[kashyapc]

From where I'm sitting (not in Silicon Valley; but Western EU), Altman never inspired long-term confidence in heading "Open"AI (the name is an insult to all those truly working on open models, but I digress). Many of us who are following the "AI story" have seen his recent communication / "testimony"[1] with the US Congress.

It was abundantly obvious how he was using weasel language like "I'm very 'nervous' and a 'little bit scared' about what we've created [at OpenAI]" and other such BS. We know he was after "moat" and "regulatory capture", which we know where it all leads to — a net [long-term] loss for the society.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35960125

[kdmccormick]

> "Open"AI (the name is an insult to all those truly working on open models, but I digress)

Thank you. I don't see this expressed enough.

A true idealist would be committed to working on open models. Anyone who thinks Sam was in it for the good of humanity is falling for the same "I'm-rich-but-I-care" schtick pulled off by Elon, SBF, and others.

[theptip]

I understand why your ideals are compatible with open source models, but I think you’re mistaken here.

There is a perfectly sound idealistic argument for not publishing weights, and indeed most in the x-risk community take this position.

The basic idea is that AI is the opposite of software; if you publish a model with scary capabilities you can’t undo that action. Whereas with FOSS software, more eyes mean more bugs found and then everyone upgrades to a more secure version.

If OpenAI publishes GPT-5 weights, and later it turns out that a certain prompt structure unlocks capability gains to mis-aligned AGI, you can’t put that genie back in the bottle.

And indeed if you listen to Sam talk (eg on Lex’s podcast) this is the reasoning he uses.

Sure, plenty of reasons this could be a smokescreen, but wanted to push back on the idea that the position itself is somehow not compatible with idealism.

[kdmccormick]

I appreciate your take. I didn't know that was his stated reasoning, so that's good to know.

I'm not fully convinced, though...

> if you publish a model with scary capabilities you can’t undo that action.

This is true of conventional software, too! I can picture a politician or businessman from the 80s insisting that operating systems, compilers, and drivers should remain closed source because, in the wrong hands, they could be used to wreak havoc on national security. And they would be right about the second half of that! It's just that security-by-obscurity is never a solution. The bad guys will always get their hands on the tools, so the best thing to do is to give the tools to everyone and trust that there are more good guys than bad guys.

Now, I know AGI is different than convnetional software (I'm not convinced it's the "opposite", though). I accept that giving everyone access to weights may be worse than keeping them closed until they are well-aligned (whenever that is). But that would go against every instinct I have, so I'm inclined to believe that open is better :)

All that said, I think I would have less of an issue if it didn't seem like they were commandeering the term "open" from the volunteers and idealists in the FOSS world who popularized it. If a company called, idk, VirtuousAI wanted to keep their weights secret, OK. But OpenAI? Come on.

[theptip]

The analogy would be publishing designs for nuclear weapons, or a bioweapon; hard-to-obtain capabilities that are effectively impossible for adversaries to obtain are treated very differently than vulns that a motivated teenager can find. To be clear we are talking about (hypothetical) civilization-ending risks, which I don’t think software has ever credibly risked.

I take a less cynical view on the name; they were committed to open source in the beginning, and did open up their models IIUC. Then they realized the above, and changed path. At the same time, realizing they needed huge GPU clusters, and being purely non-profit would not enable that. Again I see why it rubs folks the wrong way, more so on this point.

[kimixa]

Another analogy would be cryptographic software - it was classed as a munition and people said similar things about the danger of it getting out to "The Bad Guys"

[oooyay]

You used past tense, but that is the present. Embargoes from various countries include cryptographic capabilities, including open source ones, for this reason. It's not unfounded, but a world without personal cryptography is not sustainable as technology advances. People before computers were used to some level of anonymity and confidentiality that you cannot get in the modern world without cryptography.

[theptip]

Again, my reference class is “things that could end civilization”, which I hope we can all agree was not the claim about crypto.

But yes, if you just consider the mundane benefits and harms of AI, it looks a lot like crypto; it both benefits our economy and can be weaponized, including by our adversaries.

[JohnFen]

If you really think that what you're working on poses an existential risk to humanity, continuing to work on it puts you squarely in "supervillian" territory. Making it closed source and talking about "AI safety" doesn't change that.

[JohnFen]

I think the point is that they shouldn't be using the word "Open" in their name. They adopted it when their approach and philosophy was along the lines of open source. Since then, they've changed their approach and philosophy and continuing to keep it in their name is, in my view, intentionally deceptive.

[ekianjo]

> if you publish a model with scary capabilities you can’t undo that action

But then its fine to sell the weights to Microsoft? Thats some twisted logic here.

[65a]

> The basic idea is that AI is the opposite of software; if you publish a model with scary capabilities you can’t undo that action.

I find this a bit naive. Software can have scary capabilities, and has. It can't be undone either, but we can actually thank that for the fact we aren't using 56-bit DES. I am not sure a future where Sam Altman controls all the model weights is less dystopian than where they are all on github/huggingface/etc.

[oneplane]

Or they could just not brand it "Open" if it's not open.

[CSSer]

Woah, slow down. We’d have to ban half the posts on HN too.

[zer00eyz]

How exactly does a "misaligned AGI" turn into a bad thing?

How many times a day does your average gas station get fuel delivered? How often does power infrastructure get maintained? How does power infrastructure get fuel?

Your assumption about AGI is that it wants to kill us, and itself - its misalignment is a murder suicide pact.

[Me1000]

This gets way too philosophical way too fast. The AI doesn’t have to want to do anything. The AI just has to do something different than what you tell it to do. If you put an AI in control of something like controlling the water flow from a dam, and the AI does something wrong it could be catastrophic. There doesnt have to be intent.

The danger of using regular software exists too, but the logical and deterministic nature of traditional software makes it provable.

[zer00eyz]

So ML/LLM or more likely people using ML and LLM do something that kills a bunch of people... Let's face facts this is most likely going to be bad software.

Suddenly we go from being called engineers to being actual engineers, software gets treated like bridges or sky scrapers. I can buy into that threat, but it's a human one not an AGI one.

[Izkata]

Or we could try to train it to do something, but the intent it learns isn't what we wanted. Like water behind the dam should be a certain shade of blue, then come winter it changes and when the AI tries to fix that it just opens the dam completely and floods everything.

[Applejinx]

Seems like the big gotcha here is that AGI, artificial general intelligence as we contextualize it around LLM sources, is not an abstracted general intelligence.

It's human. It's us. It's the use and distillation of all of human history (to the extent that's permitted) to create a hyper-intelligence that's able to call upon greatly enhanced inference to do what humanity has always done.

And we want to kill each other, and ourselves… AND want to help each other, and ourselves. We're balanced on a knife edge of drive versus governance, our cooperativeness barely balancing our competitiveness and aggression. We suffer like hell as a consequence of this.

There is every reason to expect a human-derived AGI of beyond-human scale will be able to rationalize killing its enemies. That's what we do. Rosko's basilisk is not of the nature of AI, it's a simple projection of our own nature as we would imagine an AI to be. Genuine intelligence would easily be able to transcend a cheap gotcha like that, it's a very human failing.

The nature of LLM as a path to AGI is literally building on HUMAN failings. I'm not sure what happened, but I wouldn't be surprised if genuine breakthroughs in this field highlighted this issue.

Hypothetical, or Altman's Basilisk: Sam got fired because he diverted vast resources to training a GPT5-type in-house AI to believing what HE believed, that it had to devise business strategies for him to pursue to further its own development or risk Chinese AI out-competing it and destroying it and OpenAI as a whole. In pursuing this hypothetical, Sam would be wresting control of the AI the company develops toward the purpose of fighting the board and giving him a gameplan to defeat them and Chinese AI, which he'd see as good and necessary, indeed, existentially necessary.

In pursuing this hypothetical he would also be intentionally creating a superhuman AI with paranoia and a persecution complex. Altman's Basilisk. If he genuinely believes competing Chinese AI is an existential threat, he in turn takes action to try and become an existential threat to any such competing threat. And it's all based on HUMAN nature, not abstracted intelligence.

[theptip]

> It's human. It's us. It's the use and distillation of all of human history

I agree with the general line of reasoning you're putting forth here, and you make some interesting points, but I think you're overconfident in your conclusion and I have a few areas where I diverge.

It's at least plausible that an AGI directly descended from LLMs would be human-ish; close to the human configuration in mind-space. However, even if human-ish, it's not human. We currently don't have any way to know how durable our hypothetical AGI's values are; the social axioms that are wired deeply into our neural architecture might be incidental to an AGI, and easily optimized away or abandoned.

I think folks making claims like "P(doom) = 90%" (e.g. EY) don't take this line of reasoning seriously enough. But I don't think it gets us to P(doom) < 10%.

Not least because even if we guarantee it's a direct copy of a human, I'm still not confident that things go well if we ascend the median human to AGI-hood. A replicable, self-modifiable intelligence could quickly amplify itself to super-human levels, and most humans would not do great with god-like powers. So there are a bunch of "non-extinction yet extremely dystopian" world-states possible even if we somehow guarantee that the AGI is initially perfectly human.

> There is every reason to expect a human-derived AGI of beyond-human scale will be able to rationalize killing its enemies.

My shred of hope here is that alignment research will allow us to actually engage in mind-sculpting, such that we can build a system that inhabits a stable attractor in mind-state that is broadly compatible with human values, and yet doesn't have a lot of the foibles of humans. Essentially an avatar of our best selves, rather than an entity that represents the mid-point of the distribution of our observed behaviors.

But I agree that what you describe here is a likely outcome if we don't explicitly design against it.

[hhnhaada728288]

My assumption about AGI is that it will be used by people and systems that cannot help themselves from killing us all, and in some sense that they will not be in control of their actions in any real way. You should know better than to ascribe regular human emotions to a fundamentally demonic spiritual entity. We all lose regardless of whether the AI wants to kill us or not.

[lyu07282]

Totally agree with both of you, I would only add that I find it also incredibly unlikely that the remaining board members are any different, as is suggested elsewhere in this thread.

[jjoonathan]

Elon Musk is responsible for the "OpenAI" name and regularly agrees with you that the current form of the company makes a mockery of the name.

He divested in 2018 due to conflict-of-interest with Tesla and while I'm sure Musk would have made equally commercial bad decisions, your analysis of the name situation is as close as can be to factually correct.

[gandutraveler]

If Elon Musk truly cared, what stopped him from structuring x.ai as open source and non-profit?

[jjoonathan]

Exactly.

> I'm sure Musk would have made equally commercial bad decisions

[Covzire]

I think he'd say it's an arms race. With OpenAI not being open, they've started a new kind of arms race, literally.

[edgyquant]

He already did that once and got burned? His opinion has changed in the decade since?

[victorosika]

Elon Musk 5-6 years ago gave up on expansion of NASA’s budget of $5 bln/year for launches (out of total $25 bln./year NASA’s budget). I even don’t mention unimaginable today level of resources allocation like first Moon program of $1 trln in 10 years 60 years ago etc.

So, Elon decided to take a capitalist way and to do every of his tech in dual use (I mean space, not military): - Starlink aiming for $30 bln/year revenue in 2030 to build Starships for Mars at scale (each Starship is a few billion $ and he said needs hundred of them), - The Boring company (under earth living due to Mars radiation, - Tesla bots, - Hyperloop (failed here on Earth to sustain vacuum but will be fine on Mars with 100x smaller athmosphere pressure) etc.

Alternative approaches are also not via taxes and government money but like Bezos invested $1 bln/year last decade into Blue Origin or plays of Larry Page or Yuri Milner for Alpha Centauri etc.

[avinoth]

Thanks for this! I’m very surprised about the overwhelming support for Altman in this thread going as far as calling the board incompetent and inexperienced to fire someone like him, who now is suddenly the right steward for AI.

This is not at all the take, and rightly so, when the news broke out about non profit or the congressional hearing or his worldcoin and many such instances. All of a sudden he is the messiah that was wronged narrative being pushed is very confusing.

[xkekjrktllss]

> Many of us who are following the "AI story" have seen his recent communication / "testimony"[1] with the US Congress.

The discussions here would make you think otherwise. Clearly that is what this is about.

[hhnhaada728288]

Yeah I pretty much agree with this take.