TerrifiedMouse

I wonder how many products have components that downgrade under specific situations and they never explicitly tell the customer - and most customers don’t ask because it’s “complicated tech” they don’t want to know about it.

Why did Altman bring him onboard in the first place? What value does he provide? If there is a conflict of interest why didn’t Altman see it?

If this Quora guy is the cause of all this, Altman only has himself to blame since he is the reason the Quora guy is on the board.

The worst thing humanity can do is create a competitor for resources for itself. You do not want AI with survival instincts similar to ours. AI need to be programmed to be selfless saints or we will regret it.

> that doesn't exist and may never exist

It doesn’t exist until suddenly it does. I think there are a lot of potential issues we really should be preparing for / trying to solve.

For example, what to do about unemployment. We can’t wait until massive number of people start losing their job before we start working on what to do.

I’m not for slowing down AI research but I do think we need to restrict or slow the deployment of AI if the effects on society are problematic.

OK, most people have a price. The 3 board members and the remaining workers are outliners.

You don’t have to buy all of them, just most of them.

But they were able to get somewhere because …

> The choice they're making to leave is still their choice, made of their own volition.

Yupe. Most of OpenAI's workers chose the high SV-like salaries over the chartered mission of the organization they joined.

Money changes people. Especially when it’s a lot of money. They got used to the money and they want it to keep flowing - the charter be damned. Everyone has a price.

You compromise a few influential people in the organization to get a foot in the door and ultimately your money - which you control. Your money will do the rest.

You compromise the “few” to get a foot and your money in the door. After that, money will work its magic.

Why did you think 700 signed on? Money. Who let the money in? Altman.

Guess OpenAI that was actually open was dead the moment Altman took MS money and completely change the organization. People there got a taste of the money and the mission went out the window.

A lesson to learn I guess, just because something claims to be a nonprofit with a mission doesn’t mean it is/always will be so. All it takes is a corporation with deep pockets to compromise a few important people*, indirectly giving them a say in the organization, and things can change very quickly.

* This was what MS did to Nokia too, if I remember correctly, to get them to adopt the Windows Phone platform.

> which is why their best case scenario was them being the benevolent dictatory gatekeeping AI.

That seems like a fool's errand, even before they accepted MS's money, with Google, Facebook, and even Amazon in play.

To be an independent alternative to big corporations, I can understand. But all that went out the window with Altman, his deal with MS, and the direction he chose to take OpenAI - effectively becoming the big corporation they were suppose to fight.

Can't help but feel it was Altman that struck first. MS effectively Nokia-ed OpenAI - i.e. buyout executives within the organization and have them push the organization towards making deals with MS, giving MS a measure of control over said organization - even if not in writing, they achieve some political control.

Bought-out executives eventually join MS after their work is done or in this case, they get fired.

A variant of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Guess the OpenAI we knew, was going to die one way or another the moment they accepted MS's money.

Is their deal with Microsoft exclusive tech transfer wise? If not they can always sell/license what they have to Google, Facebook, and Amazon. They should be able to get quite a bit of money to last a while.

> It’s a bit tragic that Ilya and company achieved the exact opposite of what they intended apparently, by driving those they attempted to slow down into the arms of people with more money and less morals. Well.

If they didn’t fire him, Altman will just continue to run hog wild over their charter. In that sense they lose either way.

At least this way, OpenAI can continue to operate independently instead of being Microsoft’s zombie vassal company with their mole Altman pulling the strings.

> This could be the healing of the cancer that OpenAI brought to this field to make it closed as a whole.

I don’t know. The damage might be permanent. Everyone is probably going to be way more careful with what information they release and how they release it. Altman corrupted the entire community with his aggressive corporate push. The happy-go-lucky “look what we created” attitude of the community might be probably gone for good. Now every suit is going to be asking “can we make massive amount of money with this” or “can I spin up a hype train with this”.

And everything Google does is in its self interest or prioritizes its self interest. Altruism falls by the sidelines.

I always figured it’s because HN is run by Y Combinator, a technology startup accelerator, so inevitably many of the folks here will be more pro entrepreneurship than non-profit.

Better to have a small but independent voice that can grow in influence then being shackled by commercial interest and lose your integrity - e.g. How many people actually gives a shit what Google has to say about internet governance?

If you are hungry you go find food and eat it. If you are bored you go find something fun to do. Most of our actions, if not all, are to satisfy one need or another. Satisfying that need is the goal.

You are still goal-oriented. If you are hungry, you go look for food then consume said food if you find any. If you are bored, you look for entertainment - e.g. calling one of your friends (who isn’t a complete bore). It doesn’t have to involve complex reasoning.

> The only real virtue of LP vinyl is that it largely prohibits loudness war nonsense.

Actually the loudness war started in the 40s with vinyl.

https://www.npr.org/2009/12/31/122114058/the-loudness-wars-w...

The part about digital compression is nonsense though. That’s not now digital audio works. Not sure why the article author asked a psychology professor to explain digital signal processing.

> And at which point do people accept that this is the level at which plenty of humans operate?

I think you underestimate humans. One thing that humans (and many animals) are that LLMs aren’t, is goal-orientated.

We are capable of recognizing something we want and planning and executing a course of action to achieve it - this includes what we say; what we say is determined by our goals/objectives.

LLMs do nothing of the sort. All their output is based on their training data - i.e. the “choices” aren’t made by the LLM but by the generator of the original training data.

> isn't worth the effort of writing code to detect these non-discernible artifacts

Why wouldn’t it be worth it? You just have to write the code once and it will affect terabytes of music being compressed from that point forth.

> 1. These companies have bottom-of-the-barrel moral standards and don't care what one person on Twitter is Tweeting. This has to be political manoeuvring of some sort.

Or they just don’t want their brand associated with such posts. As kids these days say, “They don’t want no smoke”.

These companies are about making money. Getting associated with controversial stuff is bad for business.

Well at least we can damage the watermark such that it’s no longer machine readable. Since according to its marketing it’s invisible to listeners, our distortion of it should be equally invisible.

Clearly people in the non-profit part are trying to bring the organization back to its non-profit origins - after Altman effectively high jacked their agenda and corporatized the organization for his own benefit; turning its name into a meme.

> This makes no sense. People are calling what the board did a coup, but Altman is trying (failing?) to stage a coup.

I think he stage his coup long ago when he took control of OpenAI making it “CloseAI” to make himself richer by effectively selling it to Microsoft. This is the people who believe in the original charter fighting back.

> The shareholders can fire the board, but that’s not what he’s asking for.

There are no shareholders in a non-profit if I’m right. The board effectively answers to no one. It’s take it or leave it kind of deal. If you don’t believe in OpenAI’s mission as stated in their charter, don’t engage with them.

> Compression tends to discard high-frequency signals since they use the most bits.

Quite certain that’s not true. We drop everything pass 20khz simply because it’s outside the average person’s hearing range.

We drop everything under 20hz too - we also cannot hear below that.

Statistics as defined by training data.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...

Frankly, if it can be detected, it can be removed. Makes sense no?