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Comment by madsmith | Hacker News Reader

As much as the headline leads to satirization, I think this is a good thing. I’d much rather have someone who’s leading the forefront of a technical innovation on the board than not. At least they can participate and inform the board what is being done and what isn’t being done. What can be changed and what we don’t yet have the tools to do.

A board that has Sam Altman on it is going to be much better able to craft safety guidance for the use and misuse of AI than a board that doesn’t have access to such a domain expert.

Just, you know, don’t give him veto power.

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> A board that has Sam Altman on it is going to be much better able to craft safety guidance for the use and misuse of AI than a board that doesn’t have access to such a domain expert.

Incentives. You can't trust a man who makes billions on a this tech to make decisions in the best interest of the nation.

It's inevitable that commercial motives become a factor here. It's well known that OpenAI wants a "moat" and holding back competition with red tape for things they themselves have already managed to achieve before said red tape was introduced is a great way to make that happen.

Domain expert? Link please?

I’ve never heard Altman describe so much as a ReLU, I’ve never seen him publish code, I’ve never seen him do a company’s thats not at least two of: fired for shady shit and self dealing (YC, OpenAI), a massive loss to investors and/or acquirers (Loopt, Socialcam, countless), paid for by a massive network of people who just back who the other guy backed.

The guy is a dark-triad sociopath, this is well documented [0], and yeah, let’s get fucking Larry Summers in there to play the cool head.

Guy’s a super, super creepy scam artist who fails up because people say difficult to define stuff like “domain expert” to keep the myth going.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

In case anyone else was wondering

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dark-triad

Someone on the forefront of crypto like Sam Bankman Fried should pick the regulatory body for crypto. Ahahaha. It really is hilarious how some baseless principles get people to go to insane ends.

Mr Worldcoin?

Exactly. Why would it be bad for Altman to be on the board? Aren’t these things more about understanding the dangers? Why would OpenAI benefit from hiding the dangers of this technology?

I mean, they’d just as much get screwed as human victims right?

OpenAI’s public advocacy centers around selling a particular, highly controversial image of what the salient dangers are and are not, which (purely coincidentally) aligns with the policy advocacy of erect barriers to new and emergent competition in favor of a narrow set of large incumbents.

OpenAI has a lot to gain by selling a particular view of the dangers of this technology, orthogonal to the accuracy of that view.

But he’s just one member. So I understand if we don’t want him to be an AI czar or something. That would be problematic.

But a member of a board of experts seems reasonable.

> But a member of a board of experts

What is he an expert in?

Sales.

Conniving and duplicitous self promotion

I would wager that Altman is one of probably, say, 50 or 100 people on the planet that have an extremely intimate preview of the next couple of years of AI models (the other 50-100 people being his contemporaries in the various companies working on such things, whether they're senior engineers or "AI safety" people, or all the people that are working with this technology at its most raw and bleeding edge forms).

So I'd definitely count him as someone that has a good view of what's going on, and what's coming over the horizon.

Most of the board members are company leaders that also benefit from regulatory capture and limited competition. They probably will act identically or even just explicitly coordinate.

"You will find that one billion dollars will not deter the silicon the way it does the carbon."

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