I remember when they pretended to be that. The fact that the board got replaced when it tried to exert its own power proves it was a facade from the beginning. All the PR benefits of “taking safety seriously” with none of those pesky “safety vs profitability” concerns.
Comment on OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”
funkforager@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Remember when open ai was a nonprofit first and foremost, and we were supposed to trust they would make AI for good and not evil? Feels like it was only Thanksgiving…
NounsAndWords@lemmy.world 5 months ago
guacupado@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I stopped having faith in nonprofits after seeing how much the successful ones pay their CEOs. They’re just businesses riding the low-tax train until they’re rich enough to not care anymore.
camelCaseGuy@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I don’t understand that point of view? Why would they pay their CEOs less than any other company? If they did, then they would either not be able to hire CEOs, have the shittiest CEOs or have CEOs that wouldn’t give a crap. People don’t live on welfare, especially highly connected, highly educated people like CEOs.
grepe@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Why do ypu think lower paid CEO must be shitty? There turns out to be very little link between the CEO and the company performance… they are only paid a lot cause they are in the position of power to directly influence their salary.
Imalostmerchant@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Do you have a source for this?
uranibaba@lemmy.world 5 months ago
they are only paid a lot cause they are in the position of power to directly influence their salary.
And not because they have a much higher responsibility? As a CEO, it is your job to make sure a company makes a profit (unless you are a nonprofit, I guess you have some other goal you need to achieve). That is what you a pay a CEO to do. I assume you would pay more for someone who is able to turn a higher profit.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Which was always a big fat lie. I mean just look at who was involved in getting OpenAI started. Mostly super rich tech people meeting privately to divide the market among themselves like colonial powers divided their territories.
Moira_Mayhem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
It seems to be a trend that any service that claims not to be evil is just waiting for the right moment to drop that pretense.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 5 months ago
then some people realized they could monetize the shit out of it
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
“In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: ‘Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility.'”
Hiram Maxim
I wonder if something similar happened with openAI.
wooki@lemmynsfw.com 5 months ago
I wouldnt be too worried they’ve just made an over glorified word predictor
pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.world 5 months ago
AKA the perfect propaganda tool to fuck up elections and make countries collapse into civil war and fascism. Like ours.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Chatgpt would be a terrible propaganda tool. Also why do you need a better one? The existing ones work pretty well. Fox/Sky News and the internet troll army out of Russia.
wooki@lemmynsfw.com 5 months ago
Propaganda isn’t new. Sure it’s more widely available now but it’s not new
pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.world 5 months ago
And that totally justifies having a robot that does it so efficiently it allows people to deepfake shit that’s hard to invalidate, robbing people of their ability to discern what is reality and what is not
rabiddolphin@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Dave@lemmy.nz 5 months ago
I mean, there was all that drama where the board formed to prevent this from happening kicked out the CEO trying to do this stuff, then the board got booted out and replaced with a new board and brought back that CEO guy. So this was pretty much going to happen.
hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
And some people pointed it out even back then. There were signs that the employees were very loyal to Altmann, but Altmann didn’t meet the security concerns of the board. So stuff like this was just a matter of time.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 5 months ago
People pointed this out as a point in Altmann’s favor, too. “All the employees support him and want him back, he can’t be a bad guy!”
Well, ya know what, I’m usually the last person to ever talk shit about the workers, but in this case, I feel like this isn’t a good thing. I sincerely doubt the employees of that company that backed Altmann had taken any of the ethics of the tool they’re creating into account. They’re all career minded, they helped develop a tool that is going to make them a lot of money, and I guarantee the culture around that place is futurist as fuck. Altmann’s removal put their future at risk. Of course they wanted him back.
And frankly I don’t think you can spend years of your life building something like ChatGBT without having drunk the Koolaid yourself.
The truth is OpenAI, as a body, set out to make a deeply destructive tool, and the incentives are far, far too strong and numerous. Capitalism is corrosive to ethics; it has to be in enforced by a neutral regulatory body.
SuckMyWang@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The engineers are likely seeing this from an arms race point of view. Possibly something like the development of an a-bomb where it’s a race against nations and these people at the leading edge can see things we cannot. While money and capitalistic factors are at play, foreseeing your own possible destruction or demise by not being ahead of the game compared to china may be a motivating factor too.
Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Effective altruism is just capitalism camoflauge, it’s also just really bad at being camoflauge
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 5 months ago
helps you get a lot of community support and publicity during startup and then you don’t have to give a damn about them once you take off
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Effective altruism could work if the calculation of “amount of good” an action creates wasn’t performed by the person performing that action.
E.g. I feel I’m doing a lot of good buying this $30m penthouse in the Bahamas.
littlebluespark@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You had two chances to spell camouflage correctly and you missed twice? I mean. Points for consistency, at least? 🤪
Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
I can’t spell, don’t blame me for relying on an ordinarily quite useful tool.
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afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Did they kick the CEO out for doing this or was it because of something else?
Dave@lemmy.nz 5 months ago
This summary article says the board stated:
The article also says:
As far as I know the exact issue was not made public, but basically the board is there to make sure the company puts ethics over profits. Altman was hiding stuff from the board (presumably because they would consider it in conflict with their goal), and so the board fired him. But then there was an uproar from the investors, Microsoft almost ended up hiring half the company as they threatened to resign in droves, and in the end the board resigned and was replaced.
Does that answer the question?
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 5 months ago