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Notes -
To bring up another post from last week, I'm going to go ahead and repost @justcool393's piece on the Sam Altman/OpenAI/Microsoft situation, since she posted it a few hours ago and right before the last thread went down.
Here's her writing:
Another day, another entrant into the OpenAI drama. Emmett Shear is the new interim CEO of OpenAI.
I don't know why it was surprising to people that Sam wouldn't come back. The company was meant to be subservient to the nonprofit's goals and I'm not sure why the attempted coup from Sam's side (you know the whole effectively false reporting that Sam Altman was to become the new CEO) was apparently "shocking" that it failed.
https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726468006786859101
What's kinda sad about all of this is how much people were yearning for Sam Altman to be the CEO as if he isn't probably one of the worst possible candidates. Like maybe this is just a bunch of technolibertarians on Twitter or HN or something who think that the ultimate goal of humanity is how many numbers on a screen you can earn, but the amazing amount of unearned reverence towards a VC to lead the company.
In any case, here's to hoping that Laundry Buddy won't win out in the rat race for AGI, lest we live in a world optimized for maximum laundry detergent. Maybe we'll avoid that future now with Sam's departure.
Anyway, I'll leave this to munch on which I found from the HN thread.
https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1683208767054438400
I'm reposting here because I'm convinced, like many other residents, that the ongoing drama of who controls AI development has far reaching implications, likely on the scale of major power geopolitical events. If not ultimately even greater.
To add a bit to the discussion to justify reposting - I think many of these discussions around AI Safety versus Accelerationism are extremely murky because so many people in secular, rationalistic circles are extremely averse to claiming religious belief. It's clear to me that both AI Safety and Accelerationism have strong themes of classical religion, and seem to be two different sects of a religion battling it out over the ultimate ideology. Potentially similar to early Orthodox Christians versus Gnostics.
Alternatively, @2rafa has argued that many of the E/Acc (effective accelerationism) crowd comes from bored technocrats who just want to see something exciting happen. I tend to agree with that argument as well, given how devoid of purpose most of the technocratic social world is. Religion and religious-style movements tend to provide that purpose, but when you are explicitly secular I suppose you have to get your motivation elsewhere.
We've also got the neo-luddites like @ArjinFerman who just hate AI entirely and presumably want us to go back to the mid 90s with the fun decentralized internet. Not sure, I haven't actually discussed with him. I can actually agree with some of the Ludditism, but I'd argue we need to go back to 1920 or so and ban all sorts of propaganda, mass media and advertising.
Anyway, clearly the technological battle for the future of our civilization continues to heat up. The luddites seem out, but may have a surprising last hour comeback. The woke/political left leaning folks seem to be strongly in charge, though the OpenAI scandal points to trouble in the Olympian heights of Silicon Valley AI decision makers.
Will the Grey Tribe use AGI to come back and finally recover the face and ground it has lost to the advancing SJW waves? Who knows. I'm just here for the tea.
I've seen reports today that Sam has been hired by Microsoft and will likely be bringing a bunch of key staff with him (he's heading up a new AI group there.
This is pretty good damage control, but it's still damage control. It's possible that OpenAI was "lightning in a bottle," that you need all of the very specific parts to fit together in a certain way to work.
From the latest news, it seems it's now over 500 employees that are pledging to leave for Microsoft with Sam if the board doesn't immediately rehire Sam and resign, so I think it's safe to say Microsoft has that lightning pretty well bottled if they want it. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1726600151027073374#m
Assuming the board does it, the question that remains is for Microsoft. Is having essentially full control of OpenAI's human capital without a non-profit meddling worth potentially losing access to its current IP, and some initial friction as these employees work to replicate everything they can inside of Microsoft.
*EDIT: I'm saying potentially, because I can easily see the non-profit just deciding it's too late and that their current structure is just not workable. Tell all the employees to move to Microsoft, dissolve the OpenAI for-profit and sell all the IP to Microsoft (or just sell the for-profit for Microsoft to run as a subsidiary) and give the money to some other AI safety orgs or to "worker re-training" orgs, etc...
To be clear, as part of MS's initial investment, they got access to all the source code and all the model weights. They aren't losing anything. See https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-microsofts-gain/.
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