Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

Thank you for this, very much appreciate the thoughtful response.

The piece captures some of the anxieties within OpenAI right now about their competitive position. This obviously ebbs and flows but of late there has been much focus on Anthropic's relative position. We of course mention the allegations of "circular deals" and concerns about partners taking on debt.

Many of us prefer OpenAI's Codex, because we think it's a better product.

No comment on the CEO: I just find the product superior in everything but UI/UX and conversation. It's better at quality code.

He’s replying on this twitter thread - perhaps someone with an account can ask there and link his comment here?

https://xcancel.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532#m

It's worth noting Codex has 2x more stories than Claude https://hn.algolia.com/?query=codex

Yeah we moved to Claude a few months ago, mostly because the devs kept using it anyway. Altman stuff is interesting but at the end of the day you just go with whatever tool works

> You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you are

Unfortunately it probably doesn't even matter here on HN considering how brigaded down this story is predictably getting.

But yeah, it was a fantastic piece.

All fair points on trauma and memory.

As noted in the piece, we spent months talking to Altman's partners and what we found and didn't is as described.

That's not a fair assessment. "False memory syndrome" and "repressed/recovered memory" are both outside scientific mainstream consensus.

I am very sympathetic to the situation you describe. I certainly think it is possible that Annie is describing something that happened. I think the author did a fair job of representing the allegations, finding the right balance between disclosing that they were unable to corroborate the allegations without dismissing them.

That said, "recovering" memories as a therapy does not pass any sort of sniff test and it doesn't take a concerted effort to discredit the concept. Human memory is very malleable. Patients with mental health issues (which could predate abuse, or could be caused by abuse) are often in search of answers and that makes them very vulnerable.

Could a memory be buried deep in our subconscious, forgotten, only to return to the surface later? Sure, we all forget things and then remember them when triggered by something, whether that's a smell or sound or something else entirely. But can we engineer that process, with any degree of reliability? How can we even begin to reliably reverse engineer the triggers?

I think it is also important to keep in mind that Annie is rich, and the health care available to rich people can be very predatory. There are endless examples of nonsense therapies for all types of health, from ear seeds to treatments for "chronic Lyme".

Memories that return organically due to a trigger are a world apart from "recovered" memories, we shouldn't conflate them. If Annie's memories were triggered in adulthood, sure, that's really no different than remembering something... but "recovered"? That is something else entirely.

Correct me where I'm wrong, I'd like to learn your perspective, maybe there's a missing piece.

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> whether the company that branded itself as the ethical AI lab actually is one

FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months.

Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is actually genuine which is practically unicorn rarity in corporate America.

We have worked for FAANG so I know where they're coming from; this got me to drop my cynicism for once and I plan on interviewing with them soon. Hopefully I can answer this question for myself.

For what it’s worth, the story, while focused on OpenAI, is not uncritical of Anthropic. It explores whether there is a wider race to the bottom in terms of safety, and erosion of even some of Anthropic’s commitments.

There may be a reason why Altman is talked about a lot. This article in particular surfaces real information and new perspectives we've not heard in this level of detail before on some pretty significant topics that will be impacting you, me, and pretty much everyone we know not only today but well into the future.

You have a point in that Anthropic deserves some coverage too and that there are interesting perspectives that we've not heard of on that front either.

But just because that's true doesn't mean this article isn't very much relevant and needed.

Because it is.

After the US launched its attack on Iran, the ethical AI lab's CEO wrote: "Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences." - https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war

We should stop talking about potential problems or perpetrators, when we have talked about them “enough”?

That would be irrational.

We should give air time to other problems?

I think everyone agrees with that.

You have managed to distill a surprisingly pure vintage of false dichotomy, from a near Platonic varietal of whataboutism.

OP says they’ve been working on this for 18 months. Most of what you’ve said wasn’t the case until much more recently.

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Normies don't know what an "Anthropic" is. They use ChatGPT. Particularly sharp normies might know that ChatGPT is made by OpenAI, and the sharpest might know that Sam Altman is the CEO.

Now, they may have heard the word "Anthropic" due to recent media coverage. But they don't know what it is and don't remember what it makes. The fact that all businesses use "Anthropic" is about as relevant to them as knowing the overseas shipping company for all the shit they buy off Amazon.

So articles about OAI will always produce more revenue for the media, because it's related to what normies actually use day to day.

Interesting to hear! While this hasn’t been a commonplace reaction, I think if I do my job right it should allow people to read the facts as they will, exactly like this. It’s strenuously designed to be fair and, where appropriate, even generous.

I’ve really appreciated how substantive and polite the discourse here is, overall!

This is a vast and tricky question. The business model has basically fallen out from under journalism, and especially this kind of labor-intensive investigative reporting. The media landscape is increasingly dominated by moneyed individuals and companies essentially buying up the discourse.

I would really suggest subscribing to and finding ways to amplify independent outlets and journalists, and encouraging others to do so.

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It was mentioned, but not by name.

Perhaps your question answers itself.

The piece is an interrogation of this very question, at great length and with some nuance. I think what it does most usefully is scrutinize an array of different answers to the question.

My own impression after many hours of conversation is that he is identifying something of a true north star when he frames this around "winning." There are people in the story who talk about him emphasizing a desire for power (as opposed to, say, wealth). I think he probably also believes, to some extent, the story he tells that equates winning, and his gaining power, with a superabundant utopian future for all.

However, I think critics correctly highlight a tension between his statements about centering humanity writ large and his tilt into relentless accelerationism.

(Other people's) money.

This is so appreciated, thank you! These stories can honestly take a lot out of me so thoughtful reactions mean a lot.

I won’t get into behind-the-scenes specifics here but I think you can imagine how pressurized this topic was and the amount of heat that tends to generate. I’m used to getting a lot of blowback and it’s never fun. I just hope the work is meticulous and fair enough, and that enough people see the benefits of that, that I get to continue to do it.

Paying for 1 is doing more than paying for 0.

It's not your responsibility to fund for every single one, just find the one you like the most and subscribe to that one.

It could be titled "Hypergraphia"

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For those that don’t know or remember:

“Tonight isn’t just about the people in front of the camera. In this room are some of the most important TV and film executives in the world. People from every background. But they all have one thing in common: They’re all terrified of Ronan Farrow.”

Paul Grahams's latest public statement on the issue:

https://x.com/paulg/status/2041363640499200353

> what information would significantly change your views

Quite simple: show me any single action took by Sam Altman which can not be construed as an attempt to get him more power/money/influence. You can't find it.

The difference between what he claims to believe and what he actually does is a textbook example of sociopathy.

I have experience in dealing with Sam Altman-like behavior. I hope to explain how their tactics unfold.

> I can see people concluding that they have been lied to rather than accept that they had been intellectually beaten.

There are two angles to this: from an individual perspective and from a collective one.

One's interaction with such a manipulator isn't a single shot. There is not a single event that they are “beaten”. First, one gets persuaded --- you might argue that there's nothing wrong with a skillful persuasion. At some point they realize that the reality is not in line with their expectations. They bring the point up to the manipulator and ask for a change, this time in more concrete terms. The manipulator agrees with the change, negotiates compromises, and the relationship continues. After some time the manipulated party realizes that things are not going in the direction they desire. This time they ask for more concrete terms, without accepting any compromises. The manipulator accepts, yet continues to act against the terms. The manipulated party is now angry and directly confronts the manipulator. The manipulator apologizes and tells that none of it was intentional, and asks for another chance. However, at that point, the manipulator has run out of “politically correct” “persuasion tactics”, and tells blatant lies to make the other party behave.

From a collective perspective, even those “politically correct” “persuasion tactics” are discovered to be lies, because what the manipulator told different parties are in direct opposition to each other, i.e., they cannot all be truths.

> Helen Toner suggested that they effectively ambushed Altman because if he had time to respond to allegations he could have provided a reasonable explanation. It did not reflect well on her.

I understand how her behavior may raise a flag for the unsuspecting, but it was exactly the right one. Manipulators prey on the benefit of the doubt. If Toner were to bring Altman's behavior into attention of others, no doubt that Altman would manipulate them successfully.

It's unfortunate that many people are unaware of these tactics and assume the best of intentions, when such assumptions fuel the manipulation that they would better avoid.

You make very good points. Signed up to point this out to others.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the piece at all avoids key areas of disillusionment with the technology. Quite the contrary.

You could buy a physical copy (and this isn't meant to sound sarcastic).

You can walk down to a bookstore or anywhere that sells magazines and buy a physical copy

I’ve often thought about a model like this and would love to see a few news outlets run it as a pilot and see how it stacks up.

You could hit up a public library...

Or just switch your browser to Reader Mode and it's free.

[dead]

I'm not seeing a typo. Just a stylistic difference.

Many browsers let you disable autoplay globally.

I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company, founded another one, that one’s models refused to do things that the previous company would do, then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it.

Not small differences to me.

I can go with the thesis that individuals need community control (boards, regulations, laws) in order to be accountable but is there some specific evidence that Amodei is the same? It seems like a "both sides" argument.

The only foundation model CEOs I trust are Demis and Yann

Yes, but first I want to be very clear on some things.

1. I could have hidden my identify behind a throwaway. I did not feel that would be appropriate when making this calim.

2. I am not looking for anything, literally at all. Any follow ups for blogs; anything that would benefit I will not answer.

3. This is NOT a new account, I am very easy to find; I am 6'1 140lbs

I was working for a company called NationBuilder and I had the opportunity to go on a work trip. Outside of a talk he had just given I was waiting for my ride and I looked over like...damn thats the speaker. I wanted to say Hi; he damn near flagged down the police. I apologized and just decided to move on.

Note: It was in Reno, and no I don't want to go into details; the others are not hard to find because I happened upon them via blog posts so i'm sure if someone with the accumen of RF wants to know, he will find.

I have heard similar stores from several people in the years since. I AM NOT CALLING THIS PERSON RACIST. I am saying; he is observably scared of black people and that is not someone I want making descions about how the world moves foward.

> Altman is an advocate of Universal Basic Income

So he says. And the way he proposed reaching that was with a scam cryptocurrency under his control which has rightfully been banned in several countries.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

If there's one thing that's clear from the article, it's that he's a proponent of anything that will benefit him, even multiple conflicting things at the same time.

Why keep human consumers to buy your services when you could just amass all the wealth you desire, and have autonomous systems that can ensure your unassailable physical security? You would sit atop the most stratified dominance hierarchy ever achieved, and it would reduce other humans to mere pets or breeding stock. I don’t think normal humans would desire that kind of power, and I don’t believe LLMs will take us there, but I wouldn’t put it past the perverted billionaire maniac.

Do you need ants buying services from humans for the world economy to function?

If AI will indeed become superintelligent, we won't matter.

> The fact you need to work for wealth is a convention of our constraints

The current constraint is "you need to produce to have things".

If one company's AI takes all the jobs, and thus does all the producing-to-have-things, the constraint transforms into "you need that company's permission to have things".

Hence the top-level question.

The new conditions almost surely being like the old conditions: slavery, sexual exploitation, etc.

Those who are concerned is implying that any new distribution mechanism is not going to favour them.

And under the capitalist system, if nothing changes, the "new" distribution system is indeed not going to favour them - at best there would be some sort of UBI, and at worst you would be left to starve in the streets.

However, i cannot see how one can transition to a new system, and yet have the existing powers in the current system agree and not be disadvantaged.

One of the decidedly eerier parts of this story as you keep reading are all the gaps between what people are saying about Altman, and what they clearly want to say about Altman but can't.

> where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long

For anyone unfamiliar with this process, the New Yorker documentary is well worth the watch: https://www.netflix.com/title/81770824

You mention many proxies of Musk who post negative content about Altman.

In your investigation were you able to determine if Altman has similar proxies?

How common would you say that this is? Do these kinds of people generally have teams of people who sling mud for them?

Can you speculate on how that manifests on a site like Hackernews?

Calling your own article all those things is a major turn-off.

It’s not difficult to find these, Aaron always said that Sam was not to be trusted.

It's mentioned in the submitted article (about half way through), you should read it.

It’s also available via public libraries in USA via Libby if your local library system pays for a subscription, so it’s a way to support the magazine indirectly, since your local taxes pays for your library. The downside for weekly is you have to read it that week, no archive access.

Truth > revenue

I’m not going to pay for another newspaper subscription just to read one article

The information is more important than the wants of the writer, always.

Sharing what an LLM has to say about a thing is like sharing what you dreamt of last night — no one really cares.

I wouldn't be surprised if the owner of that site has AI scraping protections enabled.

Interesting. If you look at the sources it cited, there are a few links about "Sacred Songs and Solos" (likely from related/side content on the page), my guess is it didn't read the main article and instead anchored on those and hallucinated

The fact that this reads as deranged fantasy and yet I can believe is 100% real is insane lol

Counterexamples that come to mind are Neuromancer (AI driving the plot) and Blade Runner (AI antagonists.)

A compromise thesis might be that in cyberpunk media, AI is at never powerful or motivated to fundamentally reform the worldwide crapsack economic system. They don't abolish corporations, although they might take them over.

Of course, if there was a story about an AI taking over the world into a post-scarcity society, it probably wouldn't be filed under "cyberpunk" either...

AIs are in plenty of cyberpunk stories, but your comment did make me think that they are often rather stereotypically “alien entity characters” and not a kind of corporate technology / weapon that is controlled by a specific organization.

Which is a shame, as it seems to me that the overwhelming risk of AI is from the latter scenario, and not as a rogue individual entity.

It is a pretty core part of Cyberpunk the "franchise" though, both tabletop and more recent video game.

I think as well if you look closer, many cyberpunk worlds imply AI through robots, computers with personality etc.

I find that more realistic then, because it appears that's the trajectory we are going on with regards to AI, as a tool not a panacea.

AI is one of the core parts of cyberpunk, through androids / humanoid robots. Blade Runner is completely built on the protagonist having to interact with rogue artificial intelligence.

I think you can look at Star Trek as a fairly grounded example of where current LLMs could go: the ship's computer is not autonomous in any way but it does accept fairly vague instructions and you can apparently vibe-code the holodeck.

I assume it just becomes one of those things as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi

Hyperion has a pretty well-developed view of AGI.

Deus Ex is an outlier, AI is a core part of that plot

Do they need all our attention?

It would if the chickens formed a business structure that was owned and democratically controlled by its member-owners.

It's also to distinguish metal bands. Motörhead.

Unless it was a chicken coöp... One of few cases it actually resolves an ambiguity!

Thats not democracy.

There's a time and a place for everything, and rejecting popular media as "lowest common denominator" is the most uninspired form of cultural elitism.

Is it cynical to want your <art project> to make a profit? Or for it to make enough profit to subsidize other projects?

Is it cynical to make something accessible so more people who watch it are able to enjoy it?

I agree that it's embarrassing and feels crass when movies both try to be broadly appealing and simultaneously fail to be entertaining or well executed ... but many of the marvel movies clearly surpass that bar.

No one wants to make a bad movie that does poorly with critics and paying customers - but it does happen because making a movie is expensive and complicated and requires a lot of skilled people working together towards the same goal.

Regarding taste: do you think a michelin star chef swears off cheap food like hotdogs or fish and chips? Doubtful - because those foods have their place and the chef is able to enjoy them for what they are rather than use them as an excuse to display a superiority complex.

When things reach a certain level of popularity they constitute "mental real estate". Your audience has heard of Groundhog Day, so there is an opening for a movie with that title to make money -- your film will start out already having name recognition and some understanding of what the movie is about.

Thus it is a writer's job not to make references they find appealing to reveal their good taste, but to know what references their audience will find appealing and use them to help communicate concepts. If this bothers you it's because they're insulting you by saying you might be part of the audience that watches Marvel, and you had hoped reading the New Yorker would signal that you aren't.

I agree that these movies are really being cranked out. I hadn't even realised quite the extent of this until I went to look. But I think some of these movies are good enough that it shouldn't be disturbing that people in influential positions find them appealing:

I know a lot of people are critical of the Rotten Tomatoes score, but I find that when a high enough percentage of reviews are positive, it is likely I will enjoy the movie. Some of the Marvel movies have a very high proportion of positive reviews (admittedly, those reviews could be just positive, not very positive). And for most in this list with a very high score, I think it's deserved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Cinematic_Unive...

Arguably, one indication of the limitations of the Rotten Tomatoes score is the number of these Marvel movies with high scores :)

Btw, I'm not trying to convince you that if you watch the movies you'll like them. Just that they may not all be as bad as you think.

I'm an MCU fan. And while I do agree quality has gone down, I think it's hard to ignore the fact that the MCU did something really novel. They made a franchise that spanned 20+ movies and tied it up in a way that was almost universally loved by nerds and normies alike.

Are there a lot of plot holes and retcons? Yeah. And some bad writing. And the movies that came after have been pretty meh with some exceptions.

But for someone to say that referring to one of the highest grossing films and franchises of all time, means their decisions should be questioned, is quite the stretch.

I disagree with this characterisation. I loathe mass-media blockbusters, but a journalist has to be in touch with public culture in their goal to spread the truth and inform people, not just high-brow elites, but everybody. This is why their work is usually more influential, interesting and engaging than if it had been written by an academic.

Why is it that criticism of people's insatiable greed for wealth and power often gets dismissed with this thought-terminating cliche about utopias?

Desire to live in a society that's less greedy, that rewards compassion and punishes sociopathy is completely valid. We should be pursuing that earnestly because survival of our species depends on it. The people in charge are so drunk on wealth and power that they would rather drive our entire species off a cliff than sacrifice even 10% of their effectively bottomless wealth.

But instead of criticizing our current philosophy that's actively being taken too far and threatens to destroy us, you criticize people who express their frustration with this state of affairs.

Complete hearsay, but I struck up a convo with someone who had spent a few hours drinking around a campfire with him and a few others at burning man, prior to GPT3's popularity. Apparently he was utterly convinced in his pivotal role to shepherd in a new era with AI, to the point where it got really messianic and culty. He didnt recall much else other than just being really weirded out by the dude.

no it isn't lol

Palantir was using anthropic and its use is being replaced by openai.

180 children lost their lives because of decisions by people in the US military (and ultimately the US government / the POTUS).

Let's not fall into the trap of adopting narratives created to waive accountability. The spreadsheet didn't launch a missile, the spreadsheet didn't authorize the strike and the spreadsheet didn't select the target.

Not to mention that "outdated spreadsheet" is also a hilariously anachronistic excuse for a war crime if you consider what kind of satellite technology the US has publicly acknowledged to have access to, let alone what kind of technology it is likely to have access to.

The difference between intentional premeditated murder and reckless endangerment resulting in a killing is not guilt and innocence but merely the severity and nature of a crime. Both demonstrate a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life, one just specifically seeks to extinguish it, the other merely accepts death and suffering as an acceptable outcome.

Many years ago. Not "a few years ago". Also you could make the sentence that 180 people lost their lives because of an evil war, of which USA and Israel are the aggressors. And we definitely don't talk enough about that part.

At least two of YC's early (mid-aughts) "huge" successes come down to PG unilaterally (or with some help from JL) making some kind of "weird" call. AirBnB and Reddit come to mind. Even Stripe can be traced to him since he basically created the Auctomatic team (Patrick Collison's previous YC entry).

In other words, PG had the "knack" for sometimes encouraging the right weird thing. I'm not sure it's been the same since he handed off the reins, like any other formerly-founder-led company. Nowadays it really gives off the vibe of bean-counting and hype-chasing.

I don't think it's gotten quite as bad as this [0] article suggests, though.

[0] https://stanfordreview.org/is-yc-for-cowards/

“Today’s news comes at an interesting time. Last week, Business Insider’s Jonathan Marino reported that YC is close to raising several billion dollars for a new fund, with the goal of possibly expanding its scope to later stage funding. It said it’s still in preliminary discussions for this new strategy, but if true, Thiel could definitely play a big role there.”

My recollection was Thiel was injecting cash, a money deal. [0] There was another less advertised play. An established path for the Thiel “Boy Wonder Fellows”. [1]

“In addition to founding PayPal and Palantir and being the first investor in Facebook, Peter has been involved with many of the most important technology companies of the last 15 years, both personally and through Founders Fund, and the founders of those companies will generally tell you he has been their best source of strategic advice. He already works with a number of YC companies, and we’re very happy he’ll be working with more.”

Guess who was involved in the Thiel / YC deal? [2] You are not the only one seeing this as a reputation hit for YC. [3] Even I, disconnected across the other side of the world could see this as an issue.

[0] https://www.inc.com/business-insider/peter-thiel-is-joining-...

[1] https://boingboing.net/2016/08/25/peter-thiel-y-combinator-f...

[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/welcome-peter/

[3] https://qz.com/810778/y-combinator-has-no-problem-with-partn...

I don't think it's all that hard to avoid working on anything shady. It's not as easy to avoid being associated with anything shady due to widespread cynicism and a tendency to treat tech companies with thousands of projects as a monolith.

> The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary

I hope that's not true. If it is, we live in a bleak world indeed.

I can confidently say I've never once dreamed of having billions. I've never wanted billions. Not even in a fanciful manner. What would I do with that money? Buy mansions and megayachts? That's loser stuff

Most of what I want out of life cannot be bought. The pieces that come with a price tag, like a comfortable home, do not require billions

I think only sociopaths want billions because they don't understand spending your life seeking things that actually matter, like family and human connection

> The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary

That's actually the difference, most people don't want a billion

What sticks out to me most is that humanity consistently fails to weed these creatures out and regulate society. It's a bug in our social software; we seem to like these broken people rather than recognize that they're a liability.

Sociopath is the next word that people seem to want to entirely destroy the meaning of

While true and we can see them literally everywhere where there is some money and/or power (even miniscule places like classic banks have easily 1/3 of the staff with clear sociopathic traits, I have to deal with them daily... or whole politics) - thats just human nature, or part of it.

Its up to rest of society to keep them in check since classic morals are highly optional and considered nuissance blocking those games. And here we the rest fail pretty miserably, while having on paper perfect tool - majority vote.

Or, some fraction of otherwise good/normal people who “win” are turned into sociopaths by the power and sycophancy.

> I would deny that AI poses any such threat. There are actors who would use the tool in ways that threaten as you described, but that is a threat from said actor, not AI

Of course, it is popular to deny it. People constantly tell themselves "it is people, not tech". They make valid, yet banal and inconsequential statement. This distinction has no bearing on reality.

I'm not sure whether you meant this about moderator interventions or not, but our actual practice is the opposite:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

As those comments explain, this has been the #1 rule of HN moderation from the beginning. See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

people like to say this like they’re apples to apples but this comparison isn’t remotely how the brain actually works - and even if it did, the brain does it automatically without direction and at an infitesimal percentage of the power required.

And we’re just talking about cognition - it completely ignores the automatic processes such as maintaining and regulating the body and it’s hormones, coordinating and maintaining muscles, visual/spacial processing taking in massive amounts of data at a very fine scale, and informing the body what to do with it - could go on.

One of the more annoying things about this conversation is you don’t even need to make this argument to make the point you’re trying to make, but people love doing it anyway. It needlessly reduces how amazing the human brain is to a bunch of catchy sci fi sounding idioms.

It can be simultaneously true that transformer based language models can be very smart and that the human brain is also very smart. It genuinely confuses me why people need to make it an either/or.

Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many parenthesis are balanced here ((((()))))) (you can test this), it doesn't have any kind of genuine cognition.

If you think this way then why not talk to LLMs exclusively. Don’t let the oxytocin cloud your ability to problem solve.

I get you're trying to do the whole "humans and LLMs are the same" bit, but it's just plainly false. Please stop.

Has generative AI made material progress on curing cancer? Has it produced any breakthroughs, at all?

> "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".

It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin to believe the stochastic parrot is actually wise.

That's moonshot logic that reinforces the parent's point. You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment.

Founding his own company would be one alternative. Full control. No stigma on the non-profit part. Probably get the same paper money as he got now at OpenAI.

What is the value he adds anyway, being a delusional cult leader where most people around him characterize him as a sociopath? Is it just his ability to lie and create fear-hype?

It's not like he had anything to do with the technical achievements, except convincing the engineers that they were doing something valuable, but the cat is out of the bag on that.

Yes, and it seems people hate him more than Google co-founders, for example.

All the downsides without much upside...

If someone founds a company, grows it and owns $1bn of its stock, they don’t have $1bn in cash to distribute. They have a degree of control over the economic activity of that company. Should that control be taken away from them? Who should it be given to?

I can see an argument when it comes to cashing out, but I’m not clear how that should work without creating really weird incentives. Some sort of special tax?

Big agree, at a certain point a company is big enough that their impact has to be managed democratically. I don't have an issue with effective leaders, the problem is that we reward a certain kind of success with transferable credits that don't necessarily align with people's actual talents or skills.

I want skilled institutional investors who have a track records of making smart bets. I don't want a random person who happened to get lucky in business dictating investment policy for substantial parts of the economy. I want accountability for abuses and mismanagement.

I know China gets a bad rep, but their bird cage market economy seems a lot more stable and predictable than this wild west pyramid scheme stuff we do in the US. Maybe there are advantages for some people in our model, but I really dislike the part where we consistently reward amoral grifters.

Well, redistributing their money is (in some cases disingenuously) exactly how they are able to pitch investors. "Sure, value my company at $10B and my shares make me $2B, but we're alllllll gonna make money when hit AGI!!!" That kind of thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

> The New Yorker prefers insure to ensure. They have a unique house style.

That's not a stylistic choice, it's just incorrect use of English.

That's not a third category, that's just a sociopath as seen by themself.

> I suspect there's some other category, which isn't really a sociopath and isn't really a not-sociopath, which we don't have a good definition for.

There is -- I call it "corpo sociopath." The corpo sociopath really comes out in the workplace, less so in personal life.

Yeah the whole fearmongering is clearly just marketing at this point. Your LLM isn't going to suddenly gain sentience and destroy humanity if it has 10x more parameters or trains on 10x more reddit threads.

I'm not even sure we're any closer to AGI than we were before LLMs. It's getting more funding and research, but none of the research seems very innovative. And now it's probably much more difficult to get funding for anything that's not a transformer model.

> OpenAI has closed many of its safety-focussed teams

A paper with "ideas to keep people first" was (coincidentally?) published today:

  • Worker perspectives
  • AI-first entrepreneurs
  • Right to AI
  • Accelerate grid expansion
  • Accelerate scientific discovery and scale the benefits. 

  • Modernize the tax base
  • Public Wealth Fund
  • Efficiency dividends
  • Adaptive safety nets that work for everyone
  • Portable benefits

  • Pathways into human-centered work

This was an excellent piece with many new pieces of information in it. Thanks to you and your coauthor for getting it released.

You can see the vote history here[1]. It's always hard to know exactly why something gets buried. I was a little sad to see the story down-ranked when I saw that you were here in the comments.

But the discussion is generally pretty low quality with these sort of posts. People react without having read the story, or with whatever was on their mind already, or are insubstantive, or simply low effort. I don't think you'll lose k-factor not having a bigger post here.

Sometimes if you talk to the mods, they'll let you know their perspective. I generally find they're correct that people are much better at contributing/disseminating new knowledge to the world on more technical topics here.

[1]: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47659135

> the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself.

I get that this is the claimed ideal of journalism, at least for straight reporting. The problem is that it's impossible.

There isn't time or space to present all the information; the journalist has to filter. And filtering is never unbiased. Even the attempt to be "balanced" is a bias--see next item.

"Balanced" always seems to mean "give equal time and space to each side". But what if the two sides really are unbalanced? What if there's a huge pile of information pointing one way, and a few items that might point the other way if you believe them--and then the journalist insists on only showing you a few items from the first pile, so that the presentation is "balanced"? You never actually get a real picture of the facts.

There's a story that I first encountered in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books, about two kids fighting over a piece of cake: Kid A wants all of it for himself, Kid B wants to split it equally. An adult comes along and says, "Why don't you compromise? Kid A gets three-quarters and Kid B gets one-quarter." To me, the author of this article comes off like that adult.

In any case, all that assumes that this article is supposed to be just straight reporting, no opinion. For which, see the next item.

> It can be debated whether the title should be such a question.

Yes, it certainly can. If this article is just supposed to be straight reporting--no editorializing--then that title is definitely out of place. That title is an editorial--and the article either needs to own that and state the conclusion it's trying to argue for, or it shouldn't have had that title in the first place.

Oh, I agree that's the correct answer. I just don't see the article actually ending up with that answer. I see it waffling. Basically, the article ends up saying that, well, we told you about all this dodgy stuff, but what he's doing is working.

I doubt Anthropic see this as their capacity problem. They like "extra usage", and users who don't, well its their capacity problem.

General LLM is what Apple is paying Google for.

I'm curious: did you give Gemini the entire text of Neuromancer or did you expect it to use search results for chapters 1 to 14?

I would have just fed it the text of chapters 1 to 14 from a non drm copy.

I suspect that they are perfectly capable of clicking an archive link or better yet logging in as they are already a subscriber. Maybe, like me, they enjoy reading the physical magazine.

which of the two are you referring to as possibly angling for a pardon?

I have a feeling he might be angling for a pardon if he ends up bringing the whole global economy down.

John Lithgow had a take I agreed with: Her opinions were heavily misconstrued though she chose to double down at her own peril.

I'm not sure how much of that converts to revenue. If it's free plan users, that's just cost. You can say what you want about "creating a training data moat" but that doesn't seem like it's prevented the other labs from putting out excellent models.

They’re all in the negative excluding subsidies, hard core coders are more valuable than high schoolers cheating on homework.

Around the same revenue due to Anthropics strong enterprise strategy

What's your proposal? We knew he's as trustworthy as the others, and it sounds like you agree. What are you doing about them? Legally or illegally?

Mostly we don't need 3,000 words on how untrustworthy he is. We could use 3,000 words on how to remove his influence.

> Your point is that it's ok he's untrustworthy because lots of people in power are?

It's...weirdly a valid question. If Sam fibs as much as the next guy, we don't have a Sam problem. Focussing on him alon is, best case, a waste of resources. Worst case, it's distracting from real evil. If, on the other hand, as this reporting suggests, Sam is an outlier, then focussing on him does make sense.

No, it's that the entire ecosystem is rotten to the core, and it actively selects, rewards, and protects flawed personality types.

And when you're dealing with a potential existential threat, this is an existential problem.

Not sure where I said it's OK? Please point it out.

We have to deal with it. Or are you suggesting we should purchase a controlling interest and vote him off the board?