Former OpenAI employee quit to avoid 'working for the Titanic of AI'(cointelegraph.com)
cointelegraph.com
Former OpenAI employee quit to avoid 'working for the Titanic of AI'
https://cointelegraph.com/news/open-ai-artificial-intelligence-safety-employee-quit-titanic
23 comments
That’s “appendix team” being their super alignment team responsible for the core of the safety efforts?
"Superalignment" is vaporware.
Appendix is a perfect description for that team.
How so? You believe AI alignment research is unimportant? Or do you mean from the perspective of the OpenAI board
Of course “AI alignment” is bunk.
Because the bet is that LLMs won't lead to AGI? We need to learn the lessons now, not later
LLMs don't even lead to sub-human intelligence. It produces text that qualifies for a number of truth-based benchmarks which we use as a statistical plinko-board to see which model's random-number-generator is tuned better. It cannot "think" because it is a bunch of text tokens being drawn from a heuristic hat. You can map a Markov Chain or a cat on a typewriter to these tests; they're not a measure of human intelligence at all.
There aren't lessons to learn, besides the fact that we're wasting our time. The only risk around AGI is that people will trust it as much as they trust current AI, and then risk their own annihilation when they casually accept a blatantly hallucinated answer. It's like if HAL-9000 came preinstalled with Alzheimer's, and we're still adamant that we can trust him to operate the airlock. It's time to get real and admit that any risk imposed by AGI (or regular AI, for that matter) is a failure in implementation. The concept of alignment is a bald-faced marketing ploy intent on selling "AI safety" to people that don't know what AI even is.
There aren't lessons to learn, besides the fact that we're wasting our time. The only risk around AGI is that people will trust it as much as they trust current AI, and then risk their own annihilation when they casually accept a blatantly hallucinated answer. It's like if HAL-9000 came preinstalled with Alzheimer's, and we're still adamant that we can trust him to operate the airlock. It's time to get real and admit that any risk imposed by AGI (or regular AI, for that matter) is a failure in implementation. The concept of alignment is a bald-faced marketing ploy intent on selling "AI safety" to people that don't know what AI even is.
I think there are two things being discussed here:
1) alignment as portrayed by OpenAI along with the perception of intelligence from the current SoTA LLMs
2) alignment as a field of study to prevent catastrophe
I'm speaking about the latter and I don't think labeling alignment as a total facade is conducive to starting well on the path of developing guiderails for AGI. Thank the universe that it seems LLMs cannot scale to emergent intellect, because that lets us do a dry run. In my opinion, we're currently tanking the current go-around as legislation is ever farther behind while we watch an absolute arms race between nations and corporations.
1) alignment as portrayed by OpenAI along with the perception of intelligence from the current SoTA LLMs
2) alignment as a field of study to prevent catastrophe
I'm speaking about the latter and I don't think labeling alignment as a total facade is conducive to starting well on the path of developing guiderails for AGI. Thank the universe that it seems LLMs cannot scale to emergent intellect, because that lets us do a dry run. In my opinion, we're currently tanking the current go-around as legislation is ever farther behind while we watch an absolute arms race between nations and corporations.
Obviously LLMs won’t lead to AGI, but in the nooks and crannies of ridiculously pointless academic thought, you can fit multiple lifetimes worth of careers, while never achieving anything of note (unless that’s the goal - and that’s valid!).
Splash a dash of paint on the same moral and ethical questions debated ad-nauseam for very little money, sprinkle lies about how dangerous and advanced a de rigueur technique (LLM) which masquerades as a whole field (artificial intelligence) is, and by golly some silly Silicon Valley pump and dump will give you an office to pontificate in.
Splash a dash of paint on the same moral and ethical questions debated ad-nauseam for very little money, sprinkle lies about how dangerous and advanced a de rigueur technique (LLM) which masquerades as a whole field (artificial intelligence) is, and by golly some silly Silicon Valley pump and dump will give you an office to pontificate in.
The iceberg is definitely return on investment. OpenAI will eventually hit a peak that is not AGI and it’s shareholders will revolt.
Probably exhaustion of human created data. The plateau is coming and much smarter techniques will be needed to go beyond it.
Maybe it will be like tesla and FSD.
The promises will be enough to get to usable AI as a helpful tool which makes money, without the perfectionism of something impossible.
In my analogy, personally I don't care about FSD, what you get is helpful. Dangerous is as overblown as EV fires. (think of human drivers and gasoline fires)
The promises will be enough to get to usable AI as a helpful tool which makes money, without the perfectionism of something impossible.
In my analogy, personally I don't care about FSD, what you get is helpful. Dangerous is as overblown as EV fires. (think of human drivers and gasoline fires)
I don't think there'll be AGI (which is in itself a term that means different things to different people) anytime soon, if ever.
That doesn't detract from the utility of what is there already. I'm currently using it quite a lot as a "tutor" (of sorts) as I deep-dive into an area I have limited experience with. Like all tutors it gets some things wrong (which in turn reflects human misunderstandings). It is sufficiently good though at directing the flow, which in turn gives me Google terms to search.
I say this not as a rabid AI fan, I've come to it reluctantly, but its proving useful.
So I don't think shareholders will revolt (which means what? That the share price will drop?) - I think they'll just continue to provide (improved) utility and their user base will grow. This isn't like fusion where there's a binary measure of success.
Of course, like any business, there will be challenges along the way. Some survive those (Apple, MS, Google etc), some don't (Sun, DEC, Amiga). Predicting which ones succeed and which ones fail is hard. And seldom correlated to culture.
The article is fluff because it makes no conclusion, adds no data, is just a single ex-employees opinion. Meh.
That doesn't detract from the utility of what is there already. I'm currently using it quite a lot as a "tutor" (of sorts) as I deep-dive into an area I have limited experience with. Like all tutors it gets some things wrong (which in turn reflects human misunderstandings). It is sufficiently good though at directing the flow, which in turn gives me Google terms to search.
I say this not as a rabid AI fan, I've come to it reluctantly, but its proving useful.
So I don't think shareholders will revolt (which means what? That the share price will drop?) - I think they'll just continue to provide (improved) utility and their user base will grow. This isn't like fusion where there's a binary measure of success.
Of course, like any business, there will be challenges along the way. Some survive those (Apple, MS, Google etc), some don't (Sun, DEC, Amiga). Predicting which ones succeed and which ones fail is hard. And seldom correlated to culture.
The article is fluff because it makes no conclusion, adds no data, is just a single ex-employees opinion. Meh.
it is useful, i do not understand people hating on it calling it useless. I have used it countless times for various things from work to things around the house.
It is not useless and no one is saying that it is.
What we are saying is that GenAI will never be able to go beyond code helper or assistant and the people hyping these tools continually promise AGI or something that can solve complex problems.
The ROI is just not there and eventually there will be a margin call.
What we are saying is that GenAI will never be able to go beyond code helper or assistant and the people hyping these tools continually promise AGI or something that can solve complex problems.
The ROI is just not there and eventually there will be a margin call.
Since it is useful without AGI, and since that means it can be monetized, I don't believe the "shareholders will revolt" (which was the original assertion.)
There us plenty of value yo be unlocked well short of AGI.
Are investors excited? Yes. Is that excitement being fueled by hype? yes. Will excitement cool eventually? Sure. Will some investors, investing in the wrong thing, lose money? Sure.
But "revolt" (whatever that means) - no, IMO not.
There us plenty of value yo be unlocked well short of AGI.
Are investors excited? Yes. Is that excitement being fueled by hype? yes. Will excitement cool eventually? Sure. Will some investors, investing in the wrong thing, lose money? Sure.
But "revolt" (whatever that means) - no, IMO not.
The actual podcast and interview is here https://youtu.be/dzQlRt3y5mU?si=qfS0DlPVcjBn-0zd
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tiredofdiz(1)
One single person, from an appendix team, quit and speaks up about being unhappy with the direction of the company.
This happens all the time everywhere. The only mild relevance is that it's about today's Hot Topic company.