> At an event this week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar seemed to suggest that the government could act as a “backstop” for the company’s commitments
She said the quiet part out loud? This was always the play, it is obvious. Too big to fail. National security concerns. China/Russia veer scary. Blah blah blah.
Altman’s libertarian pontification is so obviously insincere it’s laughable.
You don’t even have to read the article. There is no such thing as a CEO held accountable.
Just look at Elon’s insane pay package, approved in a landslide. The skulls of the average shareholder must echo like a cave.
And the rich accuse the poor of their poverty being their own fault, because they are just being irresponsible, making bad decisions, and spending unwisely. They should look in the mirror.
At what point will the massive investments into AI show a respectable return? With the literal Trillion dollars OpenAI is constantly trying to raise what type of revenue would make that type of investment make sense? Even if you're incredibly bullish I don't know how you make that math work anymore.
> Experts note chief dealmaker Altman doesn’t have anything to lose. He has repeatedly claimed he does not have a stake in the company, and won’t have a stake even after OpenAI has restructured to become a public benefit corporation. “He has the upside, in a sense, in terms of influence, if it all succeeds,” said Ofer Eldar, a corporate governance professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “He's taking all this commitment knowing that he's not going to actually face any consequences because he doesn't have a financial stake.”
> That’s not good corporate governance, according to Jo-Ellen Pozner, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. “We allow leaders that we see as being super pioneering to behave idiosyncratically, and when things move in the opposite direction and somebody has to pay, it's unclear that they're the ones that are going to have to pay,” she said.
> Luria adds: “He can commit to as much as he wants. He can commit to a trillion dollars, ten trillion, a hundred trillion dollars. It doesn't matter. Either he uses it, he renegotiates it, or he walks away.” There are of course more indirect stakes for Altman, experts said, like the reputational blow he’d take if the deals fall apart. But on paper, he’d seemingly be off the hook, they said.
Is an intended takehome message of the article that Altman should invest his own money (with potential loss, or profit), or that he should be given a big compensation deal (maybe like the one Musk just got)?
> “The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it,” [Sam Altman]
Taking that at face value, it means we would have to invest exponential resources just to get linear improvements. That’s not exactly an optimistic outlook.
I think he means resources as in compute cycles and the like. Those tend to increase exponentially for the same number of dollars in a Moore's law type way to intelligence should increase in an approximately linear way, something similar to a few IQ points per year.
Make openai a non corporate entity that belongs to the UN. It can't be profit driven. Fuck the economic pundits. This tech is beyond humans it needs to be done right. "All tech have been Enshitified to satisfy investor greed, sufficiently advanced tech can be called magic and these fools will enshitify magic also"
I think sama thinks money won’t really exist within the next few years. ASI will take over and create a world of radical abundance. Any revenue OpenAI generates is just to create leverage.
It will be interesting to see who owns all the compute hardware in a few years, that cost billions now, and what becomes of it. With an expected useful lifetime so short the depreciation rate is insane.
What a weird take. Of course he won't be on the hook. No CEO is personally financially liable for a company's potential losses nor should they be. Otherwise why would anyone ever take any risks?
He doesn't even have a financial interest in the company, apparently. Obviously, the people who will lose their investments if everything goes south is… the investors. As it's supposed to be.
The implied premise of this headline, that somehow there's something wrong with the fact that a CEO won't be personally financially responsible for potential future losses, is truly bizarre.
How many actual AI researchers from one of the big AI companies do we have here? I ask because they always seem to be extremely quiet, but I believe there is no way you could be involved in the development of LLMs on a deep level and not understand at this point that the entire thing is a scam. LLMs are very much like a magic trick - they seem truly miraculously to those who don’t understand how the trick is done. But those who designed the trick certainly know it’s deception. They’ve done enough research by this point to see that it’s not intelligent at all, but generates a very good illusion of intelligence by returning text that seems very similar to human output (because that’s what it was trained on).
Useful? Yep - it’s like the best autocomplete you could ever imagine. Paradigm-changing even, as we now have a big chunk of human knowledge in a much more easily searchable format. It’s just not intelligent.
I have to imagine that just like a magic trick, eventually someone will come up with a way to clearly communicate to the layperson how the trick is done. At that point, the illusion collapses.
Make openai a non corporate entity that belongs to the UN. It can't be profit driven. Fuck the economic pundits. This tech is beyond humans it needs to be done right. "All tech have been Enshitified to satisfy investor greed, sufficiently advanced tech can be called magic and these fools will enshitify magic also"
18 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadShe said the quiet part out loud? This was always the play, it is obvious. Too big to fail. National security concerns. China/Russia veer scary. Blah blah blah.
Altman’s libertarian pontification is so obviously insincere it’s laughable.
Just look at Elon’s insane pay package, approved in a landslide. The skulls of the average shareholder must echo like a cave.
And the rich accuse the poor of their poverty being their own fault, because they are just being irresponsible, making bad decisions, and spending unwisely. They should look in the mirror.
> Experts note chief dealmaker Altman doesn’t have anything to lose. He has repeatedly claimed he does not have a stake in the company, and won’t have a stake even after OpenAI has restructured to become a public benefit corporation. “He has the upside, in a sense, in terms of influence, if it all succeeds,” said Ofer Eldar, a corporate governance professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “He's taking all this commitment knowing that he's not going to actually face any consequences because he doesn't have a financial stake.”
> That’s not good corporate governance, according to Jo-Ellen Pozner, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. “We allow leaders that we see as being super pioneering to behave idiosyncratically, and when things move in the opposite direction and somebody has to pay, it's unclear that they're the ones that are going to have to pay,” she said.
> Luria adds: “He can commit to as much as he wants. He can commit to a trillion dollars, ten trillion, a hundred trillion dollars. It doesn't matter. Either he uses it, he renegotiates it, or he walks away.” There are of course more indirect stakes for Altman, experts said, like the reputational blow he’d take if the deals fall apart. But on paper, he’d seemingly be off the hook, they said.
Is an intended takehome message of the article that Altman should invest his own money (with potential loss, or profit), or that he should be given a big compensation deal (maybe like the one Musk just got)?
Taking that at face value, it means we would have to invest exponential resources just to get linear improvements. That’s not exactly an optimistic outlook.
You can see a similar effect in computer chess ELO scores over time, with the odd blip up see https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iovlb0/oc... (1985 - 2023) and https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/speed_of_ai_transition/range_of_h... (1960 - 2000)
OpenAI as an entity is only in trouble if they've bound themselves completely without any way out.
These "commitments" may just function as memorandums of understanding.
1. OpenAI goes public. 2. Pay off the USA's debts with OpenAI stock. 3. Crash the bubble with no survivors. 4. Finally blockchain is useful.
Rule no of scam flavored hype: make up impressive sounding units that are opaque and meaningless
He doesn't even have a financial interest in the company, apparently. Obviously, the people who will lose their investments if everything goes south is… the investors. As it's supposed to be.
The implied premise of this headline, that somehow there's something wrong with the fact that a CEO won't be personally financially responsible for potential future losses, is truly bizarre.
Useful? Yep - it’s like the best autocomplete you could ever imagine. Paradigm-changing even, as we now have a big chunk of human knowledge in a much more easily searchable format. It’s just not intelligent.
I have to imagine that just like a magic trick, eventually someone will come up with a way to clearly communicate to the layperson how the trick is done. At that point, the illusion collapses.