I don't think you could find a single person working for OpenAI that couldn't find employment elsewhere within a month that pays more than enough for food and shelter. This is a ridiculous statement.
>These people are now dependent on their level of income.
Kinda sucks if you take a seven figure per annum job and are now dependent on their level of income. Quick question: Is this true for everyone? If I take a job that pays twice of what I earn now, my food spending is going to double for instance? Or is this an american thing?
I used to live on $20K/yr working a restaurant job, now in tech and six figs I'm still check to check. It's a lifestyle/personal choice thing in my case I'm dumb/waste money.
It's actually in some verticals of the American industrial/business sector a bit of a shibboleth I think. There's a certain mentality around "visible conspicuous consumption" that is a signal to those in the upper class that you're a prime candidate for leaning on. You're hungry, will do anything to stay where you are, and can be relied upon to "play ball with the big boys" in part because if you don't, and try to take them down, they know what you did to get there. Someone who doesn't participate in such is something to be wary of. Less purchase for manipulation. Possibly an indication of a lesser degree of skin in the game. An indication of different priors I guess. I've often wondered if there's a similar distrust between the nouveau riche and old money for similar reasons. Wouldn't know myself though. Haven't bumped around in quite those high circles myself.
There's a (maybe new?) focus on health in America, and it is tied directly with dollars spent for the most part. If I made $50k more a year, it would disappear down the drain on purchases like lean bison meat instead of fatty ground beef. I'd get more expensive, locally grown and better tasting vegetables. I'd get a home where I could have a cold plunge, sauna, and whatever new toys that data or rumor backs that promise to reduce brain fog, increase energy, etc. As always, America has so much diversity in what you can buy and food/health is no different.
I imagine it'd be hard to take your family from healthy meals back to rice and beans.
Or they all just get fancy cars and big houses to show off, who knows. I certainly can't be sure how my life would change with 7 figures.
There are many employers. OpenAI employees that quit on account of this will be in high demand at the other AI companies, especially the ones that don't bend over in 30 seconds when Uncle Donald comes calling.
there’s always someone in the world that will defend anything.
Like the people working at OpenAI had no other choice than to pick this cushy job (some have salaries of 500k per year), instead of anything else.
It’s an extreme personal opinion, but; all people working at OpenAI after this debacle are more than happy to make AI for war, because Food and Shelter.
I find your comment fitting this forum, it is where all this enabling started anyways.
Indeed, it is worth noting that Sam Altman got his chance through PG/YC and that YC was totally fine with both Musk and Zuckerberg giving them a platform long after it became evident that they had some screws loose in the ethics department.
Effectively the message is 'we don't mind you being an asshole, as long as you're rich'.
Per levels.fyi, median salary of most openAI positions are above 300k. Even "technical writers" have a median pay of 197k. I searched around the internet and it seems like even entry level positions receive well above 150k. Apart from people with severe lifestyle bloat or an unholy number of dependents I doubt too many people working there will face immediate financial difficulties if they quit.
Anyway, it is also amusing to hear tech people defend their right to earn some of the fattest salaries on this planet using the smol bean technique after a decade of "why wouldn't the West Virginian coal miner just learn to code." It was always about maintaining the lifestyle of yearly Japan vacations and MacBook upgrades and never about subsistence.
As a technical writer who's spent a great deal of time recently editing AI-drafted documentation, this use case is not going to go as well as AI boosters think it is. :)
The problem it has describing itself isn't the lack of a metaphorical mirror, tool use is there and it can grep whatever code or research is written; the problem is that all machine learning is surprisingly slow to update with new info.
Ask ChatGPT to describe itself, you may get valid documentation and API calls, or you may get the API for GPT-3 (not ChatGPT, before that). I have had both happen.
No, it's prone to assuming or falsifying details even when it has the tools at hand that could verify the true details. Even when explicitly instructed to perform a specific tool call that would load the correct information into its context. Sometimes the pull of the training data is too strong and it will just not make the call and output garbage, all the while claiming otherwise.
I dont think everyone working for OpenAI is unethical. But, it is ridiculous to frame Hmhighly paid people working for companies quite a few of their peers avoid for ethical reasons as poors with no choice.
The human operator controls what gets built. If they want to build Redis 2, they can specify it and have it built. If you can't take my word for it, take those of the creator of Redis: https://antirez.com/news/159
This is probably an outdated understanding of how LLMs work. Modern LLMs can reason and they are creative, at least if you don't mind stretching the meaning of those words a bit.
The thing they currently lack is the social skills, ambition, and accountability to share a piece of software and get adoption for it.
I suggested that the _understanding_ is outdated, not the principles.
Many people used to say that LLMs were no more than a stochastic parrot, implying that they would be incapable of forming novel ideas. It is quite obvious that that is no longer the case.
The question is irrelevant as the US just pardoned a major Honduran drug smuggler head of state, not to mention the well documented US involvement in the foreign drug trade (e.g., Afghanistan).
Yes, but: when I was young I used to love photorealism and hyperrealism, which is super-smooth-and-shiny art that conceals its process in order to awe simpletons. Then I bought an airbrush, and then true color computer graphics happened, and soon after that I began to appreciate brush strokes and the texture of pen marks and the idea of the personality of the artist's hand. But that doesn't mean the process-hiding stuff is non-art, or even bad art. What's wrong with creating an amazingly convincing illusion, wasn't that always the goal, historically? Also there are no prizes for effort, and if your artwork is only struggle, I don't want to see it. Unless you're really badass about it.
I really like Cory Doctorow’s description of why it feels empty, quote:
“Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line's worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that's the only part that carries any communicative freight.”
OK, but then there's the possibility of reestablishing the bandwidth by selecting the output. If the artist selects one AI image from hundreds, that's like photography, or collage, or "found sculpture" if you can dig it. Then we can do away with the need for hundreds of versions by saying that the artist selected this image from among all the assorted sights seen during the day to frame as art and present to the viewer, and that's just like picking a preferred version from among hundreds, and thus is just like crafting an image. Tenuously. (This falls apart because the selectivity of the selection isn't good enough, I guess. But the process - throwing away bad ideas as you go along - is just like drawing.)
Sort of. It’s like selecting from hundreds of versions of a letter of reference that word the same three bullet points slightly differently. It still feels empty to me, but I guess that’s personal.
art without will is like street vomit: it might be pretty but it's just lumps of old content arranged how you'd expect. less than food; more a waste than a triumph. and it always smells the same.
the street vomit photographer is offering a bit more art through his choices but I can already see he makes poor choices
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