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OpenAI was working on advanced model so powerful it alarmed staff
- philipov 3y agoIs this entire article based on the Reuters news that came out yesterday? The news that amounted to "Two guys in the alley told us some stuff, but we can't verify any of it" This feels like laundering news; all the "We weren't able to confirm the truth of these statements"' have been removed. https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai...
- dgritsko 3y agoIt's a great headline that feeds right in to the rest of the OpenAI drama, which is undoubtedly why it's all over the place. But I'm with you - where are the details?
- api 3y agoWe don’t have very much journalism anymore. We have click bait sites that reprint stuff they got from social media and comment sections.
- righthand 3y agoIt’s funny to talk about details because the entire OpenAI staff used vague media reporting to get their way when Altman was ousted and yet no one really has any concrete details about that. So nice they can cause a huge frenzy and then walk away in silence after it’s over because they got a payday. Suddenly any information is none of our business.
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- patcon 3y agoFrom the Reuters article you linked, the only hit from "ctrl+f confirm" now says: > Researchers have also flagged work by an "AI scientist" team, the existence of which multiple sources confirmed. Maybe it firmed up in the 6h-ago update, and so other sources started publishing more widely? I'm realizing I need to get in the habit of re-reading source materials, instead of going off memory on an evolving story like this :)
- philipov 3y agoYeah, the article is like 3 times longer than it was yesterday around 6pm ET when it was posted. It was barely 5 paragraphs then.
- mgiannopoulos 3y ago> It was barely 5 paragraphs then. It has been a very bad trend on mass media to not properly inform about the different versions of the same article. Sometimes their entire narrative changes with no indication of what the article originally was about.
- evrydayhustling 3y agoThey've confirmed that there is an "AI scientist team" at OpenAI??? Sounds like a lot of journalism happened in between those updates.
- kome 3y agoAI under copyright and closed source is the biggest threat; all this bulshitting about AI risk is absolutely ridiculous.
- bl0rg 3y agoPlease enlighten me. How do you know that?
- kome 3y agoAI is just a tool; there is ultimately nothing special about it—it simply makes our lives a bit easier. As with any tool, it can be used for good or evil, and it's very hard to separate the two. In fact, the distinction is often arbitrary and, ultimately, useless. The main problem arises when a technology is proprietary, benefiting only a portion of the people. This is literally the only present (and real) problem with AI; all the rest is just scaremongering. AI is indeed powerful, but if it's controlled by a tiny elite instead of being accessible to everybody, problems and risks arise. The same is true for every piece of technology.
- blagie 3y agoLet me give a short list of technologies I wouldn't want accessible to everybody: - Thermonuclear warheads - Designer biological viruses and bacteria - Tools to remotely compromise / brick all computers in the world ... and so on. We don't really know where AI is on the danger scale, and if it's one of the scarier corners, we might not know before it's too late. What this episode did reveal is that whatever checks-and-balances OpenAI has in place are not adequate. It almost gave it's whole business to Microsoft. The board accused the CEO of being less than candid, while it itself was less than candid. OpenAI seriously needs serious, enforceable frameworks for things like transparent governance. The level of opacity here is not okay. At this level, we should all know what's happening inside (whether or not we agree that models can be dangerous, or have access to those models).
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
- matthewfelgate 3y agoEvery article I come across on AI in the BBC or The Guardian seems to be a sensationalized scare story about AI taking over, compromising our data, or other alarming scenarios. They often quote someone they've dubbed the "Godfather of AI" to lend credibility to what feels like subpar journalism. I struggle to recall any BBC or Guardian piece that focuses on the positive potential of AI in fields like the creative arts, science, technology, and healthcare. It's consistently skewed towards negativity.
- api 3y agoNegative articles get sometimes as much as 1000X the clicks of positive articles. When your business model is delivering ads to eyeballs, you want to maximize negativity. Works in social media too. Social platforms promote the most divisive, triggering, or negative content to maximize engagement.
- c420 3y agoThe Guardian does not use an ad supported model.
- Terretta 3y ago> Every article I come across on AI in the BBC or The Guardian seems to be a sensationalized scare story about AI taking over, compromising our data, or other alarming scenarios. One thing all these have in common is being in, and by, the press: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
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- kaycebasques 3y agoI'm getting tired of these news outlets regurgitating stories. In this case all these other outlets are regurgitating that one article from Reuters. My Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect [1] radar is beginning to make worrisome beeping sounds, also. I've seen so much far-reaching speculation over the last few days, I think the best thing I can do is intentionally focus on more interesting things (just learned about Lagrange Points [2] for example) and stop feeding the OpenAI hype machine. [1] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ [2] https://science.nasa.gov/resource/what-is-a-lagrange-point/ https://science.nasa.gov/resource/what-is-a-lagrange-point/
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- mark_l_watson 3y agoGreat attempt to pump the commercial entity value before an IPO. Well done.
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- mousetree 3y agoWhat IPO?
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI misspoke. They are going to have some sort of stock sale so employees can partially cash out.
- scarmig 3y agoAny speculation on what Q* might refer to? What comes to mind are A* and QKV. Perhaps some way to more efficiently calculate QK using some kind of differentiable search.
- pvg 3y agoDiscussed yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38386487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38386487
- Sol2Sol 3y agoBeen following the story, mostly on twitter don't know if any of this is true but at this point it is just pure entertainment reading some of the speculative theories: https://twitter.com/YourFirstAI/status/1727661862781612215 https://twitter.com/YourFirstAI/status/1727661862781612215 If Q* is what I think it is… this is absolutely BONKERS Q-learning has existed for decades already. It’s just a basic reinforcement learning algorithm. A* is also fairly old- it’s a heuristic-based path finding algorithm. In typical engineering fashion, they may have found an intersection of the 2 and named it Q*. This is total speculation, but if this is a “breakthrough” that means OAI built an algorithm that can feed a highly efficient heuristic into Q-learning. That is MASSIVE.
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- wegfawefgawefg 3y agoto tone down your enthusiasm a bit, heuristic tree search and q learning were already mixed years ago. Thats what Alphago and Alphazero were.
- gmerc 3y agoWhich Ilya was involved with...
- slackfan 3y agoGotta keep yourself in the hype cycle OpenAI. Good job.
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- giardini 3y agoI'm glad to see that ChatGPT has reached the level of intelligence of a a "spirit board" (Ouija board), which has scared the bejeezus out of kids and adults for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija
- bostonsre 3y agoCan't gpt4 already do "basic math"?
- drivingmenuts 3y agoThis sounds like some fabulist horse manure or maybe just marketroid speak. The only way to "risk the future of humanity" is to intentionally build in something that makes it dangerous. Anything less and it's just an expensive and somewhat alarming toy. Besides that, if it has an off switch, it's not nearly the danger to humanity that one might claim it is.
- Tommstein 3y agoWhen you get high on your own supply.
- gaganyaan 3y agoThis sounds exactly like PR to paper over the mess of the last few days. Not a bad thing necessarily, as it sounds like some adults are back in charge instead of the teen drama we've been seeing.