I've seen a lot of people that work in AI express concerns about the impact on society as we progress towards AGI. We don't need to reach AGI for there to be a huge impact on society whether its negative or positive. OpenAI's tool is already having an impact on jobs, it seems straight forward to extrapolate that there will be larger impacts on society as models improve. I would still assert that it would be a comical level of supervillainy for Sam to only care about his companies profits over any potential negative impacts on society. It seems highly plausible that he could not be a sociopath and have empathy and actually cares about limiting negative impacts of these tools. > It's nice to think that you can have so much money you stop caring about it but it doesn't really make sense. You don't get to personally keep billions of dollars without caring about money. It is definitely not every billionaire that thinks like this but there are some that seem to not care too much about material possessions like Musk or Sam. Their endeavors seem to be the things that they care about the most and they don't seem to be doing it to attain the most amount of money possible.

somesortofthing 3y ago

Maybe he sincerely believes the line OpenAI's PR department is pushing, but that's an even better reason not to listen to him.

JohnFen 3y ago

It's certainly possible. I can't read minds. But his statements on these issues sound more to me like "Yes, this is really dangerous stuff and we're taking a huge risk in developing it, but too bad! You can't stop us."

NumberWangMan 3y ago
His point of view, that he's stated on the Lex Friedman podcast, is that AGI is potentially dangerous and inevitable, but safer to develop as soon as possible and try to make it safe by studying real-world models empirically, rather than waiting until computing power is much greater and risking a "fast takeoff". I don't know that I agree with this strategy, but I can respect that it's a consistent viewpoint. So what I hear from him is "Yes, this is dangerous stuff, and we're trying our hardest to make it safe, but we can't control everyone, so we need regulation ASAP because market forces are going to push everyone to race and release unsafe AIs".
- njarboe 3y ago
  Seems like a reasonable point of view from Sam. Better to have some kind of AGI catastrophe when some kind of Butlerian Jihad is still possible.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Yes, I know his point of view, but it doesn't really help answer the question. > I can respect that it's a consistent viewpoint. I don't think I agree that there's a great deal of consistency between that stated perspective and what OpenAI is actually doing. It's also, conveniently, a point of view that allows him to keep doing what he wants to do, and making bank by doing it. Understand, I'm not saying he's a bad actor. I'm saying that it's hard to rule that out. From his WorldCoin stuff to this, there is plenty of reason to be suspicious of his motives.

tarboreus 3y ago

Isn't it possible that Sam is actually a lizard person with a really good disguise?