“There’s absolutely no probability that you’re going to see this so-called AGI, where computers are more powerful than people, in the next 12 months. It’s going to take years, if not many decades, but I still think the time to focus on safety is now,” he said.
just days after poor lil sammyboi and co went out and ran their mouths! the horror!
Sources told Reuters that the warning to OpenAI’s board was one factor among a longer list of grievances that led to Altman’s firing, as well as concerns over commercializing advances before assessing their risks.
Asked if such a discovery contributed…, but it wasn’t fundamentally about a concern like that.
god I want to see the boardroom leaks so bad. STOP TEASING!
“What we really need are safety brakes. Just like you have a safety break in an elevator, a circuit breaker for electricity, an emergency brake for a bus – there ought to be safety breaks in AI systems that control critical infrastructure, so that they always remain under human control,” Smith added.
this appears to be a vaguely good statement, but I’m gonna (cynically) guess that it’s more steered by the fact that MS now repeatedly burned their fingers on human-interaction AI shit, and is reaaaaal reticent about the impending exposure
wonder if they’ll release a business policy update about usage suitability for *GPT and friends
From skimming some threads, most hackernews are firmly on the side of Sam Altman (“Sam”) and view the original board as out of touch weirdos. Bonus negatives for them being wimmen and not having “skin in the game”.
MSFT’s rehabilitation as a tech company has been something to see, there’s like zero FLOSS zealots warning that Github will take the GPL away anymore.
GitHub doesn’t need to take away the GPL, it’s got Copilot to launder any code you like.
It is very weird to see a generation of people too young to remember Vista grow up and not heed the warnings. But I think that it’s also a case of kids getting into it via Paul Graham and wanting to start companies instead of getting into it via Stallman and having computers instead of friends.
I’m old enough to remember the OG Halloween files, and I don’t believe MSFT is a uniquely evil company - they’re just a normal megacorp. And if you check their recent actions you’ll see they realized they lost almost an entire generation of developers by pricing their stuff out of the range of students, so they pivoted to supporting Linux. And they get paid for hosting it on Azure in any case.
So there’s no long term plan to Extinguish Linux, just use it like any other company will. And if this means that they’ll fuck up the funding for kernel development, they don’t care - it’s just capitalism.
I’m just surprised to hear the same rhetoric from 20 somethings now that I said back when I was that age. EEE is a meme in the original sense.
Remarkably, they dropped the overt oldschool EEE yet appear to be pulling some of the same bullshit with VSCode (will add link later today)
I entirely agree with you about Just Corp Things driving behaviour
Exactly, VSCode is obviously trying to gain a ton of marketshare (everyone will make extensions for it, in a couple years you can’t code without it) but MSFT isn’t doing it do “hurt FLOSS”, they’re doing it because they’re a developer-focussed company and prefer to keep developers inside the MSFT orbit. It’s not conscious, it’s mindless, driven by profit-seeking.
And it kinda works. The FLOSS crowd is either blindsided by “AI”[1] (or dismissive of it, which is basically good), and there’s not that many people demanding models be both FLOSS and accessible to people w/o giant datacenters. The number of people basically cheering for MSFT in the OpenAI fracas vs. the ones saying “It’s AI EEE!!!” is striking.
[1] I’m in the camp that considers RMS never really understanding the Internet, and that it represents a mortal thread to Free Software, the AGPL notwithstanding. OTOH considering how many of his “fans” are basically fascists, who gives a shit.
I enjoy that he posts regularly to mastodon and is categorically ignored.
oh that is an exceptionally poorly written repost bot:
was Richard distracted with thoughts of delicious foot skin or children when he programmed this trash?
it’s also very funny that the account has 2200 followers and posts every day, but nothing has comments and the most attention his posts get is 1-2 boosts if that
@self There’s a definite “Sir, this is an Arby’s” air to his posts.
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GPL was already marginalized. Most open source stuff[1] is permissively licensed. The Linux kernel and gcc are outliers.
For all that (or maybe because of it) GPL zealots are really really loud.
If an LLM spits out MIT-licensed code you might get mad the copyright notice isn’t included but if you choose a permissive license it’s what you signed up for.
[1] by whatever metric you mean, either popular, most deployed, most “productive”