[pdonis]

I'm not sure I agree that Altman has made the AI situation worse. I think Altman was right that Google, and Microsoft and others for that matter, were going to pursue AI no matter what. Even if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we'd still have much the same situation we have now.

Even if it's true that, if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we wouldn't have had the spectacle of a supposed nonprofit trying to do "ethical" AI and then pivoting to a for-profit company, that actually might be something that was worth learning: that it's not possible to do AI as a private nonprofit with an explicit commitment not to do certain things.

[danaris]

Sorry, my phrasing there was kind of poor: I didn't mean that he had made the overall AI situation worse, but rather that the AI he made was worse for the public than a hypothetical AI that was made with a deliberate eye to ethical or at least neutral behavior.

[pdonis]

Ah, ok. I certainly agree with that. My question would be whether it's even possible for we humans as we are now to make an AI with a deliberate eye to ethical behavior. Sam Altman clearly is not someone who can do that (nor is Elon Musk, for that matter). But I'm not sure I know of anyone who is.

[danaris]

I mean, there are plenty of people with the ethical chops to do so, and, I daresay, plenty who combine that with the technical chops.

What's lacking is the money & power.

Having/obtaining enough of those to be able to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Google is, unfortunately, nearly guaranteed to result in a deeply ethically compromised person at best.

[pdonis]

> there are plenty of people with the ethical chops to do so, and, I daresay, plenty who combine that with the technical chops.

Can you name some?

> What's lacking is the money & power.

How do you know money and power wouldn't make whoever you're thinking of just as corrupt as the people who have the money and power now?