In 2018 I was also enthusiastic about OpenAI, I didn't expect them to try to destroy the world. They were litterally selling themselves on doing the exact opposite.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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I forget but wasn't anthropic mostly made up of former OpenAI engineers after Altman went off the deep end?
Not that it makes them any better, but I'm pretty sure GPT-3 was the nexus point in the current mess we have now, which means they hopped off right after it was internally finished and made their own company.
2018 was a full 2 years before that point, and back then AI was still primarily stuff like OpenCV, Pytorch projects, etc. that were things you could legitimately run on one or two workstation GPUs or even a cheap tensor core addon if you didn't want to run on CPU.
GPT-2 was released 14 February 2019 so they were actually cool gaming AI opensource research foundation in 2018.
Remember that OpenAI were the people behind the DotA-playing model, back in 2017, called OpenAI Five.
2018, the before times.
Insane how true this is.
No wonder 1999 feels like a million years ago.
I love how everyone is so desperate to make Gabe to be a terrible person.
It's crazy for people to take a stance against him considering how much he's done to protect the hobby from less reputable corps.
God imagine the world we'd live in if he didn't build modern child gambling with his own two hands
Are you mistaking him for the inventor of Pokémon cards, Richard Garfield, or the inventor of baseball cards, John Baseball?
Said 'modern' for a reason, but I guess telling someone they're wrong is worth ignoring what they say
God your self-righteous
Things to say when you want to make being a piece of shit into a good thing
He may be a middle man rent seeking on the entire gaming industry, but you can't hate him because of all those great game series he never finished
I can't hate him since he broke Windows monopoly in gaming.
Oh no he runs a buisness, grow up.
What would you call someone who has $1B worth of yachts while we're all struggling to eat and pay bills?
I'm a lot less angry at him than the ones who seemingly use their wealth exclusively to make our lives worse. He just has a bunch of money to buy boats. He's the last on the list for me
yes, but valve still exploits people. They put on steam sales explicitly to get people to buy more. Especially poor people. More, that they otherwise might not be able to afford just because "it's on sale!"
Like Torvalds, Stallman and Wozniak, Gabe Newell had an idea of how he thought technology should work and has never let up on it, it's a shame they couldn't profit as much as Gabe.
The yacht hobby is a bit much but compared to the standard billionaire hobbies, destroying the planet, rape, and murder, he's pretty mild.
A billionaire...
insert "they're the same thing" meme
Obligatory reminder that billionaires are not our friends. But also, donating to AI research in 2018 is quite a different matter than if he had done so in recent years. Most people in tech were somewhere between neutral and enthusiastic towards machine learning back then and few foresaw the monster it would become. Doubt he's as enthusiastic nowadays, considering what it did to Valve's hardware ambitions.
OpenAI, back then, was also a very different organization. They were mostly a non-profit, claiming to be a research organization who's goals were to ensure AI benefited all of humanity. Hell, I'd say Whisper, which that OpenAI did release, was very positive for humanity. It was when Sam Altman saw big dollar signs in GPT2+ that things started changing fast.
Very much this, in 2023 there was a falling out between Altman and the board of OpenAI over this, and Altman was kicked out. However some big shareholders (Microsoft) made a stink and reversed it.
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We acting like people in the art community weren't hyped up over AI until they started generating images. Before chatgpt, it was all about automating coding/it and other jobs that arent considered art. Back then it was all about how everyone could pursue their passions. The only people not excited were all the transportation employees and factory workers that had been told by the general public how excited they were to replace them
As a social scientist, pre Chat GPT NLP was like opening a whole new world of possibilities. We could finally at scale analyze one of the richest sources of behavioural data in an empirical statistically driven manner.
Now, even as I do research with NLP to continue these goals, I can't bring myself to every defend these tools. If they disappeared tomorrow, we'd lose a tool but we'd prevent so much undue suffering
Altman took the money and then OpenAI abandoned the non-profit structure to become a for-profit entity (2 years ago)
The writing was on the wall for years. I remember memes about Altman in machine learning forums/chatrooms circa 2020, and especially 2021.
Nothing's changed. Anyone in the space who actually looked at what he was doing, knew. Yet the bulk of the public (and investors) lapped the Tech Bro stuff up.
Aaron Swartz said Altman was a sociopath years before AI was a gleam in anyone's eye.
The technologies with the worst potential outcomes will always be pioneered by people with no ethical or moral hangups getting in the way.
Which unfortunately are the same techs that will be elevated by our present economic structure, precisely because those traits are what enable them to make (or grift) a shitload of money.
see:
Leaded Fuel and CFCs - the same fuckin guy!? goddamn hope there is a hell
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I mean, I probably would have invested in AI prior to seeing LLMs in action, too, hoping I was funding the cool kind of AI, not this lame shit.
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At that time it was still kind of a research project than a "it's going to take over everything" hype and FUD machine.
His opinions on AI today seem more enthusiastic than I would be, but well clear of the delusional level of AI-boosters.
Was this article commissioned by Tim Sweeney?
Before OpenAI about faced on being open?
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