Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost(newyorker.com) |
Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, We All Lost(newyorker.com) |
Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.
AI can invoke existential dread for writers, educators, and artists just as much as for software developers and engineers, although on perhaps a more delayed schedule.
I think public sentiment among journalists will eventually catch up with the pros and cons of AI in a nuanced way, but it's a bit harder to appreciate how impactful it already is if you're not using it to write software every day.
This is a point made by Andrej Karpathy.
If you want an analogy, look at the history of the early railroads. Full of hype, bullshitters, scammy investments, robber-barons, unrealistic promises, and with their own legion of naysayers at the time. Yet the core technology worked and it did transform the world in the end.
I remember when IP laws were looked at like a form of oppression in the tech community...
that doesn't sound nearly as bad as you think it does; I don't see how ethics are relevant here either, unless oil is also somehow a scam
regardless, one must be delusional to deny the fact that it's useful tech
"but they're evil" is not an argument
The fact that Chinese open weight models are useful does not really say anything about whether AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs.
This article is asking none of those questions. It's mostly a high school gossip column about what was said and with what tone and who used Butt pillows by The New Yorker, it reeks of desperation. If they could just find something nefarious on Sam Altman or show him in a bad light that sticks, they could fix it all and make AI go away.
My point stands, they're in for a Rude awakening.
A fair valuation of ~$5B each for Anthropic and OpenAI for the occasionally useful tools that they had created would be more reasonable.
There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. They're fighting over who gets to wield the dick that is going to screw us all.
Sam B. stole money from everyone -> thief
Sam A. did what?
And Musk wanted to do the same thing. Both agreeded, that a non profit will not make enough money to push the frontier. He is only pissed that he didn't get control of openai and he is now pissed again because he apparently should have done the lawsuite a few years back. Despite him having unlimited money and probably very good laywers
I'm not here to defend the richest of the richest, but E.H. and S.B. are complet different storries to OpenAI
And as mentioned, they agreeed that they will not get the capital openai needs, so what did the USA people loose? A company which whouldn't have been able to do what they are known for anyway.
Again i'm not protecting the rich, i just don't think there is a real scandal and its not the same as the other 2 the newyorker mentioned
*charlatan
In the 20th paragraph of the linked article, finally getting to the actual reason:
> On Monday, the jury took only two hours to reach its verdict. Musk’s complaint, the panel found, had indeed exceeded the statute of limitations
Musk is appealing. This fight is far from over.
A win in any manner isn’t landing the same for observers as winning for a just reason.
and in this scenario, i’m supposed to root for musk who tried to use the court to harm a competitor who’s winning in the marketplace against xAI?
no thanks. if you can’t compete in the marketplace, the court isn’t your backup plan. there’s nothing. positive about the weaponization of the courts.
To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?
But that is not what happened. It is neither complicated or interesting, it is just an alternative timeline sci-fi exercise. It can be fun to engage in, but it is not anything that would had anything to do with the current world as it is.
A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position. They do good and focus on doing good rather then lie to get more investments so that they can corner the market and become powerful.
Nvidia has 75% profit margins right now. That won't continue forever. It may take quite some time but it will normalize.
Of course, here on HN it's easy to find folks who get a lot out of tinkering with tiny models, but the masses don't want to tinker with toys, they want something fast with a large context and approximating at least Opus 4.6 level reliability and capability, which simply can't be squeezed into a quantized 60b model.
I believe the reports that Sam Altman is an egomaniacal liar. But I haven't been privy to any of it other than seeing him hype his company's tech in a clearly dishonest manner. That's not great.
I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon.
In a dystopian world where everything is terrible (the one we live in), I can at least take some pleasure in seeing a person I dislike have a bad time. It still makes me angry that he can just waste the time of the courts out of spite. Can't prevent it, might as well find the silver lining.
A stopped clock is right twice a day Even Elon is sometimes right.
On the other hand, I have much more reasons to hate Sam Altman, who has stolen a significant amount of money from my own pocket and from a very great number of other people around the world, by causing the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs.
Moreover, Elon Musk has some positive achievements, even if it is hard to put them in balance with his bad actions, while I see absolutely nothing good done by Sam Altman. Successfully luring fools to invest hundreds of billions in AI does not count as something good.
his name is Luigi Mangione :)
The judge was cowed by Musk's fame to even bring this to trial, I think. It's an example of how the justice system works differently for this with more wealth and power. There is no case, just massive ego from a person with massive wealth.
AI has real benefits, that are game-changing in some areas, even if AI never improve from their current capabilities.
People are claiming (whether they truly believe it or not) that AI has incredible capabilities and benefits that they don't currently have, and may never have.
There's plenty of scamming going on. The fact that AI has real game-changing capabilities just makes the scams harder to detect. People tend to like to see things as more black-and-white than they actually are, and scammers take advantage of that.
In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an agent?
Frankly, I don't particularly care much for the moral panic around capitalism. Capitalism has it's downsides for sure, but it's the system our society has chosen to motivate people, and it seems to work okay for many things. Does it matter if the AI model that solves your diagnosis, creates a life saving drug or solves an Erdös problem is made by a corporation or not? It bothers me none, progress is progress. As long as the authors of Textbooks everywhere wouldn't have otherwise invented LLMs a decade ago if they only had been given a little bit more money, then I'd say the money is going to the right place.
You can argue that it's unlikely the for-profit conservatorship of the non-profit is incompatible with that goal, but legally that becomes very much grey area.
So nothing to loose if their model wouldn't have worked anyway.
And at the current state, its better anyway that China is pushing the non-profit/humantariy aspect of open models.
I strongly disagree. Human history is full of examples of people who made good faith attempts to do good that backfired tremendously. A good faith desire to do good isn't enough: you also need to be in a domain where your beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is are reasonably trustworthy. And you need to have some way of getting feedback from reality that pushes back on you if you start crossing certain lines.
None of this proves that Altman was making a genuine good faith attempt to do good. That wasn't my point. My point was that, in a domain like AI, it doesn't matter whether the people involved have good faith intentions to do good or not, because this domain is not one where any human has reasonably trustworthy beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is. And the current AI bubble shows that it's also a domain where nobody can get feedback from reality that pushes back when they start crossing certain lines. In other words, just as the article says, it's "structurally impossible" to do good in this domain, no matter what your intentions are, at least with the humans we have now.
It is not that hard to construct a scenario wherein an alternative version of Sam Altman pushed really hard for a genuinely ethical LLM—one trained only on data that he had full unclouded rights to, either because it was public domain or because he had bought or otherwise explicitly received the rights, among other measures—and had then made that competitive in the market with the rest of the existing crop of LLMs. In a scenario like that, whether his LLM did well or not, one could clearly see that Alt-Altman, as it were, was genuinely making an effort.
The reality doesn't look anything like that. In this reality, it doesn't matter whether Altman thought he was trying to get there first because others would make it worse: he made it worse, and his actions match up very, very well with what one would expect the actions of a man who just wanted money, control, and power to be.
Even if it's true that, if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we wouldn't have had the spectacle of a supposed nonprofit trying to do "ethical" AI and then pivoting to a for-profit company, that actually might be something that was worth learning: that it's not possible to do AI as a private nonprofit with an explicit commitment not to do certain things.
Appeals are for finding legal technicalities or edge cases. They do not overturn findings of fact from a jury.
That is, it used to be that way in the US, when the courts were ruled by law. In the modern US, the Supreme Court is a partisan political body, so perhaps people are confident it will get overturned because Musk is now political enough for the Supreme Court to give Musk personal favors for all his massive political contributions.
That sort of rank corruption is the only reason to be confident that Musk could ever win this silly case.
There are 2 senses of "win" here. You're talking about the "win" (A) where it is achieving victory regardless of reason.
The second type of "win" (B) that is being called out in quotes is one based either on the merits of the law (verses a technicality) or a sense of justice.
I'm not highlight the first sense of win (A) which parent of my comment and you seem to be talking about I'm pointing out grandparent is talking about (B).
This type of rhetoric is exactly why people think it's a scam
They do seem to be good at fooling people though.
Nevermind what they can do was pure science fiction just 3 years ago?
It doesn't change the fact that LLMs are not, and never will be, AGI.
In other words, scam.
That is the point under contention.
The shape of the intelligence frontier has turned out to be much more jagged than anyone at the time expected, so I can imagine reasonable objections from someone who has a specific, concrete benchmark of AGI that wasn't invented 6 months ago and isn't yet met. If someone just has a subjective sense that they're not smart enough, I think they're wrong.