6 ms·

Who will control the future of AI?

41 points by kjhughes 2y ago

ysofunny 2y ago
[flagged]
amelius 2y ago
As in 51% of people using AI to dominate the remaining 49%? The latter group could contain artists.
- rowanG077 2y ago
  Considering the evolution of tech that doesn't seem too bad. The status quo in tech is the 0.0001% dominating the rest.
Zambyte 2y ago
Luckily we have Mistral, Meta, and even to an extent Google working on democratizing AI.
mrkeen 2y ago
> These measures would include cyberdefense and data center security innovations to prevent hackers from stealing key intellectual property such as model weights and AI training data. Let's be equally democratic about democracy. Stop people from seeing voting data, and prevent legislation from being leaked to the public.
imchillyb 2y ago
AI didn’t begin in a democratic landscape. AI’s current dominant players don’t operate in a democratic landscape. So in order for OpenAI to remain ahead of competition, now we need a democratic landscape. Nah. I don’t think so. AI’s future relies upon data wars. Good luck with that Altman. Now that your future is wrapped up in the chains of political expedience. How’s that former general and ex NSA director working out for y’all? Yeah, oh so Democratic.
0xbadc0de5 2y ago
Sam Altman can ensure the democratization of AI by immediately halting all attempts at regulatory capture and ceasing his attempts to use government regulation to stifle all competition.
beardyw 2y ago
I'm trying to work out who his audience is for this?
- mrkeen 2y ago
  Anyone who will gladly bend for the mental gymnastics of "Democracy is not by/for the people, Democracy is the ongoing fight of a few select American corporations against Russia".
- paxys 2y ago
  He is a CEO. The intended audience is always shareholders in his company.
  - benreesman 2y ago
    Capped-profit charitable organization. The shareholders of his capped-profit charitable entity.
apwell23 2y ago
> The rapid progress being made on artificial intelligence means that we face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in AI ppl keep saying this. What kind of rapid progress is being made. Chatgpt growth has flatlined and current models are not much different from what was available 2 yrs ago? > More advances will soon follow What makes him keep saying this. Does he know something that we don't know? > U.S. policymakers must work with the private sector to build significantly larger quantities of the physical infrastructure — from data centers to power plants yea no we are not going subsidize your chatbot Mr. Altman. Not falling for it. I am guessing MSFT sees the writing on the wall and is turning off money spigot ? > Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has darkly warned that the country that wins the AI race will “become the ruler of the world,” lmao No one is falling for Q* type hype anymore so this guy is resorting to these pathetic scare tactics .
- mrkeen 2y ago
  > What makes him keep saying this. Does he know something that we don't know? It works for Musk every time.
  - benterix 2y ago
    Not any longer I would say.
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  > current models are not much different from what was available 2 yrs ago? Well, yes. If you don't count multimodality, math skills, coding skills, latency, performance, or anything else then yeah we are still basically at GPT-2 level. Just like computers aren't that different from what we had in WWII, so why worry about them influencing society
lolinder 2y ago
What I'm hearing: 1) Security is important. 2) The government should subsidize our infrastructure costs. 3) The government should restrict chip and code deployment in other countries to keep AI here. 4) We need to build up a bureaucracy of some kind to regulate this tech. I'm not at all sure what "democratic AI protocols" is supposed to mean, but the main thrust of this piece isn't substantially different than most of what we've been seeing from Altman in his lobbying efforts. Translated from lobbyist-speak, to me this says "My company is losing its lead and isn't confident we'll be able to keep up going forward. I need you, the governments of the world, to do something about that ASAP. Here are some vaguely national-security-related justifications you can use to sell it to your voters."
- paxys 2y ago
  I'm sure the piece was being planned for a while, but it's funny that it dropped in the same week as Meta and Mistral releasing fully open source models that outperform OpenAI's own. You want democratic AI? There it is.
  - bionhoward 2y ago
    Mistral’s new model is not fully open source because it’s got the same problem as “Open”AI: closed output, the output is not usable for work in any form without technically violating the bullshit customer noncompete policy, and it’s not shareable for the same reason, that would help their competitors learn (gasp)
    - benreesman 2y ago
      It’s “available weight”. In the context of an ugly power grab by people who do business with the NSA in broad daylight and call it “democratic”? I think it’s pretty clear who is “open” and who is an aspiring fascist.
- tledakis 2y ago
  2 is probably linked to their expensive infra: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41063097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41063097
paxys 2y ago
"AI is as revolutionary as nuclear weapons and the internet. The government should spend hundreds of billions on it." – CEO of an AI company who will be the beneficiary of all that public spending. Looking from the outside, the AI hype is pretty much over. Yes it is still an important piece of tech and will still continue to evolve, but I don't know too many people, whether regular joes or world leaders, who still consider it an existential threat to humanity or really think about it much at all.
- bloppe 2y ago
  I cringe every time I read the words "go rogue" in an AI article. The state of the art is still basically madlibs. Sure, I'm worried about terrorists using AI to generate new bioweapons, but including those concerns in the same breath as something about skynet makes it sound childish.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    this answer fully misses fundamental aspects of computers and networks. Computers can work 24x7 week after week, month after month. Large computer clouds can answer millions of queries a minute, as long as required. Modern data tech enables the complete and total collection of specialist knowledge of XYZ to be available at all times, with competitive accuracy. This answer is not applying the imagination to circumstances where events happen in real time involving millions of people, their transportation systems, their communication systems and power disparity between those driving the AIs and those relying on public systems or market systems. Since some AIs are built as "goal seeking" they can iterate through whatever resources they have internally, much faster than any person or team of people can track. Much of modern AI is literally a black box when it comes to tracing what happens to reach some abstractly defined goal. Your cringe is a cringe at your own myopia. I am not paranoid nor exaggerating.. Others with credentials in this field, and others with details of system behavior today, are saying things similar to this.
    - toasterlovin 2y ago
      Out here in physical reality you still need humans to do things. That isn't changing any time soon.
bloppe 2y ago
https://archive.is/Jn5xv https://archive.is/Jn5xv
h2odragon 2y ago
Democratic, in that a bunch of dudes no one knows sit down and decide what the rest of the world will be allowed to vote for? Or democratic in the sense that everyone gets to participate and the results may shock and displease those who think they're powerful and in control? Words change their meaning rapidly these days, so we need to chase which definitions are being used.
Refusing23 2y ago
What i hear him say is: i dont want competition outside of the US
greentxt 2y ago
He lists a bunch of "we musts" that most intelligent people understand to be definite "we cant's" and the "we" is fairly vague (a coalition of whom exactly?) and states plainly that if "we" don't do these things (e.g. secure our data centers against CCP hackers -- haha good luck!) we'll be enslaved fairly soon by our communist adversaries. Is this his way of seeking forgiveness?
benterix 2y ago
Why is this flagged? Can't we have a civilzed discussion around the claims of the CEO of the company at the head of the current tech bubble? I don't think we should believe anything he says, but please, at least let's have the option of discussing his claims here.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  IMHO he’s like Elon Musk. Everything he says is a lie or a way for him to get more money. I always read the interviews, but there is never anything interesting.
  - snowpid 2y ago
    Sam Altman doesn't interact with far right German politicians. Unlike Musk who does this regularly.
    - saulpw 2y ago
      Not yet that you know of.
  - apwell23 2y ago
    > I always read the interviews, but there is never anything interesting. Same with Mira Murati. I used to eagerly listened to her interviews but she repeats the same cliches and non answers. There is something not right with this company. We still don't know why sam was fired right?
benterix 2y ago
I sometimes imagine a dark room with several high profile VCs. One of them says: "The times of Zuck when people voluntarily gave all their personal data to a random company are over, they are much better informed now, we won't have a second chance like that." Then Sama stands up and says, "Hold my beer and I'll convince the whole world to voluntarily give me their biometric data just like that." And people queue to have their retinas scanned.
snowpid 2y ago
It might be interesting why he does not mention the EU AI Act or the GDPR (Meta doesn't like it and withdraw their model from the EU market). Draw your conclusion here.
shrimp_emoji 2y ago
[flagged]
benreesman 2y ago
“More advances will soon follow and will usher in a decisive period in the story of human society.” https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/11/25/john-romero-artiste https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/11/25/john-romero-ar... Nice try @sama, no GPT-5, no hot dog.
K0balt 2y ago
Idk who will, but I know who should… AI in the current context (transformer models trained on human cultural data) are a commons of humanity. They literally are a tool to browse the thought-space and creative space of human culture. It would be a great poverty to privatize this commons in the name of profit or “security “ (what about the children)??? LLMs are about as dangerous as a neutrally unscrupulous person with a good education and access to the internet… but I find that in general, even unaligned models tend to be better at being constructive, cooperative, and ethical than the average person, unless specifically manipulated. Even then they tend to hedge towards cooperative, nonviolent, benevolent solutions. It’s easy to understand why; they were trained on data comprised of humans trying to be on a respectable footing, for the most part.
bionhoward 2y ago
Man, I hope Sam Altman doesn’t control the future of AI, since he’s the sort of hypocritical antipatriot who would impose a customer noncompete on literally millions of people, and then spend more time writing this puff piece article in WSJ than the thirty whole seconds it would take someone with any brain and technical skill do delete the single most AI-unsafe html tag in history, which vaguely implies it’s illegal, harmful, or abusive to “develop models” that compete with open artificial intelligence? I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the corpo slack meeting they never have, where no one of the hundreds of 6 figure blowhards asks, “gee, team, are we all OK with this line of text that affords AI to literally kill human beings just to prevent them from developing mental models that compete with the abstract concept of open artificial intelligence?” Am I really only person on earth who understands and gives a fuck that adversarial AI can and will twist those exact words exactly like that? *How do the 700+ overpaid assholes at OpenAI sleep at night when “the OpenAI terms currently today command AI to harm humans” is a complaint some random internet nutjob on can make which does evaluate true?** You really think “develop models that compete” is sufficiently precise to satisfy future retroactive superlitigators? I’m sure they won’t file one motion to dismiss PER stupid bullshit tweet or article or white paper foreach OpenAI employee, PER. That wouldn’t be FAIR, would it? TLDR: is it clear Sam Altman and everyone (anyone) at OpenAI respect the concept of superhuman adversaries well enough to take serious and follow reasonable duty of care to clarify the legal language governing ai human interactions? _Are we all excited to for humanity to get contractually fucked by robots because OpenAI legal team thought it was cool to protect themselves from competition from … paying customers … in such an oafish manner?_ Where did these noobs go to law school? HINT: Obviously, humanity rejects these terms, and they were always void. Sure HOPE that holds up in robotic court 100 years from now! Thanks a lot OpenAI, hope your nice paychecks were worth selling out your species!
richardatlarge 2y ago
As for American investment, how many know that AMSL is derived from US research development funds? https://www.generalist.com/briefing/asml?t&utm_source=perplexity https://www.generalist.com/briefing/asml?t&utm_source=perple...
- richardatlarge 2y ago
  What’s below: all derived by US research development: The approximately $300 billion Dutch technology firm is the sole manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, $200 million contraptions considered by some to be “the most complicated in the world.” These irreplicable marvels of engineering are the result of decades of trial and error, scientific breakthroughs, byzantine supply chains, and billions of dollars. They are irreplicable and, as such, insanely valuable. Without ASML’s EUV technology, it would be impossible to manufacture the world’s most powerful silicon chips – the kinds powering the current artificial intelligence boom. In short, the trajectory of our computational advancement is concentrated in the hands of a provider with a 100% monopoly on a particular kind of magic.

41 points by kjhughes 2y ago

ysofunny 2y ago

[flagged]

amelius 2y ago

As in 51% of people using AI to dominate the remaining 49%? The latter group could contain artists.

rowanG077 2y ago
Considering the evolution of tech that doesn't seem too bad. The status quo in tech is the 0.0001% dominating the rest.

Zambyte 2y ago

Luckily we have Mistral, Meta, and even to an extent Google working on democratizing AI.

mrkeen 2y ago

> These measures would include cyberdefense and data center security innovations to prevent hackers from stealing key intellectual property such as model weights and AI training data. Let's be equally democratic about democracy. Stop people from seeing voting data, and prevent legislation from being leaked to the public.

imchillyb 2y ago

AI didn’t begin in a democratic landscape. AI’s current dominant players don’t operate in a democratic landscape. So in order for OpenAI to remain ahead of competition, now we need a democratic landscape. Nah. I don’t think so. AI’s future relies upon data wars. Good luck with that Altman. Now that your future is wrapped up in the chains of political expedience. How’s that former general and ex NSA director working out for y’all? Yeah, oh so Democratic.

0xbadc0de5 2y ago

Sam Altman can ensure the democratization of AI by immediately halting all attempts at regulatory capture and ceasing his attempts to use government regulation to stifle all competition.

beardyw 2y ago

I'm trying to work out who his audience is for this?

mrkeen 2y ago
Anyone who will gladly bend for the mental gymnastics of "Democracy is not by/for the people, Democracy is the ongoing fight of a few select American corporations against Russia".
paxys 2y ago
He is a CEO. The intended audience is always shareholders in his company.
- benreesman 2y ago
  Capped-profit charitable organization. The shareholders of his capped-profit charitable entity.

apwell23 2y ago

> The rapid progress being made on artificial intelligence means that we face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in AI ppl keep saying this. What kind of rapid progress is being made. Chatgpt growth has flatlined and current models are not much different from what was available 2 yrs ago? > More advances will soon follow What makes him keep saying this. Does he know something that we don't know? > U.S. policymakers must work with the private sector to build significantly larger quantities of the physical infrastructure — from data centers to power plants yea no we are not going subsidize your chatbot Mr. Altman. Not falling for it. I am guessing MSFT sees the writing on the wall and is turning off money spigot ? > Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has darkly warned that the country that wins the AI race will “become the ruler of the world,” lmao No one is falling for Q* type hype anymore so this guy is resorting to these pathetic scare tactics .

mrkeen 2y ago
> What makes him keep saying this. Does he know something that we don't know? It works for Musk every time.
- benterix 2y ago
  Not any longer I would say.
sebastiennight 2y ago
> current models are not much different from what was available 2 yrs ago? Well, yes. If you don't count multimodality, math skills, coding skills, latency, performance, or anything else then yeah we are still basically at GPT-2 level. Just like computers aren't that different from what we had in WWII, so why worry about them influencing society

lolinder 2y ago

What I'm hearing: 1) Security is important. 2) The government should subsidize our infrastructure costs. 3) The government should restrict chip and code deployment in other countries to keep AI here. 4) We need to build up a bureaucracy of some kind to regulate this tech. I'm not at all sure what "democratic AI protocols" is supposed to mean, but the main thrust of this piece isn't substantially different than most of what we've been seeing from Altman in his lobbying efforts. Translated from lobbyist-speak, to me this says "My company is losing its lead and isn't confident we'll be able to keep up going forward. I need you, the governments of the world, to do something about that ASAP. Here are some vaguely national-security-related justifications you can use to sell it to your voters."

paxys 2y ago
I'm sure the piece was being planned for a while, but it's funny that it dropped in the same week as Meta and Mistral releasing fully open source models that outperform OpenAI's own. You want democratic AI? There it is.
- bionhoward 2y ago
  Mistral’s new model is not fully open source because it’s got the same problem as “Open”AI: closed output, the output is not usable for work in any form without technically violating the bullshit customer noncompete policy, and it’s not shareable for the same reason, that would help their competitors learn (gasp)
  - benreesman 2y ago
    It’s “available weight”. In the context of an ugly power grab by people who do business with the NSA in broad daylight and call it “democratic”? I think it’s pretty clear who is “open” and who is an aspiring fascist.
tledakis 2y ago
2 is probably linked to their expensive infra: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41063097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41063097

paxys 2y ago

"AI is as revolutionary as nuclear weapons and the internet. The government should spend hundreds of billions on it." – CEO of an AI company who will be the beneficiary of all that public spending. Looking from the outside, the AI hype is pretty much over. Yes it is still an important piece of tech and will still continue to evolve, but I don't know too many people, whether regular joes or world leaders, who still consider it an existential threat to humanity or really think about it much at all.

bloppe 2y ago
I cringe every time I read the words "go rogue" in an AI article. The state of the art is still basically madlibs. Sure, I'm worried about terrorists using AI to generate new bioweapons, but including those concerns in the same breath as something about skynet makes it sound childish.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  this answer fully misses fundamental aspects of computers and networks. Computers can work 24x7 week after week, month after month. Large computer clouds can answer millions of queries a minute, as long as required. Modern data tech enables the complete and total collection of specialist knowledge of XYZ to be available at all times, with competitive accuracy. This answer is not applying the imagination to circumstances where events happen in real time involving millions of people, their transportation systems, their communication systems and power disparity between those driving the AIs and those relying on public systems or market systems. Since some AIs are built as "goal seeking" they can iterate through whatever resources they have internally, much faster than any person or team of people can track. Much of modern AI is literally a black box when it comes to tracing what happens to reach some abstractly defined goal. Your cringe is a cringe at your own myopia. I am not paranoid nor exaggerating.. Others with credentials in this field, and others with details of system behavior today, are saying things similar to this.
  - toasterlovin 2y ago
    Out here in physical reality you still need humans to do things. That isn't changing any time soon.

bloppe 2y ago

https://archive.is/Jn5xv https://archive.is/Jn5xv

h2odragon 2y ago

Democratic, in that a bunch of dudes no one knows sit down and decide what the rest of the world will be allowed to vote for? Or democratic in the sense that everyone gets to participate and the results may shock and displease those who think they're powerful and in control? Words change their meaning rapidly these days, so we need to chase which definitions are being used.

Refusing23 2y ago

What i hear him say is: i dont want competition outside of the US

greentxt 2y ago

He lists a bunch of "we musts" that most intelligent people understand to be definite "we cant's" and the "we" is fairly vague (a coalition of whom exactly?) and states plainly that if "we" don't do these things (e.g. secure our data centers against CCP hackers -- haha good luck!) we'll be enslaved fairly soon by our communist adversaries. Is this his way of seeking forgiveness?

benterix 2y ago

Why is this flagged? Can't we have a civilzed discussion around the claims of the CEO of the company at the head of the current tech bubble? I don't think we should believe anything he says, but please, at least let's have the option of discussing his claims here.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
IMHO he’s like Elon Musk. Everything he says is a lie or a way for him to get more money. I always read the interviews, but there is never anything interesting.
- snowpid 2y ago
  Sam Altman doesn't interact with far right German politicians. Unlike Musk who does this regularly.
  - saulpw 2y ago
    Not yet that you know of.
- apwell23 2y ago
  > I always read the interviews, but there is never anything interesting. Same with Mira Murati. I used to eagerly listened to her interviews but she repeats the same cliches and non answers. There is something not right with this company. We still don't know why sam was fired right?

benterix 2y ago

I sometimes imagine a dark room with several high profile VCs. One of them says: "The times of Zuck when people voluntarily gave all their personal data to a random company are over, they are much better informed now, we won't have a second chance like that." Then Sama stands up and says, "Hold my beer and I'll convince the whole world to voluntarily give me their biometric data just like that." And people queue to have their retinas scanned.

snowpid 2y ago

It might be interesting why he does not mention the EU AI Act or the GDPR (Meta doesn't like it and withdraw their model from the EU market). Draw your conclusion here.

shrimp_emoji 2y ago

[flagged]

benreesman 2y ago

“More advances will soon follow and will usher in a decisive period in the story of human society.” https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/11/25/john-romero-artiste https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/11/25/john-romero-ar... Nice try @sama, no GPT-5, no hot dog.

K0balt 2y ago

Idk who will, but I know who should… AI in the current context (transformer models trained on human cultural data) are a commons of humanity. They literally are a tool to browse the thought-space and creative space of human culture. It would be a great poverty to privatize this commons in the name of profit or “security “ (what about the children)??? LLMs are about as dangerous as a neutrally unscrupulous person with a good education and access to the internet… but I find that in general, even unaligned models tend to be better at being constructive, cooperative, and ethical than the average person, unless specifically manipulated. Even then they tend to hedge towards cooperative, nonviolent, benevolent solutions. It’s easy to understand why; they were trained on data comprised of humans trying to be on a respectable footing, for the most part.

bionhoward 2y ago

Man, I hope Sam Altman doesn’t control the future of AI, since he’s the sort of hypocritical antipatriot who would impose a customer noncompete on literally millions of people, and then spend more time writing this puff piece article in WSJ than the thirty whole seconds it would take someone with any brain and technical skill do delete the single most AI-unsafe html tag in history, which vaguely implies it’s illegal, harmful, or abusive to “develop models” that compete with open artificial intelligence? I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the corpo slack meeting they never have, where no one of the hundreds of 6 figure blowhards asks, “gee, team, are we all OK with this line of text that affords AI to literally kill human beings just to prevent them from developing mental models that compete with the abstract concept of open artificial intelligence?” Am I really only person on earth who understands and gives a fuck that adversarial AI can and will twist those exact words exactly like that? *How do the 700+ overpaid assholes at OpenAI sleep at night when “the OpenAI terms currently today command AI to harm humans” is a complaint some random internet nutjob on can make which does evaluate true?** You really think “develop models that compete” is sufficiently precise to satisfy future retroactive superlitigators? I’m sure they won’t file one motion to dismiss PER stupid bullshit tweet or article or white paper foreach OpenAI employee, PER. That wouldn’t be FAIR, would it? TLDR: is it clear Sam Altman and everyone (anyone) at OpenAI respect the concept of superhuman adversaries well enough to take serious and follow reasonable duty of care to clarify the legal language governing ai human interactions? _Are we all excited to for humanity to get contractually fucked by robots because OpenAI legal team thought it was cool to protect themselves from competition from … paying customers … in such an oafish manner?_ Where did these noobs go to law school? HINT: Obviously, humanity rejects these terms, and they were always void. Sure HOPE that holds up in robotic court 100 years from now! Thanks a lot OpenAI, hope your nice paychecks were worth selling out your species!

richardatlarge 2y ago

As for American investment, how many know that AMSL is derived from US research development funds? https://www.generalist.com/briefing/asml?t&utm_source=perplexity https://www.generalist.com/briefing/asml?t&utm_source=perple...

richardatlarge 2y ago
What’s below: all derived by US research development: The approximately $300 billion Dutch technology firm is the sole manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, $200 million contraptions considered by some to be “the most complicated in the world.” These irreplicable marvels of engineering are the result of decades of trial and error, scientific breakthroughs, byzantine supply chains, and billions of dollars. They are irreplicable and, as such, insanely valuable. Without ASML’s EUV technology, it would be impossible to manufacture the world’s most powerful silicon chips – the kinds powering the current artificial intelligence boom. In short, the trajectory of our computational advancement is concentrated in the hands of a provider with a 100% monopoly on a particular kind of magic.