The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship".
Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much less a superintelligence.
As a bonus, they lay out the OpenAI business model:
> Our fundraising conversations show that:
> * Ilya and I are able to convince reputable people that AGI can really happen in the next ≤10 years
> * There’s appetite for donations from those people
> * There’s very large appetite for investments from those people
Yes, frequently and loudly.
When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors.
> So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much less a superintelligence.
I just got back from an Indian restaurant in the middle of Berlin, and the table next to me I overheard a daughter talking to her mother about ChatGPT and KI (Künstliche Intelligenz, the German for AI).
The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public.
What's not obvious is how to monetise it. Old meme parroted around was "has no moat", which IMO is like saying Microsoft has no moat for spreadsheets: sure, anyone can make the core tech, and sure we don't know who is Microsoft vs StarOffice vs ClarisWorks vs Google Docs, but there's more than zero moat. From what I've seen, if OpenAI didn't develop new products, they'd be making enough to be profitable, but it's a Red Queen race to remain worth paying for.
As for "much less a superintelligence": even the current models meet every definition of "very smart" I had while growing up, despite their errors. As an adult, I'd still call them book-smart if not abstractly smart. Students or recent graduates, but not wise enough to know their limits and be cautious.
For current standards of what intelligence means, we'd better hope we don't get ASI in the next decade or two, because if and when that happens then "humans need not apply" — and by extension, foundational assumptions of economics may just stop holding true.
He always does that to give himself cover, but he has clearly shown that his words mean very little in this regard. He always dodges criticism. He used to talk about the importance of him being accountable to the OpenAI board and them being able to fire him if necessary when people were questioning the dangers of having one person have this much control over something as big as bleeding edge AI. He also used to mention how he had no direct financial interests in the company since he had no equity.
Then the board did fire him. What happened next? He came back, the board is gone, he now openly has complete control over OpenAI, and they have given him a potentially huge equity package. I really don't think Sam Altman is particularly trustworthy. He will say whatever he needs to say to get what he wants.
Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others .
2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri and so on .
- self driving has not transformed us into minority report and despite how far it has come it cannot in next 30 years be ubiquitous, even if the l5 magic tech exists today in every new car sold it will take 15 years for current cars to lifecycle.
- Crypto has not replaced fiat currency , even in most generous reading you can see it as store of value like gold or whatever useless baubles people assign arbitrary value to, but has no traction for 3 out of other 4 key functions of money .
- VR is not transformative to every day life and is 5 fundamental breakthroughs away.
- Voice assistants are useless setting alarms and selecting music 10 years in.
There has been meaningful and measurable in each of these fields, but none of them have met the high bar of world transforming .
AI is aiming for much higher bar of singularity and consciousness. Just in every hype cycles we are in peak of inflated expectations, we will reach a plateau of productivity where it is will be useful in specific areas (as it already is) and people will move on to the next fad.
I think Joel Spolsky explained the main Office moat well here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
> ... it might take you weeks to change your page layout algorithm to accommodate it. If you don’t, customers will open their Word files in your clone and all the pages will be messed up.
Basically, people who use Office have extremely specific expectations. (I've seen people try a single keyboard shortcut, see that it doesn't work in a web-based application, and declare that whole thing "doesn't work".) Reimplementing all that stuff is really time consuming. There's also a strong network effect - if your company uses Office, you'll probably use it too.
On the other hand, people don't have extremely specific expectations for LLMs because 1) they're fairly new and 2) they're almost always nondeterministic anyway. They don't care so much about using the same one as everyone they know or work with, because there's no network aspect of the product.
I don't think the moats are similar.
Which would be very inaccurate as network-effects are Excel's (and Word's) moat. Excel being bundled with Office and Windows helped, but it beat Lotus-123 by being a superior product at a time the computing landscape was changing. OpenAI has no such advantage yet: a text-based API is about as commoditized as a technology can get and OpenAI is furiously launching interfaces with lower interoperability (where one can't replace GPT-4o with Claude 3.5 via a drop-down)
I'm not sure that we need superintelligence for that to be the case - it may depend on whether you include physical ability in the definition of intelligence.
At the point that we have an AI that's capable of every task that say a 110 IQ human is, including manipulating objects in the physical world, then basically everyone is unemployed unless they're cheaper than the AI.
I have significant doubt that Sam is capable of empathy, period. It seems like what he's capable of is an extremely convincing caricature of it which he has practiced for many years.
Those assumptions are already failing billions of people, some people might still be benefiting from those "assumptions of economics" so they don't see the magnitude of the problem. But just as the billions who suffer now have no power, so will you have no power once those assumptions fail for you too.
Given the fact that how much ALL of our media beating that drum since GPT-3, I am hoping that my cat will start talking about it without understanding what it is. Even Draghi’s report has immense hidden lobbying dedicated to KI.
> [...]
> What's not obvious is how to monetise it.
This is an interesting new use of 'product market fit'. I would have thought that in the absence of a path to monetisation, there is no market. Or we could talk about the 'market' for selling $10 bills priced at $5.
I’m going to guess that GP does not consider random protestors to be in Sam Altman’s ‘sphere’
> The product market fit is fantastic.
This is true insomuch that you define “product market fit” as “somebody mentioning it in an Indian restaurant in Berlin”
> every definition of "very smart"
Every definition you say?
I've known many CEO who will stare you right in the eye and say they hear your concerns then immediately disregard you and continue with business as usual. Being a psychopath is part of the job description.
People were constantly discussing crypto in public, it even regularly made it into Tagesschau. Yet it remains an (influential) niche product.
People discussing a topic in public is not a good proxy for product market fit. It does not imply those people are using said product, nor does it imply people would be willing to pay for said product.
> even the current models meet every definition of "very smart" I had while growing up, despite their errors.
I recently tried to read a grocery store receipt into GPT4o and asked it what the KG price for the steak position was (it was listed as €/kg right next to the position name). It came up with some elaborate math, but not with the correct answer.
So yeah. These models might be able to confidentially answer questions, but I found them to be (partially) incorrect more often than not.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/narcissistic-mirroring.html
In this case, OpenAI wants look like they're going to save the world and do it in a noble way. It's Google's "don't be evil" all over again.
Maybe public figures were "saying what they meant" in, I don't know, the mid-1800s. People who grew up with "modern" communications and media infrastructure (smartphones, brain rot, streaming garbage 24/7, ads everywhere, etc) do not have the capacity to act in a non-mediatic fashion in public space anymore.
So that's the reality, I think. Not only is Sam Altman "fake" in public, so is everyone else (more or less), including you and I.
Nonetheless, it's a national sport at least in massive chunks of the English-speaking world now to endlessly speculate about the real intentions of these pharaonic figures. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: what a very peculiar timeline.
Pretend your meme pic generator is actually a weapon of mass destruction and you can eliminate most of your competition by handwaving about "safety".
The engineering behind it was really quite nice, but the hype set it up to fail. If it hasn’t been talked up so much in the media, the launch wouldn’t have felt so flat. There was no way for them to live up to the hype.
Electric micromobility is a pretty huge driver of how people negotiate the modern city. Self-balancing segways, e-skate, e-bike and scooters are all pretty big changes that we are seeing in many modern cityscapes.
Hell, a shared electric bike was just used as a getaway vehicle for an assassination in NYC.
I'm afraid you are in as much an echo chamber as anyone. 200 million+ weekly active users is large scale pmf
OpenAI is one of a handful of companies that is raking in lots of cash here. And they've barely scratched the surface. It's only a few years ago that Chat GPT was first released. OpenAI is well funded, has lots of revenue, and lots of technology coming up that looks like it's going to increase demand for their services.
There's a very obvious product market fit.
To say they don’t have PMF is nuts.
And once you are way up there and you have definitely left earth, there is no right or wrong anymore, just strong and weak.
Literally every market has been disrupted and some are being optimized into nonexistence.
You don't know anyone who's been laid off by a giant corporation that's also using an AI process that people did 3 years ago?
I know companies that have (or rather are in the process of) adopting AI into business workflows. The only companies I know of that aren't using more labor to correct their AI tools are the ones that used it pre-ChatGPT/AI Bubble. Plenty of companies have rolled out "talk to our AI" chat bubbles on their websites and users either exploit and jailbreak them to run prompts on the company's dime or generally detest them.
AI is an extremely useful tool that has been improving our lives for a long time - but we're in the middle of an absolutely bonkers level bubble that is devouring millions of dollars for projects that often lack a clear monetization plan. Even code gen seems pretty underwhelming to most of the developers I've heard from that have used it - it may very well be extremely impactful to the next generation of developers - but most current developers have already honed their skills to out-compete code gen in the low complexity problems it can competently perform.
Lots of money is entering markets - but I haven't seen real disruption.
Correct me if this the wrong meaning in the context. I will admit this is the first time I see this word. When I first read it I thought it was something to do with "millennials" also known as Gen Y.
>Robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020,
And we still dont have Lv4 / Lv 5 autonomous vehicles. Not close and likely still not in 2030. And with all the regulation hurdle in place it means even if we achieve it by 2030 in lab it wont be widespread until 2035 or later.
me too
The moment someone does that they're no longer in the very rich guys sphere.
As long as Anthropic does not dumb their own models, they are going to be better than OpenAI, at least for what I use them.
So, in the present, Claude is way more useful to me and I am subscribed. Right now, they do not support text-to-speech and imagine generation, but once they do, I would just completely abandon OpenAI.
> The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship".
Given the above, I doubt it is going to be OpenAI at this rate.
It seems better for educational purposes given that it shows you the code with modifications in real-time and you can run Python scripts for example, but that said, I have not tried the "Educational" style for Claude.
If hardware continues it's evolution of speed in the next 10 years I can have Claude but local + running constantly and yeah that would change certain things fundamentaly
It's not better, but if I couldn't access Claude for some reason, I would definitely use it.
It's primary advantage for a while has been it's crazy breadth of knowledge which it can present in a human, flexible form. But perhaps we excuse this as Generally Knowledgeable not Generally Intelligent.
But with the most recent models I'm finding the intelligence harder to deny. They are now catching errors and false assumptions unprompted and with regularity and providing reliable feedback and criticism. Gemini 2.0 can now read prints usefully, if not perfectly and has caught multiple print errors missed by the engineers and experienced machinists alike.
It provides valuable feedback and criticism and frequently interjects when it thinks I'm barking up the wrong tree. The newest models have gotten quite good at asking for clarification rather than leaning into assumptions.
Now it's certainly not the smartest. It's creativity is mediocre and it's lack of practical experience is apparent. But thats understandable, as _it's never machined a day in it's life_. It's merely studied what's been written.
Sure, hallucinations and the like are still a thing (though they've been cut down drastically). And the creativity is quite mediocre. But it seems a lot more intelligent than some of the burnouts coming out of trade schools.
Ilya reiterated on July 12, 2017, “Each year, we'll need to exponentially increase our hardware spend, but we have reason to believe AGI can ultimately be built with less than $10B in hardware.”
It's a wild take to say that they have gotten nowhere and that they haven't found product-market fit.
Good Ventures / Open Philanthropy (Dustin Moskovitz) funded GiveWell and OpenAI, and GiveWell's leadership floated to OpenAI, but I'm not convinced that GiveWell funded OpenAI.
https://www.givewell.org/about/gw-op-relationship
They are certainly both entangled with the Effective Altruism community, but GiveWell came from the "humanities/finance" side, not the tech bro technoutopia side.
I will take a wild guess and say a qualified no in the sense that nobody who report directly to these people said anything against it and my conspiracy theory is that they were not idiots who didn't have their own misgivings but they prized their own personal gain / "professional growth" by being yes men over doing what they had a professional responsibility.
My favorite example is the Amazon Fire Phone
> Jeff Bezos reportedly "...envisioned a list of whiz-bang features... NFC for contactless payments, hands-free interactions to allow users to navigate the interface through mid-air gestures and a force-sensitive grip that could respond in different ways to various degrees of physical pressure", most of which ultimately did not end up in the final product. He also "obsessively monitored the product", requiring "even the smallest decisions needed to go by him".
Did nobody think that an expensive phone would make sense with a value conscious audience of Amazon.com? If nobody (who directly reports to the CEO) dares question even a relatively minor thing like this, how can we expect them to say anything about major/existential issues in a company such as "Open" AI?
I'm always blown away when I see comments like this.
It just makes me think the people that say this either work for a competitor or simply haven't used their products.
The things that OpenAI and similar companies have created are literally revolutionary. It's insane. Pretending it's "little return" is a very strange opinion.
I mean, I know pessimistically "ackshually"-ing yourself into the wrong side of history is kind of Hackernews's thing (eg. that famous dropbox comment).
But if you don't think OpenAI found product-market-fit with ChatGPT, then I don't think you understand what product-market-fit is...
I think OP is saying despite all that there is little evidence that end users are actually paying significant sums of money to use it. To this point it’s a great marketing tool for companies that are all eager to be viewed as innovative and you have lots of very wealthy smart people with clout like Bezos and Zuckerberg talking it up. Like any good bubble you have to have at the core a real asset.
So of course there are people who use it daily as many anecdotes here in the comments point out. It’s a genuinely interesting and useful technology. That doesn’t mean though that it’s going to result in AGI or become profitable while liquidity conditions are still easy. I promise you Mark Zuckerberg would be singing a very different tune regarding chip investment if he were having to compete with bonds yielding 6-7%+.
In other words, it's also an affective death spiral.
Hmm.. where do you live? It's quite transforming already in many areas and not going to stop any time soon. I'll call it 'The Last Explosion', as opposite to 'AI Winter'. By that I mean this explosion with result in AGI. Likely sub-human first, then super-human.
Copilot ? Recall ? "Your privacy is _very important_ for us"
Modern (2024) LLMs are "little return"? Seriously? For me, they've mostly replaced Google. I have no idea how well the scaling will contiue and I'm generally unimpressed with AI-doomer narratives, but this technology is real.
That probably says more about you than about the tech.
It will literally have no impact on anything. It will be like NFT's however long ago that was. Everybody will talk about how important it is, then they wont. Life will go one as it always have, with people and work, and the slow march of progress. In 30 years nobody is going to remember who "sam altman" was.
It's more simple. They've found that the grander the vision, the bigger the lie the more people will believe it. So they lie.
Take Tesla's supposed full self-driving as an example. Tesla's doesn't have full self-driving. Musk has been lying about it for a decade. Musk tells the same lie year after year, like clockwork.
And yet there are still plenty of true believers who ardently defend Tesla's lies and buy more Tesla stock.
The lies work.
Unprecedented change has already happened with LLMs. So this is expected.
> So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return
...because it's expensive to build what they're building.
What keeps people from accepting this new reality? Is it ego, a fear of irrelevance due to AI inevitably eclipsing them in their most prized aptitudes?
Really?
I use, and pay for, OpenAI every day
If you really don't think that this line of research and development is leading to AGI then I think you are being hopelessly myopic.
>robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020
There are some incredible advances happening _right now_ in robotics largely due to advances in AI. Obviously 2020 was not exactly correct, but also we had COVID which kind of messed up everything in the business world. And arguing that something didn't happen in 2020 but instead happened in 2025 or 2030, is sort of being pedantic isn't it?
Being a pessimist makes you sound smart and world-weary, but you are just so wrong.
In terms of robotics, the progress sure is neat, but for the foreseeable time, a human bricklayer will outcompete any robot; if not on the performance dimension, then on cost or flexibility. We’re just not there yet, not by a long stretch. And that won’t change just by deceiving yourself.
What do you mean by AGI exactly? if you want to come back in 10 years to see who's right, at least you should provide some objective criteria so we can decide if the goal has been attained.
"On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."
Oh you know I don't really care about the number, it's just that I'm working on this plan to desalinate all the water in the oceans.
https://glasstire.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/288_Image1....
But no, I really doubt that's all it takes. Unless you discount all of the R&D costs as SpaceX operational expenses.
Also astronauts were willing to risk their life putting the stars and stripes on the moon I doubt that Musk can inspire the same zeal...
Isn't that exactly what he's doing with x.ai? Grok and all that? IIRC Elon has the biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right now, and is currently training the next major version of his "competing in the marketplace" product. It will be interesting to see how this blog post ages.
I'm not dismissing the rest of the post (and indeed I think they make a good case on Elon's hypocrisy!) but the above seems at best like a pretty massive blindspot which (if I were invested in OpenAI) would cause me some concern.
This is wildly untrue, and most in industry know that. Unfortunately you won't have a source just like I won't, but just wanted to voice that you're way off here.
Sure, we probably can't know for sure who has the biggest as they try to keep that under wraps for competition purposes, but it's definitely not "wildly untrue." A simple search will show that they have if not the biggest, damn near one of the biggest. Just a quick sample:
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-netwo...
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-plea...
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/elon-musk-to...
https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/musks-xais-colossus-cl...
[0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-netwo...
Do you have a source for this? I don’t buy this when compared to Google, Amazon, Lawrence Livermore National Lab…
[0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-netwo...
[1]: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-plea...
They aren't saying he isn't. But he is trying to handicap OpenAI, while his own offering at this point is farcical.
>It will be interesting to see how this blog post ages.
Whether Elon's "dump billions to try to get attention for The Latest Thing" attempt succeeds or not -- the guy has an outrageous appetite to be the center of attention, and sadly people play along -- has zero bearing on the aging of this blog post. Elon could simply be fighting them in the marketplace, instead he's waging a public and legal campaign that honestly makes him look like a pathetic bitch. And that's regardless of my negative feelings regarding OpenAI's bait and switch.
Really? I'm really surprised by that. I thought Meta was the one who got the jump on everyone by hoarding H100s. Or did you mean strictly GPUs and not any of the AI specific chips?
Nvidia wrote about it: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-netwo...
The first is the bill gates "income tax for robots" idea which does a kind of hand wavey thing figuring out how to calculate a robot, how the government will distribute taxes, etc. That one is a mess impossible to get support for and nearly impossible to transition to.
The other idea, put forth by the Democracy in Europe 2025 party, is called a universal basic dividend, which essentially says that to make AI owned by humanity, the utility of automation should be calculated, and as a result, a dividend will be paid out (just like any other stock holder) which is a percent of that company's profit derived from automation. It becomes part of the corporate structure, rather than a government structure, so this one I think kinda has merit on paper, but likewise zero motivation to implement until it's virtually too late
In one of the episodes, Detective Joe Friday spoke with some computer technicians in a building full of computers (giant, at the time). Friday asked the computer technician,
> "One more thing. Do you think that computers will take all our jobs one day?"
> "No. There will always be jobs for humans. Those jobs will change, maybe include working on and maintaining computers, but there will still be important jobs for humans."
That bit of TV stuck with me. Here we are 60 years later and that has proven true. I suspect it will still be true in 60 years, regardless of how well AI advances.
Dario Amodei, former VP of research at OpenAI and current CEO of Anthropic, notes[0] a similar sentiment:
> "First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the “10%” expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI’s are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”.
Amodei does think that eventually we may need to eventually organize economic structures with powerful AI in mind, but this need not imply humans will never have jobs.
Basically the same dynamic that you see in e.g. customer support. A company’s founder is going to be better than your typical tier 1 support person at every tier 1 support task, but the founder’s time is limited and the opportunity cost of spending their time on first-contact support is high.
None of these people live with empathy, they are all on their own narrative which if it does account for other people is them trying to speed run the story path where everyone hero worships them.
I think a lot of people confuse AGI with infinite AGI.
I suspect and hope there's gonna be a lot more Luigi Mangione's coming about soon, though.
If AGI labor is cheaper and as effective as human labor, prices will drop to the point where the necessities cost very little. People will be able to support themselves working part-time jobs on whatever hasn't been automated. The tax system will become more redistributive and maybe we'll adopt a negative income tax. People will still whine and bitch about capitalism even as it negates the need for them to lift a single finger.
https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-sub...
If this were a legal defense, this would be heard in court.
Just like “open source and forever free” - until of course it starts to make sense charging money.
It was a problem around 2014 - 2022. Even the lying part isn't new. It has always been there. But somehow most were blind to it during the same period.
Something changed and I dont know what it is. But the pendulum is definitely swinging back.
"Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn’t sound super hard. High-level linking of a large number of deep nets sounds like the right approach or at least a key part of the right approach."
Genuine question I've always had is, are these charlatans conscious of how full of shit they are, or are they really high on their own stuff?
Also it grinds my gears when they pull out probabilities out of their asses:
"The probability of DeepMind creating a deep mind increases every year. Maybe it doesn’t get past 50% in 2 to 3 years, but it likely moves past 10%. That doesn’t sound crazy to me, given their resources."
I came here thinking about this exact part. Well, many of them, but this one in particularly.
What surprises me about Elon is how much he can talk about other peoples' work without doing any of it himself. And yet each time I hear him talk about something I'm well-versed in, he sounds fairly oblivious yet totally unaware of that fact.
His go-to strategy seems to be hand waving with a bit of "how hard could it be"?
He's very fortunate he has competent staff.
You may not owe people who you feel are spoiled rich kids better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
* this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There are so many conflicting definitions of what "AGI" means. Not even OpenAI or Microsoft even knows what it means.
"AGI" is a scam.
There might be a day where billionaires employ zero humans and themselves merge with the AGI in a way that makes them not quite human any more.
The amount of data being collected about everyone and what machine learning can already do with it is frightening.
I'm afraid the reaction to AI when it actually becomes a threat is going to look like more of a peasant revolt than a skynet situation.
On that note, is there a term for, er... Negative hype? Inverse hype? I'm talking about where folks clutch their pearls and say: "Oh no, our product/industry might be too awesome and doom mankind with its strength and guaranteed growth and profitability!"
These days it's hard to tell what portion is cynical marketing ploy versus falling for their own propaganda.
In 2017 he wrote
"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs, and there should be convincing chatbots (though no one should pass the Turing test)."
"We will completely solve the problem of adversarial examples by the end of August."
Very clever to take a page from Musk's own playbook of confidently promising self-driving by next year for a decade.
Robotics being "solved" was indeed a stupid thing to assert because that's a hornet's nest of wicked problems in material science, mechanical engineering, and half a dozen other fields. Given a suitable robotic platform, though, 2020-era AI would have done a credible job driving its central nervous system, and it certainly wouldn't be a stumbling block now.
It's been a while since I heard any revealing anecdotes about adversarial examples in leading-edge GPT models, but I don't know if we can say it's a solved problem or not.
Everyone on Hacker News was saying "well of course, you can't just feed it to a chatbot, that's cheating! the leaderboard is a human competition!" because we've normalized that. It's not surprising, it's just obvious, oh yeah you can't have an Advent of Code competition if the computers get to play as well.
Granted it took seven years. Not three.
Yet, confidently promising AGI/self-driving/mars landing in the next couple of years over and over when the confidence is not justified makes you a conman by definition.
If the number 3 means nothing and can become 7 or 17 or 170 why keep pulling these timelines out of their overconfident asses?
Did we completely solve robotics or prove a longstanding theorem in 2020? No. So we should lose confidence in their baseless predictions.
At some point, OpenAI became who they said they werent. You can't even get chatgpt to do anything fun anymore as the lawyers have hobbled its creative expression.
And now they want to fight with Elon over what they supposedly used to believe about money back in 2017.
Who actually deserves our support going forward?
Elon sued OpenAI, not the other way around
"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs, and there should be convincing chatbots" (2017)
"We will completely solve the problem of adversarial examples by the end of August"
With just a raw language model instructions and chat didn't work to near the same degree.
Both elements are important and they were early in both. Illya's first email here talks about needing progress on language:
2016
Musk: Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn’t sound super hard. High-level linking of a large number of deep nets sounds like the right approach or at least a key part of the right approach.
Illya: It is not the case that once we solve “concepts,” we get AI. Other problems that will have to be solved include unsupervised learning, transfer learning, and lifetime learning. We’re also doing pretty badly with language right now.
He's allowed these opinions, we’re allowed to ignore them and lawyers are allowed to use this against him.
Isn't that almost everyone? The people who left OpenAi could have joined forces but everyone went ahead and created their own company "for AGI"
It's like the wild west where everyone dreams of digging up gold.
Recently the CFO basically challenged him to try and use his influence against competition “I trust that Elon would act completely appropriately… and not un-American [by abusing his influence for personal gain]”.
The best thing they can do is shine as much light on his behavior in the hope that he backs down to avoid further scrutiny. Now that Elon is competing, and involved with the government, he’ll be under a lot more scrutiny.
Has a nice "nailing my grievances to the town square bulletin board" feel. Doesn't result in any real legal evidence either way, but it's fun to read along.
> I have considered the ICO approach and will not support it.
...
> I respect your decision on the ICO idea
Pretty sure they aren't talking about Initial Coin Offerings. Any clue what they mean?
The part that raises eyebrows is how a non-profit suddenly become a for-profit, from a legal standpoint.
> I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?
I don't know when your autumn ("fall") or summer are in relation to September. Don't mix keys here, either use months or quarters, not a mix of things including some relative to a specific hemisphere.
If you're reading it from a southern hemisphere viewpoint and find that it doesn't make sense, isn't it quite simple to just go, "Oh, perhaps it's the opposite?" and apply that?
This is hardly the first time I've ever encountered this sort of thing. In fact, as an American, I've had to employ this sort of thinking myself when interacting with people on forums from places like South America and Australia.
It's an easy fix, and it's not that big of a deal, honestly - an innocent little side effect of the fact that we're able to communicate at such a global level[1]. :)
You did, in fact, know when was referred to. It's even possible to realize that "over the summer" can include Christmas in Sydney or Buenos Aires! Mostly people realize we live on a sphere, and what the consequences of that are.
† With apologies to American Samoa.
‡ Country name spelled in full to avoid the predictable bellyaching about the existence of a continent of the same name, or two, depending on where you hail from. Another thing you are not in fact confused about.
The way I read this: Elon Musk wanted OpenAI to commit fraud. They refused. He went away. They decided to commit the same fraud. He sued.
They're a strong case in both directions. There's a legal principle that you can't take opposing views on the same legal issue.
So, strictly in that sense, I'm appreciating this level of "openness".
Why the rejection in 2017 when in 2024 the company moved towards a similar goal?
Otherwise, why would they engage in a publicity battle to sway public sentiment precisely now, if their legal case wasn't weak?
I hope they all spend all of their money in court and go bankrupt.
For me this rhymes with recent history...
The biggest miss from Elon seems to be that he overestimated Google's lead. Did Google really drop the ball on staying in 1st place and if so why?
Yes Google - and particularly DeepMind were far ahead when OAI started. They even have the first paper on Transformers I think. But the people who ended up productising the entire thing was OAI because the incentives weren’t there for Google to make ChatGPT.
One could also say that SpaceX happened because the US desperately needed a launch vehicle of their own.
"Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity."
Well, reading this in 2024 with (so-called) "Open"AI going for-profit, it aged like milk.
Also a few lines later, he writes:
"We don’t encourage paper writing, and so paper acceptance isn’t a measure we optimize."
So much for openness and moral high ground!
This whole thread is a masterpiece in dishonesty, hypocrisy and narcissistic power plays for any wannabe villains.
It's amusing to see they keep their masks on even in internal communications though. I'd have thought the messiah complex and benevolence parade is only for the public, but I was wrong.
This is why OpenAI and Sam Altman are understandably concerned.
> Summer 2017: We and Elon agreed that a for-profit was the next step for OpenAI to advance the mission
So basically Elon had the same idea as Sam Altman.
> The HER algorithm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz_HuzgMzxo) can learn to solve many low-dimensional robotics tasks that were previously unsolvable very rapidly. It is non-obvious, simple, and effective.
> In 6 months, we will accomplish at least one of: single-handed Rubik’s cube, pen spinning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDavyRnEPrI), Chinese balls spinning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9N1duIl4Fc) using the HER algorithm
taken down now. anyone have it?
> Lock down an overwhelming hardware advantage. The 4-chip card that <redacted> says he can build in 2 years is effectively TPU 3.0 and (given enough quantity) would allow us to be on an almost equal footing with Google on compute.
who is this? it isnt cerebras. sambanova?
I think somehow related to AI companies viewing the web as valuable data to be stolen if you don’t have it and protected property if you do have it.
Musk appears to be objecting to a structure having profit driven players ("YC stock along with a salary") directly in the nonprofit...and is suggestion moving it to a parallel structure.
That's seems like a perfectly valid and frankly ethically/governance sound point to raise. The fact that he mentions incentives specifically to me suggests he was going down that line of reasoning outlined above.
Framing that as "Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit"...idk...maybe I'm missing something here, but dishonest framing is definitely the word that comes to mind.
> Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem
... and we are working to get defense contracts which is used to kill human beings in other countries, or fund organizations who kill humans
I'm surprised by OpenAI's resilience through all this drama. It's impressive to see how far they've come from 2017 to 2024. This journey has given me a whole new appreciation for startups and the individuals behind them. Now I better understand why my own past mediocre attempts didn't succeed.
Thank you for sharing this information!
one of the few youtube links on this page that is still up
Altman being the regulatory capture man muscling out competitors via pushing the white house and washington to move for safety, the whole board debacle and converting from not for profit to profit.
I don't think anyone sees Musks efforts as altruistic.
