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There is a hurdle between being standout ethical/open vs. relevant. Staying relevant in a highly expensive, competitive, fast moving area, requires vast and co

There is a hurdle between being standout ethical/open vs. relevant. Staying relevant in a highly expensive, competitive, fast moving area, requires vast and continuous resources. How could OpenAI get increasingly more resources to burn, without creating firewalled commercial value to trade for those resources? It’s like choosing to be a pacifist country, in the age of pillaging colonization. You can be the ethical exception and risk annihilation, or be relevant and thrive. Which would you choose? We “know” which side Altman breaks on, when forced to choose. Whatever value he places on “open”, he most certainly wants OpenAI to remain “relevant”. Which was also in OpenAI’s charter (explicitly, or implicitly). Expensive altruism is a very difficult problem. I would say, unsolved. Anyone have a good counter example? (It can be been "solved" globally, but not locally. Colonization took millennia to be more or less banned. Due to even top economies realizing they were vulnerable after world wars. Nearly universal agreement had to be reached. And yet we still have Russian forays, Chinese saber rattling, and recent US overreach. And pervasive zero/negative-sum power games, via imbalanced leverage: emergency loans that create debt, military aid, propping up of unpopular regimes. All following the same resource incentives. You can play or be played. There is no such agreement brewing for universally “open AI”.)

wizzwizz4 2y ago
> You can be the ethical exception and risk annihilation, or be relevant and thrive. In a heavily expertise-driven field, where there's significant international collaboration, these aren't your options, until after everyone has decided to defect. OpenAI didn't have to go this route.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  Open collaborative work is great. But a complement, not a replacement, for high resource work. Nobody needed OpenAI for normal collaborative open work to thrive. Their original idea was a relatively uncommon idea: attempt to combine (1) pushing the absolute front forward, with high resource work that matched or exceeded work from deep pocketed corporations, while (2) sharing and collaborating. They did both for a while, resulting in as significant impact as anyone could have hoped form. But those two dimensions are hard to maintain together. It requires a continuous stream of vast donations. The latter is very difficult, perhaps completely unrealistic.

wizzwizz4 2y ago

> You can be the ethical exception and risk annihilation, or be relevant and thrive. In a heavily expertise-driven field, where there's significant international collaboration, these aren't your options, until after everyone has decided to defect. OpenAI didn't have to go this route.

Nevermark 2y ago
Open collaborative work is great. But a complement, not a replacement, for high resource work. Nobody needed OpenAI for normal collaborative open work to thrive. Their original idea was a relatively uncommon idea: attempt to combine (1) pushing the absolute front forward, with high resource work that matched or exceeded work from deep pocketed corporations, while (2) sharing and collaborating. They did both for a while, resulting in as significant impact as anyone could have hoped form. But those two dimensions are hard to maintain together. It requires a continuous stream of vast donations. The latter is very difficult, perhaps completely unrealistic.