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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.
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.
I beg you to consider the possibility that progress in AI development will continue. The doomers are worried about future models, not current ones.
The risks of current models are underrated, and the doomerism focusing on future ones (especially to the paperclip degree) is bad for overall messaging.
How is someone supposed to warn you about a danger while there's still time to avert it? "There's no danger yet, and focusing on future dangers is bad messaging."
"No danger yet" is not remotely my point; I think that (whatever stupid name GPT has now) has quite a lot of potential to be dangerous, hopefully in manageable ways, just not extinction-level dangerous.
My concern is that Terminator and paperclipping style messaging leads to boy who cried wolf issues or other desensitization problems. Unfortunately I don't have any good alternatives nor have I spent my entire life optimizing to address them.
It's not clear to me if you think there are plausible unmanageable, extinction-level risks on the horizon.
Plausible, yes. I am unconvinced that concerns about those are the most effective messaging devices for actually nipping the problem in the bud.
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