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I really don't want to have anything to do with crypto, and the fact that Sam Altman is pushing it in 2023 makes both him and OpenAI look sketchy. Especially c

I really don't want to have anything to do with crypto, and the fact that Sam Altman is pushing it in 2023 makes both him and OpenAI look sketchy. Especially crypto with a weird biometric eye scanner.

c31931b 3y ago
[dead]
boppo1 3y ago
Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me. If I say "The founder of OpenAI is scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" that sets off real alarm bells.
- tim333 3y ago
  Yeah but "scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" is untrue. You can scare a lot of people by telling them untrue stuff.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    Yeah but "scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" is untrue. That is literally what he is doing. People walk up to an "orb," get their eyeballs scanned, and a unique key goes into a database. What part of the parent's statement is untrue?
    - tim333 3y ago
      The purpose is to build a financial system although data is involved. It's a bit like saying banking is a scheme to get your financial data. I mean banks have your data but it's not the purpose.
- redox99 3y ago
  Pretty sad. They don't care about regulation that would potentially have a profound impact for everybody, but they care about people voluntarily doing something for a silly crypto token?
- scrps 3y ago
  I would hope both would set off alarm bells but I guess at least one of them inducing trepidation is cause enough these days for guarded optimism.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    The regulatory capture conspiracy is myopic, ignorant, and "cope" as the kids say these days. People act as if Altman had never said spoken about AI dangers until ChatGPT took off, when in reality Altman has written about the dangers of AI before OpenAI even existed. The US government already added GPU dual-use export control restrictions a year ago due to their potential for weaponization, so he is not alone in recognizing the inherent dangers.
  - kbenson 3y ago
    One of them is easy to include in thrilling action movies that allows the idea and risk to enter public consciousness, and the other is something that economics wonks and people interested in how business works at high levels look at. Protagonist 1: "I don't get it, why are they doing this? What do they have to gain?" Protagonist 2: "I don't know, unless... oh my god, it's regulatory capture!" Protagonist 1: "Shit, of course! What will we do?" Audience: Laughs at this shit being played so straight it comes off as a farce.
    - FormerBandmate 3y ago
      Regulatory capture becomes much easier to understand when you exaggerate it and say they’re trying to hijack and take over the government to make money. It isn’t that, but it’s close enough
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      "I bear urgent news! The king is planning to destroy the margrave, not by force of arms but by monopolizing the right of seigniorage!"
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      The problem with regulatory capture is it makes everybody look bad. The usual morality play is either the evil business hurting people who has to be stopped by the benevolent government regulators, or the evil government regulators hurting innocent businesses who are just trying to make a living and keep prices down and keep jobs from moving offshore. To which the traditional solutions are either more regulations that businesses don't like or fewer regulations that businesses don't like. Regulatory capture is when the villains of both sides are working together, and the solution to it is fewer regulations that big businesses do like. But nobody wants to see their hero as a villain so anything that accurately portrays this is unpopular.
- catchnear4321 3y ago
  you forgot the part about the shiny metal orb. it really changes the flavor of it from cambridge analytica to dr evil.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    I'm starting to think Bond villains need to have a "satire" disclaimer to pre-empt future Stanford kids from thinking it's something to aspire to.
    - redler 3y ago
      They'll still have Atlas Shrugged.
    - Hamuko 3y ago
      Alternative subtitle track that just displays "(this guy is the bad guy)" when the villain is visible on screen.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        How can he be the villain, he has all the money so he must be the good guy!
      - rchaud 3y ago
        Perhaps a health bar that depletes as the good guy chips away at his evil plans?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me. You are supposed to preface it with how Altman is making AI services, selling them as AGI, and also painting AGI as a danger to the survival of humanity. Then, when they are baffled at why someone would sell something while describing it that way, you can walk them through regulatory capture and erecting barriers to competition.
  - shwaj 3y ago
    Citation requested re: Altman saying current offerings are AGI. When I search, I see things like “there may be a path to AGI”.
    - mcpar-land 3y ago
      the current 'normie' understanding of ChatGPT and other current LLMs like Bard is not that they are stochastic parrots that can complete sentences by probabilities, it's that they are 'stupid AGI.' And if we give them more funding and more training, eventually they will become 'smart AGI.' OpenAI markets their product exactly this way, focusing on how ChatGPT can 'write code' (it cannot) or 'write poetry' (it cannot) or do any number of things that lean in hard on the 'stupid AGI' angle, never clarifying that their actual product is a spicy autocomplete. You'll never hear OpenAI say 'ChatGPT is a stupid AGI' out loud, but they'll never correct any mainstream misunderstandings that it is.
      - astrange 3y ago
        The problem with saying an LLM is "just a parrot" is that we don't know how parrots work, so this doesn't mean anything.
        nhinck2 3y ago
        You know a parrot isnt going to impart new knowledge to the world.
sdenton4 3y ago
Sadly, I liked the original idea behind this, and thought it was one of the few actually-interesting applications of crypto currency. If you can (somehow) solve the unique identity problem, you can design a Universal Basic Income using a crypto-currency as backing. The Unique ID problem isn't solved by the blockchain, though, so it ends up being a total mess.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    As with all crypto ideas, I believe this starts with "If we wanted to take government out of the picture..."
    - twelve40 3y ago
      i think the question is more along the lines of how is this feasible
    - yunohn 3y ago
      And replacing said government with a team of zero-moral tech bros like Sam Altman. Not that I think any politicians/governments are doing a good job, but I’d rather not ”change” the system and end up in similar shit.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    To the best of my knowledge, the IRS has never scanned my eyeball, and yet I'm still able to send and receive money with them. I'm not getting the UBI angle at all. What part of UBI requires new technology?
    - notahacker 3y ago
      The problem it's solving or attempting to solve is "how do I create demand for a token that isn't redeemable for anything (generated by a private organization which intends to profit from exchanging tokens it generates for money)", and the only people that want those are cryptobros. Throw in the eyeball trackers as a "Proof of Personhood" twist on the "restricted supply" story, to go with the usual "future world currency, unlimited demand" spiel
Ataraxic 3y ago
I'm actually significantly more skeptical of OpenAI after discovering that one of their founders is behind this. The tag line of universal basic income is so absurd for an iris scanner built on the blockchain. Are we still in the world of 0% interest rates???
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  You can have UBI at a country level if you finance it with government budget (through taxes)[1], but as a for-profit enterprise, there's no that's a good idea (for it to work at all, it must have a monetization strategy, and they all look dystopian) [1] it actually exist(ed) in France (see RMI/RSA, though the different governments recently added tons of bureaucracy to it as a way to deter people from getting it, ruining the point), but the political will that it requires (and whether this is a good idea at all, I don't have a strong opinion on that) is the limiting factor.
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    To add : France minima sociaux are not enough to live on by themselves. Last time I checked the RSA was around 400 euros / months. The idea of UBI imply that you can live in a ok way with it. I have friends who lives with the French RSA, they have previous stash of money to complete it. One is close to spend only 400/month, but he lives on land he bought with his last job.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      > The idea of UBI imply that you can live in a ok way with it Not really, or rather it depends who you ask: on the left's perspective on UBI, you're right, but on the right side (Milton Friedman being the most prominent on that side having talked about UBI) then it should be barely enough to replace all other form of state wellfare without necessarily be enough to live from it.
  - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
    As soon as the money becomes conditional, it's not UBI. If you have to irrevokably sign up to an organ donor list, it's not UBI. UBI is inherently redistributive. Which I happen to think is immoral.
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
He was always sketchy, and the whole way he handles OpenAI is also extremely sketchy with pushing for regulation that in effect protects OpenAI's products against competition and forms a soft-to-hard government monopoly on AI (the exact opposite of OpenAI's initial mission). And yet, they did bring us GPT, and inspired the world to go in this direction, including the open-source models by Meta. History is always messy like this. And another proof of this will be if this tech becomes the beginning of the end of our civilization, but that's just me thinking out loud here.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Artificial fertilizer (which feeds billions of people worldwide) was invented by the same guy who ran the German chemical weapons program in WWI.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  the whole way he handles OpenAI is also extremely sketchy with pushing for regulation that in effect protects OpenAI's products against competition and forms a soft-to-hard government monopoly on AI To me, that's the least sketchy part of OpenAI. The part that gets me is where one day it's promoted as the future, and will be integrated into every part of our lives. And the very next day, the same guy is telling newspapers that AI is so scary and potentially destructive that it absolutely must be regulated by governments. It's like being so proud of continually building new and improved nuclear bombs, and then telling the government that it better build a bunch of nuclear bomb shelters for everyone.
- __loam 3y ago
  > including the open-source models by Meta "open-source"
  - Raed667 3y ago
    Infinitely more open than the ones from "Open"-Ai
    - 3y ago
ks2048 3y ago
It is wild to me that Altman seems to really believe his company will have a God-On-Earth within the next decade and he still wants to put his name and time into some side hustle? I don't get it. (I think he or his supporters would say Worldcoin is something necessary for the future-AI world, but I don't buy it).
- xiphias2 3y ago
  He put his name on worldcoin before OpenAI got so serious. Now he can't really back out, and can't say bad about it anymore, but you bet he doesn't want any association with it anymore.
  - yunohn 3y ago
    Is that why he is constantly tweeting about WorldCoin?
- modo_ 3y ago
  He believes proof of humanity is vital in a world where AI can convincingly pass as human
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    So, making a buck creating a huge problem, and then making another buck working on the solution to that problem as a side-hustle. Boy, I'm really proud to be working in Tech in 2023...
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > making a buck creating a huge problem, and then making another buck working on the solution to that problem as a side-hustle Except he's doing neither of these. He's just talking about them while raising money.
      - mcguire 3y ago
tracker1 3y ago
Considering I've had a lot of laser treatments (micro-veins) and am getting eye (retina) surgery before long, it makes me wonder how reliable such a system is, and how well it will tollerate change/variance of one's eye-prints. I mean, theoretically, if you lose your eye in an accident, does that mean you lose your life savings in such a scheme? It really has me concerned. As fallible as people and banking are already, I'm not sure I'm ready for that level of "secure" without such considerations.
- sterlind 3y ago
  iirc you go to a place that can verify your identity through other means, and they'll update your iris scan or give you a yubikey you can use instead or something.

c31931b 3y ago

[dead]

boppo1 3y ago

Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me. If I say "The founder of OpenAI is scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" that sets off real alarm bells.

tim333 3y ago
Yeah but "scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" is untrue. You can scare a lot of people by telling them untrue stuff.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  Yeah but "scanning people's eyeballs to build a database" is untrue. That is literally what he is doing. People walk up to an "orb," get their eyeballs scanned, and a unique key goes into a database. What part of the parent's statement is untrue?
  - tim333 3y ago
    The purpose is to build a financial system although data is involved. It's a bit like saying banking is a scheme to get your financial data. I mean banks have your data but it's not the purpose.
redox99 3y ago
Pretty sad. They don't care about regulation that would potentially have a profound impact for everybody, but they care about people voluntarily doing something for a silly crypto token?
scrps 3y ago
I would hope both would set off alarm bells but I guess at least one of them inducing trepidation is cause enough these days for guarded optimism.
- flangola7 3y ago
  The regulatory capture conspiracy is myopic, ignorant, and "cope" as the kids say these days. People act as if Altman had never said spoken about AI dangers until ChatGPT took off, when in reality Altman has written about the dangers of AI before OpenAI even existed. The US government already added GPU dual-use export control restrictions a year ago due to their potential for weaponization, so he is not alone in recognizing the inherent dangers.
- kbenson 3y ago
  One of them is easy to include in thrilling action movies that allows the idea and risk to enter public consciousness, and the other is something that economics wonks and people interested in how business works at high levels look at. Protagonist 1: "I don't get it, why are they doing this? What do they have to gain?" Protagonist 2: "I don't know, unless... oh my god, it's regulatory capture!" Protagonist 1: "Shit, of course! What will we do?" Audience: Laughs at this shit being played so straight it comes off as a farce.
  - FormerBandmate 3y ago
    Regulatory capture becomes much easier to understand when you exaggerate it and say they’re trying to hijack and take over the government to make money. It isn’t that, but it’s close enough
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    "I bear urgent news! The king is planning to destroy the margrave, not by force of arms but by monopolizing the right of seigniorage!"
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The problem with regulatory capture is it makes everybody look bad. The usual morality play is either the evil business hurting people who has to be stopped by the benevolent government regulators, or the evil government regulators hurting innocent businesses who are just trying to make a living and keep prices down and keep jobs from moving offshore. To which the traditional solutions are either more regulations that businesses don't like or fewer regulations that businesses don't like. Regulatory capture is when the villains of both sides are working together, and the solution to it is fewer regulations that big businesses do like. But nobody wants to see their hero as a villain so anything that accurately portrays this is unpopular.
catchnear4321 3y ago
you forgot the part about the shiny metal orb. it really changes the flavor of it from cambridge analytica to dr evil.
- rchaud 3y ago
  I'm starting to think Bond villains need to have a "satire" disclaimer to pre-empt future Stanford kids from thinking it's something to aspire to.
  - redler 3y ago
    They'll still have Atlas Shrugged.
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    Alternative subtitle track that just displays "(this guy is the bad guy)" when the villain is visible on screen.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      How can he be the villain, he has all the money so he must be the good guy!
    - rchaud 3y ago
      Perhaps a health bar that depletes as the good guy chips away at his evil plans?
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Yeah, if I talk to a 'normie' and explain that chatGPT and OpenAI are nefariously plotting regulatory capture most will roll their eyes at me. You are supposed to preface it with how Altman is making AI services, selling them as AGI, and also painting AGI as a danger to the survival of humanity. Then, when they are baffled at why someone would sell something while describing it that way, you can walk them through regulatory capture and erecting barriers to competition.
- shwaj 3y ago
  Citation requested re: Altman saying current offerings are AGI. When I search, I see things like “there may be a path to AGI”.
  - mcpar-land 3y ago
    the current 'normie' understanding of ChatGPT and other current LLMs like Bard is not that they are stochastic parrots that can complete sentences by probabilities, it's that they are 'stupid AGI.' And if we give them more funding and more training, eventually they will become 'smart AGI.' OpenAI markets their product exactly this way, focusing on how ChatGPT can 'write code' (it cannot) or 'write poetry' (it cannot) or do any number of things that lean in hard on the 'stupid AGI' angle, never clarifying that their actual product is a spicy autocomplete. You'll never hear OpenAI say 'ChatGPT is a stupid AGI' out loud, but they'll never correct any mainstream misunderstandings that it is.
    - astrange 3y ago
      The problem with saying an LLM is "just a parrot" is that we don't know how parrots work, so this doesn't mean anything.
      - nhinck2 3y ago
        You know a parrot isnt going to impart new knowledge to the world.

sdenton4 3y ago

Sadly, I liked the original idea behind this, and thought it was one of the few actually-interesting applications of crypto currency. If you can (somehow) solve the unique identity problem, you can design a Universal Basic Income using a crypto-currency as backing. The Unique ID problem isn't solved by the blockchain, though, so it ends up being a total mess.

jabradoodle 3y ago
What does this mean? You already have a unique identity as far as the government are concerned, and who would pay UBI if not the government.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  As with all crypto ideas, I believe this starts with "If we wanted to take government out of the picture..."
  - twelve40 3y ago
    i think the question is more along the lines of how is this feasible
  - yunohn 3y ago
    And replacing said government with a team of zero-moral tech bros like Sam Altman. Not that I think any politicians/governments are doing a good job, but I’d rather not ”change” the system and end up in similar shit.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  To the best of my knowledge, the IRS has never scanned my eyeball, and yet I'm still able to send and receive money with them. I'm not getting the UBI angle at all. What part of UBI requires new technology?
  - notahacker 3y ago
    The problem it's solving or attempting to solve is "how do I create demand for a token that isn't redeemable for anything (generated by a private organization which intends to profit from exchanging tokens it generates for money)", and the only people that want those are cryptobros. Throw in the eyeball trackers as a "Proof of Personhood" twist on the "restricted supply" story, to go with the usual "future world currency, unlimited demand" spiel

Ataraxic 3y ago

I'm actually significantly more skeptical of OpenAI after discovering that one of their founders is behind this. The tag line of universal basic income is so absurd for an iris scanner built on the blockchain. Are we still in the world of 0% interest rates???

littlestymaar 3y ago
You can have UBI at a country level if you finance it with government budget (through taxes)[1], but as a for-profit enterprise, there's no that's a good idea (for it to work at all, it must have a monetization strategy, and they all look dystopian) [1] it actually exist(ed) in France (see RMI/RSA, though the different governments recently added tons of bureaucracy to it as a way to deter people from getting it, ruining the point), but the political will that it requires (and whether this is a good idea at all, I don't have a strong opinion on that) is the limiting factor.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  To add : France minima sociaux are not enough to live on by themselves. Last time I checked the RSA was around 400 euros / months. The idea of UBI imply that you can live in a ok way with it. I have friends who lives with the French RSA, they have previous stash of money to complete it. One is close to spend only 400/month, but he lives on land he bought with his last job.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > The idea of UBI imply that you can live in a ok way with it Not really, or rather it depends who you ask: on the left's perspective on UBI, you're right, but on the right side (Milton Friedman being the most prominent on that side having talked about UBI) then it should be barely enough to replace all other form of state wellfare without necessarily be enough to live from it.
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
  As soon as the money becomes conditional, it's not UBI. If you have to irrevokably sign up to an organ donor list, it's not UBI. UBI is inherently redistributive. Which I happen to think is immoral.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

He was always sketchy, and the whole way he handles OpenAI is also extremely sketchy with pushing for regulation that in effect protects OpenAI's products against competition and forms a soft-to-hard government monopoly on AI (the exact opposite of OpenAI's initial mission). And yet, they did bring us GPT, and inspired the world to go in this direction, including the open-source models by Meta. History is always messy like this. And another proof of this will be if this tech becomes the beginning of the end of our civilization, but that's just me thinking out loud here.

Legend2440 3y ago
Artificial fertilizer (which feeds billions of people worldwide) was invented by the same guy who ran the German chemical weapons program in WWI.
reaperducer 3y ago
the whole way he handles OpenAI is also extremely sketchy with pushing for regulation that in effect protects OpenAI's products against competition and forms a soft-to-hard government monopoly on AI To me, that's the least sketchy part of OpenAI. The part that gets me is where one day it's promoted as the future, and will be integrated into every part of our lives. And the very next day, the same guy is telling newspapers that AI is so scary and potentially destructive that it absolutely must be regulated by governments. It's like being so proud of continually building new and improved nuclear bombs, and then telling the government that it better build a bunch of nuclear bomb shelters for everyone.
__loam 3y ago
> including the open-source models by Meta "open-source"
- Raed667 3y ago
  Infinitely more open than the ones from "Open"-Ai
  - 3y ago

ks2048 3y ago

It is wild to me that Altman seems to really believe his company will have a God-On-Earth within the next decade and he still wants to put his name and time into some side hustle? I don't get it. (I think he or his supporters would say Worldcoin is something necessary for the future-AI world, but I don't buy it).

xiphias2 3y ago
He put his name on worldcoin before OpenAI got so serious. Now he can't really back out, and can't say bad about it anymore, but you bet he doesn't want any association with it anymore.
- yunohn 3y ago
  Is that why he is constantly tweeting about WorldCoin?
modo_ 3y ago
He believes proof of humanity is vital in a world where AI can convincingly pass as human
- ryandrake 3y ago
  So, making a buck creating a huge problem, and then making another buck working on the solution to that problem as a side-hustle. Boy, I'm really proud to be working in Tech in 2023...
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > making a buck creating a huge problem, and then making another buck working on the solution to that problem as a side-hustle Except he's doing neither of these. He's just talking about them while raising money.
    - mcguire 3y ago

tracker1 3y ago

Considering I've had a lot of laser treatments (micro-veins) and am getting eye (retina) surgery before long, it makes me wonder how reliable such a system is, and how well it will tollerate change/variance of one's eye-prints. I mean, theoretically, if you lose your eye in an accident, does that mean you lose your life savings in such a scheme? It really has me concerned. As fallible as people and banking are already, I'm not sure I'm ready for that level of "secure" without such considerations.

sterlind 3y ago
iirc you go to a place that can verify your identity through other means, and they'll update your iris scan or give you a yubikey you can use instead or something.