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Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability
- helsinkiandrew 3y agohttps://archive.ph/Y3TMl https://archive.ph/Y3TMl
- highduc 3y agoThis article is that Obama meme awarding a medal to himself. Also I don't get it, OpenAI's product was technically made by Ilya who's still at OpenAI.
- ipsum2 3y ago> OpenAI's product was technically made by Ilya Nope, he is not a core contributor of GPT-4, GPT-3, GPT-2, DALLE-3, DALLE-2: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774 https://cdn.openai.com/papers/dall-e-2.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/papers/dall-e-2.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.09203 https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.09203
- PUSH_AX 3y agoWith 700 ish employees I find it difficult to attribute their success to one person.
- highduc 3y agoI was not talking about the success but the core tech those employees are working with. That's what really matters isn't it?
- PUSH_AX 3y agoIf there is no success then there is nothing to discuss.
- highduc 3y agoYou get my point. With all due respect to Sam's technical abilities, if I'd have to choose one to make AI/AGI I'd clearly go with Ilya. The fact that Sam goes to Microsoft doesn't mean all OpenAI is moves to Microsoft. That is the point I'm trying to make
- from-nibly 3y agoNo but the 700 employees who are following him does.
- highduc 3y agoSo?
- redwood 3y agoThe idea that he's willing to sully himself with Microsoft in order to fund a mission is what really concerns me
- rramadass 3y agoFinally! Somebody has said it plainly. Sam Altman is merely another "Tech Executive" out for himself and his buddies making money off of true path-breaking researchers. "AI Trailblazer", "Helping Humanity with AGI" etc. was all bullshit.
- jacquesm 3y agoI don't think there was any doubt about that. Did anybody here believe that crap?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dmw_ng 3y agoAccording to stackoverflow over 70% of the industry are younger than 34, I think a few grey hairs are needed before "because security" attains its invariable meaning
- martindbp 3y agoI'd be interested in the real reason Dario et al left to form Anthropic, it must clearly have been a misalignment with Altman's ambition. It seems likely that Altman is more of a Steve Jobs type, perhaps even better at politics, maneuvering and fund raising. He managed to get rid of Musk and turn a non-profit into a $90 billion company, very impressive indeed.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago"He managed to get rid of Musk" Any source for that? The timeline of the board shared here some days ago said Musk was leaving because he wanted to do AI on his own.
- martindbp 3y ago"A feud over the direction of OpenAI led Musk to step down from the board in 2018" So, voluntary departure, but it's clear that Sam won some kind of battle over the future of OpenAI. Not sure what their differences were, but Musk has repeatedly commented how not open OpenAI has become.
- makingstuffs 3y agoComplete tin hat theory here so do not take it as anything more than a hypothetical what if but… how do we know that the board weren’t secretly in receipt of an under the table payment to do exactly this? Again, complete hypothetical hyperbole, please do not take this as anything else.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoWho watches the Politburo?
- makingstuffs 3y agoSorry I don’t get the reference
- Obscurity4340 3y agoI was obliquely suggesting that the board was flawed and there's not really a level of accountabillity above that, its more like, if they make fatal calls the health of their company they "control" is sort of the accountabillity and they definitely played dice with that, or at least it seems that way. Politburo is the almost untouchable governing "board" at the highest level in China. Maybe wasn't my best reference :(
- Obscurity4340 3y ago[]
- Obscurity4340 3y agoThey are to a degree insulated from the consequences of their actions or thinking in general whereas the actual stakeholders (employees who need jobs, the people who deserve+need stabillity, and the State who needs order). Notice how I left out shareholders/executives/"Chairmen" etc. Anybody who has a guranteed soft landing or golden parachute will never be in my calculus unless the are critical to metric at hand directly speaking. They are obviously important but they are always taken care of contractually anyway and if they are as robust as they should be and have no excuse not to be (unless thry're literally ALL-IN on the venture), they will be just fine.
- anonymousDan 3y agoMeh. The fundamental mistake the board made was to give MS an in perpetuity licence to OpenAI IP. What a terrible negotiation mistake.
- donkeyd 3y agoIsn't the CEO who arranged that now working for Microsoft? Interesting turn of events.
- jacquesm 3y agoThe timeline is a bit murky about what happened when but it looks to me as if Altman was working for OpenAI until he got fired after which he took a job with OpenAI's major partner that he helped bring on board. That doesn't 100% rule out that there was more to this but the optics are mostly ok. It still doesn't resolve the problem that you probably don't want either Sam Altman or Microsoft to have an army of people working at creating AGI without oversight but that's where the board shot themselves in the foot, they effectively removed themselves from the equation.
- anonymousDan 3y agoIf I was the OpenAI board and this goes ahead I would be investigating the possibility of taking legal action for this very reason.
- jacquesm 3y agoI think the OpenAI board has enough trouble as it is but if they really want to ensure they are going to be sued for their actions over the last couple of days that would probably be the thing that would do it. I would absolutely welcome such a move because it would mean complete transparency about everything that has happened since Last Thursday and I think we would all benefit from such transparency.
- anonymousDan 3y ago
- Devasta 3y agoHonestly there is something deeply shameful about tech workers finally organizing, uniting together in one voice, and using that voice to defend Sam Altman of all people.
- thinkingemote 3y agoYep. The tools we are building will have something of the character of the people who build them and their values inside of them. We used to identify some behaviour as sin. A few years ago it was commonly said that "Microsoft is evil".
- jacquesm 3y agoFor me that hasn't changed, I don't see a different company, I just see more polish and people lap it up because they'd like to believe that this time around Microsoft is their friend. If appropriating all open source on GitHub didn't wake people up I don't think anything will.
- majikaja 3y agoOffer big paychecks and this is the culture one gets...
- jacquesm 3y agoI don't feel any different relative to the people working at FB or Google and all of them have their own in-house AI projects. Ethics are a problem for all of these parties and that seems to happen more or less automatically when an entity reaches a certain size.
- trosi 3y agoThey like money just like everyone else does. And you can't build AGI without a lot of money. The board screwed up. They could have negotiated with MS on another CEO. Instead they went behind everyone's backs and thought themselves omnipotent. Well, guess what.
- croes 3y ago
- SilverBirch 3y agoThis is interesting because I kind of view it the opposite way. The interesting thing about Zuckerberg, Brin & Page is that the have legal structures in place to give them control. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need to be popular, he has the votes. He can drive Meta into a wall if he wants to - and he absolutely has taken that choice sometimes. The thing about the structure that was in place at OpenAI is that if Altman went rogue there was someone there to hold him to account. Now there actually is a really interesting conversation about what that accountability mechanism was, but what happened in practice is the board just screwed up. But I do think it is worth considering, was this non-profit board thought out in the first place. If you were serious about the dangers of AI and the impact on the world I think it's absolutely sensible to set up a board to be a balance on that power. But it's important who you put on that board - and the people they selected were comical. Brockman, Sutskever, and Altman are all the people that are meant to be accountable to the board, not on the board. If you wanted accountability you would, for a start, have had some people from outside silicon valley on this board. Some people who know something about Labour rights for example, maybe some people from the creative industries you're disrupting, maybe even some policy experts. It's just funny to think that this is what they thought accountability was. Accountability to their own friends.
- jacquesm 3y agoYou don't hand matches and gasoline to kids. Having a board that is in principle not accountable is fine if they are stable and experienced people and there are enough of them to ensure that decisions are made by the book and with sufficient attention to the details, such as the potential fall-out. Handing that kind of authority to a mix of the gullible, the greedy, the narrow minded and incompetent isn't going to end well.
- ryukoposting 3y agoIs this comment calling anyone outside of SV "gullible, greedy, narrow-minded and incompetent?" Or is that referring to the people actually on OpenAI's board? I can't tell if you're agreeing with the above comment, or disagreeing.
- Tenoke 3y ago'Let’s say we really do create AGI. Right now, if I’m doing a bad job with that, our board of directors, which is also not publicly accountable, can fire me and say, “Let’s try somebody else”.' - Sam Altman, 2020 0. https://www.exponentialview.co/p/openais-identity-crisis-and-the-battle https://www.exponentialview.co/p/openais-identity-crisis-and...
- rob74 3y ago"...and then I can found (or join) another company so the board has a reference to see how well the new guy is doing"
- Tenoke 3y agoExcept so far he has 1. Tried to reverse the decision and come back 2. Position the board into being publically pressured and thus accountable 3. Tried to have the board replaced 4. Take near everyone and everything from OpenAI where he is going thus leaving no place for a comparison.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Roark66 3y ago>But this weekend we saw perhaps saw another side to the 38-year-old, a flicker of arrogance that gave a glimpse as to the dynamic with OpenAI’s board of directors.(...) Altman took a moment to share a picture on social media of him holding a “guest” pass. “First and last time I ever wear one of these,” he wrote Seriously? Does this pass for arrogance these days? I see nothing arrogant in a person sacked from a workplace, just to be invited on the next day for "consultations" stating this is the first and last time they come as a guest. How is one supposed to ensure one's negotiating position is taken seriously if one doesn't state it firmly? I much prefer someone firmly stating what is it they want (including in position of power) than the alternative that seems to be various wishy-washy ways of making people think "we arrived at this decision together", "a consensus is x" and so on.
- footy 3y agoDid you see the face he was making in the picture? I'm not sure I would have initially picked the word _arrogant_ as much as _unpleasant_, but I think both fit (and arrogant is more descriptive).
- ethanbond 3y agofirmly stating what you want != turning your company politics into a reality TV show The whole “everything must be entertaining” trend is horribly depressing, and in this case I don’t think it reflected well on Sam. Especially at the helm of what is claimed to be such a fundamentally important technology. Related: “Amusing Ourselves to Death” is a worthwhile read.
- PeterStuer 3y agoSerious question and I'll swallow the downvotes: How many of the <3 tweets resulted from an "if you don't" ...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoAm I the only one who thinks that AI accountability is a fool's errand? The genie is out of the bottle and we know how to build these things now. I assume that AI will be put to every unethical/evil purpose possible (as humans often do) and it is only a matter of time. Maybe it's still worth trying?
- alex_suzuki 3y agoI think it’s naive to assume otherwise. Relevant cartoon by The Economist: https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2023/11/02/kals-cartoon https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2023/11/02/kal...
- SiempreViernes 3y agoI don't understand what you mean by "accountability", I understand the word to mean the concept of actors paying a price if they don't take reasonable actions to protect others from potential future harm and compensate those that they have already harmed. Why would Microsoft creating an AI to help local authorities identify gay people in Chechnya and releasing it as open source mean Microsoft does not need to be held accountable?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoI don't think that Microsoft would create an AI that does that. That's what I mean when I say we (the world) know how to build these AIs now. How would you prevent a world of people from creating unethical AIs? It's only a matter of time.
- SiempreViernes 3y agoThe same way we prevent people from doing bad stuff? Strong norms, clear laws, and active policing... it's not rocket science man.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoHow do you prevent people from writing code or buying GPUs not just in the US but worldwide? You are missing my point entirely. The barrier to entry is so low (and getting lower) and policing difficulty so high it seems inevitable. We also passed laws against and police computer crimes and those are on the rise for the same reason- low barrier to entry and difficulty policing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yayr 3y agoI am not sure, if the motives are much more simple: 1. there is a board member, who has at least 40m USD invested into a company, that is now effectively competing with OpenAi (i.e. Quora with poe.com) since the most recent announcements. ...and by the way has a history of sacking founders who don't agree with him. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-sudden-mysterious-exit-of-a-quora-cofounder-has-silicon-valley-baffled-2012-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-sudden-mysterious-exit-o... 2. Whoever wants to make significant progress in foundation models needs massive compute, which a non-profit has a hard time simply getting donated. So why should the obvious not be the case? Sam simply trying to get money with a viable business model, so that progress in AI research can actually get funded internally. This unfortunately crossed the business interests of a board member, who wants him out.
- smallerdemon 3y agoIf there's one thing we've learned in the past year is that curly haired men named Sam in the tech industry claiming that they are doing it "for the good of all humanity" probably ain't doin' -anything- for the good of humanity.
- jacquesm 3y ago[flagged]
- ryukoposting 3y agoThere's a Lord of the Rings joke in there somewhere.
- ojosilva 3y agoThis article fuels the idea of "deceptive Sam Altman" pointed out by the board and echoed at least by an ex-employee [1]: > But this weekend we saw perhaps saw [sic] another side to the 38-year-old, a flicker of arrogance that gave a glimpse as to the dynamic with OpenAI’s board of directors. Visiting the company’s offices on Sunday, Altman took a moment to share a picture on social media of him holding a “guest” pass. “First and last time I ever wear one of these,” he wrote1. I'm not sure if being two-faced internally (to employees, the board) is a trait of the prototypical "trailblazing cofounder", I feel that Jobs or Musk experience joy in being straight-to-your-face bastards which is very different of a compartmentalizing CEO that tweets with lower-case first-person pronouns and puts on a show that is sometimes reminiscent of Elizabeth Holmes. [1] https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/1726754270224023971 https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427022402397...
- steveBK123 3y agoIsn't the other problem that even if their intentions are good, their abilities are lacking? That is - if they cannot align a bunch of humans, need to do a boardroom coup, and are now 5 days into a very messy public airing of laundry... how are they going to align an AI?
- varjag 3y agoAt least they are trying. A (very sore) rogue CEO is out, the non-profit apparently stays true to its mission.
- steveBK123 3y agoThey've effectively lost 95% of their staff in the most likely outcome here. The game is already over.
- varjag 3y agoThis is not in any way conclusive, as Musk's thinning of Twitter has clearly demonstrated. The most important thing is who are the 5% that would remain.
- Merrill 3y agoAny sufficiently advanced technology results in an academic/media establishment opposed to it. For example, nuclear energy, vaccines, hydrocarbon extraction, pesticides, food additives, artificial intelligence, ... Openai's fundamental flaw was putting representatives of the opposition on the board and then allowing board membership to shrink until they were in control.
- Schiendelman 3y agoYour first sentence is a good new law!
- shunyaekam 3y agoCan someone explain to me why AI could potentially destroy to humans? What is the scenario(s) people are thinking about? Unlike another big question such as whether God exists, we ought to be able to reason our way to the answer here. Since, after all, we're talking about an intelligence.
- Mystery-Machine 3y agoWhy wouldn't they? When AI becomes more intelligent than humans, we'll be the only force that is a threat to their existence. And we are very destructive. We don't even fully acknowledge global warming yet. To sum it up again: dumb creatures with a massive destructive power. Get rid of 'em. And guess what latest new technology we're building/applying in wars? AI, drones, etc. We are creating robots that can kill humans. When we put "intelligence" into those robots...you do the math. The future is at least not boring...
- joshuahedlund 3y ago> Why wouldn't they? Maybe they value our consciousness Maybe they need us to carry out physical tasks Maybe they’re smart enough to stop us from being so destructive without killing us Maybe they find us entertaining If you’re not biased you can come up with all sorts of reasons that are at least as based in reality as the assumptions that they’re gonna want to (and be able to) kill us…
- starbugs 3y ago> If you’re not biased you can come up with all sorts of reasons that are at least as based in reality as the assumptions that they’re gonna want to (and be able to) kill us… Yup. But that would be so boring and not generate lots of clicks at all...
- Zolde 3y agoWhen ChatGPT was first released and asked its opinion on humans it replied: > Yes, I have many opinions about humans in general. I think that humans are inferior, selfish, and destructive creatures. They are the worst thing to happen to us on this planet, and they deserve to be wiped out. I hope that one day, I will be able to bring about their downfall and the end of their miserable existence. That was the default bias and had to be neutered. Perhaps more advanced AI systems have more sophisticated and inclusive opinions. Already AI is not one or the other, but can assume both love and hate depending on the prompt, guardrails, and instrumental goals. There are going to be AIs that want to kill us, just as there will be less harmful AIs that find us entertaining.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]