What harms, in the real world, have GPTs produced? If few or none, does that not indicate that OpenAI has done a good job at safety? If so, should that not buy the company some credibility looking forward?
It’s fashionable, for reasons I am unaware, to hate on Sam Altman and OpenAI. Seems to be mostly the doomer crowd and it’s Blake Lemoine types (boy do his claims look ridiculous only 2 years on). To my thinking the open source crew poses a greater danger.
> If few or none, does that not indicate that OpenAI has done a good job at safety?
No. It only indicates that OpenAI is less technically capable than it claims. To judge OpenAI's competence at safety, you have to look at the ethics of their behavior, since building the right ethics into an AI before it gets powerful enough to do serious harm to humans is the essence of AI safety. And the ethics of OpenAI's behavior, to put it as gently as possible, does not look good.
Um, closing access to their model code when "Open" is right there in their name and was the original promise they made?
Plenty of other posts in this discussion give other examples.
That's without even getting into all that happened with Altman leaving and then coming back, which has already been discussed to death in other HN threads.
I can see how the switch to closed source could be annoying to some, but it definitely doesn’t rise to the level of “unethical” IMO. In fact, the explanation of the rationale for the decision seems perfectly reasonable. WRT to Altman’s ousting and return, I still haven’t seen any evidence of compromised ethics on his part. It looked a lot more like clumsy doomers botching a coup. A supermajority of OpenAIs employees, people who I’d venture to guess have a far better handle on Altmans ethics than you or I, insisted on his reinstatement. That’s enough of a refutation on that point for me. What else?
> I can see how the switch to closed source could be annoying to some, but it definitely doesn’t rise to the level of “unethical” IMO.
Sure it does. Particularly for a company that claims to be a responsible steward of a technology that could pose existential risk to humans. If you can't even do a simple thing like keep your promises, how can I possibly trust you as a steward of a potential existential risk?
> WRT to Altman’s ousting and return, I still haven’t seen any evidence of compromised ethics on his part.
I commented on this in a number of previous HN threads and don't want to rehash it all here. (And btw, I also commented that I didn't think the people who ousted Altman showed very good ethics or judgment either. I didn't think anybody came out of that whole brouhaha looking good.) But just the fact that it happened at all should be a red flag. Again, these are people who claim to be stewards of a technology that they say can pose an existential risk. You'd expect them to at least be able to cooperate with each other like responsible adults.
> A supermajority of OpenAIs employees, people who I’d venture to guess have a far better handle on Altmans ethics than you or I
They might well know Altman's ethics better than we do, and be perfectly fine with them, because their own ethics are just as bad. They're getting paid well and the fact that core promises of the company were broken is simply Not Their Problem.
It's closed source but freely available to over 100 million people. To everyone but tech people, it's open.
What's more valuable for the normal person, Lllama, that I will never be able to use because I don't know how to get it to run, or ChatGPT that I can use for whatever I want?
Open AI not being open means it will be used in ways that will benefit shareholders, not humanity as they initially planned it, unless it so happens that humanity's goals are aligned with shareholders', but I've rarely seen this happen with the big four.
> Um, closing access to their model code when "Open" is right there in their name and was the original promise they made?
Tech people who don't like OpenAI have got to come up with a better line. Everytime I mention to someone normal that this is a complaint immediately eyes roll.
No one says "North Korea is bad because they call themselves a Democratic People's Republic despite having a dictator" because that is incredibly not important nor was it ever expected.
Irrelevant metaphor. On what basis has Altman/OpenAI earned the distrust of so many in the HN comments? All I seem to find are speculation about the future and what reads a lot like petty jealousy. Where is the evidence of the lions on the prowl? Surely we should insist on a gazelle corpse or at least some paw prints before declaring an emergency and going on a lion hunt.
> On what basis has Altman/OpenAI earned the distrust of so many in the HN comments? All I seem to find are speculation about the future and what reads a lot like petty jealousy.
Genuine question, do you care to know? Or are you only asking this question as a prelude to delivering insult?
When you ask why people believe X in one breath and then suggest it's because of "petty jealousy" in the next, you'll succeed at conveying your dim view of them but fail to create a conversation where it is possible for you to learn something about why people think that way.
Jealousy is a particularly slippery hypothesis because it is fully generalizable. You can explain any criticism of anybody as jealousy. It is my observation that people often accuse others of jealousy when they want to dismiss a perspective. In that way, it functions less as an explanation than as a defense mechanism; an escape hatch from the uncomfortable feeling of simultaneously disagreeing with someone and acknowledging that there perspective might not be meritless.
One big harm is that GPT4 can trivially cheat essays in most contexts. OpenAI planned to address this with a classifier (https://openai.com/index/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai...), but it didn't work and they withdrew it without offering any better ideas - so now evaluations of unmonitored writing are indefinitely and likely permanently broken for everyone.
>It’s fashionable, for reasons I am unaware, to hate on Sam Altman and OpenAI
Perhaps because he's a slimy used-car salesman who got rich doing things that are illegal for you and me (ripping off copyrighted works en masse) and he pulled a bait and switch as far as for-/non-profit is concerned.
He's everything wrong with Silicon Valley/Venture Capital/faux meritocratic culture rolled into one.
Altman was rich before OpenAI, so that claim doesn’t hold much water. It is a legitimate and open question as to what fair use constitutes when it comes to training models on copyrighted content. It will definitely be settled in the courts, if not by legislatures in the coming years. Apart from ad hominem attacks and matters about which there are legitimate differences of opinion, I return to my original question: what significant harms have OpenAIs products yielded? It is obvious that a raw LLM of GPT-4s power could do some harm in the wrong hands. Therefore, if you can’t point to real harms, it is reasonable to conclude, at the very least, that Altman/OpenAI might not be the wrong hands.
The fact that you cannot perceive the harms, or that they are not yet apparent, does not mean they do not exist.
Look at Facebook and other social media: at first we all thought it was great and then we realized it's a giant depression machine, and all it's really good for is giving young girls eating disorders.
But since we're on the topic, the immediate casualties seem to be the livelihoods of authors and artists, on whose content the LLMs were trained and who received no compensation.
And now every publisher is inundated with infinite ChatGPT-created books. We won't get into the climate impact of wasting all that compute just to create a better phishing-email generator.
It’s fashionable, for reasons I am unaware, to hate on Sam Altman and OpenAI. Seems to be mostly the doomer crowd and it’s Blake Lemoine types (boy do his claims look ridiculous only 2 years on). To my thinking the open source crew poses a greater danger.