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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28781 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.

I posted this comment well over a year ago, and I think it holds up:

I am not a Musk fanboy, but I'll say this, Elon Musk very transparently cares about the survival of humanity as humanity, and it is deeply present down to a biological drive to reproduce his own genes. Musk openly worries about things like dropping birth rates, while also personally spotlighting his own rabbit-like reproductive efforts. Musk clearly is a guy who wants and expects his own genes to spread, last and thrive in future generations. This is a rising tides approach for humans Musk has also signaled clearly against unnatural life extensions.

“I certainly would like to maintain health for a longer period of time,” Musk told Insider. “But I am not afraid of dying. I think it would come as a relief.”

and

"Increasing quality of life for the aged is important, but increased lifespan, especially if cognitive impairment is not addressed, is not good for civilization."

Now, there is plenty, that I as a conservative, Christian, and Luddish would readily fault in Musk (e.g. his affairs and divorces). But from this perspective Musk certainly has large overlap with a traditionally "ordered" view of civilization and human flourishing.

Altman, on the other hand has no children, and as a gay man, never will have children inside of a traditional framework (yes I am aware many (all?) of Musks own children were IVF. I am no Musk fanboy).

I certainly hope this is just my bias showing, but I have greater fear for Altman types running the show than Musks because they are a few extra steps removed from stake in future civilization. We know that Musk wants to preserve humanity for his children and his grandchildren. Can we be sure that's anymore than an abstract good for Altman?

I'd rather put my faith in Musks own "selfish" genes at the cost of knowing most of my descendants will eventually be his too than in a bachelor, not driven by fecund sexual biology, doing cool tech.

Every child Musk pops out is more the tightly intermingled his genetic future is with the rest of humanity's.

...

In either case, I don't know about AI x-risk. I am much more worried about 2cimerafa's economic collapse risk. But in both scenarios I am increasingly of a perspective that I'll cheekily describe as "You shouldn't get to have a decision on AI development unless you have young children". You don't have enough stake.

I have growing distrust of those of you without bio-children eager or indifferent to building a successor race or exhaulting yourself through immortal transhumanist fancies.

"You shouldn't get to have a decision on AI development unless you have young children"

Okay. I'm a father. Full steam ahead I say. I graciously donate my "I'm straight and have functioning sperm" vote to Sam Altman.

Do expect your kids to have jobs if we build machines that can do everything better and cheaper than humans?

I so enormously doubt "everything better and cheaper". But some things sure.

Machine looms and mechanized agriculture have put almost everyone out of their jobs. A large majority of people used to work in agriculture or cloth making. It was a black hole for labor and human effort.

And yet now clothing and food are extremely cheap and I have a job. Not a job growing food or working a loom. But a job.

If AI does some things better and cheaper then great news, prices are going to get cheaper. That's a good thing. I hope things that are very expensive to me are very cheap for future generations. Like clothing for us vs pre-industral revolution.

Surely there could be a point where technology advances enough that computers do everything better, no?

Sure. And at that point we are discussing hypothetical scifi futures. Like in Accelerando when the Hello Kitty artificial intelligence explains to newly created people that things like monster trucks are free and they can have as many as they want.

But I'm not very concerned about all human labor being made irrelevant soon. Maybe some portion of it. And that won't be very conformable for some people. Like English clothing makers when machine looms were first made. A hard time, but society did not collapse or suffer permanent unemployment. They only had to slaughter a small number of people to stop them from destroying clothing factories. And clothes are now a tiny fraction of the cost. I'd say a clear net good. I'm hoping when HR drones are replaced with software we can figure out how to deal with them more peacefully than British soldiers dealt with Luddites. I have been told that Excel put most accountants out of business and we navigated that without bloodshed and social upheaval.

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