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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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someone in the HN thread reminded me of this again, and I remembered I didn't remember the entire story here. part of the thing with reddit was not only did Sam Altman engineer Conde Nast into being a minority stakeholder and by helping to manufacture a bunch of leadership crisises at reddit. if you're not familiar with this, here's Yishan, a former CEO of reddit, saying exactly this in a manner that is second only in wink wink nudge nudge to If I Did It.

Here's one.

In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.

Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, he would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board.

Once this was done, he and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder.

JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/comment/cszjqg2/

this seems similar to what ended up essentially happening at OpenAI, although it's over board seats rather than stake in the company.

My story: Maybe they had lofty goals, maybe not, but it sounded like the whole thing was instigated by Altman trying to fire Toner (one of the board members) over a silly pretext of her coauthoring a paper that nobody read that was very mildly negative about OpenAI, during her day job. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...

And then presumably the other board members read the writing on the wall (especially seeing how 3 other board members mysteriously resigned, including Hoffman https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...), and realized that if Altman can kick out Toner under such flimsy pretexts, they'd be out too.

So they allied with Helen to countercoup Greg/Sam.

I think the anti-board perspective is that this is all shallow bickering over a 90B company. The pro-board perspective is that the whole point of the board was to serve as a check on the CEO, so if the CEO could easily appoint only loyalists, then the board is a useless rubber stamp that lends unfair legitimacy to OpenAI's regulatory capture efforts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38386365

I imagine this HN commenter is right and at the end of the day this comes down to capitalism.

That's a misreading of the situation. The employees saw their big bag vanishing and suddenly realised they were employed by a non-profit entity that had loftier goals than making a buck, so they rallied to overturn it and they've gotten their way. This is a net negative for anyone not financially invested in OAI.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38376123

this is probably not news to themotte, but it also seems pretty evident to me that the nonprofit's goals were wholly unimportant to those working there. whether you like openai or not1, the name was and is a punching bag essentially because it's neither open nor ai. the weird structure seemed to those working there probably just was seen as tax evasion (sorry, avoidance) and that aforementioned rubber stamp.

but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Larry Summers of all people2 being added to the board is darkly hilarious though. it's basically taking off the mask.

1. I don't particularly care one way or another about them as I don't use their stuff nor plan to.

2. this part is more unrelated snark so i'm leaving it to a footnote, but he's a great measure for economists. he managed to predict that 3 contradictory things were going to happen with regards to inflation and none of those 3 things happened.

This sort of outcome is what makes it very, very difficult for me to take the AI doomerism seriously. Yes, we may get Paperclip Maximiser AGI, but I think it's much more likely to come about by "humans in notional charge think it will make them trillions and so follow blindly its advice" than "machine becomes agent and decides on its own goals". I have no belief in Fairy Godmother AGI that will make every single human on the planet (and that means every single human, not simply 'coastal cities PMC types') rich and happy forever and ever because it magically figured out workarounds to bypass the physical limits of the natural world to give us free energy and infinite resources.

Some people are going to get very, very rich off this, the rest of us? Survival, scrabbling, or gig economy as right now.

The theoreticists about alignment were doomed from the start, since in reality it was never going to work out how they hoped. 'Let's write heartful letters about the dangers of AI and the need to slow down research in order to avert the danger to humanity" - yes, and who signed off on that letter? One Mr. Sam Altman. I read a claim in a news article that this kind of 'support' by corporations etc. was all about positioning themselves as the ones to be first to market and making it difficult or impossible for smaller, newer start-ups to rival them, and not at all about the ostensible 'threat to humanity'.

And I think we see this working out in real time right now. The pro-safety faction within OpenAI moved against Altman, due (it is being speculated) to fears that he was too much on the "get a product out to market, and to heck with the cautious safety-first approach" train. This hit Microsoft's share price, and now Altman is back (for the moment, anyway) and it's a safe bet that OpenAI will now be moving ahead with enabling Microsoft to gain first mover advantage by having their pet AI widely available commercially.

OpenAI's real function, even if the idealists on the board didn't realise it, was to provide the necessary reassurance for the regulators and government: "yes indeed, we are ticking all the safety boxes, no worries!" That's why Altman scolded Toner for her paper; it didn't matter if it was only really followed by nerds, it was not doing her job which was to help sell OpenAI as the bestest safest no need for interference by the government while we develop the product.

How exactly are the coastal PMC types going to get rich in a way that doesn't enrich the rest of us?

If AGI can manufacture goods much more cheaply, then that means cheap goods for everyone. If AGI can provide services for zero to low cost, that means cheap or free services for everyone.

While there are situations where individuals can get rich at the expense of the masses through rent-seeking (I'm thinking someone like Carlos Slim monopolising Mexican telecoms) the overwhelming majority of billionaires got that way by providing something useful to the masses. Elon Musk sold luxury electric cars, Jeff Bezos provided an online retail experience far superior to anything that came before it, Steve Jobs sold consumer-friendly, well-designed electronics.

If Sam Altman ends up a trillionaire, how exactly could that leave the rest of us poorer?

If Sam Altman ends up a trillionaire, how exactly could that leave the rest of us poorer?

Bezos, Musk, etc. have fortunes but that money is not making its way to me. I have even less reason to think that Altman as a trillionaire is going to mean the lake fisherman in Tanzania suddenly getting thousands of dollars extra per year as a wage. Cheap goods/services for everyone is a nice-sounding idea, but it relies on "I have enough money as disposable income to purchase those goods/services". If I lose my job because the company replaced me with AI, it doesn't matter how 'cheap' the next model iPhone is because now it's made by AI, I'm not going to be buying one.

Bezos, Musk, etc. have fortunes but that money is not making its way to me.

To the degree that they have cash it is making it's way to you about as much as any other cash, as for their wealth, that they created, they did so by creating lots of utility. I can order something online and have it the very same day. That's awesome. Thanks Jeff. You deserve all that money for doing something so awesome. You earned it! Thanks Elon for the cool cars and internet!

These are things people want (we know this because people pay them for these things).

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