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Notes -
OpenAI announces leadership transition
I posted this in Twitter and someone speculated that it's because Altman paused subscriptions on Tuesday, but that would alone seem like a pretty inconsequential reason for this sort of a major move.
This is pretty crazy, and it will be interesting to see people's takes on WHY this happened, from the unlikely (he was too woke), to the more likely (he wasn't woke enough), to the pants-shitting scary (researchers disturbed a Balrog and AGI is here).
One thing I still don't understand is how Open AI is simultaneously a 5013C non-profit, half owned by Microsoft, and hoping to raise more money at an 86 billion valuation.
Am I wrong for being hopeful that Elon Musk seems to be going for a second try into the AI space? I'm honestly a little worried about the direction Open AI is taking lately, going headlong into AGI research while being hypervigilant about woke microaggressions.
I'm not so sure I am, it seems to severely hamper the performance of their model. If they keep going down this path they will be overtaken.
I figure that, in addition to the likelihood that many of the people who are working on the tech are genuinely sensitive to the possibility that their work might harm people, and many others have pro-censorship political leanings, also it's just that when people almost start inevitably start using the AI to generate stuff like child porn and psychological advice that causes them to kill themselves, there will be such a giant shitstorm in the media and among the populace that companies are really scared to get too close to that scenario.
The fires are already being lit:
The definition of a victimless crime if I've ever heard one.
As I've linked before, there is evidence showing that porn availability is associated with a decrease in sexual abuse rates/no relationship, not an increase/normalization:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1524838020942754?journalCode=tvaa
I strongly expect that the same is true for child pornography.
At any rate, since no real people were harmed, I see no reason to get worked up over it, but then again, even the normies know that "think of the children" is often a ploy to enact irrational feel-good policies.
Not only do you get to use "think of the children", you also get to partake in socially-approved hate for a group of weirdos for their innate characteristics. Humans have always had an appetite for doing this, but in modern times there are far fewer acceptable targets.
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