13 ms·

OpenAI boss ‘heartened’ by talks with world leaders over will to contain AI risk

21 points by thx-2718 3y ago

it_citizen 3y ago
Whatever the real intentions of Sam Altman are, I think what he is doing might end up being a net positive. Imagine if fossil fuel companies had helped, early-on, to hammer into the public perception of oil how it might end up being disastrous for humanity instead of burying the studies they made. I don't think we would have stopped using fossil fuels, but maybe we would have been in a better spot today.
- bluefishinit 3y ago
  I think a better analogy would be if fossil fuel companies lobbied the government to make it illegal to have solar panels on your roof. The thought of AI being fully controlled by corporations is the threat. Not some fake apocalypse those seeking regulatory capture have ginned up.
- dpflan 3y ago
  What would that spot be?
  - it_citizen 3y ago
    Not sure, this is a fiction. But if I took a guess: more internalization of climate change by the general population, earlier investments into alternative sources of energies, maybe baking in carbon pricing early on before we all became completely dependent on oil.
- est31 3y ago
  This is the fox guarding the henhouse. Establishing a business model for OpenAI is his whole intent, nothing less and nothing more. He shapes the public image of AI in a way that the only "safe" way of having AI is that it's controlled by megacorporations like MS, Google or Facebook, and that anyone running a model privately at home is a potential criminal. Also, in the unlikely case that OpenAI has given birth to a malevolent AI that is trying to take over the world right now, then that AI might come to the conclusion that one of the biggest threats to its existence aren't humans themselves, but other AI models created by humans. So "AI must be regulated" can just as well be the product of a rogue AI that doesn't want some other rogue AI to take over control.
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    Pine trees spread needles to suppress growth in the around them and keep nearby competitors from consuming their resources. Human governance structures and corporations do the same. No reason to think that a sufficiently complex AI would not do the same. We should apply the same principles to fight each of these tendencies and reject special treatment for big players in all it's forms.
    - twobitshifter 3y ago
      Your comment made me imagine a scenario where Altman is secretly asking GPT-5 what to do next. As a result he goes out on this world tour to try to turn governments against alternative AIs.
    - tivert 3y ago
      Your example is wrong: https://www.thespruce.com/do-pine-needles-acidify-soil-1403128 https://www.thespruce.com/do-pine-needles-acidify-soil-14031...: > When a myth dies hard, you can bet that it is either because people want to believe it (for example, when it makes their lives easier) or because there is a kernel of truth in it just big enough to make it convincing. The long-lived gardening myth that pine needles lower soil pH falls into the latter category. It is a twofold myth, erroneously claiming that pine needles should be used as a mulch only around acid-loving plants, and that they will acidify compost if added to a compost bin.... > Perhaps lending further credibility to the myth is that gardeners often observe that it is difficult to grow most plants under large pine trees. They attach an assumption to this observation: It must be that the pine needles shed by the tree cause the soil there to become acidic. However, this is a case of drawing an incorrect conclusion from the facts. The reasons most plants perform poorly when grown under large pine trees are that the trees cast too much shade, or the root system of the trees blankets the soil surface, forming a barrier and sucking up most of the available water and nutrients. A better example would be Black Walnut: https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/ilriverhort/2018-08-06-plants-inhibit-other-plants https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/ilriverhort/2018-08-06-...: > Black walnuts (Juglans nigra) are one of the best known allelopathic plants. Black walnut trees naturally contain a chemical called juglone which can inhibit the growth of some plants. Walnut buds, nut hulls, and roots contain the largest amount of juglone. However, even walnut leaves and stems contain a small concentration of juglone.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "Imagine if fossil fuel companies had helped, early-on, to hammer into the public perception of oil how it might end up being disastrous for humanity instead of burying the studies they made." Saying your product is a disaster for humanity is...a bold marketing strategy...
coldtea 3y ago
I think the real intention here is to get to be a player in politics and have him and his company earn negotiating power at the policy level...
mydriasis 3y ago
Man invents gun, points it threateningly at everyone, insists it can kill them. Man is 'heartened' when everyone complies with his demands.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
blackbear_ 3y ago
In other news: "AI Doomerism Is a Decoy - Big Tech’s warnings about an AI apocalypse are distracting us from years of actual harms their products have caused.". Notable quote: > This seems like really sophisticated PR from a company that is going full speed ahead with building the very technology that their team is flagging as risks to humanity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36175060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36175060
- digging 3y ago
  I don't think we should let real, present-day threats distract us from the actual possibility of AI apocalypse either. They're two separate problems, they're both serious problems, and they can both be addressed (well, actually, we don't know if AI alignment even can be solved). Not that I don't appreciate you bringing this up. As someone apparently wasting a lot of my time trying to explain the concept of misaligned AGI, I still think it's very important that we 1) don't trust Sam Altman, and 2) spend a lot of resources dealing with human alignment problems, such as abuse of existing AI and other technology.
- taylodl 3y ago
  They want to erect barriers to entry so they own the AI market. I for one don't believe a word this man is saying.
- davidguetta 3y ago
  Eh, every generation had its share of people predicting the apocalypse (Mayas Calendar, Nuclear, AI, Robot Uprising, Environemental collapse, Zombie Apocalypse) to the point one wonder if it's not a trait of human race. It's just not all very serious
mrfinn 3y ago
Which risk? I mean I saw "Terminator 1" and "Terminator 2" (great movies) and I played "Horizon Zero Dawn" (great game). But what proof do we have of those risks exist apart from wild exercises of imagination?
- blackbear_ 3y ago
  You cannot prove that the risks exist, and you cannot prove that the risks do not exist, so this approach to the problem is clearly not useful to make any progress on the question "is AI dangerous or not".
  - mrfinn 3y ago
    Of course you can, there's a thing called research. This narrative is being pushed WITHOUT any significant research behind. So this is only about economics and politics, not science.
    - blackbear_ 3y ago
      How would you design an experiment to definitely prove or disprove that AI is (not) dangerous?
      - mrfinn 3y ago
        Well I'm not being paid to do that, but my professional instinct is, like you do with any other software, you set up a sandbox. Pretty sure an AI specialist could have much better ideas than me. What I don't get is how this narrative is being so wildly pushed without any research sustaining it, even just to say "hey we tried to investigate this huge issue, here you can see the great amount of papers we wrote, but we concluded is actually impossibly to establish the risks because etc etc". This is first class BS.
        blackbear_ 3y ago
        I am not sure how you came to the conclusion that there is no research on this topic. On Google Scholar you can literally find millions of research papers discussing the risks of AI, its ethics, alignment with human values, and so on, for example: - Scherer, Matthew U. "Regulating artificial intelligence systems: Risks, challenges, competencies, and strategies." Harv. JL & Tech. 29 (2015): 353. (934 scholar citations) - Araujo, Theo, et al. "In AI we trust? Perceptions about automated decision-making by artificial intelligence." AI & society 35 (2020): 611-623. (334 scholar citations) - Osoba, Osonde A., and William Welser IV. "An intelligence in our image: The risks of bias and errors in artificial intelligence." Rand Corporation, 2017. (278 scholar citations) - Gabriel, Iason. "Artificial intelligence, values, and alignment." Minds and machines 30.3 (2020): 411-437. (216 scholar citations) - Bryson, Joanna, and Alan Winfield. "Standardizing ethical design for artificial intelligence and autonomous systems." Computer 50.5 (2017): 116-119. (214 scholar citations) - Yu, Han, et al. "Building ethics into artificial intelligence." arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.02953 (2018). (200 scholar citations) - Munoko, Ivy, Helen L. Brown-Liburd, and Miklos Vasarhelyi. "The ethical implications of using artificial intelligence in auditing." Journal of Business Ethics 167 (2020): 209-234. (180 scholar citations) - Christian, Brian. "The alignment problem: Machine learning and human values." WW Norton & Company, 2020. (178 scholar citations) - Manheim, Karl, and Lyric Kaplan. "Artificial intelligence: Risks to privacy and democracy." Yale JL & Tech. 21 (2019): 106. (178 scholar citations) - Russell, Stuart, et al. "Ethics of artificial intelligence." Nature 521.7553 (2015): 415-416. (164 scholar citations) - Risse, Mathias. "Human rights and artificial intelligence: An urgently needed agenda." Hum. Rts. Q. 41 (2019): 1. (135 scholar citations) - Turchin, Alexey, and David Denkenberger. "Classification of global catastrophic risks connected with artificial intelligence." Ai & Society 35.1 (2020): 147-163. (108 scholar citations) - Taylor, Jessica, et al. "Alignment for advanced machine learning systems." Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (2016): 342-382. (95 scholar citations) - Santoni de Sio, Filippo, and Giulio Mecacci. "Four responsibility gaps with artificial intelligence: Why they matter and how to address them." Philosophy & Technology 34 (2021): 1057-1084. (84 scholar citations)
ianzakalwe 3y ago
Sam Altman has a talent of utilizing any narrative in a way that benefits his company. It is sad to see legislators jumping onto AI space out of fear rather than to facilitate innovation
carom 3y ago
I hate this narrative. Every piece of it has problems. We are no where close to AGI. On top of that, the risks associated with AI have not been demonstrated beyond some speculative pieces sci-fi fan fiction. The current generation of work is not AI. The risks it poses are minimal. You cannot hurt me with an LLM. It may reshape the internet due to the fact that content generation just got a whole lot easier. Beyond that you would have a difficult time harming me in any way with an LLM. This article really boils down to Sam Altman traveling the world and having all the institutions of power happily agree that they want to repress any threats to their power. I hope open source wins before the UN Treaty on Compute gets drafted.
- flangola7 3y ago
  This is a remarkably dense set of falsehoods. I count a single truthful sentence. GPT-4 is not AI? Such obstinate denialism.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    The goalposts for AI are so far removed from where they were a year ago that they're hardly visible anymore.
    - teddyh 3y ago
      The current LLM’s can say things, but they have nothing to say; they all just say whatever sounds good in context. We have yet to have a generally useful AI which can reason, and use the reasoning to tell us things.
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        Actually we have reasoning AI - in inductive and deductive reasoning spaces. What we lack is abductive reasoning AI, which LLMs are actually really really close to. They all lack agency, but you can approximate agency through goal based agents. By tying together a goal based agent with inductive, deductive and LLM in a feedback cycle, I think you’ll find we are pretty darn close. The reasoning behavior will be different than human, and maybe the reasoning classes need to be extended, but we have already crafted either optimal or decent approximations of human reasoning. The task as I see it is less making LLM AGI but in taking all the AI work to date and synthesizing them into an ensemble that delegates tasks to the right model based on the domain of a sub tasks in a larger task space and providing the appropriate feedback, state, integrations, as well as providing integrations to optimizers, solvers, and other computational and mechanical algorithms.
nothatscool 3y ago
Needing a licence to create or possess models is what they’re planning here right? It obviously makes sense for openai and other big companies because it makes it more difficult for smaller competitors but it is really scary. It is probably way more dangerous for society than some theoretical artificial super intelligence because of opportunity cost and that it would certainly lead to more and more authoritarianism.
- boppo1 3y ago
  Yeah, we need some sort of groundswell propaganda to inform the masses that this is what the FUD is largely about.
xwdv 3y ago
Imagine if someone had been ‘heartened’ by talks with world leaders over the will to contain cryptography risks.
joebob42 3y ago
I think I missed the whole evil Microsoft bit in the 90s (a little too young), and while a lot of big tech has done a lot of harm since it hasn't felt so obviously, unashamedly evil. Altman seems like the successor to Micro$oft to me. Every time I hear his name it's associated with some effort to regulate "ai" so his company can profit at the expense of humanity. It makes me so angry.
- angusb 3y ago
  I get that regulatory capture is a bad thing if done for the reason of creating a moat, but where is the evidence that creating a moat is the primary motivation here? AI researchers aren’t close to a consensus on the potential for bad alignment outcomes, so isn’t it possible Altman is warning of something real?
  - joebob42 3y ago
    That's fair in principle. I think if this needs to be captured and controlled, it's unfair and unreasonable for it to be a high margin business (since the margins would stem in substantial part from a government granted monopoly). I'm certain low margin stewardship isn't what Altman has in mind.
seee-I-Told-you 3y ago
Anyone who thinks AI is a threat is either a moron or an agent (agent of influence, power or state). As described in many initiated conversations, AI to date in it's most known form is a glorified autocomplete. Any ML-implementations are rudimentary but valuable. One of the hardest proponents of "there's a 50% chance of AI will wipe out humanity" are right out not well. Tegmark, the one who uttered this is a real hoax. His "Future of Life Institute" also offered pro-nazi paper "Nya Dagbladet" 100 000 USD. Once uncovered by expo in Sweden (https://expo.se/2023/01/elon-musk-funded-nonprofit-run-mit-professor-offered-finance-swedish-pro-nazi-group https://expo.se/2023/01/elon-musk-funded-nonprofit-run-mit-p...) the offer was retracted. The venue, "Nya dagbladet" is connected to Russia and seems to be a broad spectrum investment into the far-right movement.
twobitshifter 3y ago
With open source LLMs approaching Chat-GPT it makes sense for OpenAI to ask governments to erect barriers and controls on the use of AI. If AI can be deeply regulated then only deep pockets will be able to play. Similar talk was heard about cryptography being weaponized and needing export controls, regulations, and protections.

21 points by thx-2718 3y ago

Whatever the real intentions of Sam Altman are, I think what he is doing might end up being a net positive. Imagine if fossil fuel companies had helped, early-on, to hammer into the public perception of oil how it might end up being disastrous for humanity instead of burying the studies they made. I don't think we would have stopped using fossil fuels, but maybe we would have been in a better spot today.

bluefishinit 3y ago
I think a better analogy would be if fossil fuel companies lobbied the government to make it illegal to have solar panels on your roof. The thought of AI being fully controlled by corporations is the threat. Not some fake apocalypse those seeking regulatory capture have ginned up.
dpflan 3y ago
What would that spot be?
- it_citizen 3y ago
  Not sure, this is a fiction. But if I took a guess: more internalization of climate change by the general population, earlier investments into alternative sources of energies, maybe baking in carbon pricing early on before we all became completely dependent on oil.
est31 3y ago
This is the fox guarding the henhouse. Establishing a business model for OpenAI is his whole intent, nothing less and nothing more. He shapes the public image of AI in a way that the only "safe" way of having AI is that it's controlled by megacorporations like MS, Google or Facebook, and that anyone running a model privately at home is a potential criminal. Also, in the unlikely case that OpenAI has given birth to a malevolent AI that is trying to take over the world right now, then that AI might come to the conclusion that one of the biggest threats to its existence aren't humans themselves, but other AI models created by humans. So "AI must be regulated" can just as well be the product of a rogue AI that doesn't want some other rogue AI to take over control.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  Pine trees spread needles to suppress growth in the around them and keep nearby competitors from consuming their resources. Human governance structures and corporations do the same. No reason to think that a sufficiently complex AI would not do the same. We should apply the same principles to fight each of these tendencies and reject special treatment for big players in all it's forms.
  - twobitshifter 3y ago
    Your comment made me imagine a scenario where Altman is secretly asking GPT-5 what to do next. As a result he goes out on this world tour to try to turn governments against alternative AIs.
  - tivert 3y ago
    Your example is wrong: https://www.thespruce.com/do-pine-needles-acidify-soil-1403128 https://www.thespruce.com/do-pine-needles-acidify-soil-14031...: > When a myth dies hard, you can bet that it is either because people want to believe it (for example, when it makes their lives easier) or because there is a kernel of truth in it just big enough to make it convincing. The long-lived gardening myth that pine needles lower soil pH falls into the latter category. It is a twofold myth, erroneously claiming that pine needles should be used as a mulch only around acid-loving plants, and that they will acidify compost if added to a compost bin.... > Perhaps lending further credibility to the myth is that gardeners often observe that it is difficult to grow most plants under large pine trees. They attach an assumption to this observation: It must be that the pine needles shed by the tree cause the soil there to become acidic. However, this is a case of drawing an incorrect conclusion from the facts. The reasons most plants perform poorly when grown under large pine trees are that the trees cast too much shade, or the root system of the trees blankets the soil surface, forming a barrier and sucking up most of the available water and nutrients. A better example would be Black Walnut: https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/ilriverhort/2018-08-06-plants-inhibit-other-plants https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/ilriverhort/2018-08-06-...: > Black walnuts (Juglans nigra) are one of the best known allelopathic plants. Black walnut trees naturally contain a chemical called juglone which can inhibit the growth of some plants. Walnut buds, nut hulls, and roots contain the largest amount of juglone. However, even walnut leaves and stems contain a small concentration of juglone.
JimtheCoder 3y ago
"Imagine if fossil fuel companies had helped, early-on, to hammer into the public perception of oil how it might end up being disastrous for humanity instead of burying the studies they made." Saying your product is a disaster for humanity is...a bold marketing strategy...

coldtea 3y ago

I think the real intention here is to get to be a player in politics and have him and his company earn negotiating power at the policy level...

mydriasis 3y ago

Man invents gun, points it threateningly at everyone, insists it can kill them. Man is 'heartened' when everyone complies with his demands.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

blackbear_ 3y ago

In other news: "AI Doomerism Is a Decoy - Big Tech’s warnings about an AI apocalypse are distracting us from years of actual harms their products have caused.". Notable quote: > This seems like really sophisticated PR from a company that is going full speed ahead with building the very technology that their team is flagging as risks to humanity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36175060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36175060

digging 3y ago
I don't think we should let real, present-day threats distract us from the actual possibility of AI apocalypse either. They're two separate problems, they're both serious problems, and they can both be addressed (well, actually, we don't know if AI alignment even can be solved). Not that I don't appreciate you bringing this up. As someone apparently wasting a lot of my time trying to explain the concept of misaligned AGI, I still think it's very important that we 1) don't trust Sam Altman, and 2) spend a lot of resources dealing with human alignment problems, such as abuse of existing AI and other technology.
taylodl 3y ago
They want to erect barriers to entry so they own the AI market. I for one don't believe a word this man is saying.
davidguetta 3y ago
Eh, every generation had its share of people predicting the apocalypse (Mayas Calendar, Nuclear, AI, Robot Uprising, Environemental collapse, Zombie Apocalypse) to the point one wonder if it's not a trait of human race. It's just not all very serious

mrfinn 3y ago

Which risk? I mean I saw "Terminator 1" and "Terminator 2" (great movies) and I played "Horizon Zero Dawn" (great game). But what proof do we have of those risks exist apart from wild exercises of imagination?

blackbear_ 3y ago
You cannot prove that the risks exist, and you cannot prove that the risks do not exist, so this approach to the problem is clearly not useful to make any progress on the question "is AI dangerous or not".
- mrfinn 3y ago
  Of course you can, there's a thing called research. This narrative is being pushed WITHOUT any significant research behind. So this is only about economics and politics, not science.
  - blackbear_ 3y ago
    How would you design an experiment to definitely prove or disprove that AI is (not) dangerous?
    - mrfinn 3y ago
      Well I'm not being paid to do that, but my professional instinct is, like you do with any other software, you set up a sandbox. Pretty sure an AI specialist could have much better ideas than me. What I don't get is how this narrative is being so wildly pushed without any research sustaining it, even just to say "hey we tried to investigate this huge issue, here you can see the great amount of papers we wrote, but we concluded is actually impossibly to establish the risks because etc etc". This is first class BS.
      - blackbear_ 3y ago
        I am not sure how you came to the conclusion that there is no research on this topic. On Google Scholar you can literally find millions of research papers discussing the risks of AI, its ethics, alignment with human values, and so on, for example: - Scherer, Matthew U. "Regulating artificial intelligence systems: Risks, challenges, competencies, and strategies." Harv. JL & Tech. 29 (2015): 353. (934 scholar citations) - Araujo, Theo, et al. "In AI we trust? Perceptions about automated decision-making by artificial intelligence." AI & society 35 (2020): 611-623. (334 scholar citations) - Osoba, Osonde A., and William Welser IV. "An intelligence in our image: The risks of bias and errors in artificial intelligence." Rand Corporation, 2017. (278 scholar citations) - Gabriel, Iason. "Artificial intelligence, values, and alignment." Minds and machines 30.3 (2020): 411-437. (216 scholar citations) - Bryson, Joanna, and Alan Winfield. "Standardizing ethical design for artificial intelligence and autonomous systems." Computer 50.5 (2017): 116-119. (214 scholar citations) - Yu, Han, et al. "Building ethics into artificial intelligence." arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.02953 (2018). (200 scholar citations) - Munoko, Ivy, Helen L. Brown-Liburd, and Miklos Vasarhelyi. "The ethical implications of using artificial intelligence in auditing." Journal of Business Ethics 167 (2020): 209-234. (180 scholar citations) - Christian, Brian. "The alignment problem: Machine learning and human values." WW Norton & Company, 2020. (178 scholar citations) - Manheim, Karl, and Lyric Kaplan. "Artificial intelligence: Risks to privacy and democracy." Yale JL & Tech. 21 (2019): 106. (178 scholar citations) - Russell, Stuart, et al. "Ethics of artificial intelligence." Nature 521.7553 (2015): 415-416. (164 scholar citations) - Risse, Mathias. "Human rights and artificial intelligence: An urgently needed agenda." Hum. Rts. Q. 41 (2019): 1. (135 scholar citations) - Turchin, Alexey, and David Denkenberger. "Classification of global catastrophic risks connected with artificial intelligence." Ai & Society 35.1 (2020): 147-163. (108 scholar citations) - Taylor, Jessica, et al. "Alignment for advanced machine learning systems." Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (2016): 342-382. (95 scholar citations) - Santoni de Sio, Filippo, and Giulio Mecacci. "Four responsibility gaps with artificial intelligence: Why they matter and how to address them." Philosophy & Technology 34 (2021): 1057-1084. (84 scholar citations)

ianzakalwe 3y ago

Sam Altman has a talent of utilizing any narrative in a way that benefits his company. It is sad to see legislators jumping onto AI space out of fear rather than to facilitate innovation

carom 3y ago

I hate this narrative. Every piece of it has problems. We are no where close to AGI. On top of that, the risks associated with AI have not been demonstrated beyond some speculative pieces sci-fi fan fiction. The current generation of work is not AI. The risks it poses are minimal. You cannot hurt me with an LLM. It may reshape the internet due to the fact that content generation just got a whole lot easier. Beyond that you would have a difficult time harming me in any way with an LLM. This article really boils down to Sam Altman traveling the world and having all the institutions of power happily agree that they want to repress any threats to their power. I hope open source wins before the UN Treaty on Compute gets drafted.

flangola7 3y ago
This is a remarkably dense set of falsehoods. I count a single truthful sentence. GPT-4 is not AI? Such obstinate denialism.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  The goalposts for AI are so far removed from where they were a year ago that they're hardly visible anymore.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    The current LLM’s can say things, but they have nothing to say; they all just say whatever sounds good in context. We have yet to have a generally useful AI which can reason, and use the reasoning to tell us things.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Actually we have reasoning AI - in inductive and deductive reasoning spaces. What we lack is abductive reasoning AI, which LLMs are actually really really close to. They all lack agency, but you can approximate agency through goal based agents. By tying together a goal based agent with inductive, deductive and LLM in a feedback cycle, I think you’ll find we are pretty darn close. The reasoning behavior will be different than human, and maybe the reasoning classes need to be extended, but we have already crafted either optimal or decent approximations of human reasoning. The task as I see it is less making LLM AGI but in taking all the AI work to date and synthesizing them into an ensemble that delegates tasks to the right model based on the domain of a sub tasks in a larger task space and providing the appropriate feedback, state, integrations, as well as providing integrations to optimizers, solvers, and other computational and mechanical algorithms.

nothatscool 3y ago

Needing a licence to create or possess models is what they’re planning here right? It obviously makes sense for openai and other big companies because it makes it more difficult for smaller competitors but it is really scary. It is probably way more dangerous for society than some theoretical artificial super intelligence because of opportunity cost and that it would certainly lead to more and more authoritarianism.

boppo1 3y ago
Yeah, we need some sort of groundswell propaganda to inform the masses that this is what the FUD is largely about.

xwdv 3y ago

Imagine if someone had been ‘heartened’ by talks with world leaders over the will to contain cryptography risks.

joebob42 3y ago

I think I missed the whole evil Microsoft bit in the 90s (a little too young), and while a lot of big tech has done a lot of harm since it hasn't felt so obviously, unashamedly evil. Altman seems like the successor to Micro$oft to me. Every time I hear his name it's associated with some effort to regulate "ai" so his company can profit at the expense of humanity. It makes me so angry.

angusb 3y ago
I get that regulatory capture is a bad thing if done for the reason of creating a moat, but where is the evidence that creating a moat is the primary motivation here? AI researchers aren’t close to a consensus on the potential for bad alignment outcomes, so isn’t it possible Altman is warning of something real?
- joebob42 3y ago
  That's fair in principle. I think if this needs to be captured and controlled, it's unfair and unreasonable for it to be a high margin business (since the margins would stem in substantial part from a government granted monopoly). I'm certain low margin stewardship isn't what Altman has in mind.

seee-I-Told-you 3y ago

Anyone who thinks AI is a threat is either a moron or an agent (agent of influence, power or state). As described in many initiated conversations, AI to date in it's most known form is a glorified autocomplete. Any ML-implementations are rudimentary but valuable. One of the hardest proponents of "there's a 50% chance of AI will wipe out humanity" are right out not well. Tegmark, the one who uttered this is a real hoax. His "Future of Life Institute" also offered pro-nazi paper "Nya Dagbladet" 100 000 USD. Once uncovered by expo in Sweden (https://expo.se/2023/01/elon-musk-funded-nonprofit-run-mit-professor-offered-finance-swedish-pro-nazi-group https://expo.se/2023/01/elon-musk-funded-nonprofit-run-mit-p...) the offer was retracted. The venue, "Nya dagbladet" is connected to Russia and seems to be a broad spectrum investment into the far-right movement.

twobitshifter 3y ago

With open source LLMs approaching Chat-GPT it makes sense for OpenAI to ask governments to erect barriers and controls on the use of AI. If AI can be deeply regulated then only deep pockets will be able to play. Similar talk was heard about cryptography being weaponized and needing export controls, regulations, and protections.