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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.
I posted this comment well over a year ago, and I think it holds up:
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Well this is some crazy shit. Why do you believe in a make pretend fantasy to start with?
You were told, repeatedly, that you were on your last chance, and yet your last several warnings were mod-noted with "Permaban next time." Yet you weren't, because, well, you seemed to be making a good faith effort to dial it down... for a while. But your comments remain mostly low effort and shitty. So much so that after being here for months, we still have to manually approve your posts because you can't get out of the new user filter. This isn't because you have some brave iconoclastic point of view that's too much for the Motte; there are other edgy, lefty posters who establish themselves as decent posters.
This post is just another crappy low effort post. I've specifically told you to stop writing posts whose entire content is just "Your beliefs are stupid."
It's also the last straw. I will not miss fishing your posts out of the queue and having to decide which of the dozen posts you wrote during a drunk-posting spree need to be modded. This was a dumb hill to die on, but so mote it be. Good bye.
While I've had my fair share of sometimes heated arguments with Frenchie and agree that the comment you're responding to is a low-effort contentless flame which at best will lead to nothing at all, the next part of your argumentation is just bad.
This is simply wrong. The new user filter feature is fundamentally chilling effect on views that go against the local mainstream and has a very predictable endpoint, already visible here. Fundamentally, low-effort "hot takes" like this (to name something you have encountered most recently) are not going away, but alternative viewpoints that go against that sort of content - most likely are.
The problem you're not seeing is that it's not the absence of a "variety of hot takes", it's that relying on the upvote/downvote mechanism for user absorption is guaranteed to fossilize a consensus based on some side of the very culture war this thread is about. I've had that argument with your colleagues on the site's telegram a number of times, and, as far as I can tell, there really isn't a counter-argument to present. Even if you're okay with having that particular kind of opinion dominate, you are still going to face a fall in quality of content, as is always the case in all echo-chambers that face no pushback.
Since I'm never going to be able to climb out of the new user filter you seem to laud, I doubt this comment will actually appear in the thread. But hopefully you'll at least see it...
I reject the characterization of my comment as a low-effort hot take. Considered in isolation, perhaps, but when seen in the context of a long conversation in which I also made a number of high-effort, sophisticated arguments in favor of my position, I don’t think it’s fair to characterize one particular comment that way. I’m extremely willing to defend my positions at length, which you can see, since you picked out a comment that was deep into a thread where I was doing so.
That's fine. If you believe that "Anyone affiliated with the Innocence Project deserves prison time" is a sophisticated, nuanced argument in favour of a certain position - it is your right to do so. I disagree and not simply with the position itself, but also with the prospects of such a comment leading to a reasoned discussion that could arrive at some interesting conclusion.
Here's a counter-example: "Executing all landlords in the world would be a good way to solve the housing crisis". It's a position that's a little juvenile and rather facile, but I am absolutely capable of writing a number of high-effort, good(ish) faith arguments for it by using utilitarian principles.
Do you think that the discussion writing something like this would lead to is going to be high level?
Look at the rest of the thread and my participation in it. Do you believe that I contributed nothing of intellectual value to it? Again, I’m not pretending that the particular comment you picked on was high-effort; however, I’m clearly quite capable of offering much higher-effort expansions of my position, which I did, in numerous parts of that same comment thread. That is the difference between me and someone who contributes nothing but low-effort swipes. If your belief is simply that no commenter, no matter how long-standing and high-quality-on-average, should ever be able to get away with posting anything low-effort, that’s fine, but it is not my position, nor does it appear to be the mods’ position.
Yes, absolutely! We see very high-effort and interesting threads branch off from arguments like that frequently here. I agree that you would also probably incite a lot of low-effort and/or uncharitable replies as well, but that doesn’t mean the post itself wouldn’t ultimately be worth it. If you genuinely do hold that belief, why not make an effortful post about it?
It very explicitly is not my belief, you misunderstood me. My point was that upvote/downvote system is bad at weeding out low-effort postings in general, because vast majority of people will not downvote a low-effort inflammatory statement that they agree with. I am with you as far as the idea that low-effort posting only becomes a serious concern when it dominates over higher-effort posting, and that is usually caused by people who pretty much exclusively post low-effort, ideologically-motivated comments.
I've done the very thing you suggested once 🫠. That's why I'm never going to be able to climbe out of a premoderation hole, lol
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