4 ms·

While I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, I think the article makes an interesting observation that suggests it actually doesn't matter whet

by pdonis 5mo ago

While I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, I think the article makes an interesting observation that suggests it actually doesn't matter whether these people are intentionally trying to screw everybody or not--the actual problem is much bigger even than that: To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?

cma 5mo ago
Leaked emails I think showed the open source part at the heart of the concept of OpenAI was never serious and was just to help recruit.
- pdonis 5mo ago
  I don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?
  - jayd16 5mo ago
    These are Dr. Doom morals.
  - danaris 5mo ago
    To the extent that that's true, it's true because Sam Altman did it at all. It is not that hard to construct a scenario wherein an alternative version of Sam Altman pushed really hard for a genuinely ethical LLM—one trained only on data that he had full unclouded rights to, either because it was public domain or because he had bought or otherwise explicitly received the rights, among other measures—and had then made that competitive in the market with the rest of the existing crop of LLMs. In a scenario like that, whether his LLM did well or not, one could clearly see that Alt-Altman, as it were, was genuinely making an effort. The reality doesn't look anything like that. In this reality, it doesn't matter whether Altman thought he was trying to get there first because others would make it worse: he made it worse, and his actions match up very, very well with what one would expect the actions of a man who just wanted money, control, and power to be.
    - pdonis 5mo ago
      I'm not sure I agree that Altman has made the AI situation worse. I think Altman was right that Google, and Microsoft and others for that matter, were going to pursue AI no matter what. Even if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we'd still have much the same situation we have now. Even if it's true that, if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we wouldn't have had the spectacle of a supposed nonprofit trying to do "ethical" AI and then pivoting to a for-profit company, that actually might be something that was worth learning: that it's not possible to do AI as a private nonprofit with an explicit commitment not to do certain things.
      - danaris 5mo ago
        Sorry, my phrasing there was kind of poor: I didn't mean that he had made the overall AI situation worse, but rather that the AI he made was worse for the public than a hypothetical AI that was made with a deliberate eye to ethical or at least neutral behavior.
        pdonis 5mo ago
        Ah, ok. I certainly agree with that. My question would be whether it's even possible for we humans as we are now to make an AI with a deliberate eye to ethical behavior. Sam Altman clearly is not someone who can do that (nor is Elon Musk, for that matter). But I'm not sure I know of anyone who is.
        danaris 5mo ago
        I mean, there are plenty of people with the ethical chops to do so, and, I daresay, plenty who combine that with the technical chops. What's lacking is the money & power. Having/obtaining enough of those to be able to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Google is, unfortunately, nearly guaranteed to result in a deeply ethically compromised person at best.
        pdonis 5mo ago
watwut 5mo ago
> But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible? But that is not what happened. It is neither complicated or interesting, it is just an alternative timeline sci-fi exercise. It can be fun to engage in, but it is not anything that would had anything to do with the current world as it is. A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position. They do good and focus on doing good rather then lie to get more investments so that they can corner the market and become powerful.
- pdonis 5mo ago
  > A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position. I strongly disagree. Human history is full of examples of people who made good faith attempts to do good that backfired tremendously. A good faith desire to do good isn't enough: you also need to be in a domain where your beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is are reasonably trustworthy. And you need to have some way of getting feedback from reality that pushes back on you if you start crossing certain lines. None of this proves that Altman was making a genuine good faith attempt to do good. That wasn't my point. My point was that, in a domain like AI, it doesn't matter whether the people involved have good faith intentions to do good or not, because this domain is not one where any human has reasonably trustworthy beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is. And the current AI bubble shows that it's also a domain where nobody can get feedback from reality that pushes back when they start crossing certain lines. In other words, just as the article says, it's "structurally impossible" to do good in this domain, no matter what your intentions are, at least with the humans we have now.
  - watwut 5mo ago
    > Human history is full of examples of people who made good faith attempts to do good that backfired tremendously I meant it as "they don't end up as super rich powerful CEO able to get unimaginable amount of investments while getting idealists working for him for less money, because they trust ideals he breaks whenever it suits him". NONE of that happens by random or just by having good intentions. All of that is possible only if getting a lot of money and power are your primary goal. And none of what happens with Sam Altman is "good intentions backfiring". Whatever little backslash he is experiencing has nothing to do with some good intentions having unpredictable consequences. > this domain is not one where any human has reasonably trustworthy beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is. Lying to people is known to not be good. And the category of "lying to protect a dissident from authoritarian oppression" exceptions does not apply here. > And the current AI bubble shows that it's also a domain where nobody can get feedback from reality that pushes back when they start crossing certain lines. Feedback from reality and "being able to get money" are two different things. You seem to be conflating them here. You can amass a lot of money and power by doing immoral, unethical and illegal things. In fact, doing those gives you distinct advantage over people who genuinely care about doing good. > In other words, just as the article says, it's "structurally impossible" to do good in this domain, no matter what your intentions are, at least with the humans we have now. It is structurally possible to do do good, including in this domain. It is just that your main goal must NOT be "creating a monopoly I can exploit".
hsuduebc2 5mo ago
It’s ridiculous to accuse someone of having a “somewhat loose relationship with the truth” when Elon Musk is sitting right across from him, accusing him of dishonest behavior.
- tsimionescu 5mo ago
  There is nothing implausible about two known liars accusing each other of lying and both being truthful this one time - though extremely hypocritical, of course.
- adrian_b 5mo ago
  It is an extremely common thing to see 2 liars accusing each other of lying, thus telling the truth in this special occasion.

by pdonis 5mo ago

cma 5mo ago

Leaked emails I think showed the open source part at the heart of the concept of OpenAI was never serious and was just to help recruit.

pdonis 5mo ago
I don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?
- jayd16 5mo ago
  These are Dr. Doom morals.
- danaris 5mo ago
  To the extent that that's true, it's true because Sam Altman did it at all. It is not that hard to construct a scenario wherein an alternative version of Sam Altman pushed really hard for a genuinely ethical LLM—one trained only on data that he had full unclouded rights to, either because it was public domain or because he had bought or otherwise explicitly received the rights, among other measures—and had then made that competitive in the market with the rest of the existing crop of LLMs. In a scenario like that, whether his LLM did well or not, one could clearly see that Alt-Altman, as it were, was genuinely making an effort. The reality doesn't look anything like that. In this reality, it doesn't matter whether Altman thought he was trying to get there first because others would make it worse: he made it worse, and his actions match up very, very well with what one would expect the actions of a man who just wanted money, control, and power to be.
  - pdonis 5mo ago
    I'm not sure I agree that Altman has made the AI situation worse. I think Altman was right that Google, and Microsoft and others for that matter, were going to pursue AI no matter what. Even if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we'd still have much the same situation we have now. Even if it's true that, if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we wouldn't have had the spectacle of a supposed nonprofit trying to do "ethical" AI and then pivoting to a for-profit company, that actually might be something that was worth learning: that it's not possible to do AI as a private nonprofit with an explicit commitment not to do certain things.
    - danaris 5mo ago
      Sorry, my phrasing there was kind of poor: I didn't mean that he had made the overall AI situation worse, but rather that the AI he made was worse for the public than a hypothetical AI that was made with a deliberate eye to ethical or at least neutral behavior.
      - pdonis 5mo ago
        Ah, ok. I certainly agree with that. My question would be whether it's even possible for we humans as we are now to make an AI with a deliberate eye to ethical behavior. Sam Altman clearly is not someone who can do that (nor is Elon Musk, for that matter). But I'm not sure I know of anyone who is.
        danaris 5mo ago
        I mean, there are plenty of people with the ethical chops to do so, and, I daresay, plenty who combine that with the technical chops. What's lacking is the money & power. Having/obtaining enough of those to be able to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Google is, unfortunately, nearly guaranteed to result in a deeply ethically compromised person at best.
        pdonis 5mo ago

watwut 5mo ago

> But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible? But that is not what happened. It is neither complicated or interesting, it is just an alternative timeline sci-fi exercise. It can be fun to engage in, but it is not anything that would had anything to do with the current world as it is. A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position. They do good and focus on doing good rather then lie to get more investments so that they can corner the market and become powerful.

pdonis 5mo ago
> A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position. I strongly disagree. Human history is full of examples of people who made good faith attempts to do good that backfired tremendously. A good faith desire to do good isn't enough: you also need to be in a domain where your beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is are reasonably trustworthy. And you need to have some way of getting feedback from reality that pushes back on you if you start crossing certain lines. None of this proves that Altman was making a genuine good faith attempt to do good. That wasn't my point. My point was that, in a domain like AI, it doesn't matter whether the people involved have good faith intentions to do good or not, because this domain is not one where any human has reasonably trustworthy beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is. And the current AI bubble shows that it's also a domain where nobody can get feedback from reality that pushes back when they start crossing certain lines. In other words, just as the article says, it's "structurally impossible" to do good in this domain, no matter what your intentions are, at least with the humans we have now.
- watwut 5mo ago
  > Human history is full of examples of people who made good faith attempts to do good that backfired tremendously I meant it as "they don't end up as super rich powerful CEO able to get unimaginable amount of investments while getting idealists working for him for less money, because they trust ideals he breaks whenever it suits him". NONE of that happens by random or just by having good intentions. All of that is possible only if getting a lot of money and power are your primary goal. And none of what happens with Sam Altman is "good intentions backfiring". Whatever little backslash he is experiencing has nothing to do with some good intentions having unpredictable consequences. > this domain is not one where any human has reasonably trustworthy beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is. Lying to people is known to not be good. And the category of "lying to protect a dissident from authoritarian oppression" exceptions does not apply here. > And the current AI bubble shows that it's also a domain where nobody can get feedback from reality that pushes back when they start crossing certain lines. Feedback from reality and "being able to get money" are two different things. You seem to be conflating them here. You can amass a lot of money and power by doing immoral, unethical and illegal things. In fact, doing those gives you distinct advantage over people who genuinely care about doing good. > In other words, just as the article says, it's "structurally impossible" to do good in this domain, no matter what your intentions are, at least with the humans we have now. It is structurally possible to do do good, including in this domain. It is just that your main goal must NOT be "creating a monopoly I can exploit".

hsuduebc2 5mo ago

It’s ridiculous to accuse someone of having a “somewhat loose relationship with the truth” when Elon Musk is sitting right across from him, accusing him of dishonest behavior.

tsimionescu 5mo ago
There is nothing implausible about two known liars accusing each other of lying and both being truthful this one time - though extremely hypocritical, of course.
adrian_b 5mo ago
It is an extremely common thing to see 2 liars accusing each other of lying, thus telling the truth in this special occasion.