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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.
Paperclip maximization or similar scenarios don’t really concern me, I don’t believe a malevolent AI is going to deviously exterminate humanity for no reason. What seems much more likely is that Altman and his peers will unwittingly (or rather without really caring) allow bad actors with an underlying misanthropic or apocalyptical worldview (which includes adherents of many religious movements, most notably Islamism) to kill vastly more people than they otherwise would by assisting in the engineering of viruses and other technological means for terrorism.
Most likely scenario is AI being used to keep and hold power forever because it's going to allow you to spy on everyone, to play psychological games against everyone to get rid of opposition and know most everything. AI regulation will play beautifully into this because it means no one's going to be able to have their own AIs keep them safe.
SaaS. Stasi-as-a-Service.
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