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Comment by cabalamat | Hacker News Reader

> What was learned was object manipulation, not cube solving

Which is almost certainly a harder problem

I wonder if tech people are assuming this is super obvious (the object manipulation is the hard part; the cube solving part is just an extraneous detail since that's been solved since forever) while communicating about this project, and it just happens to be less obvious to non-tech people and therefore accidentally misleading. I could guess that non-tech people when seeing the project barely notice the robotic hand part ("robots have been in popular culture for decades, I guess this is just one of them"), figure that thinking about a Rubik's cube is a smart-person thing, and therefore it's a new smart AI thing too now. The whole case seems like a nice example of how it's necessary to think about how to present the assumptions and goals of a project.

The point is it wasn't ad hoc object manipulation + cube solving, the hand had its hand held regarding which macro-action it was supposed to take next.

The PR I've seen about it doesn't make this clear and is happy to leave the ambiguity because it means more publicity, rather than demonstrating a better understanding of editorial ethics.

As much as I'd love to give OpenAI the benefit of the doubt, I have to agree that they are purposefully being misleading to generate more interest rather than be as straight-forward as possible about their accomplishment. After the confusion over whether or not they're really "open" after taking MS investment, and what I personally consider terrible mismanagement of the GPT-2 announcement and release, I've just lost faith in the organization to be honest. They never directly lie, they always ambiguously lie, so I rarely even bother to explain to people why I don't like them and just recommend my friends look for work elsewhere.

> I've just lost faith in the organization to be honest

:( sorry to hear that.

Note that we have a publicly-available Charter which spells out how we operate: http://openai.com/charter. We all use that to guide our actions, and we have not changed a single word in it since publication. I hope that as time goes on, you'll increasingly see the consistency between our actions and the words in the Charter, we'll be able to win back your support.

FWIW, just watching you interact with your critics on here has done a lot for you to earn my respect. I hope I've been too quick to judge and that OpenAI is able to make me reconsider my stance in the future.

The part they didn't do was the trivial part. My phone has an app that solves Rubik's cubes based on photograph.

That's correct, and also not the concern.

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