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by ji_zai 828 days ago
It's sad to see many comments here assume that Sam was at fault for something without really knowing what happened behind the scenes.

Let's try not to jump to conclusions, as hard as that may be.

And if you're actively wishing people to fail, then I ask you to try to understand where that stems from.

If you think Openai should be run differently, and if you have the inclination, I genuinely encourage you to build a competitor. I actually mean it.

People think that Openai is too far ahead, but the fact is that someone with a capability to understand things from first principles will often find a unique, valuable insight to compete with. And the world is sufficiently decentralized such that you can't be stopped from pursuing this, even by Openai.

As technology becomes more powerful, first principles reasoning >> factual knowledge (information) about how things work. In a sense, Openai's work reduces their own moat.

1 comments

I assume many people who want OpenAI to fail want to whole AGI program in general to fail, at least for a few decades longer. A competitor won't help, it'll plausibly make it worse.
Agreed. I was talking about folks that wish AI were being built differently (i.e. more transparent, etc.) as opposed to being against the rapid pace of AI development itself. I should have made myself more clear.
Personally the way I'm thinking is AI cooperatives. Democratic membership controlled organisations with relatively low fees to train AI aligned with the interests of the members.

Such organisations won't solve the fact that functioning AGI or very effective LLMs that can program or solve general text tasks precisely reduces the power of workers, but they'd at least mean that ordinary people control their own propaganda apparatus and are not stuck with models that are part of other people's propaganda apparatus (the state, Microsoft shareholders, some charity board that they do not control etc.).

Something impactful like AI shouldn't be a technology dominated by a single entity. That can only have bad outcomes. I hope OpenAI will fail, but I hope they'll fail because people wake up and realize it's not a good thing to have a limited group of people that has so much power.

And then I hope people will invest in a truly open technology that truly benefits everyone.