If OpenAI remained a full nonprofit looking to build an "OPEN" AI for the benefit of all humanity (not only the US or a few shareholders), I would have been happy to share my code, my work, and even label their data... This said, I don't blame them. It's a difficult mission to remain a nonprofit and, at the same time, have the required capital investment to build AGI.
I'm not criticizing them, but I hope this race towards the first-best result or AGI doesn't blind them to making good decisions such as not using their users' data without consent.
Imagine what a genuinely openness-focused organization of this sort could be. Even if we imagined a commercial half, we could imagine a foundation with mass-membership, perhaps with a membership fee equal to 1/2 the typical personal subscription and functioning to set the direction, elect the board, etc., and then a commercial half which might be rough, tricky, deceptive, making deals with anybody.
I think I'd have been fine with the commercial half being a bit of a monster, as long as I'm part of the members and we decide what sort of board it gets and there's a clear "this is basically controlled by the public" and if I were part of a club of this sort, I would, like you absolutely fill up a directory with texts and computer programs and careful annotations to aid training.
and they could have had it. It could have been easy to make an organization like this. I think you still can. An international AI club, the members vote on what sort of training material may be supplied and for what intents, create some committees to review quality, and then everyone starts making their little games and RL environments and annotated stories and programs that ordinary LLMs misunderstand, and then they get together and fine-tune something, and if that works well they then get some staff and better training infrastructure and end up with a commercial half.
Both you and the parent comment give Sam Altman a lot of undue credit. He was given funding specifically because his sociopathic tendencies were considered useful for the job. It was only after he had connections through YC that he started fearmongering around AI. The "AGI" concept as he describes it is part and parcel with this deceptive marketing that he does.
How can any of us act surprised, now that OpenAI has gone mask-off? Sam made those Worldcoin orbs. He's Paul Graham's cannibal king. You have been warned at every stop along this road, and yet we still take him seriously when he says empty platitudes to placate investors. AGI is like "China's Final Warning", a plain lie that only teases a potential innovation but never precedes it.
Ah, I didn't intend to imply anything of that sort.
It's just that I, having never seen what that would actually be like, imagine that I'd be fine with a genuinely democratic mass-organization for LLM development which has a cutthroat, even OpenAI-level cutthroat commercial arm.
It's funny that this is missing the negative effects or the possibility of an economic crisis scenario. Many data centers are being built by companies that won't exist in a few years, as the winner will take all. This is why XAI is already renting compute to Anthropic. This goes as well without saying that in few years, compute pricing will drop heavily.
Another effect is increased inequality in the US and other Western countries as software/AI/hardware companies are able to do more with less.
The increase in manual labor wages is not systemic. It affects only the labor used to build data centers.
That sounds like a marvelous scenario for economic growth, because we will have tons of capacity to deploy ai models everywhere.
The bad scenario is compute efficiently not increasing much, and hardware prices staying high, while AI is too expensive for most tasks, and 50% of all investments in the economy over the last X years have gone into AI.
The person stated “ Many data centers are being built by companies that won't exist in a few years, as the winner will take all.” The person stated this as a negative.
If those built data-centers are sold to other companies what is the negative? The gains you mention would happen even if those other companies stay in business.
I believe it is probably a combination of several factors:
- Social media and doomscrolling without sufficient parental controls: Several OECD countries are already addressing this by introducing or considering restrictions on teenagers’ access to social media.
- App UX/UI: Many apps are designed to compete for our attention, which can gradually reduce our ability to sustain focus.
- LLMs: The impact of AI is more recent and still needs to be properly assessed. However, LLMs could significantly affect attention and critical thinking for both adults and children, especially as we increasingly delegate parts of our thinking to AI models.
- Changes in the education system: In France, for example, mathematics was removed as a mandatory subject for some high-school tracks for a period of time. In my view, that was a major mistake.
- COVID-19: Many students experienced significant gaps in their education during the pandemic, with the effects often being more pronounced among students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
>- Social media and doomscrolling without sufficient parental controls: Several OECD countries are already addressing this by introducing or considering restrictions on teenagers’ access to social media.
Surely this time banning things will improve test scores!
Even before you get to the scores in the report, it shows what percentage of students come from schools that have banned phones. There doesn't seem to be any obvious correlation where banning phones from school gives better results. Eg Estonia averaged 520 points with 26% of students from schools that ban phones. 88.9% of students were in NZ schools where cellphones are banned, but NZ averaged 511 points.
I think before we start banning more "random" things we should consider whether these bans actually produce results. Let the countries that are making these changes run their banning experiment and the rest of us should wait and see whether their scores meaningfully improve afterwards.
>Score results aren’t alone sufficient proof about whether a ban on phones in school is successful or not.
If the scores aren't increasing as a result of it, then why are we doing it? We're clearly not asking for legitimate input from the people who are actually impacted by these policies (students).
Also, everything "enables" bullying. Bullying is not a problem that's caused by things. It won't go away when you take the things away.
I firmly believed OpenAI would take back the lead. It's healthy to have competition with Anthropic and, hopefully, other LLM providers. I'm excited to test their model. Their attitude towards developers/builders has been nice and appreciated for the last couple of months.
I find that when someone comes from an attitude of abuse and hostility towards it users, then later without taking responsibility and owning its original actions says “we changed were being nice now” that it isn’t really a change but a farce to continue to trick you. I used to be more gullible and naive and fall for these tricks, but not anymore.
You change when you take ownership of your past mistakes and share with those you harmed how you have done that. With some reparation and restoration of past harms. I haven’t seen openAI do that.
We will have more bugs. Even the best models with the best software engineers will produce bugs. There are two reasons : first the pressure to produce more and second LLMs will always produce slop
What are your arguments then ? What are your thoughts ? I use fable everyday and it is always coming up with changes on thousands of files for simple things, overall the code does the job but there is always marginal slop or unnecessary code to be addressed.
To be more concrete, the last two examples were that Fable added every time a function called utcnow in newly added Python modules, and it always ended up adding constants. I'm saying it takes a lot of effort to make sure Fable or other frontier models don't produce such marginal slop and to keep things concise.
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