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It's almost like the guy behind an obvious grift like Worldcoin doesn't always work in good faith. What gives me even less sympathy for Altman is that he took

by api 3y ago

It's almost like the guy behind an obvious grift like Worldcoin doesn't always work in good faith. What gives me even less sympathy for Altman is that he took OpenAI, whose mission was open AI, and turned it not only closed but then immediately started a world tour trying to weaponize fear-mongering to convince governments to effectively outlaw actually open AI.

mherrmann 3y ago
I have no specific sympathy for Altman one way or the other, but: Why is Worldcoin a grift? And I believe his argument for it not being open is safety.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  “Now that I have a powerful weapon, it’s very important for safety that people who aren’t me don’t have one”
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    As much as it's appealing to point out hypocrisy, and as little sympathy for Altman, I honestly think that's a very reasonable stance to take. There're many powers with which, given the opportunity, I would choose to trust only exactly myself.
    - dexterdog 3y ago
      But by that logic nobody else would trust you.
      - BobaFloutist 3y ago
        Correct. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong, or that they're wrong, it only means that I have a much greater understanding and insight into my own motivations and temptations than I do for anyone else.
        prepend 3y ago
        It means your logic is inefficient and ineffectual as trust is necessary.
    - jajko 3y ago
      Well thats easy to understand - not ideal analogy but imagine if in 1942 you would by accident constructed fully working atomic bomb, and did so and showed it around in full effect. You can shop around seeing who offers you most and stall the game for everybody everywhere to realize whats happening, and definitely you would want to halt all other startups with similar idea, ideally branding them as dangerous, and whats better than National security (TM).
    - bcye 3y ago
      in such a situation, the only reasonable decision is to give up/destroy the power. i think you'd be foolish to trust yourself (and expect others) to not accidentally leak it/make a mistake.
      - BobaFloutist 3y ago
        I know myself better than you know me, and you know yourself better than I know you. I trust myself based on my knowledge of myself, but I don't know anyone else well enough to trust them on the same level. AI is perhaps not the best example of this, since it's knowledge-based, and thus easier to leak/steal. But my point still stands that while I don't trust Sam Altman with it, I don't necessarily blame him for the instinct to trust himself and nobody else.
    - prepend 3y ago
      It’s reasonable for the holder to take. It’s also reasonable for all of the non-holders to immediately destroy the holder. It was “reasonable” for the US to first strike the Soviet Union in the 40s before they got nuclear capabilities. But it wasn’t right and I’m glad the US didn’t do that.
- kylebenzle 3y ago
  Probably. Most cryptocurrency projects have turned into cash grabs or pump and dumps eventually. Out of 1,000s to choose from arguably the only worthwhile cryptocurrencies are XMR and BCH.
  - bcye 3y ago
    Why BCH? (curious, i don't know much about the history of the hard fork)
- mihaic 3y ago
  What is it then if not a grift? It makes promises without absolutely any basis in exchange for personal information.
  - tim333 3y ago
    It's billed as a payment system and proof of being a unique human while preserving anonymity. I'm a happy user and have some free money from them. Who's being grifted here?
    - mihaic 3y ago
      What do you use it for? I mean, for what kind of payments? It sounds to me like the investors are being grifted.
      - tim333 3y ago
        So far I haven't used it for payments, I just recieved free coins some of which I changed to USD. I guess the people swapping USD for Worldcoins may regret it one day but it's their choice to buy or sell the things. So far they are doing ok - I sold for around $2 and they are now nearly $8.
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  "I declare safety!" You cannot abandon your non-profit's entire mission on a highly hypothetical, controversial pretext. Moreover, they've released virtually no harmless details on GPT-4, yet let anyone use GPT-4 (such safety!), and haven't even released GPT-3, a model with far fewer capabilities than many open-source alternatives. (None of which have ended the world! What a surprise!) They plainly wish to make a private cash cow atop non-profit donations to an open cause. They hit upon wild success, and want to keep it for themselves; this is precisely the opposite of their mission. It's morally, and hopefully legally, unacceptable.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > You cannot abandon your non-profit's entire mission on a highly hypothetical, controversial pretext. "OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact." - https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai I'm not actually sure which of these points you're objecting to, given you dispute the dangers as well as getting angry about the money making, but even in that blog post they cared about risks: "It’s hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it’s equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly." GPT-4 had a ~100 page report, which included generations that were deemed unsafe which the red reaming found, and which they took steps to prevent in the public release. The argument for having any public access is the same as the one which Open Source advocates use for source code: more eyeballs. I don't know if it's a correct argument, but it's at least not obviously stupid. > (None of which have ended the world! What a surprise!) If it had literally ended the world, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. If you don't know how much plutonium makes a critical mass, only a fool would bang lumps of the stuff together to keep warm and respond to all the nay-sayers with the argument "you were foolish to even tell me there was a danger!" even while it's clear that everyone wants bigger rocks… And yet at the same time, the free LLMs (along with the image generators) have made a huge dent in the kinds of content one can find online, further eroding the trustworthiness of the internet, which was already struggling. > They hit upon wild success, and want to keep it for themselves; this is precisely the opposite of their mission. It's morally, and hopefully legally, unacceptable. By telling the governments "regulate us, don't regulate our competitors, don't regulate open source"? No. You're just buying into a particular narrative, like most of us do most of the time. (So am I, of course. Even though I have no idea how to think of the guy himself, and am aware of misjudging other tech leaders in both directions, that too is a narrative).
- c0pium 3y ago
  At this point, the burden of proof is the other direction. All crypto is a grift until it proves otherwise.
Spooky23 3y ago
Everything around it seems so shady. The strangest thing to me is that the shadiness seems completely unnecessary, and really requires a very critical eye for anything associated with OpenAI. Google seems like the good guy in AI lol.0
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Google, the one who haphazardly allows diversity prompt rewriting to be layered on top of their models, with seemingly no internal adversarial testing or public documentation?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    "We had a bug" is shooting fish in a barrel, when it comes to software. I was genuinely concerned about their behaviour towards Timnit Gebru, though.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      If you build a black box, and a bug that seems like it should have been caught in testing comes through, and there's limited documentation that the black box was programmed to do that, it makes me nervous. Granted, stupid fun-sy public-facing image generation project. But I'm more worried about the lack of transparency around the black box, and the internal adversarial testing that's being applied to it. Google has an absolute right to build a model however they want -- but they should be able to proactively document how it functions, what it should and should not be used for, and any guardrails they put around it. Is there anywhere that says "Given a prompt, Bard will attempt to deliver a racially and sexually diverse result set, and that will take precedence over historical facts"? By all means, I support them building that model! But that's a pretty big 'if' that should be clearly documented.
      - prepend 3y ago
        > Google has an absolute right to build a model however they want I don’t think anyone is arguing google doesn’t have the right. The argument is that google is incompetent and stupid for creating and releasing such a poor model.

by api 3y ago

mherrmann 3y ago

I have no specific sympathy for Altman one way or the other, but: Why is Worldcoin a grift? And I believe his argument for it not being open is safety.

Spooky23 3y ago
“Now that I have a powerful weapon, it’s very important for safety that people who aren’t me don’t have one”
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  As much as it's appealing to point out hypocrisy, and as little sympathy for Altman, I honestly think that's a very reasonable stance to take. There're many powers with which, given the opportunity, I would choose to trust only exactly myself.
  - dexterdog 3y ago
    But by that logic nobody else would trust you.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      Correct. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong, or that they're wrong, it only means that I have a much greater understanding and insight into my own motivations and temptations than I do for anyone else.
      - prepend 3y ago
        It means your logic is inefficient and ineffectual as trust is necessary.
  - jajko 3y ago
    Well thats easy to understand - not ideal analogy but imagine if in 1942 you would by accident constructed fully working atomic bomb, and did so and showed it around in full effect. You can shop around seeing who offers you most and stall the game for everybody everywhere to realize whats happening, and definitely you would want to halt all other startups with similar idea, ideally branding them as dangerous, and whats better than National security (TM).
  - bcye 3y ago
    in such a situation, the only reasonable decision is to give up/destroy the power. i think you'd be foolish to trust yourself (and expect others) to not accidentally leak it/make a mistake.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      I know myself better than you know me, and you know yourself better than I know you. I trust myself based on my knowledge of myself, but I don't know anyone else well enough to trust them on the same level. AI is perhaps not the best example of this, since it's knowledge-based, and thus easier to leak/steal. But my point still stands that while I don't trust Sam Altman with it, I don't necessarily blame him for the instinct to trust himself and nobody else.
  - prepend 3y ago
    It’s reasonable for the holder to take. It’s also reasonable for all of the non-holders to immediately destroy the holder. It was “reasonable” for the US to first strike the Soviet Union in the 40s before they got nuclear capabilities. But it wasn’t right and I’m glad the US didn’t do that.
kylebenzle 3y ago
Probably. Most cryptocurrency projects have turned into cash grabs or pump and dumps eventually. Out of 1,000s to choose from arguably the only worthwhile cryptocurrencies are XMR and BCH.
- bcye 3y ago
  Why BCH? (curious, i don't know much about the history of the hard fork)
mihaic 3y ago
What is it then if not a grift? It makes promises without absolutely any basis in exchange for personal information.
- tim333 3y ago
  It's billed as a payment system and proof of being a unique human while preserving anonymity. I'm a happy user and have some free money from them. Who's being grifted here?
  - mihaic 3y ago
    What do you use it for? I mean, for what kind of payments? It sounds to me like the investors are being grifted.
    - tim333 3y ago
      So far I haven't used it for payments, I just recieved free coins some of which I changed to USD. I guess the people swapping USD for Worldcoins may regret it one day but it's their choice to buy or sell the things. So far they are doing ok - I sold for around $2 and they are now nearly $8.
a_wild_dandan 3y ago
"I declare safety!" You cannot abandon your non-profit's entire mission on a highly hypothetical, controversial pretext. Moreover, they've released virtually no harmless details on GPT-4, yet let anyone use GPT-4 (such safety!), and haven't even released GPT-3, a model with far fewer capabilities than many open-source alternatives. (None of which have ended the world! What a surprise!) They plainly wish to make a private cash cow atop non-profit donations to an open cause. They hit upon wild success, and want to keep it for themselves; this is precisely the opposite of their mission. It's morally, and hopefully legally, unacceptable.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > You cannot abandon your non-profit's entire mission on a highly hypothetical, controversial pretext. "OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact." - https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai I'm not actually sure which of these points you're objecting to, given you dispute the dangers as well as getting angry about the money making, but even in that blog post they cared about risks: "It’s hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it’s equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly." GPT-4 had a ~100 page report, which included generations that were deemed unsafe which the red reaming found, and which they took steps to prevent in the public release. The argument for having any public access is the same as the one which Open Source advocates use for source code: more eyeballs. I don't know if it's a correct argument, but it's at least not obviously stupid. > (None of which have ended the world! What a surprise!) If it had literally ended the world, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. If you don't know how much plutonium makes a critical mass, only a fool would bang lumps of the stuff together to keep warm and respond to all the nay-sayers with the argument "you were foolish to even tell me there was a danger!" even while it's clear that everyone wants bigger rocks… And yet at the same time, the free LLMs (along with the image generators) have made a huge dent in the kinds of content one can find online, further eroding the trustworthiness of the internet, which was already struggling. > They hit upon wild success, and want to keep it for themselves; this is precisely the opposite of their mission. It's morally, and hopefully legally, unacceptable. By telling the governments "regulate us, don't regulate our competitors, don't regulate open source"? No. You're just buying into a particular narrative, like most of us do most of the time. (So am I, of course. Even though I have no idea how to think of the guy himself, and am aware of misjudging other tech leaders in both directions, that too is a narrative).
c0pium 3y ago
At this point, the burden of proof is the other direction. All crypto is a grift until it proves otherwise.

Spooky23 3y ago

Everything around it seems so shady. The strangest thing to me is that the shadiness seems completely unnecessary, and really requires a very critical eye for anything associated with OpenAI. Google seems like the good guy in AI lol.0

ethbr1 3y ago
Google, the one who haphazardly allows diversity prompt rewriting to be layered on top of their models, with seemingly no internal adversarial testing or public documentation?
- ben_w 3y ago
  "We had a bug" is shooting fish in a barrel, when it comes to software. I was genuinely concerned about their behaviour towards Timnit Gebru, though.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    If you build a black box, and a bug that seems like it should have been caught in testing comes through, and there's limited documentation that the black box was programmed to do that, it makes me nervous. Granted, stupid fun-sy public-facing image generation project. But I'm more worried about the lack of transparency around the black box, and the internal adversarial testing that's being applied to it. Google has an absolute right to build a model however they want -- but they should be able to proactively document how it functions, what it should and should not be used for, and any guardrails they put around it. Is there anywhere that says "Given a prompt, Bard will attempt to deliver a racially and sexually diverse result set, and that will take precedence over historical facts"? By all means, I support them building that model! But that's a pretty big 'if' that should be clearly documented.
    - prepend 3y ago
      > Google has an absolute right to build a model however they want I don’t think anyone is arguing google doesn’t have the right. The argument is that google is incompetent and stupid for creating and releasing such a poor model.