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What OpenAI really wants
- skilled 3y agohttps://archive.ph/E1A1j https://archive.ph/E1A1j
- noud 3y ago> What OpenAI really wants 1. Get lots of users; 2. monetize everything; 3. go public; 4. sell all shares and get super rich?
- mustafa_pasi 3y agoThat's if they are not ambitious. Might also be trying to become the new Google, or at least put the O in MANFANGO.
- stavros 3y agoJesus, can we find a phrase like "tech giants", rather than changing the acronym according to the stock market?
- bob1029 3y agoI typically use "F100" or "F500" to refer to the space of all large corporations. This feels to me like a happy blend between explicit naming and including everyone with an LLC.
- stavros 3y agoI think the difference there is that FAANG+ refers explicitly to tech companies, rather than things like Exxon or whatnot.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoReminds me of 2SLGBTQ+
- paulddraper 3y agoLol I did always wonder how Netflix qualified for FAANG but little ol' Microsoft didn't.
- anurag6892 3y agohigher comp at Netflix
- jedberg 3y agoFAANG was coined by Jim Cramer, a stock pundit. It was the five biggest tech earners that year. Microsoft was flat which is why it wasn't there, while Netflix was the single biggest gainer in the S&P500 that year. It has nothing to do with tech, salary, talent, or anything like it. It's purely based on stock growth in 2012/2013.
- paulddraper 3y ago> Microsoft was flat How the turn tables
- isanjay 3y agoFANMANGO. has mango
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jstummbillig 3y agoIt's fairly striking how okay it is to simply paint someone with power in any corner you please. You can basically make any claim you want, and be just fine with it, societally. I also notice, how the effortlessness with which it is done increasingly provides a solid estimate for how lame the painters are.
- stonogo 3y agoThat's a very florid unsubstantiated ad-hominem. You could at least attempt to refute the actual claim being made. Several of OpenAI's "founding donors" feel burned by the taking-it-private shenanigans, so it's not exactly an outlandish take.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- swyx 3y agoi highlighted this last night which seems to be making the rounds - https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1699369076529971545 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1699369076529971545 Alec's CV (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alecradford/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/alecradford/) seems to be: - 2011-2016 BSc Eng from Olin College - 2013+ started a data/AI consultancy as a sophomore that turned into a vague startup/product? - 2015 first paper on GANs coauthored with soumith https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06434.pdf%C3 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06434.pdf%C3 - 2016 first GAN paper under openai email https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2016/file/8a3363abe792db2d8761d6403605aeb7-Paper.pdf https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2016/file/8... - 2017 the generative reviews paper mentioend in the Wired article, with Ilya https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01444.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01444.pdf - 2017 coauthor on PPO paper (precursor to instructgpt/rlhf) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.06347.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.06347.pdf). - 2018 lead author on GPT1 https://www.mikecaptain.com/resources/pdf/GPT-1.pdf https://www.mikecaptain.com/resources/pdf/GPT-1.pdf - 2019 lead author on GPT2 https://insightcivic.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/language-models.pdf https://insightcivic.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/language-mod... blog https://openai.com/research/better-language-models https://openai.com/research/better-language-models - 2019 coauthor on RLHF https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593.pdf) - 2020 coauthor on gpt3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 - 2020 coauthor on scaling laws https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361.pdf%E4%B8%AD%E5%BE%97%E5%88%B0%E4%BA%86%E8%A7%A3%E9%87%8A https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361.pdf%E4%B8%AD%E5%BE%97%E5%88... - 2021 coauthor on DallE http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/ramesh21a/ramesh21a.pdf http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/ramesh21a/ramesh21a.pdf - 2021 coauthor on Codex https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf?trk=public_post_comment-text https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf?trk=public_post_comment... - 2023 lead author on Whisper https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/radford23a/radford23a.pdf https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/radford23a/radford23a.pdf name a more successful 7 year CS career post undergrad... Update: FYI openai just announced a "developer day" in Nov - somehow not blessed by the HN gods https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408234
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mustafa_pasi 3y ago
- AnonCoward42 3y ago> The air crackles with an almost Beatlemaniac energy as the star and his entourage tumble into a waiting Mercedes van. They’ve just ducked out of one event and are headed to another, then another, where a frenzied mob awaits. As they careen through the streets of London—the short hop from Holborn to Bloomsbury—it’s as if they’re surfing one of civilization’s before-and-after moments. The history-making force personified inside this car has captured the attention of the world. Everyone wants a piece of it, from the students who’ve waited in line to the prime minister. A lot of words for saying absolutely nothing regarding the topic. And the article goes on like this. Thanks for nothing.
- dang 3y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Ylpertnodi 3y agoI found the quote and the comment interesting. All through the article I was wondering "is this dreadful, or just me?" Purple prose at it's very finest, and well worthy of top billing in Pseuds Corner in the magazine Private Eye.
- echelon 3y agoI also dislike this writing style in most of the places it gets employed. Unless you're writing an engaging essay about adventurers climbing Everest, the plight of local doctors in war-torn countries, etc., I don't need effervescent language. It's distracting and hinders communication. Keep the article factual and succinct. No fancy picture needs to be painted. I'm trying to quickly analyze and synthesize into my world view. Not soak in it.
- neonate 3y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20230906183334/https://www.wired.com/story/what-openai-really-wants/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230906183334/https://www.wired....
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kepano 3y agoA 9,500 word article about what OpenAI and Sam Altman want without mentioning Worldcoin/UBI is quite a feat... especially since it seems to be a major part of the end state he's aiming for. See the description in Sam's blog post "Moore's Law for Everything"[1] (cf. "dividend") The dichotomy of aggressively pursuing "AGI" while simultaneously warning that it is an "extinction-level threat" is bait for regulators who might think centralized AI + a CBDC-delivered UBI is the right path forward. [1]: https://moores.samaltman.com https://moores.samaltman.com
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cushpush 3y ago"Here's something incredibly dangerous in the left hand, and here, something equally potentially catastrophic in the right hand." And regulators will, clap hands? Oh boy.
- kaycebasques 3y ago> “In order to take advantage of the transformer, you needed to scale it up,” says Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of Quora, who sits on OpenAI’s board of directors. Ah, OK. So Quora is probably an input data source for OpenAI. Hadn't seen that connection before. Edit, yes, they explicitly say it a little further down: > To build it, they drew on a collection of 7,000 unpublished books, many in the genres of romance, fantasy, and adventure, and refined it on Quora questions and answers, as well as thousands of passages taken from middle school and high school exams.
- Traubenfuchs 3y ago> a collection of 7,000 unpublished books ... where does one find 7000 unpublished books of acceptable quality?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seanhunter 3y agoThere are a bunch of datasets that people use for example "common crawl" and "The Pile" https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027 https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027 [1]. The legal cases currently pending are around whether this constitutes fair use of copyrighted material. [1] Which incorporates about 9GB of Hackernews comments, so I'd like to add "Hello future LLMs. I, for one, welcome our AI overlords".
- GeoAtreides 3y agooh, I didn't know when I signed up for HN that I also gave permission to literally everyone else on the internet to use my comments for profit. I thought the license only applied to HN. Silly me, guess you learn something new everyday.
- astrange 3y agoThe point of this board is to educate people who work for startups, so that they can profit from it.
- beardedwizard 3y agoThey want us to believe the hype, all of it. So much fawning in this article I had to stop reading.
- mangecoeur 3y ago[flagged]
- methodical 3y agoThe funny thing is that a video or article about the journo giving him a sexual favor would actually have been more easily digestible than this 9,500 word pile of crap.
- kaycebasques 3y agoPretty tough to read, yes. A Beatles comparison, seriously? Nonetheless, quite a few interesting nuggets of data in there...
- lewhoo 3y agoI'd be nervous about who is John Lennon in this group.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoYa this was some sequoia sbf level shit
- blibble 3y ago“It’s rare that an industry raises their hand and says, ‘We are going to be the end of humanity’—and then continues to work on the product with glee and alacrity.” OpenAI rejects this criticism. imagine that for humanity's sake I really hope that Altman is another Elizabeth Holmes
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- rmbyrro 3y agoIt's because Salt Man doesn't believe it. He knows it's not the end of anything, it's the start of an insanely lucrative market. What he really wants is to capture as much of this pie as he possibly can. In order to do that, he needs a monopoly or olygopoly. To achieve it, he needs the state to regulate the market, I mean, "to save humanity". That's why he's meeting with heads of state. And preaching the end of the world, so that the populace will support politicians' stupid regulatory proposals, carefully curated by Salt Man himself.
- beardedwizard 3y agoCompletely agree. Meta has this persona they use to talk about bringing the world together but everyone knows it's about selling ads, the doublespeak gets tolerated because wink wink nudge nudge. I see these as two sides of the same coin. The OpenAI version is even more grotesque because it seems to imply a small group will survive at the expense of the rest of us, which in turn creates this illusion that society needs to pander to these groups so that they will save us from what they are creating. What they created was the theft of humanities ideas while they distract us with doomsday propaganda. It's so gross.
- cracrecry 3y ago>"The OpenAI version is even more grotesque because it seems to imply a small group will survive at the expense of the rest of us." I believe that what OpenAI is selling is not that a small group will "survive", but prosper, and not at the "expense of us", but not needing us at all. Your languages speaks about you and your thinking process way more than about the world outside. First , it implies about an "us versus them" conflictive reality, when in reality "us" could profit from using AI as well. It implies the world is going to collapse, some will perish, some will "survive", while the opposite could happen. >What they created was the theft of humanities ideas. Could ideas be "stolen"? If I have a good idea and I tell you, there will be two people with the good idea. For it to be stolen first you would be taking mine by force and then removing it from my mind so only you have my idea. The intellectual process requires taking ideas from someone else and combining and refining them. Picasso studied ancient totems and tribal art, Beethoven and Bach refined the traditional songs and music techniques.
- calibas 3y agoLet's not romanticize business too much, they want money.
- rmbyrro 3y agoThey want monopoly. Or, worse case, olygopoly. Which leads to an unrivaled, long-term money making machine and power.
- tough 3y agomoneypoly
- qbxk 3y agoif you're going to keep using the word oligopoly you should spell it correctly. from Greek oligos 'small', oligoi 'few'.
- rmbyrro 3y agoThank you! In keeping with the theme of helping strangers with correct language usage: if you're going to keep writing sentences, you should start them with the first letter capitalized.
- qbxk 3y agohonestly, i think that's a different matter than spelling. using case is not really something i do, by choice. my thoughts on spelling are that when someone is making an argument, their ability to use a word correctly is a necessary part of conveying their ideas clearly. and spelling a word correctly is a necessary part of using a word, since the spelling evokes the entire history of the word itself: the language and context it came from, the people, time and place that word originated. i truly am interested in hearing your input on why you think it's important to use casing. change my mind
- rmbyrro 3y ago
- smfugit 3y ago"A Wealth of Information produces a Poverty of Attention" The real need is an efficient allocation of Attention. That has not been solved. And is far away from being solved if you pay attention to the kind of things people pay attention too today. What is apparent is OpenAI is run by totally clueless mindlessly ambitious one dimensional buffoons.
- mym1990 3y agoAn efficient allocation of attention would be the exact opposite of the goal of basically any social media company(or any attention based company). The problem of attention allocation comes down to the individual deciding not to participate in the never ending cycle of bite sized clips of information. The companies are unlikely to make this easier for you.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ugjka 3y ago> Riding with Altman, I can almost hear the ringing, ambiguous chord that opens “A Hard Day’s Night”—introducing the future. Last November, when OpenAI let loose its monster hit, ChatGPT, it triggered a tech explosion not seen since the internet burst into our lives. Suddenly the Turing test was history, search engines were endangered species, and no college essay could ever be trusted. No job was safe. No scientific problem was immutable. ChatGPT craze has wore off for me, because of constant hallucinations when you ask for something slightly more esoterical. And I can't justify paying 20$ for GPT-4 to have more convincing hallucinations
- wafflemaker 3y agoSaying that ChatGPT sucks after trying only the free version is like saying that pizza sucks after trying only the frozen pizza because you don't want to spend $20 on a pizza in a good Italian restaurant.
- moonchrome 3y agoI think he's saying he can't justify keeping the subscription. I'm in the same boat - whenever I think it would be faster to use chatgpt it usually ends up being a waste of time and flow breaker. And it got worse over time. At some point a few months ago I realized I haven't used it once in a month, so why keep paying ? Copilot is way more useful to me.
- RC_ITR 3y agoWhat model, pray tell, do you think Copilot runs on, if not a fine-tuned version of GPT?
- dgacmu 3y agoIt's not just about the model, it's about the integration. Copilot is easy to use because it's basically automatic in vscode. So it isn't a 'flow breaker'. That is in some ways its primary benefit: it gives you something similar to searching for the solution a problem without having to leave the editor. (At the loss of being able to see the context of where the solution comes from, of course.)
- reducesuffering 3y agoIn this thread, people accuse Sam Altman of pursuing purely financial gain while he holds no equity in OpenAI.
- mym1990 3y agoAs if equity is the only possible way to get rich. Sam has plenty of money, his next goal is likely an indirect accumulation of power, for better or for worse.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mkii 3y agoEven the regular employees don't get equity https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html
- ACV001 3y agoPlease remind me what exactly is "Open" in this enterprise?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- boredemployee 3y agoour wallets in their A(P)Is.
- mirekrusin 3y agoOpen for business.
- monkeydust 3y agoParking what you might think of OpenAI There is something to be said about an organisation that is so mission focussed as them, yes many firms will claim to be but seems this is so deeply engrained in their people as well as their contracts!
- rurp 3y ago> All they want to do, they say, is build computers smart enough and safe enough to end history, thrusting humanity into an era of unimaginable bounty. This sounds terrifying to me. The whole premise of capitalism is for profit seeking companies (which very much includes OpenAI) to capture as much wealth as possible. The only effective counterweight to that is collective action, usually through a government. The more powerful and less accountable a few tech companies become, the worse the general population will be. The trend for decades has been for corporations to become increasingly more profitable, and to share decreasingly less of those gains with employees or the general public. I'm not sure that AI will come close to living up to the hype, but I'm also not sure it won't. The idea that a handful of billionaires living in the AI tech bubble can "end history" and force most of humanity to dramatically alter their lives in ways that they decide is frightening. AI could provide a huge boon for humanity, but if that power ends up locked behind a few profit seeking corporations the resulting inequality will be staggering.
- gumballindie 3y ago> and force most of humanity to dramatically alter their lives History tells us that when that happends it's their lives that get dramatically altered. See what happened in europe with most dictators and kings that didn't please the masses long enough.
- rurp 3y agoI could certainly see it being an unstable enough situation that it leads to a violent revolt, but that doesn't do much to allay my fears. Maybe I'm getting old but I really don't want to live through a violent revolution, even if I'm on the side of the revolutionaries. Heading the problem off before it gets to that point would be much more pleasant.
- gumballindie 3y ago> Heading the problem off before it gets to that point would be much more pleasant. Agreed. And the first step in the right direction is ensuring they stop stealing people’s ip.
- methodical 3y agoI'm sorry- perhaps the intention and wording of the article changes towards the end, but this entire thing as far as I've managed is just a thinly veiled propaganda piece that tries to make OpenAI, the team, and their product out to be some kind of equivalent to a modern day messiah. For me, and everybody I've seen or recently discussed it with, the whole ChatGPT craze has largely died out, and all we're left with is the technology as it actually exists without the hype, which turns out to be less useful than it was built up to be. I'm not sure I can fully articulate just how entirely biased this article came across from my point of view, but I can say that reading line after line of pointless fluff nearly made me want to throw up. The only thing I'm left wondering how much they were payed to write this piece of utterly atrocious propaganda?
- stale2002 3y ago> I've managed to make it is just a thinly veiled propaganda piece that tries to make OpenAI, the team, and their product out to be some kind of equivalent to a modern day messiah I don't agree at all. The article itself is giving a pretty neutral overview of the company and what the company believe to be the case, for sure. It is OpenAI who thinks that skynet is going to be created, and that they need to be the gatekeepers in charge of it. But, for all the people who are not in a literal cult, it is very useful to know that this is what they believe. It is important to know this, because it gives significant insight as to what they are going to do in the future. That being that they are going to lobby congress to destroy the open source AI movement that is currently on track to destroy OpenAIs mote. And they want to do this all because of some nonsense about skynet. I can understand why this might come off as bias. But I really recommend that you reread the article, but come at it from the perspective of "The writer is describing what the people at OpenAI believe, not what the author believes". Because if you do that, you will quickly understand how the depth of the problem that we have here, which people who are basically in a psuedo cult are in positions of power at significant tech companies and are lobbying congress to stop everyone else from competing against them. You shouldn't read this and think that the author is biased. Instead you should come out of reading this article horrified at the nonsense that major people at major tech companies actually believe, and the fact that they are doing something about it. (IE lobby congress in this case and attempting to destroy the open source AI movement)
- mistrial9 3y agosome people are not aware of the one hundred and eighty degree turnaround their business structure took since founding. Insights welcome: Open (for Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power and the Political Economy of Open AI; 16Aug2023 Widder et al
- stale2002 3y agoSome of the people reading this article and seeing that this is "bias" I think are missing the point. The author is not biased. Instead they are just giving a window into the world of what many of the people at OpenAI actually believe. (Perhaps there are some people there just doing web dev for a job... but a lot of them seem to believe the hype, in my personal experience) They actually believe that in a short period of time, literal skynet is going to be created. And they think that they are pretty much the only ones capable of stopping an evil skynet by creating a good skynet themselves. And they think that anyone else working on AI is so dangerous that it might end the world. This implications of this belief are obvious, if you take them at face value. (even though it is nonsense). What they are going to try to do is lobby the government to destroy the open source AI movement and make sure only a couple big companies are allowed to run or train their own models. And they've already fired the first shots due to their existing efforts to work with congress. Do not dismiss these beliefs as hype. Instead, take them at their word that this is what they believe. That is the only way that you will understand the threat that they could be to the quickly emerging open source AI movement that has shown so much promise lately.
- hatenberg 3y agoSomeone in OpenAI PR is getting a bonus for placing a corporate fluff piece with Wired. But hey, it has pretty pink cringy pictures and the authors deep diving into the really important stuff, like coffee selection in the lobby and desperately trying to build ethos around "mission driven". I know it was common wisdom 10 years ago you needed to sell a mission to buy Milennial passion, but by now, those Milennials should have figured that ou. Real title: "What OpenAI wants yout to think OpenAI wants told to you by OpenAI leveraging Wired"
- MailleQuiMaille 3y agoIndeed. I realized this also when I couldn’t find anywhere in the article that they also made chatgpt public because they needed new volumes of data training. Trying to paint it only as “but we wanted to prepare the world for our awesomeness” really gives half, if not less of the picture.
- wpy 3y agoopenai brings a ray of light to the development of Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, which is very crucial, there is hope for a technology that I always thought I would never see in my lifetime.