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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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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 future of Open Ai is much like Wolfram Alpha--something overhyped to change the world and initially really cool and useful, but now crap due to to extreme metering of computational power and paywalls. Expect the same here. The need to turn a profit from this will limit the power.

You know, I totally forgot about Wolfram Alpha. I remember it was really cool back several years when I last played around with it, but after I got through the math classes I had it help me with, it just flew out of my mind and was forgotten.