Posted by adrianhon 1 day ago
Isn't this really what everything is about? A pure research non-profit transitioned to a revenue generating enterprise because it had to, and a lot of people don't like that. Does that make it evil?
It's romantic to think that the magic of science and research can stand on its own, but even Ilya has admitted more recently that SSI needs to ship something consumer facing.
Anthropic, the lab that put all of its social capital in the safetyism basket, is having the exact same realization, with Claude Code being a mess of technically reckless vibe coded slop that nevertheless is the cash cow for the company.
Maybe it's time for everyone to realize that for an innovation this big to come to bear, it either needs to be state funded, or privately funded, the latter requiring revenue and a plausible vision of generating ROI.
Literally, the only hope for humanity is that large language models prove to be a dead-end in ASI research.
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1: “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.” — I guess now I know of two people with these traits.
I am fairly confident when I say this -- sama is a sociopath. I don't know how anyone with solid intuition could even come to any other conclusion than the guy is deeply weird and off-putting.
Some concepts from the book:
> Core trait: The defining characteristic is the absence of conscience, meaning they feel no guilt, shame, or remorse.
> Identification: Sociopaths can be charming and appear normal, but they often lie, cheat, and manipulate to get what they want.
> The Rule of Threes: One lie is a mistake, two is a concern, but three lies or broken promises is a pattern of a liar.
> Trust your instincts over a person's social role (e.g., doctor, leader, parent)
Check and check.
OpenAI is too important to trust sama with. He needs to go. In fact, AI should be considered a public good, not a commodity pay-as-you-go intelligence service.
We only say a lot of CEOs are sociopaths because they're in that third category we haven't named, where they're very good at manipulating people, but also can feel conscience, guilt, remorse, etc, perhaps just muted or easier to justify against.
E.g. if you think you're doing something for the betterment of mankind, it doesn't really matter if you lie to some board members some year during the multi-decade pursuit.
Whereas the people in the category I’m describing might feel those things, but prioritize those feelings far below the benefits of achieving what they set out to achieve.
Yes that is the core trait I highlighted in the 1st bullet.
There is -- I call it "corpo sociopath." The corpo sociopath really comes out in the workplace, less so in personal life.
> OpenAI is too important to trust sama with.
...wat? They made a chat bot. How can that possibly be so existentially important? The concept of "importance" (and its cousin "danger") has no place in the realistic assessment of what OpenAI has accomplished. They haven't built anything dangerous, there is no "AI safety" problem, and nothing they've done so far is truly "important". They have built a chat bot which can do some neat tricks. Remains to be seen whether they'll improve it enough to stay solvent.
The whole "super serious what-ifs" game is just marketing.
I'm not even sure we're any closer to AGI than we were before LLMs. It's getting more funding and research, but none of the research seems very innovative. And now it's probably much more difficult to get funding for anything that's not a transformer model.
I mean this is very obviously untrue. It'd be like saying we aren't any closer to space flight after watching a demonstration of the Wright Flyer. Before 2022-2023 AI could barely write coherent paragraphs; now it can one-shot an entire letter or program or blog post (even if it's full of LLM tropes).
Just because something is overhyped doesn't mean you have to be dismissive of it.
Regardless of whether spaceflight is still 1000 or 100 or 50 years away, you are still closer than you were before you demonstrated the ability to fly.