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AI firms mustn’t govern themselves, say ex-members of OpenAI’s board
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- behnamoh 2y agoAny talk about AI governance (either pro or against) just further feeds the AI hype. I work in the AI industry and know the benefits, but tbh 90% of startups out there don't deserve the amount of attention (read: VC money) they receive. It'll burst, and it will be ugly. The only one benefiting from all the AI bubble is nvidia (fuck them).
- fnetisma 2y agoSure there will be corrective behaviour in the market, and the better product with more outreach, better experience will win over suboptimal products with overlapping offerings, but does that mean that the current generative AI momentum is hollow or there is a sticky use case behind the promises? And if so, in your opinion, how overstated is the Total Addressable Market compared to what’s claimed by an aggregate of startups across the VC space?
- dmix 2y agoAnd let me guess these 2 want to be the ones controlling it (again but with more power)
- toomuchtodo 2y agoPeople who want to govern shouldn’t be in the role. This selects for service over seeking power.
- whimsicalism 2y agogood luck lol
- theropost 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_road_to_hell_is_paved_with_good_intentions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_road_to_hell_is_paved_wi...
- williamtrask 2y agothere's really no evidence of that (in the article or otherwise)
- dmix 2y agoYou must not have read much into these people I previously dug into Helen Toner’s history and listened to her talks at conferences on YouTube (including an Effective Altruism one) and read her interviews on other sites where she was strongly against GPT being released to the public. Then we have their behaviour and comments during the coup attempt and her temporary OpenAI CEO, Emmett Shear, she brought in who made a number of radical statements about wanting to cripple AI research before he was put forward as CEO and then he made an awkward, and very evasive, initial statement to employees that scared off many to Sam’s side. He too played coy about his intentions during that timeframe just like Helen avoided publicity despite being the spare, but her past states were revelatory. Not exactly someone’s opinion I trust. This is just being spun as a moderate stance on AI regulation by people who IRL have much more aggressive and non mainstream takes on stopping AI development. Which is why I ask who will be the caretaker in this scenario.
- cpursley 2y agoYou’re getting downvoted but regulatory capture and cronyism (voting in laws that prohibit new entrants; for the greater good, of course) is a trick as old as democratic systems been have established, maybe older and perhaps not exclusive to democracy.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoHe's getting downvoted because the article specifically calls out the risks of cronyism and regulatory capture. A paywall workaround was posted: https://archive.is/wbwC2 https://archive.is/wbwC2. It would benefit a lot of commenters here if they actually read the article first.
- cpursley 2y agoThanks. I really wish there was automoderation or even conversion to archive.is of paywalled articles here.
- hnlmorg 2y agoNo company should govern themselves. AI or others
- diego_sandoval 2y agoDo you also think that no person should govern themself?
- hnlmorg 2y agoWe already don’t govern ourselves. We have something called “laws”. Most people aren’t assholes but it only takes a small minority to ruin it for the rest of us.
- Loughla 2y agoWhat?
- hiddencost 2y agoThis is what boards are for.
- xboxnolifes 2y agoNo, it's what governments are for.
- nicce 2y agoRather, if you want to pursuit on providing valuable service or product, you should not have shareholders at all. Or any dependency whatsoever. No pressure for maximizing profits and abuse your position for profits.
- crazygringo 2y agoShareholders are just owners. Every company has to have owners (even if those owners are the employees, for instance). Owners ultimately make the decisions, by electing a board which oversees management. Anyone starting a company is free to cap profits if they want. You can write it directly into the articles of incorporation. Obviously it makes it harder to find investors, so good luck.
- walrushunter 2y ago[flagged]
- cellwebb 2y agoPeople who so quickly devolve to disparagement are, well, I think you know. So what are your thoughts on Sam Altman having no equity in OpenAI?
- siva7 2y agoWhile obvious in retrospective, the board drama at this company for which these ex-members are partly responsible destroyed the chance that investors or executives would ever let such people take over governance again.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Anybody who would willingly give up governance of their company That’s the rub. It wasn’t founded as a company.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- TulliusCicero 2y agoIt might be reasonable to have regulations here, but I shudder to think what form they would take, given the typical government level of technological expertise and understanding.
- andy99 2y agoExisting laws cover almost everything "bad" you could do with AI/ML. It's not like there's some "I used AI" loophole that exempts one from the law. So most of this is about either regulatory capture, self importance (oh, my linear algebra research is like inventing the atom bomb), ideology, power seeking or a combination.
- janice1999 2y ago> Existing laws cover almost everything "bad" you could do with AI/ML. If (like many non-EU countries and parts of the US) you don't already have basic digital privacy laws, transparency or consumer protections, that is simply not true.
- riquito 2y agoSo in countries were the government doesn't attempt to protect you you'll keep not being protected
- janice1999 2y agoAnd AI will make it much worse by lowering the effort required to do harm.
- NegativeLatency 2y agoI’m not suggesting we’re at this point now, but it would be nice if we create sentient AI if it wasn’t enslaved. I think we would probably need some new laws for the case of non human personhood Not sure what laws would apply or how they’d be enforced based on how we treat people and say chimps, and corporations like people.
- web3-is-a-scam 2y agoI don’t trust industry to self-regulate and I definitey don’t trust the government to be able to regulate it effectively. Honestly, we’re f*cked
- Y_Y 2y agoIn fairness, based on the position you've put forward, I can't imagine an unfuckable situation.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- solardev 2y agoMaybe we need an AI democracy where the AI themselves vote for regulations.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoWhich they will do according to stuff they read on Reddit
- solardev 2y agospez 4 galactic emperor?
- tbrownaw 2y agoAs if they'd ever vote for things that would annoy the handful of corporations providing the datacenters they live in. Do you really want to hand that much power to Amazon (or Microsoft, or Google)?
- loceng 2y agoIsn't it then a weapon's race which will depend first on immediate CPU and energy resources available + how quickly it can drive further allocation of CPU-energy towards itself, etc? The end game will happen very quickly once the needed ingredients and initial integrations are there from the beginning. Otherwise I think AI avatars competing against other AI avatars, where they are honed-trained by a specific person or organization, is how we'll determine and create the different future paths of indoctrination for learning - whether the narratives that win out and get propagated are the truth or not, or if it is the "winners write history" as the outcome that reigns.
- sherburt3 2y agoOh man I wish someone I trust would be in charge of this project. I know, let’s put bureaucrats in charge!
- astrange 2y agoWorks for Asia. The key is having good bureaucrats.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoAnyone who says someone else can’t govern themselves is just looking to shift power into their own hands, or the hands of people they are aligned to. They never admit this but it’s the reality. These former board members conducted themselves in such a poor way during the attempted ouster of Sam Altman, that they clearly cannot be trusted. Why is their opinion important to listen to? Mind you - I don’t trust OpenAI or big tech companies either, mostly because of the amount of power or wealth they can accumulate. But I see that as a need to revise antitrust law. I am less onboard with trying to block people from developing models, since that to me is more like violating the right to thought and speech.
- yareal 2y agoWell, obviously, right? They started with the premise of, "what if we committed wholesale intellectual property theft" and moved immediately to, "I bet we can put a whole lot of people out of work and keep the profits to ourselves!" It's astonishingly clear we need to regulate them.
- whimsicalism 2y agomany people have tried regulating away “making profits out of putting people out of work” it works out terribly for obvious and foreseen reasons
- XorNot 2y agoThe more interesting thing about LLMs at this point is their stunning success rate at psychologically attacking people. We have this endless stream of "AGI imminent" claims and then ChatGPT-x still fails at some basic task everytime they release it.
- trhway 2y agoMay be the AGI imitates the failures to avoid scaring humans into shutting it down that early before it took real power over the civilization. The Ender’s Game is definitely in the training set.
- slowhadoken 2y agoBecause commercial industry regulating itself has worked so well in the past?
- Osmium 2y agoWhat would regulation look like if it was based on energy usage rather than capabilities? A guardrail on mass deployment that is not linked to specific model size or aspects of model performance that are difficult to quantify.
- Lerc 2y agoEnergy usage of training or inference? As a guard on capabilities, it would permit a rise in abilities with gains in both hardware and software efficiency. Is this desirable?
- Osmium 2y agoOverall energy usage, from the perspective that energy usage is the primary immediate harm of AI. This is a thesis, not an opinion.
- dhfbshfbu4u3 2y agoArchived version: https://archive.is/wbwC2 https://archive.is/wbwC2
- JojoFatsani 2y agoFun fact, McCauley is married to Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
- genter 2y agoAnd if you live in a cave like me, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an actor.
- JojoFatsani 2y agoSurely even nerds have seen Dark Knight Rises.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- moose44 2y agoCurious about past examples of industries and companies left to govern themselves?
- maximus-decimus 2y agoMovie ratings. They censored themselves to avoid the government stepping in. Also professional orders like engineers, accountants and teachers in some places I guess.
- 93po 2y agoFilm/TV ratings is a famously terrible, opaque process with no rhyme or reason to it at all, and everyone in hollywood hates it
- XorNot 2y agoConversely the Australian experience where the government is involved is just stupid, and gives us random banned games like Bully because it triggers boomer-era moral panic.
- defrost 2y agoBully the game rated 'M' in Australia that some parent groups raised a stink about and threatened to ban ? https://www.classification.gov.au/titles/bully-1 https://www.classification.gov.au/titles/bully-1 Films and computer games classified M (Mature) are not recommended for children under the age of 15. They can have content such as violence and themes that requires a mature outlook. Children under the age of 15 may legally access this content. For an actual example of "Banned in Australia" (March 2022) see: The Board considered that the depiction of drug use in the game, Rimworld, did include “illicit or proscribed drug use related to incentives or rewards” and that therefore the Board was required to classify the game, Refused Classification. A game that has received an RC rating cannot be sold, hired, advertised, or legally imported into Australia. Rimworld: https://steamcommunity.com/app/294100 https://steamcommunity.com/app/294100 A sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. Generates stories by simulating psychology, ecology, gunplay, melee combat, climate, biomes, diplomacy, interpersonal relationships, art, medicine, trade, and more. https://www.classification.gov.au/about-us/media-and-news/media-releases/media-statement-classification-game-rimworld https://www.classification.gov.au/about-us/media-and-news/me...
- blackhawkC17 2y agoAren’t these two of the board members who lost their jobs due to sheer incompetence in handling the Sam Altman situation? Of course they’re seeking power via the back door..
- vundercind 2y agoMy predictions: 1) AI stuff’s overblown. It’ll be a good tool, becoming just another of many, and probably will improve over time, but we’ll find we’re nowhere near as close to creating silicon sentience as some worry we are. 2) The real problem is letting a few megacorps raid the commons—and hell, lots of stuff that’s not really in the commons at all, basically just all of culture—then gate “their” creations behind a paywall (oh, but that they expect us to respect, because that makes sense), and these AI safety folks don’t seem to give a shit about that.
- ronsor 2y agoI agree with this. On (2), I would like to see companies have no rights over models trained on public data. It's very arguable they should be required to release model weights.
- vundercind 2y agoYeah IMO a good outcome would be that training on data you don’t own or license should require release of the model. Is allowed, doesn’t get you something you exclusively own. Bonus points if existing rights assignments aren’t enough to count as a grant of permission for AI training.
- astrange 2y agoI don't think there's any precedent for requiring someone to distribute a work they created. That sounds expensive and could easily be a contract violation for other data they did license.
- astrange 2y agoHmm, it is sort of how patents work. Copyright registration involves giving some sort of the work to the Library of Congress, but I'm not familiar with that part of it.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoAfter everything I've seen in the time since Altman's ouster then reinstatement at OpenAI, I would definitely admit I was wrong in my original assessment of the board's actions. While I still think how they went about it was both naive and very poorly executed, everything I've read online (both from the board members but, more importantly, from others in-the-know at OpenAI) makes me believe their action was warranted, especially given the stated function of the OpenAI board. I've never met Sam Altman, but the last "straw" for me was the recent Scarlett Johansson brouhaha. While I think it's pretty clear they wanted their AI system to evoke Johansson's persona in the movie, OpenAI would have at least had some level of plausible deniability if it weren't for Altman's 3-letter "her" tweet. It's like he just couldn't help himself - it seemed the embodiment of these "tech boy-princes" who, despite all their often lauded "genius", just seem incapable of shutting TFU. I honestly don't mean to solely dump on Altman (see also Musk, Andreessen, etc.), it's just that he's obviously a focus of this article. But everything I've heard about nearly every other tech billionaire makes me think I absolutely do not want them independently in charge of humanity's future with AI.
- prox 2y agoWhy do these figures all have like this immature thing about them?
- greenchair 2y agojust part of being a sociopath
- jamiek88 2y agoI’m starting to believe one cannot be a billionaire without being mentally ill.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoMy theory is that we're all pretty much that immature, but the rest of us have normal societal guardrails confirming that we're not actually as special and smart as we think we are. But these tech bros and others with that much power have no such societal constraints. And, importantly, they did have huge impacts on society: creating the first popular Internet browser, jumpstarting the EV revolution, exposing the masses to AI - these all really were enormous accomplishments. So it's not that hard to go from there to convincing yourself that your shit don't stink and that you have some unique insight into all areas of human existence.
- z7 2y ago>Tasha McCauley holds a B.A. from Bard College and a master of Business Administration from the University of South California. >Helen Toner holds an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown, as well as a BSc in Chemical Engineering and a Diploma in Languages from the University of Melbourne. So these are the AI experts...?
- mistrial9 2y agothere is a tsunami of publicity on this topic, going for months on end.. This short exposition bubbles up to the front page of YNews. Reading it you can see that it quickly moves from "AI Companies are doing this.." to direct anecdotes about OpenAI and their infamous origin of being totally helpful and open. Sum the parts with those bios you point out, and you can see that this is intellectually shallow waters with young companies spoken by young voices. Why jump on that harsh interpretation? evidence is in the choice of seatbelts in Dept of Transportation regs to compare to safety. What meatspace regulations are adequate metaphor for what is going on in digital transaction space.? really not showing any effort by the authors, and confirming that this is a made-for-headline news level essay.
- sh1mmer 2y agoSam Altman holds.. no degree? So presumably using their academic qualifications as a basis for their eligibility for the board of OpenAI is as silly as using Mr Altman’s? Would you give him the benefit of the doubt as an “AI expert” because of his well know work experience at YC? Without discussing their careers at all this comment seems at best unhelpful.
- reducesuffering 2y agoWhy don't you read some of Helen's papers and make a more informed analysis? https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NNnQg0MAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NNnQg0MAAAAJ&hl=en
- robwwilliams 2y agoThis commentary strikes the right balance between necessary/inevitable progress toward AGI and one or more common goods (however you define that—-even as a libertarian). The other more difficult question though is behind the screen—-how do we achieve the right balance between what we believe is the common good? How will we (liberal democratic belief systems) evaluate our version of the common good against other versions of the common good: what “they” (autocratic, theocratic, …) believe is the common good? No one society/culture can rationally adjudicate this decision or make any decisions stick. Unfortunately this has already become yet another version of “warfare by other means”. I personally hope that a pragmatic inclusive liberal democratic tradition gains a strong upper hand. I want my AGI to read and embed J Dewey, Gh Mead, J Rawls, J Habermas, O Dasgupta, RA Posner, and R Rorty. But here will inevitably be battles among AGI systems, perhaps on behalf of one or another human culture; perhaps not. Both scenarios are equally frightening. The Chinese proverb of “living in interesting times” applies in force.
- motohagiography 2y agoeven though I see the existential concerns with AI, I was at the table with a group of ISPs for the same governance conversations about the internet in the mid 90s and probably still have an RSA encryption munitions t-shirt in a box somewhere. what got bypassed was telco and ITU regulation, and the internet demolished the "converged" telco oligopoly system on content and publishing pretty naturally and in a fairly controlled way. given the impact of social media, could similar governance as is being advocated here have enabled the growth and whole new economies the way the platforms have? I don't see it. the people who ostensibly require your consent to serve you are the absolute last people you want to give control of powerful economic tools to, as first, what would they need your consent for if they have the tools, and since they don't actually make anything, by definition these people exist to optimize for solving zero-sum, closed loop problems in their own decision power and for redistribution to their coalitions. they do not -and will not- use AI to create the things that grow. charitably, governors and managers can be the shit from which things grow, but we are not in a shit shortage. imo, governance is the antithesis of desire. open source everything, build everything, release everything as fast as you can because these are the same old people who wanted cryptography backdoored, the internet content policed, speech punished, and now AI controlled. every generation must find a way to thrive in spite of them.
- m463 2y agothere must be a happy medium between daily tps reports and and a no-privacy gig economy. I think the answer is always checks and balances. And some things should be purposefully ambiguous, like "high crimes and misdemeanors".
- motohagiography 2y agosort of interesting on the always part, as I don't think the failure mode of it is acceptable or desirable, where someone whose default is always to have checks/balances is ok with it because presumably they benefit. the alternative to checks and balances is the freedom to defect, exit, repurpose, optimize, compete, reinterpret, etc. we can always invent moderation schemes. even though I think the effect of unregulated social media has been existentially bad for western societies, most of the regulatory state seems pretty happy about the outcome. who could have predicted that all most people really wanted was to deliver food and do soft peepshow sex work while they raged about their outgroups and waited for their 15mins of fame? ugly and messy, but it's what we wanted. The one group you don't want to help are the ones who are actuated by having power over others. It's a sick kink, and the only thing that has kept them at bay so far has been the high bar of competence for math and code. AI changes that, and depriving good people of powerful tools by restricting them to the hands of regulators means only the worst people will have them. Open sourcing everything to take away any moats they may have seems more urgent than ever.
- whimsicalism 2y agoI absolutely agree, but don’t think the solution is self-labeled policy experts from the east coast chattering classes in DC, NYC, and Boston. People involved in the governance need to be conversant in the tech itself.
- rjvs 2y agoI don’t think that there is anything in the article that disagrees with this.
- ein0p 2y agoNation state governments are responsible for the vast majority of deaths attributable to violence historically. Willingly entrusting them with a potentially world ending technology that they’re 100% certain to abuse is a moronic idea.
- ZhadruOmjar 2y agoThis whole thing seems like a way to build a regulatory framework so only the existing, largest AI players can continue and there is too much regulation for anyone else to enter the industry.
- ein0p 2y agoPretty much. I hope we at least get some trillion parameter GPT4 grade FOSS models before they inevitably succeed in regulating linear algebra.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoThis is the thing that bothers me - we’re just talking about doing math, doing more thinking, doing more speech. That’s what these models are. But everyone who isn’t an independent (non monopolist) technologist is vying for control of something they don’t understand to achieve their political or financial goals.
- thrance 2y agoWould it have been better if nuclear weapons had been developed by a private company whose board consisted entirely of lunatics?
- ein0p 2y agoThe “responsible” US government proceeded immediately to nuking a bunch of civilians in two cities, narrowly sparing Kyoto. So the answer to that question doesn’t seem clear cut to me. Do realize that you’re putting lunatics in charge in either case, but governments have unlimited budgets and monopoly on violence.
- stuaxo 2y agoSam Altman just comes across so sneezy that it's impossible to take anything they say in good faith, so Id assume this comes from a place of suppressing competitors.