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Saw this linked elsewhere, and do we now have a better notion of what was going on inside OpenAI with the attempted ousting of Sam Altman? With Altman re-instated, and a new, Altman-friendly board in place, is this the kind of revision of the mission statement that was worrying the previous board?
I continue to believe the real danger from AI is not the AI itself, but the humans that use it, and "We can make zillions from fat, juicy, military contracts/Whoops, how we were to know that would happen?" seems like one of the failure modes that should concern the AI doomer set.
The only interesting thing about the accelerationist vs safetyist wars is that for some reason the safetyists actually thought they were still going to matter once big money and the military-industrial complex decided what should be. EA hangers-on writing papers for their pet think tanks are just lucky they're unserious enough people to be sidelined through board wrangling and don't need to be thrown off any bridges.
They've long been called useful idiots whose ideas around safety only really serve to establish and maintain control and do nothing to prevent evil uses.
I think this move vindicated that analysis.
'Evil uses'.
At the moment, LLMs couldn't plot their way out of a paper bag and fail at basic logic.
If we're talking 'evil' using LLMs to combat 'extremism' and 'misinformation' is both widely not seen as 'evil' and the most immediate use. They'll also be used to snoop through people's emails and highlight things cops could use.
Was any of that a use case OpenAI mission statement prohibited?
Image recognition seems good enough now though that killer drones that don't need an uplink and guidance to their own targets so they're immune to jamming are going to be fielded fairly soon. (<5 years).
But is OpenAI best at that?
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