2 ms·

>It’s fashionable, for reasons I am unaware, to hate on Sam Altman and OpenAI Perhaps because he's a slimy used-car salesman who got rich doing things that are

by nvy 2y ago

>It’s fashionable, for reasons I am unaware, to hate on Sam Altman and OpenAI Perhaps because he's a slimy used-car salesman who got rich doing things that are illegal for you and me (ripping off copyrighted works en masse) and he pulled a bait and switch as far as for-/non-profit is concerned. He's everything wrong with Silicon Valley/Venture Capital/faux meritocratic culture rolled into one.

next_xibalba 2y ago
Altman was rich before OpenAI, so that claim doesn’t hold much water. It is a legitimate and open question as to what fair use constitutes when it comes to training models on copyrighted content. It will definitely be settled in the courts, if not by legislatures in the coming years. Apart from ad hominem attacks and matters about which there are legitimate differences of opinion, I return to my original question: what significant harms have OpenAIs products yielded? It is obvious that a raw LLM of GPT-4s power could do some harm in the wrong hands. Therefore, if you can’t point to real harms, it is reasonable to conclude, at the very least, that Altman/OpenAI might not be the wrong hands.
- nvy 2y ago
  The fact that you cannot perceive the harms, or that they are not yet apparent, does not mean they do not exist. Look at Facebook and other social media: at first we all thought it was great and then we realized it's a giant depression machine, and all it's really good for is giving young girls eating disorders. But since we're on the topic, the immediate casualties seem to be the livelihoods of authors and artists, on whose content the LLMs were trained and who received no compensation. And now every publisher is inundated with infinite ChatGPT-created books. We won't get into the climate impact of wasting all that compute just to create a better phishing-email generator.

2 ms·

>It’s fashionable, for reasons I am unaware, to hate on Sam Altman and OpenAI Perhaps because he's a slimy used-car salesman who got rich doing things that are

by nvy 2y ago

next_xibalba 2y ago
Altman was rich before OpenAI, so that claim doesn’t hold much water. It is a legitimate and open question as to what fair use constitutes when it comes to training models on copyrighted content. It will definitely be settled in the courts, if not by legislatures in the coming years. Apart from ad hominem attacks and matters about which there are legitimate differences of opinion, I return to my original question: what significant harms have OpenAIs products yielded? It is obvious that a raw LLM of GPT-4s power could do some harm in the wrong hands. Therefore, if you can’t point to real harms, it is reasonable to conclude, at the very least, that Altman/OpenAI might not be the wrong hands.
- nvy 2y ago
  The fact that you cannot perceive the harms, or that they are not yet apparent, does not mean they do not exist. Look at Facebook and other social media: at first we all thought it was great and then we realized it's a giant depression machine, and all it's really good for is giving young girls eating disorders. But since we're on the topic, the immediate casualties seem to be the livelihoods of authors and artists, on whose content the LLMs were trained and who received no compensation. And now every publisher is inundated with infinite ChatGPT-created books. We won't get into the climate impact of wasting all that compute just to create a better phishing-email generator.