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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.
Honestly, these histrionics about Altman being some gay supervillain make me like him more, not less. Being crazy and ambitious is a prerequisite to doing great things. And the notion that because he's gay, he doesn't care about anything is ridiculous. If only he could be as pro human as Joseph Stalin (two children), Robert Mugabe (four children) or Genghis Khan (innumerable children)?
I’m not saying that no parents are short-termist psychopaths, I’m saying that no childfree people aren’t short-termist psychopaths.
Outsourcing the necessary work of (both literal and figurative) species reproduction to god-knows-who (and in all likelihood it’s to 7-kids-per-woman educationless Third Worlders) is a rather spectacular indicator that you Just Don’t Give A Shit, no matter what prosocial rhetoric might come out of your mouth.
Plenty of work is outsourced by all of us to god-knows-who, including work that is much more necessary in both short- and long-term than 2.1 white TFR. Perhaps not you, if you grow your own food, spin and weave your own clothes, mine and smelt your own ore, source your own electricity and defend your own border, all at once.
Besides, by all accounts it is not normal for a human being to care about species reproduction on the global level for you to call one who doesn't a "psychopath". It is not "necessary work", but a purely selfish genetic drive that doesn't work particularly well.
Disagree here. Someone who doesn't mind the extinction of the human race (and especially the worthiest parts of it) is deeply broken and shouldn't be trusted. I probably wouldn't use the word 'psychopath' but the sentiment remains the same. (And by 'the best parts of it' I mean human potentials. If aliens said "We're going to keep humans alive in a zoo but dial everyone down to 60 IQ and give them toys to keep them occupied", well, that wouldn't fly for me either.)
As to 'purely selfish genetic drive' I assume you mean selfish on the part of the genes? Feel free to correct me if not. But if so, I'm confused as to what alternatives you can imagine. Can someone not value aspects of human experience without immediate concern for specific genes?
I think there is a vast gulf between 'I don't want to have kids for whatever reason, and if a sufficient number of people feel the same way, I am fine with humanity slowly fading' and 'fuck all humans, launch the nukes'.
At the worst, it is more like driving an ICE car in a world where climate change is a thing than personally melting the ice caps.
Yes, but crazy as it sounds I really think it's a matter of quantity, not quality. To be sure, one of those is a much more immediate threat. But both are threats.
Do you really want people who don’t care about the future of humanity (as you claim) reproducing and passing their values on to the next generation?
Yeah, we need more people. And, that problem can be fixed with a software update.
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