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Any competent lawyer is going to get Musk on the stand reiterating his opinions about the danger of AI. If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed a

Any competent lawyer is going to get Musk on the stand reiterating his opinions about the danger of AI. If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given. Not saying I agree that being closed source is in the public good, although one could certainly argue that accelerating the efforts of bad actors to catch up would not be a positive.

nicce 3y ago
> If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given. Not really. It slows down like security over obscurity. It needs to be open that we know the real risks and we have the best information to combat it. Otherwise, someone who does the same in closed matter, has better chances to get advantage when misusing it.
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  This only holds if defense outscales attack. It seems very likely that attack outscales defense to me with LLMs.
  - nicce 3y ago
    Well then, isn’t the whole case about just denying the inevitable? If OpenAI can do it, I would not say that that is very unlikely for someone else to do the same. Open or not. The best chance is still that we prepare with the best available information.
    - FeepingCreature 3y ago
      Yep, it absolutely is about denying the inevitable, or rather, "playing for time." The longer we manage to delay, the more likely somebody comes up with some clever approach for actually controlling the things. Also humanity stays alive in the meantime, which is no small thing in itself.
      - nicce 3y ago
        > with some clever approach for actually controlling the things. But if we hide the things, we have no idea what we are trying to control.
        FeepingCreature 3y ago
        ... Eh? You as an end-user can't contribute to this anyways. If you really want to work on safety, either use a smaller network or join the safety team at a big org.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      >denying the inevitable I mean, you spend a lot of time in your own life denying the inevitable, humans spend a lot of time and effort avoiding their own personal extinction. >The best chance is still The best information we have now is if we create AGI/ASI at this time, we all die. The only winning move is not to play in that game.
      - nicce 3y ago
        > The best information we have now is if we create AGI/ASI at this time, we all die. We can still unplug or turn off the things. We are still very faraway from the situation where AI has some factories and full supply chain to control and take physical control of the world.
        FeepingCreature 3y ago
        Meanwhile, every giant AI company: "yeah we're looking at robotics, obviously if we could embody these things and give them agency in the physical world that would be a great achievement"
        pixl97 3y ago
        Our rush into AI and embodiment reminds me of the lily pad exponential growth parable. >Imagine a large pond that is completely empty except for 1 lily pad. The lily pad will grow exponentially and cover the entire pond in 3 years. In other words, after 1 month there will 2 lily pads, after 2 months there will be 4, etc. The pond is covered in 36 months We're all going to be sitting around at 34 months saying "Look, it's been years and AI hasn't taken over that much of the market.
  - arez 3y ago
    either way it still shouldn't be in the hands of a private for profit corporation
- patcon 3y ago
  When I try to port your logic over into nuclear capacity it doesn't hold very well. Nuclear capacity is constrained, and those constraining it attempt to do so for reasons public good (energy, warfare, peace). You could argue about effectiveness, but our failure to self-annihilate seems positive testament to the strategy. Transparency does not serve us when mitigating certain forms of danger. I'm trying to remain humble with this, but it's not clear to me what balance of benefit and danger current AI is. (Not even considering the possibility of AGI, which is beyond scope of my comment)
  - Vetch 3y ago
    This is a poor analogy, a better one would be nuclear physics. An expert in nuclear physics can develop positively impactful energy generation methods or very damaging nuclear weapons. It's not because of arcane secrets that so few nations have nuclear weapons, all you need is a budget, time and brilliant physicists and engineers. The reason we don't have more is largely down to surveillance, economics, challenge of reliable payload delivery, security assurances, agreements and various logistical challenges. Most countries are open and transparent about their nuclear efforts due to the diplomatic advantages. There are also methods to trace and detect secret nuclear tests and critical supply chains can be monitored. Countries who violate these norms can face anything from heavy economic sanctions and isolation to sabotage of research efforts. On the technical side, having safe and reliable launch capacity is arguably as much if not more of a challenge than the bomb itself. Logistical issues include mass manufacture (merely having capacity only paints a target on your back with no real gains) and safe storage. There are a great many reasons why it is simply not worth going forward with nuclear weapons. This calculus changes however, if a country has cause for fear for their continued existence, as is presently the case for some Eastern European countries.
  - mywittyname 3y ago
    The difference between nuclear capability and AI capability is that you can't just rent out nuclear enrichment facilities on a per-hour basis, nor can you buy the components to build such facilities at a local store. But you can train AI models by renting AWS servers or building your own. If one could just walk into a store and buy plutonium, then society would probably take a much different approach to nuclear security.
- tw04 3y ago
  Just like nuclear weapons? The whole “security through obscurity doesn’t work” is absolute nonsense. It absolutely works and there are countless real world examples. What doesn’t work is relying on that as your ONLY security.
  - matthewmacleod 3y ago
    This is a broken comparison IMO because you can’t instantly and freely duplicate nuclear weapons across the planet and then offer them up to everyone for low marginal cost and effort. The tech exists, and will rapidly become easy to access. There is approximately zero chance of it remaining behind lock and key.
  - gary_0 3y ago
    I'm not sure if nuclear weapons are a good example. In the 1940's most of the non-weapons-related nuclear research was public (and that did make certain agencies nervous). That's just how scientists tend to do things. While the US briefly had unique knowledge about the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the basics could be easily worked out from first principles, especially once schoolchildren could pick up an up-to-date book on atomic physics. The engineering and testing part is difficult, of course, but for a large nation-state stealing the plans is only a shortcut. The on-paper part of the engineering is doable by any team with the right skills. So the main blocker with nuclear weapons isn't the knowledge, it's acquiring the raw fissile material and establishing the industrial base required to refine it. This makes nuclear weapons a poor analogy for AI, because all you need to develop an LLM is a big pile of commodity GPUs, the publicly available training data, some decent software engineers, and time. So in both cases all security-through-obscurity will buy you is a delay, and when it comes to AI probably not a very long one (except maybe if you can restrict the supply of GPUs, but the effectiveness of that strategy against China et al remains to be seen).
    - tw04 3y ago
      >This makes nuclear weapons a poor analogy for AI, because all you need to develop an LLM is a big pile of commodity GPUs, the publicly available training data, some decent software engineers, and time. Except the GPUs are on export control, and keeping up with the arms race requires a bunch of data you don't have access to (NVidia's IP) - or direct access to the source. Just like building a nuclear weapon requires access to either already refined fissile material. Or the IP and skills to build your own refining facilities (IP most countries don't have). Literally everyone has access to Uranium - being able to do something useful with it is another story. Kind of like... AI.
- robbrown451 3y ago
  I don't see how opening it makes it safer. It's very different from security things, where some "white hat" can find a security, and they can then fix it so instances don't get hacked. Sure, a bad person could run the software without fixing the bug, but that isn't going to harm anyone but themselves. That isn't the case here. If some well meaning person discovers a way that you can create a pandemic causing superbug, they can't just "fix" the AI to make that impossible. Not if it is open source. Very different thing.
starbugs 3y ago
> If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest If that was true, then they shouldn't have started off like that to begin with. You can't have it both ways. Either you are pursuing your goal to be open (as the name implies) or the way you set yourself up was ill-suited all along.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  Their position evolved. Many people at the time disagreed that having open source AGI - putting it in the hands of many people - was the best way to mitigate the potential danger. Note that this original stance of OpenAI was before they started playing with transformers and having anything that was beginning to look like AI/AGI. Around the time of GPT-3 was when they said "this might be dangerous, we're going to hold it back". There's nothing wrong with changing your opinion based on fresh information.
  - starbugs 3y ago
    > There's nothing wrong with changing your opinion based on fresh information. I don't really get that twist. What "fresh" information arrived here suddenly? The structure they gave themselves was chosen explicitly with the risks of future developments in mind. In fact, that was why they chose that specific structure as outlined in the complaint. How can it now be called new information that there are actually risks involved? That was the whole premise of creating that organization in the form it was done to begin with!
    - ENGNR 3y ago
      I’d agree. And the fact that it evolved in a way that made individuals massive massive profit, suggests that maybe their mind wasn’t changed, and profit was the actual intention
    - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
      The fresh information was seeing who built an AGI, and what it looks like. When OpenAI was founded it was expected that AGI would likely come out of Google, with OpenAI doing the world a favor by replicating this wonderful technology and giving it to the masses. One might have imagined AGI would be some Spock-like stone cold super intelligence. As it turns out, OpenAI themselves were the first to create something AGI-like, so the role they envisaged for themselves was totally flipped. Not only this, but this AGI wasn't an engineered intelligence but rather a stochastic parrot, trained on the internet, and incredibly toxic; as much of a liability as a powerful tool. OpenAIs founding mission of AI democracy has turned into one of protecting us from this bullshitting psychopath that they themselves created, while at the same time raising the billions of dollars it takes to iterate on something so dumb it needs to be retrained from scratch every time you want to update it.
Nevermark 3y ago
Other groups are going to discover the same problems. Some will act responsibly. Some will try to, but the profit motive will undermine their best intentions. This is exactly the problem having an open non-profit leader was designed to solve. Six month moratoriums, to vet and mitigate dangers including outside experts, would probably be a good idea. But people need to know what they are up against. What can AI do? How do we adapt? We don't need more secretive data gathering, psychology hacking, manipulative corporations, billionaires (or trillionaires), harnessing unknown compounding AI capabilities to endlessly mine society for 40% year on year gains. Social networks, largely engaged in winning zero/negative sum games, are already causing great harm. That would compound all the dangers many times over.
seydor 3y ago
Then the foundational document of openAi is Self-contradictory
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  Perhaps, but who knew? Nobody at that time knew how to build AGI, and what it therefore might look like. I'm sure people would have laughed at you if you said "predict next word" was the path to AGI. The transformer paper that kicked off the LLM revolution would not be written for another couple of years. DeepMind was still focusing on games, with AlphaGo also still a couple of years away. OpenAI's founding charter was basically we'll protect you from an all-powerful Google, and give you the world's most valuable technology for free.
psychoslave 3y ago
>If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given. Tell about a technology you think but dangerous, and I'll give you fifty way to kill someone with it. Plastic bag for example, are not only potentially dangerous, they make a significant contribution to the current mass extinction of biodiversity.
- lukan 3y ago
  "Plastic bag for example, are not only potentially dangerous, they make a significant contribution to the current mass extinction of biodiversity." That is news to me, how exactly do they significantly contribute?
  - a1o 3y ago
    Animals that eat jellyfishs eat plastic bags and die is one example
  - psychoslave 3y ago
    https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-do-plastic-bags-harm-our-environment-and-sea-life-98859 https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-do-plastic-bags... https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/sustainability/references.html https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_... https://www.genevaenvironmentnetwork.org/resources/updates/plastics-and-health/ https://www.genevaenvironmentnetwork.org/resources/updates/p...
    - lukan 3y ago
      I am really not a fan of plastic trash, neither in the oceans, nor the forest, nor anywhere else. But in your links I did not found hints of "a significant contribution to the current mass extinction of biodiversity." This was the most concrete, so some contribution (no news to me), but not in a significant way, like pesticides do, for example. "When turtles eat plastic, it can block their intestinal system (their guts). Therefore, they can no longer eat properly, which can kill them. The plastics in their tummy may also leak chemicals into the turtle. We don’t know whether this causes long term problems for the turtle, but it’s probably not good for them."
geor9e 3y ago
You don't even need to call him to the stand, it's not some gotcha, he writes it all over the complaint itself. "AGI poses a grave threat to humanity — perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today." I highly doubt a court is going to opine about open vs closed being safer, though. The founding agreement is pretty clear that the intention was to make it open for the purpose of safety. Courts rule on if a contract was breached, not whether breaching it was a philosophy good thing.
- andy_ppp 3y ago
  You’re forgetting that any good lawyer would do something some random on hacker news made up to support their belief the lawsuit is about AI safety.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    You're perhaps forgetting that the plaintiff here is Elon Musk, the man who was forced to buy Twitter due to not realizing that signing a legally binding contract was legally binding.
andy_ppp 3y ago
Are you a lawyer or have some sort of credentials to be able to make that statement? I’m not sure if Elon Musk being hypocrite about AI safety would be relevant to the disputed terms of a contract.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  I don't think it's about him being a hypocrite - just him undermining his own argument. It's a tough sell saying AI is unsafe but it's still in the public's best interest to open source it (and hence OpenAI is reneging on it's charter).
  - advael 3y ago
    Not really. The fact that "we keep our technology secret for safety reasons" is the reasoning given by many for-profit corporations does not make it a good argument, just a very profitable lie to tell, and it has never stopped showing itself false at every opportunity to test it. But it's also never stopped being profitable to keep this secrecy, which is why the likes of Apple and Microsoft make these claims so frequently This is, in many ways, the substance of the lawsuit. This logic of "we must guard this secret carefully... for safety!" doesn't actually inevitably come from most lines of enabling research in any field in academia for example, but it does reliably come up once someone can enclose the findings in order to profit from exploiting this information asymmetry somehow Secrecy for profit isn't a super benevolent thing to do, but it's generally speaking fine. We have whole areas of law about how to balance the public benefit of wide availability of information and the private benefit to discoverers of some technique, technology, or even facts about the world. It is well understood by most people that trade secrets aren't public knowledge. We see this plea to "safety" come up only exactly in cases where companies want to justify having control over things that have become pervasive and often mandatory to use in many contexts in a way that allows said companies to in turn exert further control over that thing's users, which is to say in tech monopolies. The use of that reasoning basically one-to-one predicts a business model that relies on DMCA 1201 (or its international equivalents) to function, a legal edifice designed by Microsoft lawyers which has become pervasive worldwide essentially at their behest That said, I don't think it's particularly hard to make the case that writing a whole-ass non-profit charter explicitly outlining the intent to do research in the open and then suddenly switching to the very familiar corporate reality distortion field stance of a convicted monopolist you happen to have formed a partnership with in order to justify effectively abandoning that charter is a good basis for a lawsuit
ryukoposting 3y ago
> If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given. I contend that a threat must be understood before it can be neutralized. It will either take a herculean feat of reverse-engineering, or an act of benevolence on OpenAI's behalf. Or a lawsuit, I guess.
troyvit 3y ago
> If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given. Then what should we do about all the open models that are closing in on OpenAI's capabilities?
bamboozled 3y ago
I have absolutely zero reason to believe "AI" is better of in the hands of Altman, Brockman etc and most of the public would feel similar.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Who would most of the public trust with AI?
  - bamboozled 3y ago
    Personally, I don't have a trust problem with AI per se, I have a problem with the technology being locked behind closed doors. My point is, if whatever they're doing is dangerous, I don't see what is actually special about Altman and Brockman having control of dangerous things. They seem completely motivated by money. I'd trust scientists, AI experts who aren't in a for profit company with some government oversight over Aman and Bman.

nicce 3y ago

> If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given. Not really. It slows down like security over obscurity. It needs to be open that we know the real risks and we have the best information to combat it. Otherwise, someone who does the same in closed matter, has better chances to get advantage when misusing it.

FeepingCreature 3y ago
This only holds if defense outscales attack. It seems very likely that attack outscales defense to me with LLMs.
- nicce 3y ago
  Well then, isn’t the whole case about just denying the inevitable? If OpenAI can do it, I would not say that that is very unlikely for someone else to do the same. Open or not. The best chance is still that we prepare with the best available information.
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    Yep, it absolutely is about denying the inevitable, or rather, "playing for time." The longer we manage to delay, the more likely somebody comes up with some clever approach for actually controlling the things. Also humanity stays alive in the meantime, which is no small thing in itself.
    - nicce 3y ago
      > with some clever approach for actually controlling the things. But if we hide the things, we have no idea what we are trying to control.
      - FeepingCreature 3y ago
        ... Eh? You as an end-user can't contribute to this anyways. If you really want to work on safety, either use a smaller network or join the safety team at a big org.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >denying the inevitable I mean, you spend a lot of time in your own life denying the inevitable, humans spend a lot of time and effort avoiding their own personal extinction. >The best chance is still The best information we have now is if we create AGI/ASI at this time, we all die. The only winning move is not to play in that game.
    - nicce 3y ago
      > The best information we have now is if we create AGI/ASI at this time, we all die. We can still unplug or turn off the things. We are still very faraway from the situation where AI has some factories and full supply chain to control and take physical control of the world.
      - FeepingCreature 3y ago
        Meanwhile, every giant AI company: "yeah we're looking at robotics, obviously if we could embody these things and give them agency in the physical world that would be a great achievement"
        pixl97 3y ago
        Our rush into AI and embodiment reminds me of the lily pad exponential growth parable. >Imagine a large pond that is completely empty except for 1 lily pad. The lily pad will grow exponentially and cover the entire pond in 3 years. In other words, after 1 month there will 2 lily pads, after 2 months there will be 4, etc. The pond is covered in 36 months We're all going to be sitting around at 34 months saying "Look, it's been years and AI hasn't taken over that much of the market.
- arez 3y ago
  either way it still shouldn't be in the hands of a private for profit corporation
patcon 3y ago
When I try to port your logic over into nuclear capacity it doesn't hold very well. Nuclear capacity is constrained, and those constraining it attempt to do so for reasons public good (energy, warfare, peace). You could argue about effectiveness, but our failure to self-annihilate seems positive testament to the strategy. Transparency does not serve us when mitigating certain forms of danger. I'm trying to remain humble with this, but it's not clear to me what balance of benefit and danger current AI is. (Not even considering the possibility of AGI, which is beyond scope of my comment)
- Vetch 3y ago
  This is a poor analogy, a better one would be nuclear physics. An expert in nuclear physics can develop positively impactful energy generation methods or very damaging nuclear weapons. It's not because of arcane secrets that so few nations have nuclear weapons, all you need is a budget, time and brilliant physicists and engineers. The reason we don't have more is largely down to surveillance, economics, challenge of reliable payload delivery, security assurances, agreements and various logistical challenges. Most countries are open and transparent about their nuclear efforts due to the diplomatic advantages. There are also methods to trace and detect secret nuclear tests and critical supply chains can be monitored. Countries who violate these norms can face anything from heavy economic sanctions and isolation to sabotage of research efforts. On the technical side, having safe and reliable launch capacity is arguably as much if not more of a challenge than the bomb itself. Logistical issues include mass manufacture (merely having capacity only paints a target on your back with no real gains) and safe storage. There are a great many reasons why it is simply not worth going forward with nuclear weapons. This calculus changes however, if a country has cause for fear for their continued existence, as is presently the case for some Eastern European countries.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  The difference between nuclear capability and AI capability is that you can't just rent out nuclear enrichment facilities on a per-hour basis, nor can you buy the components to build such facilities at a local store. But you can train AI models by renting AWS servers or building your own. If one could just walk into a store and buy plutonium, then society would probably take a much different approach to nuclear security.
tw04 3y ago
Just like nuclear weapons? The whole “security through obscurity doesn’t work” is absolute nonsense. It absolutely works and there are countless real world examples. What doesn’t work is relying on that as your ONLY security.
- matthewmacleod 3y ago
  This is a broken comparison IMO because you can’t instantly and freely duplicate nuclear weapons across the planet and then offer them up to everyone for low marginal cost and effort. The tech exists, and will rapidly become easy to access. There is approximately zero chance of it remaining behind lock and key.
- gary_0 3y ago
  I'm not sure if nuclear weapons are a good example. In the 1940's most of the non-weapons-related nuclear research was public (and that did make certain agencies nervous). That's just how scientists tend to do things. While the US briefly had unique knowledge about the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the basics could be easily worked out from first principles, especially once schoolchildren could pick up an up-to-date book on atomic physics. The engineering and testing part is difficult, of course, but for a large nation-state stealing the plans is only a shortcut. The on-paper part of the engineering is doable by any team with the right skills. So the main blocker with nuclear weapons isn't the knowledge, it's acquiring the raw fissile material and establishing the industrial base required to refine it. This makes nuclear weapons a poor analogy for AI, because all you need to develop an LLM is a big pile of commodity GPUs, the publicly available training data, some decent software engineers, and time. So in both cases all security-through-obscurity will buy you is a delay, and when it comes to AI probably not a very long one (except maybe if you can restrict the supply of GPUs, but the effectiveness of that strategy against China et al remains to be seen).
  - tw04 3y ago
    >This makes nuclear weapons a poor analogy for AI, because all you need to develop an LLM is a big pile of commodity GPUs, the publicly available training data, some decent software engineers, and time. Except the GPUs are on export control, and keeping up with the arms race requires a bunch of data you don't have access to (NVidia's IP) - or direct access to the source. Just like building a nuclear weapon requires access to either already refined fissile material. Or the IP and skills to build your own refining facilities (IP most countries don't have). Literally everyone has access to Uranium - being able to do something useful with it is another story. Kind of like... AI.
robbrown451 3y ago
I don't see how opening it makes it safer. It's very different from security things, where some "white hat" can find a security, and they can then fix it so instances don't get hacked. Sure, a bad person could run the software without fixing the bug, but that isn't going to harm anyone but themselves. That isn't the case here. If some well meaning person discovers a way that you can create a pandemic causing superbug, they can't just "fix" the AI to make that impossible. Not if it is open source. Very different thing.

starbugs 3y ago

> If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest If that was true, then they shouldn't have started off like that to begin with. You can't have it both ways. Either you are pursuing your goal to be open (as the name implies) or the way you set yourself up was ill-suited all along.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Their position evolved. Many people at the time disagreed that having open source AGI - putting it in the hands of many people - was the best way to mitigate the potential danger. Note that this original stance of OpenAI was before they started playing with transformers and having anything that was beginning to look like AI/AGI. Around the time of GPT-3 was when they said "this might be dangerous, we're going to hold it back". There's nothing wrong with changing your opinion based on fresh information.
- starbugs 3y ago
  > There's nothing wrong with changing your opinion based on fresh information. I don't really get that twist. What "fresh" information arrived here suddenly? The structure they gave themselves was chosen explicitly with the risks of future developments in mind. In fact, that was why they chose that specific structure as outlined in the complaint. How can it now be called new information that there are actually risks involved? That was the whole premise of creating that organization in the form it was done to begin with!
  - ENGNR 3y ago
    I’d agree. And the fact that it evolved in a way that made individuals massive massive profit, suggests that maybe their mind wasn’t changed, and profit was the actual intention
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    The fresh information was seeing who built an AGI, and what it looks like. When OpenAI was founded it was expected that AGI would likely come out of Google, with OpenAI doing the world a favor by replicating this wonderful technology and giving it to the masses. One might have imagined AGI would be some Spock-like stone cold super intelligence. As it turns out, OpenAI themselves were the first to create something AGI-like, so the role they envisaged for themselves was totally flipped. Not only this, but this AGI wasn't an engineered intelligence but rather a stochastic parrot, trained on the internet, and incredibly toxic; as much of a liability as a powerful tool. OpenAIs founding mission of AI democracy has turned into one of protecting us from this bullshitting psychopath that they themselves created, while at the same time raising the billions of dollars it takes to iterate on something so dumb it needs to be retrained from scratch every time you want to update it.

Nevermark 3y ago

Other groups are going to discover the same problems. Some will act responsibly. Some will try to, but the profit motive will undermine their best intentions. This is exactly the problem having an open non-profit leader was designed to solve. Six month moratoriums, to vet and mitigate dangers including outside experts, would probably be a good idea. But people need to know what they are up against. What can AI do? How do we adapt? We don't need more secretive data gathering, psychology hacking, manipulative corporations, billionaires (or trillionaires), harnessing unknown compounding AI capabilities to endlessly mine society for 40% year on year gains. Social networks, largely engaged in winning zero/negative sum games, are already causing great harm. That would compound all the dangers many times over.

seydor 3y ago

Then the foundational document of openAi is Self-contradictory

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Perhaps, but who knew? Nobody at that time knew how to build AGI, and what it therefore might look like. I'm sure people would have laughed at you if you said "predict next word" was the path to AGI. The transformer paper that kicked off the LLM revolution would not be written for another couple of years. DeepMind was still focusing on games, with AlphaGo also still a couple of years away. OpenAI's founding charter was basically we'll protect you from an all-powerful Google, and give you the world's most valuable technology for free.

psychoslave 3y ago

>If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given. Tell about a technology you think but dangerous, and I'll give you fifty way to kill someone with it. Plastic bag for example, are not only potentially dangerous, they make a significant contribution to the current mass extinction of biodiversity.

lukan 3y ago
"Plastic bag for example, are not only potentially dangerous, they make a significant contribution to the current mass extinction of biodiversity." That is news to me, how exactly do they significantly contribute?
- a1o 3y ago
  Animals that eat jellyfishs eat plastic bags and die is one example
- psychoslave 3y ago
  https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-do-plastic-bags-harm-our-environment-and-sea-life-98859 https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-do-plastic-bags... https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/sustainability/references.html https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_... https://www.genevaenvironmentnetwork.org/resources/updates/plastics-and-health/ https://www.genevaenvironmentnetwork.org/resources/updates/p...
  - lukan 3y ago
    I am really not a fan of plastic trash, neither in the oceans, nor the forest, nor anywhere else. But in your links I did not found hints of "a significant contribution to the current mass extinction of biodiversity." This was the most concrete, so some contribution (no news to me), but not in a significant way, like pesticides do, for example. "When turtles eat plastic, it can block their intestinal system (their guts). Therefore, they can no longer eat properly, which can kill them. The plastics in their tummy may also leak chemicals into the turtle. We don’t know whether this causes long term problems for the turtle, but it’s probably not good for them."

geor9e 3y ago

You don't even need to call him to the stand, it's not some gotcha, he writes it all over the complaint itself. "AGI poses a grave threat to humanity — perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today." I highly doubt a court is going to opine about open vs closed being safer, though. The founding agreement is pretty clear that the intention was to make it open for the purpose of safety. Courts rule on if a contract was breached, not whether breaching it was a philosophy good thing.

andy_ppp 3y ago
You’re forgetting that any good lawyer would do something some random on hacker news made up to support their belief the lawsuit is about AI safety.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  You're perhaps forgetting that the plaintiff here is Elon Musk, the man who was forced to buy Twitter due to not realizing that signing a legally binding contract was legally binding.

andy_ppp 3y ago

Are you a lawyer or have some sort of credentials to be able to make that statement? I’m not sure if Elon Musk being hypocrite about AI safety would be relevant to the disputed terms of a contract.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
I don't think it's about him being a hypocrite - just him undermining his own argument. It's a tough sell saying AI is unsafe but it's still in the public's best interest to open source it (and hence OpenAI is reneging on it's charter).
- advael 3y ago
  Not really. The fact that "we keep our technology secret for safety reasons" is the reasoning given by many for-profit corporations does not make it a good argument, just a very profitable lie to tell, and it has never stopped showing itself false at every opportunity to test it. But it's also never stopped being profitable to keep this secrecy, which is why the likes of Apple and Microsoft make these claims so frequently This is, in many ways, the substance of the lawsuit. This logic of "we must guard this secret carefully... for safety!" doesn't actually inevitably come from most lines of enabling research in any field in academia for example, but it does reliably come up once someone can enclose the findings in order to profit from exploiting this information asymmetry somehow Secrecy for profit isn't a super benevolent thing to do, but it's generally speaking fine. We have whole areas of law about how to balance the public benefit of wide availability of information and the private benefit to discoverers of some technique, technology, or even facts about the world. It is well understood by most people that trade secrets aren't public knowledge. We see this plea to "safety" come up only exactly in cases where companies want to justify having control over things that have become pervasive and often mandatory to use in many contexts in a way that allows said companies to in turn exert further control over that thing's users, which is to say in tech monopolies. The use of that reasoning basically one-to-one predicts a business model that relies on DMCA 1201 (or its international equivalents) to function, a legal edifice designed by Microsoft lawyers which has become pervasive worldwide essentially at their behest That said, I don't think it's particularly hard to make the case that writing a whole-ass non-profit charter explicitly outlining the intent to do research in the open and then suddenly switching to the very familiar corporate reality distortion field stance of a convicted monopolist you happen to have formed a partnership with in order to justify effectively abandoning that charter is a good basis for a lawsuit

ryukoposting 3y ago

> If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given. I contend that a threat must be understood before it can be neutralized. It will either take a herculean feat of reverse-engineering, or an act of benevolence on OpenAI's behalf. Or a lawsuit, I guess.

troyvit 3y ago

> If the tech really is dangerous then being more closed arguably is in the public's best interest, and this is certainly the reason OpenAI have previously given. Then what should we do about all the open models that are closing in on OpenAI's capabilities?

bamboozled 3y ago

I have absolutely zero reason to believe "AI" is better of in the hands of Altman, Brockman etc and most of the public would feel similar.

paulddraper 3y ago
Who would most of the public trust with AI?
- bamboozled 3y ago
  Personally, I don't have a trust problem with AI per se, I have a problem with the technology being locked behind closed doors. My point is, if whatever they're doing is dangerous, I don't see what is actually special about Altman and Brockman having control of dangerous things. They seem completely motivated by money. I'd trust scientists, AI experts who aren't in a for profit company with some government oversight over Aman and Bman.