this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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Remember when open ai was a nonprofit first and foremost, and we were supposed to trust they would make AI for good and not evil? Feels like it was only Thanksgiving…
I mean, there was all that drama where the board formed to prevent this from happening kicked out the CEO trying to do this stuff, then the board got booted out and replaced with a new board and brought back that CEO guy. So this was pretty much going to happen.
And some people pointed it out even back then. There were signs that the employees were very loyal to Altmann, but Altmann didn't meet the security concerns of the board. So stuff like this was just a matter of time.
People pointed this out as a point in Altmann's favor, too. "All the employees support him and want him back, he can't be a bad guy!"
Well, ya know what, I'm usually the last person to ever talk shit about the workers, but in this case, I feel like this isn't a good thing. I sincerely doubt the employees of that company that backed Altmann had taken any of the ethics of the tool they're creating into account. They're all career minded, they helped develop a tool that is going to make them a lot of money, and I guarantee the culture around that place is futurist as fuck. Altmann's removal put their future at risk. Of course they wanted him back.
And frankly I don't think you can spend years of your life building something like ChatGBT without having drunk the Koolaid yourself.
The truth is OpenAI, as a body, set out to make a deeply destructive tool, and the incentives are far, far too strong and numerous. Capitalism is corrosive to ethics; it has to be in enforced by a neutral regulatory body.
The engineers are likely seeing this from an arms race point of view. Possibly something like the development of an a-bomb where it’s a race against nations and these people at the leading edge can see things we cannot. While money and capitalistic factors are at play, foreseeing your own possible destruction or demise by not being ahead of the game compared to china may be a motivating factor too.
Bless your heart, sweet summer child.
Effective altruism is just capitalism camoflauge, it's also just really bad at being camoflauge
helps you get a lot of community support and publicity during startup and then you don't have to give a damn about them once you take off
Effective altruism could work if the calculation of "amount of good" an action creates wasn't performed by the person performing that action.
E.g. I feel I'm doing a lot of good buying this $30m penthouse in the Bahamas.
Did they kick the CEO out for doing this or was it because of something else?
This summary article says the board stated:
The article also says:
As far as I know the exact issue was not made public, but basically the board is there to make sure the company puts ethics over profits. Altman was hiding stuff from the board (presumably because they would consider it in conflict with their goal), and so the board fired him. But then there was an uproar from the investors, Microsoft almost ended up hiring half the company as they threatened to resign in droves, and in the end the board resigned and was replaced.
Does that answer the question?
I remember when they pretended to be that. The fact that the board got replaced when it tried to exert its own power proves it was a facade from the beginning. All the PR benefits of "taking safety seriously" with none of those pesky "safety vs profitability" concerns.
I stopped having faith in nonprofits after seeing how much the successful ones pay their CEOs. They're just businesses riding the low-tax train until they're rich enough to not care anymore.
I don't understand that point of view? Why would they pay their CEOs less than any other company? If they did, then they would either not be able to hire CEOs, have the shittiest CEOs or have CEOs that wouldn't give a crap. People don't live on welfare, especially highly connected, highly educated people like CEOs.
Why do you think lower paid CEO must be shitty? There turns out to be very little link between the CEO and CEO pay and the company performance... they are only paid a lot cause they are in the position of power to directly influence their salary.
Do you have a source for this?
broadly gestures at everything
Which was always a big fat lie. I mean just look at who was involved in getting OpenAI started. Mostly super rich tech people meeting privately to divide the market among themselves like colonial powers divided their territories.
It seems to be a trend that any service that claims not to be evil is just waiting for the right moment to drop that pretense.
then some people realized they could monetize the shit out of it
“In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: 'Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.'”
Hiram Maxim
I wonder if something similar happened with openAI.
Forgot about NFTs and marketing. Invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats more efficiently.
I wouldnt be too worried they’ve just made an over glorified word predictor and blender of peoples art
AKA the perfect propaganda tool to fuck up elections and make countries collapse into civil war and fascism. Like ours.
Chatgpt would be a terrible propaganda tool. Also why do you need a better one? The existing ones work pretty well. Fox/Sky News and the internet troll army out of Russia.
Propaganda isn’t new. Sure it’s more widely available now but it’s not new
And that totally justifies having a robot that does it so efficiently it allows people to deepfake shit that's hard to invalidate, robbing people of their ability to discern what is reality and what is not
Again not new stop grandstanding it as a new effect. Media outlets have been doing this since the dawn of journalism. Scientific process created to combat it, political standards to help reduce it fand laws to make it financially unattractive act remains its not new.
The only thing that is new. The financial gain from the hype of abusing the word AI and thr media not calling it out. But hey here we are back at the start. Its not new.
And that totally makes it okay for you to use an LLM to do so far more effectively and far more efficiently, destroying humanity's ability to discern reality
The fact you think people need an LLM to create garbage is just weird. They can do it without it just fine. Better get some tinfoil, I hear putting it on your head stops the Artifical word predictor from copying your thoughts.
Yes because the kinds of people who would fall for a deep fake would never have fallen for propaganda before.
Nope, not deepfakes that convincing.
Keep lying to yourself though. Keep convincing yourself it's worthwhile to destroy the world you claim to love just so you can keep your shiny new toy. Keep trying to tell yourself it's not going to harm everyone else around you and that you're still a good person.
Right all those people eating fucking horse dewormer were perfectly rational before.
Oh noes AI is going to destroy us all.
Because only the right wing understands the true danger of AI.
Not new and certainly very much not new to politics. Are you new?