I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken(theatlantic.com) |
I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken(theatlantic.com) |
Mr Robinson if you are reading this – if you are truly concerned about AI safety share proof of donation of 100% of your OpenAI earnings and equity towards undoing the damage you have done to society during your time there.
In the absence of that this is simply a career pivot into being an AI "influencer" and raising money for a new scam.
Would I respect a martyr who sacrificed their financial security to do this more? Of course. But it's important to applaud people speaking out on important topics
They are not the same thing, and it’s unhelpful to assume they have no ethics.
>After three and a half years at OpenAI,
Yes, it is easier to have a moral compass when you don’t have to worry about you and your children starving. But that doesn’t imply that moral compass is wrong or broken.
If it wasn’t clear, the coup should have solidified it.
Yet he stayed for 3 more years and vested his stock and improved the company and then spoke out.
I believe that is why most of the comments here are mocking him.
The other issue is that the narrative about safety within these companies is largely a function of the extreme financial incentive.
As an example, Anthropic was an "ai safety" company that has now produced an AI that fails to listen to basic instructions. If you were concerned about safety, would you produce an AI that was unable to follow instructions? You ask a question, it begins executing commands and doing things.
Safety is product to sell to politicians, not consumers.
Not serious.
> Easy to suddenly find a moral compass when you, your kids and their kids never have to worry about working for money again.
If someone is in this situation, you can safely ignore their hand-wringing about “safety.”
Highly suspect trends that can only make one believe it's marketing.
I mean you can be truly concerned and also think donating to AI safety doesnt work, or maybe just be a bit selfish. That doesnt make the concern less real. Its easy to read these articles as the author taking the moral high ground and writing it as some sort of way of proving to themselves theyre a good person, but isnt it just as likely that they think providing an inside perspective can do good by convincing people openAI is a bad actor? I think most of these AI insider accounts largely agree with you that theyre not the most upstanding citizens, does that mean we should write them off?
I do think this carries some weight from this particular author due to the length of his tenure. I happen to agree with him in spirit, but this is still largely a post revolving around sentiment not substance. Does anyone think that the overriding incentives even leave room for something like this in practice?
I sense that these are people who have already eaten the cake and want to somehow absolve themselves of it.
People who were part of the sausage factory, on gaining financial independence, feeling suddenly liberated to talk about how the sausage was made, seem like exactly the people who would be most able to speak to institutional problems.
This doesn't seem like an argument to discount their views?
> Two changes are urgently needed. First: AI companies need to rely more on the safety expertise that already exists in other fields. And second, before we create systems significantly more capable than the ones we have today, we need new science to ensure that more capable models (and their successors) will make safe choices when we aren’t looking.
He mentions farther down about learning from aerospace engineers and nuclear engineers about safety. Those industries are heavily regulated, so perhaps regulation above a certain capability level is needed. Defining what that level is might be tough, though.
The second point is harder: in the field of AI, practice has extended far beyond theory, so his call for new science is going to be fundamentally tough, because we can't effectively coordinate a global slowdown in AI development so we can let theory catch up. This means, like so many other industries, the safety lessons will be written in blood.
Yeah so that's never going to happen
What are the concerns of individuals in comparison to the overall progress of humanity?
Always overlooked counterpoint: what point is the progress of humanity if it doesn't take into account the concerns of the individuals?
This pattern is playing out with increasing frequency.
Last I checked it was still within the laws of physics to run air-gapped systems, and to ensure it is physically impossible for a model to “escape” or gain access to information it shouldn’t have. Maybe this safety guy should have been worried about that and not humble-bragging about writing 12 reports.
Yay humanity's future...
Even though it’s in model producer’s interest that these models do what you don’t want them to do - they want to engineer the model’s to behave in the interests of theirs.
I can’t believe people can’t see it lmao.
This is not the case with SaaS services.
With LLMs, at least in the cases of internal/test models doing things they shouldn’t, the people “pulling the trigger” are the board and CEO.
Reading posts on here is slowly becoming akin to brain rot.
I don't think this takes seriously enough the possibility that said CEO doesn't think the failure mode is likely and ignores it. Plenty of people are willing to take risks of the flavor "heads you win, tails everyone loses".
And if we can't solve it for an AGI, what are we going to do with an ASI?
AI is a force multiplier for intelligence. Even if "aligned", aligned with whom or what?
Whom are you comfortable with, lording as some sort of demi-god over you?
AI doesn't tell you what goals you want it to achieve. Allowing people to destroy human society with it is obviously not a good idea.
The case will be lot more complicated if someone uses Kimi to hack into a site. Should the person giving agent the command responsible or the CEO of kimi.
The reality is they have to reduce the capability to ensure security. If someone wants more? Then use the product with your identity and face scan at each session.
Trade offs mate.