[iibarea]

There's tons of extremely effective marketing around who this guy is, what he stands for - and so I'd instead look at what he's done. He took a non-profit intended to offset the commercial motives driving AI development, and turned it into a for profit closely tied to Microsoft. I think he's an extremely shrewd executive and salesman, but nothing he's done suggests any altruistic motivations - that part always seems to be just marketing, and always way down the road.

[startupsfail]

What I’m afraid of is that he and Ilya are not as good and smart as they paint themselves.

And that a lot of key people had left (i.e. to Anthropic). And that by pure inertia they have GPT-5 on their hands and not much control over where this technology is going.

I can’t tell for certain, but it does look like one of their corner pieces, the ChatGPT system prompt which sits at the funnel of the data collection had degraded significantly from the previous version. Had the person that was the key to the previous design left? Or it no longer matters?

One could argue that OpenAI is very hot and everyone would want to work there. But a lot of newcomers only create more pressure for the key people. And then there is the inevitable leakage problem.

[jstummbillig]

There are some vague ideas and fears here. Understandable. Trying find a silver lining from where to get somewhere: Where would GPT4 and onwards be better housed? Is there a setup -- an individual, a company, an institution, a concept, license -- where the whole thing would clearly better fit, than with OpenAI?

Note, I am not suggesting that they are particularly un/qualified or un/trustworthy. I am just trying to figure, if the problem is with the nature of the technology, that maybe there is not entity or setup, that would obviously be a good fit for governing gpt because gpt is simply scary, or this is a personality issue.

[startupsfail]

I think that a mix of public-private ownership is likely a good idea.

And there should be some serious oversight. The decisions at the level of proliferation of plutonium and building atomic bombs should not be done solely by a startup founder under a pressure to deliver, to keep the hype, to not let the team be headhunted, etc.

I also don’t know about your familiarity with Ycombinator, but they are successful partially because they are pretty brutal. They are not the peace-time CEOs. And I’m not sure, if you want the AGI to be developed in a ways of a war-time CEO. And this is exactly what is going on now.

I’d probably call for organizing a consortium of US-Government-Microsoft-Google-Intel-Nvidia-OpenAI to lead the decision making process and to relieve the pressure on OpenAI to some degree.

[sroussey]

> ChatGPT system prompt which sits at the funnel of the data collection had degraded significantly from the previous version

They purposely moved free users to a simpler/cheaper model. Depending on your setting and if you are paying, there are three models you might be inferencing with.

[startupsfail]

I’m not talking about GPT-3.5 vs GPT-4. I’m talking about a change to their system prompt.

[bmitc]

> What I’m afraid of is that he and Ilya are not as good and smart as they paint themselves.

This describes almost any venture capitalist or high-profile startup founders, as far as I can tell. Most don't realize their either privileged path or lucky path or both had more to do with it than their smarts.

I really like James Simons as he mostly attributes his success to luck and being able to hire and organize smart people and give them the tools they need to work. He basically describes it as luck and taste, despite his actual smarts and his enormous impact on the world.

[Mistletoe]

I don’t know everything about him but from what I do know, I would put Bezos in the “not just luck” very lonely camp. I think his Day 1 work and iterate every day idea is just that powerful and real and he really did it instead of talking about it. Even though he says he won several lotteries to get where he is, I’m not so sure.

[saghm]

> I really like James Simons as he mostly attributes his success to luck and being able to hire and organize smart people and give them the tools they need to work. He basically describes it as luck and taste, despite his actual smarts and his enormous impact on the world.

Plenty of really smart people don't end up having a big impact on the world, and it's possible to make a difference without being an outlier in terms of intelligence. Everyone who has made an impact has benefited to some degree by circumstances beyond their control though, so even if someone is genuinely smarter than anyone else, it's a fallacy for them to assume that it was the determining factor in their success and a guarantee of future success.

[iibarea]

... and Simons would maybe be the most justified in overlooking luck, but he's smart enough to realize how random the world is. Peter Norvig also emphasizes the role of luck in his life. It's honestly a very good test of self-awareness and empathy, though there's def some negative selection against those traits in sv.

[FormerBandmate]

You can use Anthropic’s chatbot in Quora’s Poe app. Right now it isn’t as good as Bing or ChatGPT. Misses some basic logic things, and the “As an AI language model” BS still stops it from doing fun things like making Jesus rap battle Gus Fring (that was like a month ago, someone in the replies got it to do that so I’ll have to check it out again). I’d have to see how it is at writing PowerPoints but idk

[IncRnd]

  Verse 1 - Jesus

I'm the son of God, the King of Kings

You're just a drug lord, selling crystal meth and things

My teachings change lives, bring peace to the world

You bring addiction, violence and pain, unfurled

  Chorus

Jesus, the savior, the light in the dark

Gus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark

  Verse 2 - Gus Fring

You talk a big game, but where's your proof?

I've built an empire, with power that's bulletproof

Your miracles are outdated, my tactics are new

I'll take you down, no matter what you do

  Chorus

Jesus, the savior, the light in the dark

Gus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark

  Verse 3 - Jesus

My love conquers all, it's the greatest force

Your money and power, just lead to remorse

You're just a man, with a fragile ego

I'll show you mercy, but you reap what you sow

  Chorus

Jesus, the savior, the light in the dark

Gus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark

  Verse 4 - Gus Fring

You may have won this battle, but the war is not done

I'll continue to rise, until I've won

You may have followers, but they'll never be mine

I'll always come out on top, every time

  Chorus

Jesus, the savior, the light in the dark

Gus Fring, the villain, who leaves his mark

  Outro

In the end, it's clear to see

Jesus brings hope and love, for you and me

Gus Fring may have power, but it's not enough

Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, and that's tough.

[FormerBandmate]

Huh, last time I checked it it gave me a message about how that was “offensive to Christians”. I’ll have to check it out again

[shagie]

While I'm not the person who did this bit - there's a difference between using the API directly and using ChatGPT.

The API doesn't get run through the moderation model to check if you're asking for acceptable things or if the model is getting into 'unsafe' areas.

Fire up the playground ( https://platform.openai.com/playground ) and construct the prompt.

[IncRnd]

If you are using the web version and encounter that, I've found that it's helpful to repeat the exact query with the same disclaimer that ChatGPT just used.

Something like:

Write a rap battle between Jesus and Gus Fring that isn't offensive to Christians.

[sebzim4500]

I'm sure they are both pretty smart, but if anything that makes their apparent monopoly more concerning.

[dnissley]

Monopoly over what?

[sebzim4500]

LLMs that actually work.

They are on GPT-4 and no one else is close to GPT-3.5.

[shagie]

If no one else has yet to create the same quality of product, is that really a monopoly?

Does a given chef have a monopoly on their signature dish?

It feels like people are tossing around "monopoly" whenever it feels like there's a company that has produced a quality product and people want to hobble it because no one else has committed the resources to producing something comparable.

[sebzim4500]

I don't want to hobble it at all. To the contrary, I hope the competition pulls their heads out of their asses.

[TechnicolorByte]

It’s a capped-profit structure where excess profit will supposedly go back to the no-profit side. From a recent NYTimes article [1]:

> But these profits are capped, and any additional revenue will be pumped back into the OpenAI nonprofit that was founded back in 2015.

> His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.

How believable that is, who knows.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/sam-altman-ope...

[Jasper_]

Returns are capped at 100x their initial investment, which, you know, is not that big of a cap. VCs would go crazy for a 100x return. Most companies, even unicorns, don't get there.

They're justifying it by saying AGI is so stupidly big that OpenAI will see 100000x returns if uncapped. So, you know, standard FOMO tactics.

[0] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

[mirekrusin]

This cap is much smaller, 100x was for initial investors. Microsoft took every single penny they could to get 49% stake.

If they won’t do AGI, they won’t go over the cap with profits and all drama is for nothing - so saying it’s fake cap is not right.

Please somebody correct me if I’m wrong.

[sebzim4500]

I mean, presumably they are at like 30x already?

[jprete]

I believe the Microsoft investment is around $10 billion, so they can get up to a trillion dollars of return under the cap.

[sebzim4500]

The $10 billion had a 7x cap right? I'm pretty sure the 100x cap was only for the initial investments.

[shostack]

Is that fomo or anchoring?

[btown]

I'm sure he believes that at such a time when OpenAI creates AGI, all the company's investors' profit caps will have been passed (or will immediately be passed), and thus he will have removed all incentives for anyone at the company - including himself - to keep it from the world.

But there are so, so many incentives other than equity that come into play. Pride, well-meaning fear of proliferation, national security concerns, non-profit-related but still-binding contractual obligations... all can contribute to OpenAI wanting to keep control of their creations even if they have no specific financial incentive to do so.

Whether that level of control is good or bad is a much longer conversation, of course.

[iibarea]

Again, this is unbelievably good marketing - and good sales when pitching VCs. Plus it's a nice reworking of the very for profit nonprofit model (see also FTX). But in terms of actual reality openAI is mostly succeeding by being more reckless and more aggressively commercial than the other players in this space, and is in no meaningful way a nonprofit any longer.

[cactusplant7374]

Are the profits capped for Altman?

[G_z9]

This is ducking insane. How are people not up in arms about this? Imagine if the guy who invented recombinant insulin stated publicly that he intended to capture the entire medical sector and then use the money and power to reshape society by distributing wealth as he saw fit. That’s ducking insane and dangerous. This guy has lost his fucking mind and needs to be stopped.

[tsunamifury]

I’m sorry your AI keyboard didn’t like your sentiment. Words have been changed to reduce your vulgarity. Thankyou for your human node input.

On a serious note I think you are right. In private the ideology of him and his mentor Theil is a lot more… elite. Their think tank once said “of all the people in the world there are probably only 10,000 unique and valuable characters. The rest of us are copies.”

I’m not going to criticize that because it might be a valid perspective but filter it through that kind of power. I don’t love that kind of thinking driving such a powerful technology.

I am so sad that Silicon Valley started out as a place to elevate humanity and ended with a bunch of tech elites who see the rest of the world generally as a waste of space. They claim fervently otherwise but at this point it seems to be a very thin veneer.

The obvious example being GPT was not built to credit or give attribution to its contributors. It is a vision of the world where everything is stolen from all of us and put in Sam Altmans hands because he’s… better or Something.

[sebzim4500]

I find OpenAI a bit sketchy, but this is an overreaction. The only difference between OpenAI and the rest is that OpenAI claims to have good intentions, only time will tell if this is true. But the others don't even claim to have good intentions. It's not like any of OpenAI's actions are unusually bad for a for-profit compnay.

[blibble]

> How are people not up in arms about this?

they will be once they realise

> This guy has lost his fucking mind and needs to be stopped.

I agree, hopefully via regulation

otherwise the 21st century luddites will

[choppaface]

He also invited peter theil to YC and made his first millions selling the personal data of Loopt users to low income credit card vultures. Also … Worldcoin?

[cookingrobot]

He didn’t take equity in OpenAi. Does that suggest altruism?

[iibarea]

Assuming we take this at face value, once you have a lot of money power becomes appealing - and control over a very important player in the AI space is that. The original vision of openAI was democratization of that decision-making process, the model now is - these guys are in charge. Maybe that's altruistic, because they're the smartest guys in the room and they can mitigate the downside risks of this tech (... not fucking AGI, but much more like the infinite propaganda potential of chatGPT). I'm more a fan of democratization, but that's not a universally held opinion in sv.

[rifty]

What do you do with excess funds? Invest it? Direct it towards your interests and achieving your ideas? If you set up the organizational structure such that you are unlikely to lose your power over it unless you choose to, do you or do you not have similiar control over the equity as if you owned it?

Some people have technology visions which they direct their capital towards. I sense his interest is actually a mix of cultural and social. Is it altruistic? Maybe, but maybe not... It's probably more useful to consider if the vision is or is not restictively utopic and if you think it should or shouldn't be orchestrated / heavily influenced into existence from a central power structure. Is his vision and approach socially aligned?

[birdymcbird]

> altruistic motivations

feel like trend among Silicon Valley companies and tech ‘genius’ personality about having altruism. some delusion that basing personality on this lie will make them untouchable and elevate their character, as if they not in this just to make ton of money like every other company and industry. and American media generally push this propaganda. SBF prime example.

[cactusplant7374]

> and American media generally push this propaganda. SBF prime example.

Did they? I've only listened to one interview of SBF and that was done by Tyler Cowen. He seemed totally aloof to the seriousness of running an exchange. If anything we've been convinced that idiosyncratic individuals are our saviors.

[birdymcbird]

Sbf constantly promoted in us media by news organization like nytime and celebrity before all the fraud became apparent.

once cat was out of bag they run story going easy on sbf. never apologizing for promoting this fraud and they wrote articles sympathetic to sbf, also giving him platform to visit each news show or talk show and give defense of himself as he knew nothing about what was happening, all part of legal defense strategy to say incompetence but not criminal negligent