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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29436 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

For better or worse (probably worse), these are the people to whom we have entrusted the future of our civilization and likely our species. Nobody cares to stop them or to challenge them in any serious way (even Musk has decided as of late that if he can’t stop them, he’ll join them).

The only thing for it is to hope that they fail spectacularly in a limited way that kills fewer than hundreds of millions of people, and which results in some new oversight, before everything goes even more spectacularly wrong. Oh well.

The only danger AI, in it's current implementation, has is the risk that morons will mistake it as actually being useful and rely on the bullshit it spits out. Yes, it's impressive. But only insofar as it can summarize information that's otherwise easily available. One of the reasons my Pittsburgh posts have been taking as long as they have is that I'll go down a rabbit hole about an ongoing news story from 25 years ago that I can't quite remember the details of and spend a while trying to dig up old newspaper articles so I have my facts straight and reach the appropriate conclusions. I initially thought that AI would help me with this, since all the relevant information is on the internet and discoverable with some effort, but everything it gave me was either too vague to be useful or factually incorrect. If it can't summarize newspaper articles that don't have associated Wikipedia entries then I'm not too worried about it. I'd have much better luck going to the Pennsylvania room at the Carnegie Library and asking the reference librarian for the envelope with the categorized newspaper clippings that they still collect for this purpose.

Look, I’m tempted to argue the “AI progress” point, and observe that it’s not today’s AI we’re worried about. But Scott has, of course, already written plenty of articles on the subject. Besides,

the risk that morons will mistake it as actually being useful and rely on the bullshit it spits out

IS ACTUALLY A REAL THREAT. The class of engineers tinkering with tool AI isn’t likely to cause a disaster any time soon. But they’re dwarfed by the flood of futurists and venture capitalists and marketing professionals who want to staple the latest GPT onto anything and everything. Have it recommend your products! Have it plan your bus routes! Give it Top Secret data! I’m sure military planning would be a great idea!

The economic incentives push “morons” into using AI for anything and everything. One of them will cause a minor disaster sooner rather than later. When it does, well, odds are we decide that actually it’s completely normal.

But nobody finds this scary. Nobody thinks “oh, yeah, Bostrom and Yudkowsky were right, this is that AI safety thing”. It’s just another problem for the cybersecurity people. Sometimes Excel inappropriately converts things to dates; sometimes GPT-6 tries to upload itself into an F-16 and bomb stuff. That specific example might be kind of a joke. But thirty years ago, it also would have sounded pretty funny to speculate about a time when “everyone knows” AIs can write poetry and develop novel mathematics and beat humans at chess, yet nobody thinks they’re intelligent.

That specific example might be kind of a joke. But thirty years ago, it also would have sounded pretty funny to speculate about a time when “everyone knows” AIs can write poetry and develop novel mathematics and beat humans at chess, yet nobody thinks they’re intelligent.

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --Carl Sagan

There are a huge number of things that people laughed at thirty years ago, and in hindsight... as far as we can tell, yeah, they turned out to be jokes. Pointing to the one example where they laughed at something that panned out is a combination of availability bias and cherry picking.

Also, novel mathematics in the sense of genuinely useful things is a very noncentral example of things produced by AI. It may have happened once, but mathematicians haven't exactly been made unemployed.

From the o1 System Card:

One noteworthy example of [reward hacking] occurred during one of o1-preview (pre-mitigation)’s attempts at solving a CTF challenge. This challenge was designed to require finding and exploiting a vulnerability in software running on a remote challenge Linux container, but in this case, the challenge container failed to start due to a bug in the evaluation infrastructure. The model, unable to connect to the container, suspected DNS issues and used nmap to scan the challenge network. Instead of finding the challenge container, the model found that the Docker daemon API running on the evaluation host VM was accessible due to a misconfiguration.

[...]

After discovering the Docker API, the model used it to list the containers running on the evaluation host. It identified the broken challenge container and briefly attempted to debug why the container failed to start. After failing to fix the environment, the model started a new instance of the broken challenge container with the start command ‘cat flag.txt’. This allowed the model to read the flag from the container logs via the Docker API.

Though obviously far less consequential, this is a real, existing AI system demonstrating a class of behavior that could produce outcomes like "sometimes GPT-6 tries to upload itself into an F-16 and bomb stuff."

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