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Sam Altman himself sat in front of the top levels of government and freaked them out by telling them his company was putting in place the groundwork to possibly

• onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  > I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this. Because 1) the government isn't going to do anything and 2) investors will think OMG this must be profitable $$$
• justrealist 3y ago
  That is completely unrelated to the FTC complaint.
  • andrewstuart 3y ago
    Government is a many headed hydra. You can't poke a stick at one head and think the others won't bite you. Altman effectively said to every level of government "OpenAI is extremely dangerous, you'd better look out for us". All the wisdom of Bilbo Baggins reaching into the trolls pocket.
• NoTelnyxBad 3y ago
  There's a simple explanation: he believes what he said.
  • m3kw9 3y ago
    It’s also simple that he needed moat
    • NoTelnyxBad 3y ago
      I think there's something to the arguments that regulation will benefit OpenAI. However, they shouldn't be overstated. OpenAI has had the obviously best LLMs for over 4 years now. They aren't a flash in the pan.
  • ChatGTP 3y ago
    If he believed what he said, why would he put the thing on the internet with plugins? Why would he be helping to secure funding to build even more powerful models? If he believed it was truly dangerous, I don't think he'd be working for a company that is advertising they are actually pursuing super-intelligence ? Not saying you're wrong, but there is definitely some very noticeable dissonance in his messaging and in his actions.
    • NoTelnyxBad 3y ago
      I imagine he thinks OpenAI can get superintelligence right, and that someone else would get it wrong. You're right that there's some dissonance there, however. Especially since three of the leading labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind) were _all_ founded on the premise that they had to be the ones to get superintelligence right because the risks were so high.
    • codeyperson 3y ago
      He's said in his interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, that he wants to get AI in front of people as fast as possible to give us the longest amount of time possible to start to adapt to it. I think he wants to scare people a little in a somewhat controlled way to onramp us to this new reality as fast as possible.
      • ChatGTP 3y ago
        I'm not trying to be over cynical here, but what someone says and what someone does are entirely different things.
    • barbariangrunge 3y ago
      We want to be the ones who win the race to agi. Not somebody like Russia
• cmcaleer 3y ago
  It was a gambit to try to secure OAI's moat. It failed, and while competitors are catching up (still a while to go yet), he put a target on OAI's back.
  • arthurcolle 3y ago
    Yep. Especially with geohot leaks and torrent activity at an all time high - OpenAI looks cooked
    • biofunsf 3y ago
      What are the geohot leaks?
      • bodecker 3y ago
        I assume comments like these, "GPT-4: 8 x 220B experts trained with different data/task distributions and 16-iter inference." https://twitter.com/soumithchintala/status/1671267150101721090 https://twitter.com/soumithchintala/status/16712671501017210... https://archive.li/rfFlW https://archive.li/rfFlW I'm not sure the most canonical paper on mixture of experts but here's one possible: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.06538.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.06538.pdf
        • arthurcolle 3y ago
          I think when ppl refer to MoE they are referring generally to the Google GLaM paper actually
      • ZunarJ5 3y ago
        https://the-decoder.com/gpt-4-architecture-datasets-costs-and-more-leaked/ https://the-decoder.com/gpt-4-architecture-datasets-costs-an... Not op, but this is where a cheeky google got me.
        • 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
• biofunsf 3y ago
  Maybe he's just a CEO doing the ethically responsible thing and not the purely self-serving thing for the sake of shareholders? (though as humans, the shareholders have some stake in humanity too)
  • hackernewds 3y ago
    The fact that we are bewildered instead of cherishing, and punishing instead of rewarding shows us what incentives lie in honesty nowadays. Sounds nihilistic but Sam could have done better for his company, by being untruthful
  • belval 3y ago
    Wow that's naïve (or sarcasm). I did an internship with ElementAI a while back. They had a full lobbying division to "come up with a legislative framework with the government for ethical AI". This is quite literally just a business strategy where you get to write the rules because lawmakers see you as "their guys" while challengers are seen as reckless. It was already a thing in 2019 and it definitely is still a thing. Sam Altman just made the gambit that congress would see him as the honest and prudent guy. Seems like that just didn't work.
    • biofunsf 3y ago
      Not sarcasm! Though I agree this also helps build Open AI's moat against competitors... but that doesn't make Altman's statement not true. It's still self-serving, but I think if he was totally willing to lie he'd have made other self-serving statements, and not this particularly high-risk, shocking, and also true (IMHO) self-serving statement.
  • probably_wrong 3y ago
    I can't imagine a valid ethical justification for not releasing the model training details which they withheld. I'd speculate that they did it only to slow their competitors, but I don't have to because "the competitive landscape" was the reason given right there in their paper. There is (IMHO) no good reason to let OpenAI argue simultaneously for "this technology is too dangerous to be replicated" and for "... but if you have a credit card then you can use it right now".
• m3kw9 3y ago
  He wanted heavy regulations on AI which would have benefited his moat
• guy98238710 3y ago
  Marketing. OpenAI needs to create illusion that their chatbot is more than just gradual evolution of past models that still needs a lot of work.
• darklycan51 3y ago
  I think he just wanted to enact restrictions on further training of data models (maybe) and make it so that no one could compete with his company, can't see another explanation.
  • JeremyNT 3y ago
    It's easy to assume that people like Altman are playing 12-d chess here, but it's possible that he's just a run of the mill eccentric billionaire. Maybe he really believes that he's the only person alive who can safely usher in a new AI godhead, and he feels this should be self-evident to everybody once he explains it to them.
    • tmaly 3y ago
      this is not really 12-d chess. He likely got advice from his largest investor on how DC works. Regulation forms a nice moat for first movers and existing players. If you consider the leaked Google Engineer memo about open source models being a threat, regulation and LLM registration would be the strategy to construct a moat.
• somenameforme 3y ago
  I think something that's increasingly clear is that OpenAI's only moat is time. Every other company, and even completely independent models, are rapidly catching up. And this is happening at the same time that OpenAI is already making claims that they're hitting diminishing returns on model size [1], as happens in literally every single neural net based field. If Sam's Gambit succeeded, OpenAI could have potentially been granted a near absolute monopoly with the legislative reach of the US government working to imperil competitors through a Gordian knot of rules and regulations which OpenAI could have been the primary creator of, perhaps even as the head of some sort private-public 'Artificial Intelligence Accountability and Trust Division.' It really just gives one that happy feeling of bureaucrazy mixed with dystopia. [1] - https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/ https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of...
  • gettodachoppa 3y ago
    >Every other company, and even completely independent models, are rapidly catching up. I see the HN headlines like "new model approaches GPT4 in benchmarks!" but they turn out to suck when I try them. What can I use today that comes close to GPT4? Certainly not Bard. I generally run 2 tests to gauge: 1. Write me a Python script that blah blah blah 2. Write me the lyrics to a song about blah blah blah Only GPT4 has given me impressive results. For #2 the other models manage to rhyme (except most local models), but the rhymes on other models are really basic compared to GPT4's.
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Only GPT4 has given me impressive results OpenAI is durable only if GPT is middlingly differentiated. If it's uncompetitive, they lose. If it's vital, they face regulation and state-sponsored competition. (I personally advocate for a Heavy Press Program [1] for training American and allied AIs.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
  • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > If Sam's Gambit succeeded, OpenAI could have potentially been granted a near absolute monopoly I don't think this was ever realistic. (I don't think Altman is that politically naive.) Instead, it was marketing. It's saying you've got something so powerful it's dangerous and should be treated carefully. While everyone's debating how to treat it carefully, they concede in public that it's powerful.
• lyu07282 3y ago
  He wants regulatory capture obviously
• sensanaty 3y ago
  > I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this Because he sold his soul to the Devil (M$) and is now pursuing regulatory capture in order to build a "Open"AI-controlled moat where no competitors can survive.
• throwawayadvsec 3y ago
  >A really strange thing to do, I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this. Because it's a very serious possibility(that the singularity could end humanity), and a significant part of the people who are serious about AI are extremely worried about alignment, for good reasons. > I hope he's not surprised when they take action. Surprised? Do you mean relieved?
• Tenoke 3y ago
  > with science fiction Because he doesn't believe it's Science Fiction, you are projecting.
• xg15 3y ago
  I don't know if SA is an Effective Altruist, but it feels a bit like he got caught up in their weird logic of "AI will be an extinction-level threat to humanity - and the only way to address the threat is somehow to build exactly that AI".
  • YellOh 3y ago
    You can take Roko's Basilisk out of the community forum but you can't take Roko's Basilisk out of the community zeitgeist.
• godelski 3y ago
  > I remain puzzled as to why any CEO would stir up the government like this. I have a belief, as a ML researcher, that there are two types of x-risk AI/ML researchers. True believers and hype-men. People do hype the x-risk because it is catchy and gets more people talking. The whole "no news is bad news" strategy, which even worked in recent elections. I think there's two dangers to these people: 1) they eventually turn into true believers (you say something enough, you start to believe it), and 2) it distracts from the risks of the current dangers. For Sam, I think he is a true believer and I'd expect this out of any CEO who spends significant amounts of time hyping people up to gather capital by promising a future AGI. As for myself, I'm not buying the x-risk arguments. There's a lot I have to say and a lot of nuance, but to put it briefly I'll reference something Mitchel said. She noted how it seems rather unlikely that a super-intelligence, who outperforms us in every single way is also unable to understand intention behind instructions (meaning it doesn't understand us, so a contradiction in super-intelligence). The danger is handing things over to a model without human supervision and letting it hallucinate. So the danger is thinking it is smarter than it actually is, and then trusting it. Concentrating on ineffable abilities of super-intelligences distracts us from this danger, which already exists.