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Notes -
OpenAI To Become a For-Profit Company
You'll notice that the link is to a hackernews thread. I did that intentionally because I think some of the points raised there get to issues deeper than "hurr durr, Elon got burnt" or whatever.
Some points to consider:
It is hard to not see this as a deliberate business-model hack. Start as a research oriented non-profit so you can more easily acquire data, perhaps investors / funders, and a more favorable public imagine. Sam Altman spent a bunch of time on Capitol Hill last year and seemed to move with greater ease because of the whole "benefit to humanity" angle. Then, once you have acquired a bunch of market share this way, flip the money switch on. Also, there are a bunch of tax incentives for non-profits that make it easier to run in the early startup phase.
I think this can be seen as a milestone for VC hype. The trope for VC investors is that they see every investment as "changing the world," but it's mostly a weird status-signaling mechanism. In reality, they're care about the money, but also care about looking like they're being altruistic or, at least, oriented towards vague concepts of "change for the better." OpenAI was literally pitched as addressing an existential question for humanity. I guess they fixed AI alignment in the past week or something and now it's time, again, to flip the money switch. How much of VC is now totally divorced from real business fundamentals and is only about weird idea trading? Sure, it's always been like that to some extent, but I feel like the whole VC ecosystem is turning into a battle of posts on the LessWrong forums.
How much of this is FTX-style nonsense, but without outright fraud. Altman gives me similar vibes as SBF with a little less bad-hygiene-autism. He probably smells nice, but is still weird as fuck. We know he was fired and rehired at OpenAI. A bunch (all?) of the cofounders have jumped shipped recently. I don't necessarily see Enron/FTX/Theranos levels of plain lying, but how much of this is a venture funding house of cards that ends with a 99% loss and a partial IP sale to Google or something.
Any insight from your friend on why Altman feels this way?
Does it require a special explanation? It’s not actually that uncommon of a view. Well, I suppose it’s uncommon among normies, but it’s not uncommon in online AI circles. A lot of AI hype is driven by a fundamental misanthropy and a desire to “flip the table” as it were, since these people find the current world unsatisfactory.
There's a lot of that going around.
But it's not really a CURRENT YEAR thing. It's more a strain of religiosity that is inherently anti-human and has been around forever.
These same type of people might have been monks in a different environment.
And that's fine, but also let's not give them any power please.
I mean, I'm one of them. I find the current world unsatisfactory, for a fairly broad definition of "current world". Lots of people do, on all sides of the political spectrum and from a wide variety of worldviews. Table-flipping is evidently growing more and more attractive to a larger and larger portion of the population. Policy Starvation is everywhere.
I get that you have in mind a narrower selection of misanthropic transhumanist techno-fetishists, but I would argue that the problem generalizes to a much wider set.
I have a higher than average strain of consistent misanthropy, but I also ascribe to a weird blend of Catholic moralism and Aristotelian / Platonic virtue ethics - courage being high among them.
I know that sounds pretentious (and it is!) but what this boils down to is I think the world is very fucked up, I am unsure if it can be fixed, but I think we ought to try and the ends do not justify the means because the means become the ends. The only way out of this is through it, and through it with hard work and - by the day - more and more pain and suffering.
What worries me about Altman types is they seem to be operating in both a deceitful and covert way. Covert in that their final objectives are cloaked and obfuscated, deceitful in that they are manipulating current systems to go to those objectives, instead of pointing out that the current systems are fucked up and we should change them or build alternatives.
To be more specific, Altman's lobbying is 100% designed to (a) get regulatory capture for OpenAI and (b) re-direct hundreds of billions of dollars of public money to fund it. And, until today, this was all done with a ton of vibes emitting peace-and-love-and-altruism and "we're an non-profit research company, maaaaaan." It seems like comic book levels of cold calculating hyper capitalist mixed with techno anarchist mixed with millenium cult leader.
Did you read Toilken as a kid? I’ve long taken inspiration from the book which was “do your duty and that which is right even if it seems unlikely to win over evil.”
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