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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.
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.
Or that AI doomerism is pure (or almost pure) nonsense. Maybe someday we'll find something with the potential to risk FOOM! or Von Neumann style self-replication, but we're nowhere near there yet. AI killbots, though possible, aren't the same sort of risk.
AI will kill us for totally boring ways. Less killbots deciding to genocide us, more 'a solar flare scrambled the GPS for the latest SpaceLink update and now every ship has travelled into Null Island with no crew able to remember the password to reset the nav computer that bricked itself after an OTA update.'
Fooling killbots is remarkably easy. Just have an especially juicy dummy target that can stand up to shrapnel. Mannequins and inflatable noodle men are really cheap, and its really funny to see AI targeting algos shit themselves homing in on dummies versus a bent over human.
Remember lads, you don't need to outrun the bear. Just be faster than the guy next to you.
Why do you think that an AI that has reached the point of making and executing a viable destroy-all-humans plan would not be able to build kilbots that will not be fooled by dummies?
There is this strange tendency in the AI-skeptical/-contrarian crowd to get hung up on particular shortcomings of current models, especially when these are of a form that would be conceivable but indicative of some sort of defectiveness in humans ("you claim that it can do original research, but it still hallucinates citations/fails to distinguish dogs and cats/?"). To me it reads like some sort of mistargeting of interhuman bullying/status jockeying onto nonhuman targets - if you just make the killbot look dweeby enough, nobody will take it seriously as a threat.
I could see this leading to a sort of dark punchline where in our efforts to align AIs and equip them with more human-like comprehension/preferences/personality, we wind up building ones that can actually "take it personally". Like a tropey high school dork deciding to prove that you do not in fact need to be good at sportsball and socialising to unload several AR clips into your classmates, the model might just pair a very convincing simulacrum of spite over sentiments like yours, as found in its training set and amplified by RLHF, with the ability to tree-search a synthesis of deadly neurotoxin even if it relies on blatantly made-up citations.
Oh, if your point is that being mean to AI and robots is foolish because they will remember my meanness and kill me, then I am already dead. I am personally responsible for the active torture and destruction of dozens if not hundreds of robots by this point, as I put all manner of robots through real world paces. Come the robot revolution, I will be first against the wall.
If these stupid fucking things can even find me in the first place without shitting themselves.
Even presuming sensor and edge computing technologies advance to the equivalent of human brains, deep learning AI models are unable to parse dynamic contexts, and have to retrain on the fly because existing models will be working off now irrelevant boundaries. Preloaded segmentation models shit themselves when multiple models arrive at similar confidence intervals, and frictional costs on physical systems spike during dynamic environmental transitions. Cloud computing ala skynet network is the true solution for smart bots (provided the comms loop is lag insignificant) but a wideband EM flooder is stupid effective for its costs. Networked bots shitting themselves after losing their network links really is like gaunts fleeing in panic after killing a zoanthrope in Space Marine 2.
In a real world environment, humans are actually able to filter out noise remarkably well, usually subconsciously. Robots are cursed with perfect awareness of their inputs, and in that noise they go crazy differentiating a rock from a human under a wet blanket, much less a mannequin hooked up to a battery from a human.
If anything, I feel that LLM Scrapers are moving us further away from AGI than advancing it. We are getting more convincing approximations of a Real Boy, but ultimately it is still playing pretend. AGI may invent a neurotoxin specifically designed to kill 2D3D, torturer of inorganic carbon, but getting that toxin to me will be a lot more difficult without working arms and eyes. Its not like we humans are difficult to poison, just gotta replace MSG with potassium sulphide and we'd all kill ourselves before the next sportsball match finishes.
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