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OpenAI speedrun to the Google playbook of abandoning founding principles. Impressive that they could get this big this fast and just go full mask off so abruptl

• rightbyte 3y ago
  Being a warmonger is the new cool. No appeasement and whatever. Sama is just being down with the kids.
  • lebean 3y ago
    Finding applications for defense = warmongering?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • rightbyte 3y ago
      "Defense"? Really? But, no, not really, no. I tried to be funny and relate to the zeitgeist. Another example is the Occulus guy, that pivoted into levering something VR I guess to make stuff to kill other people since Zuckerberg crushed him.
    • enraged_camel 3y ago
      "Defense" doesn't mean much. Department of Defense regularly conducts offensive wars.
      • manquer 3y ago
        For most of its history from 1789 to 1943 it was war department. It is just rebranded not changed in the last 70 years
        • philwelch 3y ago
          Common misconception. The Department of Defense governs all branches of the military. The Department of War only governed the Army while the Department of the Navy was a separate Cabinet-level department.
          • manquer 3y ago
            It also included the Air Force . It was not just the army . Navy was separate but everything else was under war department
            • philwelch 3y ago
              The Air Force was not a separate branch before the Department of Defense was formed; it was part of the Army. And the Marine Corps was (and is) governed by the Department of the Navy (which is currently a sub-department of Defense).
              • manquer 3y ago
                Everything was part of the army back then , that is the point. Department of war was the “army” yes , but army is not what we think of army today, it literally included the entire air force - which wasn’t small auxiliary unit : both wars used tens of thousands of fighter planes . Department of war was a department for war not just a name for what we know as army today .
                • philwelch 3y ago
                  > Everything was part of the army back then …except the Navy and Marine Corps, which was the original point. A large part of the Second World War was fought by the naval services, despite those services being outside the Department of War. During the war, overall coordination of the military was not carried out by the War Department but rather via the Joint Chiefs of Staff and through ad hoc high level coordination between Army and Naval command. In particular, command in the Pacific theater was split between General Douglas MacArthur Admiral Chester Nimitz (with the ground operations under Nimitz being primarily carried out by Marines). The difficulties caused by this approach were the primary motivation for the reorganization of the American military into a unified Department of Defense. I am well aware that the Army Air Forces were a very large part of the Army during the Second World War. However, the Navy and Marines also had tens of thousands of airplanes, none of which were under the control of the War Department or the Army Air Forces. It’s a little misleading to claim the War Department controlled the “entire air force” when they only controlled the Army Air Forces and not naval aviation. The War Department controlled the Army and the Army Air Forces, which were part of the Army at the time, so it’s just as correct and a lot quicker to say that the War Department was only in charge of the Army. It wasn’t in charge of the Navy and Marines, and it wasn’t even in charge of fighting wars because we needed the Navy and Marines to help fight wars and they were under a different department. Which, again, was the reason for forming the Department of Defense in the first place. When the Air Force became an independent service during the postwar military reorganizations, they actually tried (and failed) to take over naval aviation; to this day the United States Navy has a larger air force than most countries.
    • gopher_space 3y ago
      Depends on your religion and point of view. For Christians, absolutely.
  • Log_out_ 3y ago
    We had a whole mindset that basically rolled out the red carpet for dictators disguised as peace ment with apps. Including praise for turning oneself into an anti democratic psyOPs zombie. A correction of this nonsense was overdue. And in the moment of weakness, it was also revealed how alone the West really was with its values. The idealists are out there in the trenches, getting shot in the street, because peaceful cowards are willing to sacrifice everything and everyone for indefensible nimbyism.
  • EasyMark 3y ago
    what do you plan on doing when China and/or Russia and/or Iran come knocking on your door?
    • rightbyte 3y ago
      Not being in the house? If the elites can't play nicely with each other it is not my problem. I don't trust them.
    • teloli 3y ago
      So far, it’s always been the other way round though.
      • deelly 3y ago
        You mean thats the USA that indirectly attacks China, Russia, Iran?
        • dragonelite 3y ago
          Pretty much but not the US directly its the US hiring Mercs in the form of Ukrainian proxies recently and in the near past it was Isis and co in the middle east to attack Iran and China's belt and road plans.
          • deelly 3y ago
            > its the US hiring Mercs in the form of Ukrainian proxies or, its just a russian propaganda... Could you please next time start you comments with disclaimer "according to russian propaganda.."? From your other comment: > You also had Russians finding a lot of virus labs in ukraine etc. You understand that no one except russian trolls believes in this lies? On second though I think even russian trolls do not believe in it..
• octacat 3y ago
  > OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is developed safely and responsibly. Oof. It is not AGI, so does not count (sarcasm).
• siva7 3y ago
  Somehow sad but the more i think about it the more i'm certain that Google lost the race having watched closely the events from the very beginning.
• huijzer 3y ago
  I'm probably gonna get downvoted for this, but I find allowing the technology to be used for all kinds of different things more "open" than arbitrary restrictions. Yes, even "military and warfare" are pretty arbitrary terms because defensive systems or certain questionnaire research, for instance, could be considered "military and warfare".
  • huijzer 3y ago
    Like our PhD project for example, we're doing machine learning on special forces selection in the Netherlands (for details, see [1]). The aim is basically just to reduce costs for the military and disappointment for the recruits. Furthermore, we hope to learn more about how very capable individuals can be detected early. This is a topic that is useful for many more situations than just the military. [1]: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/s6j3r https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/s6j3r
    • heresie-dabord 3y ago
      > we hope to learn more about how very capable individuals can be detected early Following which, you will need to learn how to defend against all the internal threats to any such system. ^_^
    • throwup238 3y ago
      Your research will be assimilated by the Killbot Evolution Research Program. Your country thanks you. For your service, here is a limited edition digital flag pin emoji:
    • chucky 3y ago
      > This is a topic that is useful for many more situations than just the military. Fair enough, but that's not who funded your research (according to your own disclosure, the military paid for it). If this topic is so useful for "more situations" , why didn't those "many more situations" fund it? Will you be conducting research into how this topic will have non-military usages, or is that just something you tell yourself to sleep better at night while the military pays for more research that "is useful for many more situations than just the military"?
• charcircuit 3y ago
  >Google made it about 17 years before it removed "Don't be Evil". It wasn't removed https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/ https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
  • krunck 3y ago
    The last line of the CoC document: "And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!" This is Google telling ME to not be evil not Google telling itself to not be evil. Big difference. Its sounds more like "if you see something, say something" snitch culture. That's evil.
    • charcircuit 3y ago
      This document is written where the first person is a Google employee.
  • ignoramous 3y ago
    "Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil." https://archive.is/6XL7e https://archive.is/6XL7e
• inopinatus 3y ago
  I’m no fan of either firm but the hyperbole is unwarranted. The substance here is plainly a normalisation of contract language to focus on the activity rather than the actor.
• dontupvoteme 3y ago
  I cannot figure out why they documented such a thing, it's too amateurish - just do the standard operating procedure and let the military industrial complex friends and allies of america use the service and keep it under the rug I normally have a very dim view of OpenAI/Altman but in this case I wonder if is something akin to a warrant canary, except for 5th generation warfare? Altman does seem to have a bit of Chomsky in him, so it's not impossible.
  • ziddoap 3y ago
    SOP matches 126 meanings and MIC matches 123 on acronymfinder. For the ignorant (me), what do you mean? I'm guessing SOP is "standard operating procedure" given the military context of this thread, but MIC? No clue. It's really helpful to just spell out the words, at least the first time.
    • hipadev23 3y ago
      military-industrial complex
    • dontupvoteme 3y ago
      sorry, standard operating procedure and military industrial complex. The topic sometimes puts one into acronym mode :) (re: acronymfinder - funny enough, though 90% of AI is shit this bit falls into the 10% where it's pretty good at explaining acronyms, i use it often enough with MBA types, the depths of its hidden context are the untapped goldmines)
  • samstave 3y ago
    >warrant canary I think you figured out at least one important factor in this - I forgot about warrant canaries until your comment... So thanks for resurrecting that. What we should then ask, is for a OpenAI PUBLIC SECTOR Contract Details Dashboard" <-- Meaning, they should be required to show all the "open" AI they have being built on their systems if they want us to have faith in Safe Responsible Humane Alignments? -- @dylan604: >* Timelines are much more compressed now* The Smart hockey-stick :-) But yeah - and the worse part is not just Corporate competitors, but bad actors, rogue states, triads, ALL the Mafia's/scammers/phishers/ransomers/coin snatchers... They all benefit at an unprecedented EQUAL rate at this point with the broad spectrum, capability, cost-effectiveness and effectively un-regulated, not-yet-aligned/guard-railed AIs here, in dev, and in near term. Its got to be an amazing spot if your a top notch cybercrime person in the A-game right now. That, and White-Hat AI-pentesting, and next level security is behind schedule, it seems. --- Also, I posted this regarding national security status for cloud provider's infra: [0] In the increasingly interconnected global economy, the reliance on Cloud Services raises questions about the national security implications of data centers. As these critical economic infrastructure sites, often strategically located underground, underwater, or in remote-cold locales, play a pivotal role, considerations arise regarding the role of military forces in safeguarding their security. While physical security measures and location obscurity provide some protection, the integration of AI into various aspects of daily life and the pervasive influence of cloud-based technologies on devices, as evident in CES GPT-enabled products, further accentuates the importance of these infrastructure sites. Notably, instances such as the seizure of a college thesis mapping communication lines in the U.S. underscore the sensitivity of disclosing key communications infrastructure. Companies like AWS, running data centers for the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC), demonstrate close collaboration between private entities and defense agencies. The question remains: are major cloud service providers actively involved in a national security strategy to protect the private internet infrastructure that underpins the global economy, or does the responsibility solely rest with individual companies? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38975443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38975443
• dylan604 3y ago
  Any artificial limitations OpenAI places upon themselves will absolutely not be used by competitors. Google did not see that back in their day. Timelines are much more compressed now
• glitchc 3y ago
  I actually think OpenAI is on an accelerated path because it knows it's days are numbered. If the tech were truly superior, we would see Apple, Google and Meta rushing to license their tech. Yet they're not, instead, they're all building their own version. There's no secret sauce left to building an LLM. It's all public knowledge. And while ChatGPT has an edge right now, it's not a substantial one.
  • yieldcrv 3y ago
    synthetic datasets ftw! they might have had a library when nobody was looking, but everything created after GPT-3 is analyzed by everyone and everything before GPT is extracted by getting GPT and other LLM's to talk oh noes not the terms of service!
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Apple is apparently throwing largish sums of money to license all its training data, so it may be that OpenAI ends up exploding because of the “move fats and break things” so common in SV.
    • ponderings 3y ago
      With enough training anyone can be a belly dancer.
  • boringuser2 3y ago
    Nah, none of the other LLMs are particularly useful at much of anything, but GPT-4 is profoundly useful.
    • potsandpans 3y ago
      I've seen a lot of things come from gtp4, none of them "profound." Could you share something that you se and think "profound"?
      • boringuser2 3y ago
• stcredzero 3y ago
  OpenAI speedrun to the Google playbook of abandoning founding principles. Impressive that they could get this big this fast and just go full mask off so abruptly. Google made it about 17 years before it removed "Don't be Evil". It's inevitable that dangerous real time AI capable of formulating plans are going to be developed for military purposes. The "OODA Loop" is fundamental to combat. (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) Having a tighter and more potent (in the sense of fast and accurate processing) OODA loop is a fundamental advantage. The economics and game theory of military combat is going to result in units which have potent OODA loops which can overwhelm a human being's OODA loop. Once that happens, competition between different sides will result in an arms race going far above that level of capability. Once the above happens, it's disturbingly likely that instrumental goals will arise in such entities which are dangerous not only to human beings on the wrong side, but to human beings on any side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
• jart 3y ago
  That's because Google never went mask off. When Google started, only nerds cared about the Internet. As the Internet became more successful, non-nerds started demanding that the company do for them all the evil things non-nerd society has always done, and Google got blamed for it every single time. Now that the Internet had been thoroughly colonized by those people before OpenAI came along, is it any surprise that they'd demand OpenAI enact the exact same tyranny from day one?
  • krapp 3y ago
    Google was literally funded by CIA and NSA interests[0], "don't be evil" was the mask. The weird prejudice in your comment against "non-nerds" and your assertion that they "colonized" the internet and "demanded...evil things" doesn't reflect reality. Knowledge of computer science does not correlate with moral or ethical qualities of character. [0]https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  Right. Because an evil company would abide by their terms/principles. Once they removed that pesky, "don't be evil" barrier it was open-season on being super evil. They removed it because it's stupid and meaningless.
• inglor_cz 3y ago
  Or they just adapt their policies to the real world. It is easier to be theoretical pacifist if basically nothing happens. But last 2 years are a shitshow and the Western world has been forcefully reminded about the fact that military might actually serves some positive purpose, too.