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  • Hacker News
  • I have no idea what is paid propaganda any more on this
  • Love living in a manifestly dysfunctional country with no regulatory state. Just running the country on autopilot until something catastrophic happens.
  • Used to work as human data trainer feeding data to AI companies. OpenAI projects are definitely the most toxic ones.
  • I remember something very similar when there was a sudden rush of articles and movies like "The Social Dilemma" criticizing Facebook and social networks, heavily featuring ex-employees, all of them happy to leave with big brands on their resumes and a hefty increase in net worth, all of a sudden having a "worried" expression about what their past employers were doing, as if they didn't know. Same with that book "Careless People".

    I sense that these are people who have already eaten the cake and want to somehow absolve themselves of it.

  • There are numerous problems with “alignment.” What are “human values” to begin with? He outlines some at the beginning of the post, implicitly: build bigger, better, more powerful things faster without adequate safeguards. We are literally pouring trillions of dollars of value into this enterprise, and I would say this is something that many humans also value in a qualitative sense. Then we have explicit values which in the West are largely rooted in Christian morality. Nietzsche circled this dichotomy two hundred years ago and I feel like what we have gotten since then is an increasingly detailed anatomy of power as the basis for what is normal vs deviant behavior. He who has the power, makes the rules, to be reductive.

    I do think this carries some weight from this particular author due to the length of his tenure. I happen to agree with him in spirit, but this is still largely a post revolving around sentiment not substance. Does anyone think that the overriding incentives even leave room for something like this in practice?

  • How about... not trying to build a superintelligence? The goal is unsalvageably flawed: alignment is ill defined and a future where humanity is the pet species of a god-like artificial intelligence is hardly an appealing one!
    by lf88
  • OpenAI and other frontier labs won't ever introduce safety-level standards like those used for railways or nuclear plants until they are forced to do so by customers or by law. The reason is simple: safety is expensive, and if safety is introduced properly, development is no longer mainly about how to implement feature A. Instead, it becomes much more about how to design two or more redundant systems to implement feature A safely, while also documenting everything clearly and having it audited by an independent auditor.

    So the focus completely shifts from spending 90% of the effort on the functionality of feature A to spending 99% of the effort figuring out how to safely implement even a lightweight feature A.

    by nlcs

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I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken · Birbla