[HN Gopher] What OpenAI really wants
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What OpenAI really wants
 
Author : skilled
Score  : 65 points
Date   : 2023-09-05 11:39 UTC (1 days ago)
 
web link (www.wired.com)
w3m dump (www.wired.com)
 
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20230906183334/https://www.wired....
 
  | [deleted]
 
| ACV001 wrote:
| Please remind me what exactly is "Open" in this enterprise?
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | boredemployee wrote:
  | our wallets in their A(P)Is.
 
| smfugit wrote:
| "A Wealth of Information produces a Poverty of Attention" The
| real need is an efficient allocation of Attention. That has not
| been solved. And is far away from being solved if you pay
| attention to the kind of things people pay attention too today.
| 
| What is apparent is OpenAI is run by totally clueless mindlessly
| ambitious one dimensional buffoons.
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | mym1990 wrote:
  | An efficient allocation of attention would be the exact
  | opposite of the goal of basically any social media company(or
  | any attention based company). The problem of attention
  | allocation comes down to the individual deciding not to
  | participate in the never ending cycle of bite sized clips of
  | information. The companies are unlikely to make this easier for
  | you.
 
| ugjka wrote:
| > Riding with Altman, I can almost hear the ringing, ambiguous
| chord that opens "A Hard Day's Night"--introducing the future.
| Last November, when OpenAI let loose its monster hit, ChatGPT, it
| triggered a tech explosion not seen since the internet burst into
| our lives. Suddenly the Turing test was history, search engines
| were endangered species, and no college essay could ever be
| trusted. No job was safe. No scientific problem was immutable.
| 
| ChatGPT craze has wore off for me, because of constant
| hallucinations when you ask for something slightly more
| esoterical. And I can't justify paying 20$ for GPT-4 to have more
| convincing hallucinations
 
  | wafflemaker wrote:
  | Saying that ChatGPT sucks after trying only the free version is
  | like saying that pizza sucks after trying only the frozen pizza
  | because you don't want to spend $20 on a pizza in a good
  | Italian restaurant.
 
    | moonchrome wrote:
    | I think he's saying he can't justify keeping the
    | subscription.
    | 
    | I'm in the same boat - whenever I think it would be faster to
    | use chatgpt it usually ends up being a waste of time and flow
    | breaker. And it got worse over time. At some point a few
    | months ago I realized I haven't used it once in a month, so
    | why keep paying ?
    | 
    | Copilot is way more useful to me.
 
    | [deleted]
 
  | dist-epoch wrote:
  | Bing Chat, which uses GPT-4, is free.
 
    | ugjka wrote:
    | asks for edge
 
| blibble wrote:
| "It's rare that an industry raises their hand and says, 'We are
| going to be the end of humanity'--and then continues to work on
| the product with glee and alacrity."              OpenAI rejects
| this criticism.
| 
| imagine that
| 
| for humanity's sake I really hope that Altman is another
| Elizabeth Holmes
 
  | rmbyrro wrote:
  | It's because Salt Man doesn't believe it. He knows it's not the
  | end of anything, it's the start of an insanely lucrative
  | market.
  | 
  | What he really wants is to capture as much of this pie as he
  | possibly can.
  | 
  | In order to do that, he needs a monopoly or olygopoly. To
  | achieve it, he needs the state to regulate the market, I mean,
  | "to save humanity".
  | 
  | That's why he's meeting with heads of state. And preaching the
  | end of the world, so that the populace will support
  | politicians' stupid regulatory proposals, carefully curated by
  | Salt Man himself.
 
  | [deleted]
 
| kepano wrote:
| A 9,500 word article about what OpenAI and Sam Altman want
| without mentioning Worldcoin/UBI is quite a feat... especially
| since it seems to be a major part of the end state he's aiming
| for. See the description in Sam's blog post "Moore's Law for
| Everything"[1] (cf. "dividend")
| 
| The dichotomy of aggressively pursuing "AGI" while simultaneously
| warning that it is an "extinction-level threat" is bait for
| regulators who might think centralized AI + a CBDC-delivered UBI
| is the right path forward.
| 
| [1]: https://moores.samaltman.com
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | cushpush wrote:
  | "Here's something incredibly dangerous in the left hand, and
  | here, something equally potentially catastrophic in the right
  | hand." And regulators will, clap hands? Oh boy.
 
| skilled wrote:
| https://archive.ph/E1A1j
 
| monkeydust wrote:
| Parking what you might think of OpenAI There is something to be
| said about an organisation that is so mission focussed as them,
| yes many firms will claim to be but seems this is so deeply
| engrained in their people as well as their contracts!
 
| swyx wrote:
| i highlighted this last night which seems to be making the rounds
| - https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1699369076529971545
| 
| Alec's CV (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alecradford/) seems to be:
| 
| - 2011-2016 BSc Eng from Olin College
| 
| - 2013+ started a data/AI consultancy as a sophomore that turned
| into a vague startup/product?
| 
| - 2015 first paper on GANs coauthored with soumith
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06434.pdf%C3
| 
| - 2016 first GAN paper under openai email
| https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2016/file/8...
| 
| - 2017 the generative reviews paper mentioend in the Wired
| article, with Ilya https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01444.pdf
| 
| - 2017 coauthor on PPO paper (precursor to instructgpt/rlhf)
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.06347.pdf).
| 
| - 2018 lead author on GPT1
| https://www.mikecaptain.com/resources/pdf/GPT-1.pdf
| 
| - 2019 lead author on GPT2 https://insightcivic.s3.us-
| east-1.amazonaws.com/language-mod... blog
| https://openai.com/research/better-language-models
| 
| - 2019 coauthor on RLHF https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593.pdf)
| 
| - 2020 coauthor on gpt3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
| 
| - 2020 coauthor on scaling laws
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361.pdf%E4%B8%AD%E5%BE%97%E5%88...
| 
| - 2021 coauthor on DallE
| http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/ramesh21a/ramesh21a.pdf
| 
| - 2021 coauthor on Codex
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf?trk=public_post_comment...
| 
| - 2023 lead author on Whisper
| https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/radford23a/radford23a.pdf
| 
| name a more successful 7 year CS career post undergrad...
| 
| Update: FYI openai just announced a "developer day" in Nov -
| somehow not blessed by the HN gods
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408234
 
  | Der_Einzige wrote:
  | I had an opportunity to interview with Indico and some of the
  | people around Alex (i.e. Slater). Still not sure if not
  | pursuing that further was a mistake or not.
 
  | mustafa_pasi wrote:
  | They all have crazy CVs. If you're really talented in the US
  | you can get very far on talent alone. If he was in Germany he's
  | be a Ph.d or Postdoc toiling in some outdated research field
  | that nobody cares about.
  | 
  | The CTO has an even crazier CV. Born in the poorest European
  | country, BSc at Dartmond (is that considered a good uni? idk),
  | internship at GS, a stint at Tesla, couple of startups and hits
  | gold with OpenAi. A BSc in mechanical engineering wouldn't even
  | get you a job in Germany.
 
    | sdeframond wrote:
    | > If you're really talented in the US you can get very far on
    | talent alone
    | 
    | While this seems true, I wonder how much selection bias is
    | involved here. I mean, we wouldn't know about talented people
    | that kept failing, right?
    | 
    | Edit: since they failed, they must be dumb, right? No matter
    | how many PhDs they have. (I am being sarcastic, ofc)
 
    | borroka wrote:
    | As somebody who grew up in Europe and moved to the US for a
    | postdoc and then started working in tech and never left, the
    | main difference is the lack of venture capital ecosystem in
    | Europe. Why there is no VC ecosystem is a topic for another
    | day. You can have a brilliant idea, but with debt financing,
    | start-ups are not an inviting business for banks, whether the
    | founders have the "right" credentials or not.
 
    | swyx wrote:
    | maybe Europe needs to lighten up a little on the
    | credentialism. (i am not at all saying this is exclusive to
    | europe tho)
 
      | mustafa_pasi wrote:
      | Definitely, but it is not our only problem. We don't get
      | those lucrative internships and neither do we get the
      | boatloads of startup capital.
      | 
      | It's all caused by the same risk averse mentality, though.
 
        | nxm wrote:
        | Most importantly, it's bankruptcy laws in the US that
        | encourage and reward risk taking which push technology
        | forward. Last I've heard Europe is trying to update its
        | laws for this exact reason
 
        | cushpush wrote:
        | The "risk averse" mentality is insightful to me,
        | attempting to comprehend what cultural differences my
        | (European issue) parents engage the world with
 
        | mustafa_pasi wrote:
        | Oh, it's definitely one of the most distinctive
        | difference between US and Europe. Of course it is not all
        | the same. Germans are on the more conservative side,
        | while the Dutch are known to be more entrepreneurial. But
        | overall none is on the same level as you Americans.
 
        | troupo wrote:
        | It's caused by "a business that loses billions of dollars
        | a year for over a decade isn't a sustainable business"
        | mentality. The US is the exact opposite.
        | 
        | Even OpenAI, however amazing it is, is not a business
        | (yet?). It's a money sink.
 
        | cushpush wrote:
        | "Loss-leader" is the term, I believe
 
        | calderwoodra wrote:
        | Can you point to an example of a country that had/has a
        | similar mentality to the US and it backfired?
 
      | nashashmi wrote:
      | This is true. But this is also what happens when there is
      | too much money at play, and not enough of a try-and-fail
      | approach.
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | api wrote:
  | I am very happy to see an actual researcher and innovator get a
  | significant piece of the proceeds from their work. This used to
  | be a fairly rare event. The fact that it's becoming more common
  | is a sign of progress.
 
    | mustafa_pasi wrote:
    | Definitely. It is why I like to say that when it comes to the
    | upper two quarters of income/wealth, there is way way way
    | more upwards economic mobility in the US than in Europe.
    | 
    | Here in Germany it is very easy to go from broke to middle
    | class if you are talented. But going from talented to rich is
    | impossible. There is no access to capital so people fight
    | over the few good paying corporate positions and even there
    | you mostly get the position through nepotism.
 
| calibas wrote:
| Let's not romanticize business too much, they want money.
 
  | rmbyrro wrote:
  | They want monopoly. Or, worse case, olygopoly. Which leads to
  | an unrivaled, long-term money making machine and power.
 
    | tough wrote:
    | moneypoly
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | mkii wrote:
  | OpenAI is technically a non-profit :-)
 
  | mmanciop wrote:
  | The just want tons of moneys
 
  | JamesBarney wrote:
  | The Open AI corporation is owned by a non-profit.
 
    | trwaw wrote:
    | Open Ai is a cash grab that's shitting on everything the open
    | source movement used to stand for. They have single handedly
    | done more damage to the open source ecosystem in 4 years than
    | Microsoft did in 40.
 
      | samvher wrote:
      | Can you say more? It sounds like you're referring to more
      | than just the contamination of the word "open".
 
    | stonogo wrote:
    | Irrelevant. The non-profit is controlled by the same people,
    | and only existed to class their massive startup capital as
    | 'donations.'
 
| kaycebasques wrote:
| > "In order to take advantage of the transformer, you needed to
| scale it up," says Adam D'Angelo, the CEO of Quora, who sits on
| OpenAI's board of directors.
| 
| Ah, OK. So Quora is probably an input data source for OpenAI.
| Hadn't seen that connection before.
| 
| Edit, yes, they explicitly say it a little further down:
| 
| > To build it, they drew on a collection of 7,000 unpublished
| books, many in the genres of romance, fantasy, and adventure, and
| refined it on Quora questions and answers, as well as thousands
| of passages taken from middle school and high school exams.
 
| reducesuffering wrote:
| In this thread, people accuse Sam Altman of pursuing purely
| financial gain while he holds no equity in OpenAI.
 
  | mym1990 wrote:
  | As if equity is the only possible way to get rich. Sam has
  | plenty of money, his next goal is likely an indirect
  | accumulation of power, for better or for worse.
 
| beardedwizard wrote:
| They want us to believe the hype, all of it. So much fawning in
| this article I had to stop reading.
 
  | kaycebasques wrote:
  | Pretty tough to read, yes. A Beatles comparison, seriously?
  | Nonetheless, quite a few interesting nuggets of data in
  | there...
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | mangecoeur wrote:
  | I was waiting for the part where the journalist gave sam a bj
 
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| > The air crackles with an almost Beatlemaniac energy as the star
| and his entourage tumble into a waiting Mercedes van. They've
| just ducked out of one event and are headed to another, then
| another, where a frenzied mob awaits. As they careen through the
| streets of London--the short hop from Holborn to Bloomsbury--it's
| as if they're surfing one of civilization's before-and-after
| moments. The history-making force personified inside this car has
| captured the attention of the world. Everyone wants a piece of
| it, from the students who've waited in line to the prime
| minister.
| 
| A lot of words for saying absolutely nothing regarding the topic.
| And the article goes on like this. Thanks for nothing.
 
  | dang wrote:
  | " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
  | people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
  | 
  | " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article
  | or post to complain about in the thread. Find something
  | interesting to respond to instead._"
  | 
  | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
 
    | Ylpertnodi wrote:
    | I found the quote and the comment interesting. All through
    | the article I was wondering "is this dreadful, or just me?"
    | Purple prose at it's very finest, and well worthy of top
    | billing in Pseuds Corner in the magazine Private Eye.
 
  | echelon wrote:
  | I also dislike this writing style in most of the places it gets
  | employed.
  | 
  | Unless you're writing an engaging essay about adventurers
  | climbing Everest, the plight of local doctors in war-torn
  | countries, etc., I don't need effervescent language. It's
  | distracting and hinders communication.
  | 
  | Keep the article factual and succinct. No fancy picture needs
  | to be painted.
  | 
  | I'm trying to quickly analyze and synthesize into my world
  | view. Not soak in it.
 
| noud wrote:
| > What OpenAI really wants
| 
| 1. Get lots of users; 2. monetize everything; 3. go public; 4.
| sell all shares and get super rich?
 
  | mustafa_pasi wrote:
  | That's if they are not ambitious. Might also be trying to
  | become the new Google, or at least put the O in MANFANGO.
 
    | stavros wrote:
    | Jesus, can we find a phrase like "tech giants", rather than
    | changing the acronym according to the stock market?
 
      | zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
      | Reminds me of 2SLGBTQ+
 
      | bob1029 wrote:
      | I typically use "F100" or "F500" to refer to the space of
      | all large corporations. This feels to me like a happy blend
      | between explicit naming and including everyone with an LLC.
 
        | stavros wrote:
        | I think the difference there is that FAANG+ refers
        | explicitly to tech companies, rather than things like
        | Exxon or whatnot.
 
    | paulddraper wrote:
    | Lol I did always wonder how Netflix qualified for FAANG but
    | little ol' Microsoft didn't.
 
      | jedberg wrote:
      | FAANG was coined by Jim Cramer, a stock pundit. It was the
      | five biggest tech earners that year. Microsoft was flat
      | which is why it wasn't there, while Netflix was the single
      | biggest gainer in the S&P500 that year.
      | 
      | It has nothing to do with tech, salary, talent, or anything
      | like it. It's purely based on stock growth in 2012/2013.
 
        | paulddraper wrote:
        | How the turn tables
 
      | anurag6892 wrote:
      | higher comp at Netflix
 
    | isanjay wrote:
    | FANMANGO. has mango
 
  | jstummbillig wrote:
  | It's fairly striking how okay it is to simply paint someone
  | with power in any corner you please. You can basically make any
  | claim you want, and be just fine with it, societally.
  | 
  | I also notice, how the effortlessness with which it is done
  | increasingly provides a solid estimate for how lame the
  | painters are.
 
    | stonogo wrote:
    | That's a very florid unsubstantiated ad-hominem. You could at
    | least attempt to refute the actual claim being made. Several
    | of OpenAI's "founding donors" feel burned by the taking-it-
    | private shenanigans, so it's not exactly an outlandish take.
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | [deleted]
 
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