[grey-area]

Effective altruism is also very attractive to manipulative sociopaths who want to maximise their power over others whilst appearing virtuous and hoarding wealth and power. Poster boy for this movement is the convicted fraudster SBF. I believe Altman is also a fan.

As to a better world or super intelligence, I’ll believe it may be possible when I see some signs of intelligence from what people are calling AI, instead of plausible text and image generation based on a very large corpus.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>I believe Altman is also a fan.

Altman says he thinks it is an "incredibly flawed movement"

https://x.com/sama/status/1593046526284410880

The dislike is mutual. Here's a long video takedown of Sam from a major EA org:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eYTkvZqbnQ

[HDThoreaun]

And what movement isn’t attractive to manipulative sociopaths who want to maximize their power? That’s unavoidable when dealing with humans.

[notahacker]

An important adjacent point is the same people that are insisting that only their research can stop intelligent manipulative computers from controlling the human race are also some of the few people who believed that OpenAI was a philanthropic endeavour and that Sam Bankman Fried was trustworthy...

[fwipsy]

I'm not seeing any claims to exclusivity. I'm seeing people actively encouraging more people to enter the field of AI safety/security and openness to robust debate, etc.

I agree that there seems to be a huge problem with value drift--either people who used to research AI safety, pivoting to building AI (looking at Anthropic) or people who only ever paid lip service to safety (I tend to put Musk and Altman in this category.) These people need to be held accountable, but it doesn't mean every AI safety researcher ever was a stooge or a fraud.

[notahacker]

Ok, fair enough theyre not entirely opposed to outsiders setting up research institutes like theirs and enjoy debate (or the optics of debate) more than most, and I don't think most of them are insincere. But the point wasn't that they were exclusionary, but more that whilst priding themselves on their supposedly superior ability to predict the future and "align" AIs, they somehow missed the value drift and human non-alignment with their values basically any outsider saw coming...

[HDThoreaun]

OpenAI now controls one of if not the largest philanthropic endowments on the planet. They are still a philanthropic endeavor, though I agree the non profit bait and switch as well as the Altman board situation were tragedies.

[notahacker]

I mean, they're also gearing up for one of the largest IPOs in history to generate unprecedented amounts of wealth for themselves, and the nonprofit foundation's focus is community engagement with OpenAI products. Goldman Sachs has a large philanthropic endowment but I wouldn't confuse that with their priorities being philanthropy.

The point was I think pretty much everyone else saw the bait and switch coming...

[grey-area]

Well I think there is a definite pattern to sociopaths using a movement that seems externally good and has many true believers - like say an open foundation to promote AI, or effective altruism. Then twisting it to their own ends to gain power, influence and wealth.

We should therefore be very skeptical of people claiming altruistic motives while requiring that they be in control.