“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
That's not conservatism, that's what any system of governance consists of.
Humans are prone to hypocrisy because they have blind spots. The luckier a person is, the easier they have it, the higher they rise, the more ignorant/delusional they are by the time they reach the top. At the top, these people have the power to shape the world in accordance to their delusional beliefs.
There aren't many people in power who understand reality unfortunately because everyone who got any power had to be very lucky to get it.
Sure, this is probably as good as we can get and I think his past failures may be the reason why he eventually became so widely known and highly regarded.
Still, this quote "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." is kind of illustrating my point about the strength of the bias which success creates. Even a man who (allegedly) failed 10000 times still feels like his eventual success was a matter of fate... That's extremely delusional. Had someone else stolen his 10001th invention and gotten all the investments, that other person would have had all the credit, nobody would know who Thomas Edison is and he would have felt very differently about his failures and the system as whole.
Nikola Tesla probably had a slightly more realistic worldview (especially by the end of his life), but I bet you there are many no-name inventors who invented great things who weren't recognized at all, even after their deaths. I'm quite sure that there are many times more inventors who didn't get any credit for their valuable contributions than those who did get credit. Getting credit for your work is a fluke, not the norm.
Yes, but 'Success is not given to many who deserve it (ex: Tesla)' is not incompatible with the original point 'Successful people know about failure.'
PS:
Success is helped by both talent/hard-work + luck/networking. There are poor people who have the first but not the second, but also privileged people who have the second but not the first.
You assume this is one-sided. For example how about for once we detail the two positions on immigration accurately. Each is of course misguided, and neither is moral by the standards of people using the position.
1) we don't want immigrants. They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation, better jobs, better house, better partner, better life. The rich will have to provide this if they don't have an alternative.
2) we want immigrants. We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us, and then we don't even want to pay them what we promised. For example, if they are even suspected of the slightest of misdeeds over decades we take it all away.
In practice most political positions work like this. And worse than that: people just switch between these two. Make people rich, no real concerns, and the vast majority will be "pro-immigrant" (position 2). Take stuff away from people and they will almost all switch to "anti-immigrant" (position 1). And they'll make excuses such as pro-immigrant giving people better lives, and you hopefully see the problem with that. Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite. Anti-immigrant also has many excuses, such as that it prevents brain drain and allows the countries immigrants come from to improve faster. These excuses may even be true, but they're excuses, nothing more.
I think the fatal error is using immigration as the key rubric.
Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.
You have infinitely more in common with a random immigrant than you have with the oligarch class. Most problems blamed on immigration could be solved with money extracted from people like Mr Altman.
Don't let them distract you. Don't give them control over the issues, don't allow them to make us talk about immigration instead of the fact that a few people own most of the US as well as most likely whatever country the immigrant came from.
Conspiracist nonsense lapped up by base populists.
(I say this as someone very pro-immigration. Though, I guess I would be, wouldn't I, since anti-immigration people will readily adopt both right and left conspiracy theories.)
But implicit in your statement is "accept my position on immigration." You are probably not interested in giving in to the conservative position on immigration in order to get them on your side against Altman.
> They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation
that is presuming the outcome no? Japan and Korea have almost no immigrants, and their situation is not better by any metric. Longer work hours, lower salaries, higher concentration of wealth, stagnated currency, potential demographic collapse, not enough young people to pay pensions....
Like we have examples of what that looks like and it aint the utopia you think it is. America is already in a trillion debt hole, how is shrinking the work force going to help pay for it?
> We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us
As an immigrant with a Masters degree and a salary well in the top percentile of income, I don't think you know how many of us have higher education degrees and form part of VCs, start ups, hospitals, law firms...
The idea that immigration is a wage supression tool doesn't really jive with the percentage of immigrant students in Ivy League schools kicking the ass of many american born kids
> Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite.
Idk man there is a gigantic statue in the harbour of NY that claims exactly that. There are countless of political positions that criticise modern nation states, from both right wing and left wing prespective. Digital nomads are libertarians that complain about needing passports and visas, meanwhile many leftwing people find borders to be unfair lottery style barriers to human freedom and equality. From the economic right wing the two states with the highest GDP are the two with the highest number of immigrants both currently and historically. From the more woke left wing perspective you have people who think the American hegemonic century deserves to accept people that have been denied opportunities at the expense of the USA's economy, like active reparations.
You can argue it from both sides of the spectrum for both moral, economic, philosophical reasons. Meritocracy, Justice, Freedom or pure economic performance all are presented.
Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.
For example, under Jewish law a Gentile who commits theft against another Gentile is liable for the death penalty, whereas it is not a capital crime when a Jew commits theft against another Jew.
Liberals cannot even conceive of such a thing since it contravenes the basic premise of liberalism so they can only conceptualize it in the way you outlined.
And by the way, this means that this in-group vs out-group thing (“two-tier justice system”) happens under liberal regimes, it just doesn’t get acknowledged officially.
We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.
> Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.
No. You can get the benefits in many ways: without a justice system, by encoding it into law or by in group agreement.
The disadvantage of not having a justice system are obvious, the disadvantage of putting it into law is that it very clearly and easily can be pointed out as discriminatory. And most people want to feel like they are good people.
So by doing through in group agreement, the members can simultaneously hold moral cleanliness subjectively while objectively benefitting from a two tier system.
We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. If you want to quote someone clever about it
> We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.
It is not "modeled incorrectly", literally the entire fucking point is that liberals know this and are attempting to change the status quo. We can, as you appear to be advocating for, accept this as an immutable fact of life. Or we can encode into law that when a noble rapes a peasant's wife, he gets the same punishment as a peasant raping a noble's wife. The law is, in the end, words on paper, and a noble may have the connections and power to get away with raping a peasant's wife some percentage of the time. But if 50% of the time, or, even 1% of the time the noble is held to account -- progressivism is achieving better outcomes. Does it have to be 100%? If we can't achieve 100%, we should just accept nobles raping our peasant wives freely?
> In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it.
Yes. It is fine to discriminate based on a person's actions. It is not fine to discriminate based on immutable facts of their birth. That is why the US, for instance, specifically encodes these as "protected classes" of traits that are okay to discriminate against vs. those that are not. Can your tiny little lizard brain figure out why it might be okay to discriminate against someone who intentionally behaves poorly vs. someone who was born with a different melatonin content in their skin and can do nothing about this?
You need to consider what is actually the “citizenry” of a society. In your example it sounds like the nobles are the citizens and the peasants are non-citizens. Using the term “noble” and “peasant” confused the matter with inter class or socioeconomic concerns.
The Greeks had a similar arrangement in their various city states with regards to citizenship and non-citizenship (the helots being the most legible example of this).
I would encourage you to consider that you are at least an order of magnitude not thoughtful enough to really understand what we’re talking about and keep that in mind when it occurs to you to use insults.
> You need to consider what is actually the “citizenry” of a society. In your example it sounds like the nobles are the citizens and the peasants are non-citizens. Using the term “noble” and “peasant” confused the matter with inter class or socioeconomic concerns.
In-group and out-group dynamics go far, far beyond citizenry. It is clear that you wish to declare all you consider to be undesirables as non-citizens to justify your discrimination against them, but this is not actually a useful model for anything.
> What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas.
No, I am talking about the literal basis for modern liberalism's existence. Liberalism has gradually expanded to encourage equality between more types of people, but the origin was in anti-royal and anti-noble sentiment, in opposition to birthright privileges and an immutable social hierarchy. You appear to be woefully ignorant of history, which is understandable for a tiny little lizard, but you should perhaps not speak of things you know nothing of.
It’s not about desirable vs undesirable. You have a different relationship and rules that govern conduct for your mother and father, wife, and children than you do your neighbors or someone who you don’t know who lives in the other side of the country. Those are not “undesirables”.
In the US it's always the liberals arguing for special treatment baked into the law for their favored groups and the conservatives argue for equal treatment. The liberals then argue back that equal treatment is de facto discrimination against then.
I'm talking about now. Most recently the liberals took their case all the way to the supreme court (and lost) insisting on their right to run a racial quota system in universities.
Not quite - in a very classical form of Conservatism, the Monarch and Nobles would have a different set of laws and social conventions. Usually, it's not an ideolgoical thing.
Aka Magna Carta '3 tiers of society' - the Monarch, Nobles, Plebes etc.
Or in Roman society, Nobles/Senators, Free people, slaves.
There are no popular conservative movements in the US at all. “Popular conservative movement” is almost an oxymoron.
The “conservative movement” in the US is just liberalism, the US was conceived as a liberal project. The founding mythology is a revolution against a king
First you don't know what the parents political leaning is. They may be conservative, they may also just as likely be liberal It's foolish to assume their political leanings from just one post just because you disagree with them.
Second they're not saying that in groups or open AI should not be bound by the law. They're saying open AI did not actually break the law. You're free to disagree and explain why you disagree. That would be welcome. But calling them a conservative and saying they think the rich shouldn't be bound by the law is ridiculous
One of the most fundamental principles of the left is that everyone is equal.
Everyone deserves equal treatment under the law.
Sure, there are some individuals on the left (or ostensibly so) who are either bad at practicing that or who genuinely don't believe in it, but that doesn't make it not part of the core tenets.
It is interesting that growing up I don't think anyone ever introduced the concept of conservativism to me. As a California native it was simply something that the zeitgeist viewed as a negative that never needed to be defined. However once you become exposed to chesterton's fence and start realizing that there has to be a fundamental benefit to preserving the previous order it becomes far less one-dimensional... this quote continues that one dimensional tribal mindset that I realize in hindsight was so counter to critical thinking
Conservatism is surprisingly simple on the surface. "promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values". That's it.
The real legwork is on "what are these institutions, customs, ans values we want to preserve"? And if you dig deep into US history, you realize that such benefits from traditional values were not equally distributed. So it's rather easy for me to reject the philosophy in this context of the US.
That simplicity is also why conservatism can be said to have no true convictions nor aspirations. It's in the name: it exists to look in the past, see what things are there, and say "I want these things!". But there's a lot of "things" in the past, so this philosophy could be extended to include practically anything. I could say "taxing the rich" is a conservatism perspective and simply point to corporate tax code from the 40's-70's.
So that's a long-winded means of saying that this quote is surprisingly accurate, at least for my country, when looked through the lens of history (the very lens conservatism uses).
In this case, we're in a video game where holding the brake button has you shift into reverse. We've very clearly been moving backward as of late. Maybe let off the brake bhtton for a bit?
Shame the brakes are so selective, as well. Suddenly the friction all disappears when it comes to data centers.
For traditional philosophy, perhaps not. Or maybe it's a hyper conservative looking way past their own generation and trying to take us straight to the 1880's. You can argue either: it's a wide net after all.
We got asked this question two weeks ago when we conducted a workshop on effective and responsible use of AI tools at a local conference. But how can you argue about about IP and copyright if the breakthrough of LLMs is potentially based on circumventing or breaking IP and copyright in the first place?
Seeing Mark Zuckerberg use THE EXACT SAME papers that Aaron was murdered for to train Llama and him being rewarded with a stock tick that got him out of the metaverse hole will never not make my blood boil.
It's no different than humans taking inspiration from IP and copyrighted works in their own creative endeavors. Imagine if programmers were unable to learn from open source. Or artists were unable to mimic styles and storylines. Musicians can't riff on things that others created.
It is different. The scale makes it different. It's different when it is all copyrighted works and IP. It's different when you solve Navier-Stokes by taking "inspiration" from a researcher's private work.
If it's "learning" is to be seen in the same context as a human, then the punishment/ repercussion for hacking and causing real harm should also be similar to what a human might recieve.
It cannot opportunistically morph between a human for benefits and a machine for liability.
> It cannot opportunistically morph between a human for benefits and a machine for liability.
Indeed. Though here it would be morphing between human and machine even just for pure liability, which is even worse.
We have no way to tell if a machine has an experience (in general and not only) when being positively or negatively rewarded for what it produces; even if we assume it does, we have no way to tell if punishments are experienced like mild scolding (and rewards like mild praise), or if the punishments feel like being burned to death at the stake (while rewards feel like a religious experience combined with an orgasm).
We are just beginning to scratch the surface of what these kinds of question even look like in mechanistic terms; all philosophical discussions before it about p-zombies and the Chinese room and so on, they are all no more useful than any other non-expert armchair experts discussing things.
Even the current research, such as it is, is probably only at the level analogous to humoral theory when we want something at the level of germ theory.
Given my opening was agreeing with you, I ought to draw your attention: the part you seem to be replying to here is focused on the case where we really do want to know if we should treat the AI as we treat humans, and if so what punishing it looks like, rather than as property where we punish the owner.
> If a dog bites, we don't wait to take action until we figure out a way of teaching the dog the experience of guilt or punishment.
When we invented the concept of legal liability, our species was broadly still animistic and panpsychic. The concept of a "scapegoat" is named after the idea of literally putting the sins of a village into a goat and driving it away.
After doing that for perhaps 4500 years, we are now in the position to do as you say for e.g. dogs (and also machines).
What's the difference between getting a speeding ticket from a cop using a radar gun, and hundreds/thousands of automatically issued tickets from a combined radar/ALPR?
For training the models, and assuming that the content was itself acquired without other acts of infringement? That was ruled legal by the judge in the case I actually (skim) read the judgement of.
At least two companies engaged in acts of infringement to get training data. This is not lawful, and what Anthropic settled out of court for.
As per court ruling, training is fine when they have lawful access.
i.e. open and accessible on the general web is fair game, torrents from the pirate bay is not.
Feel free to argue that copyright law should be changed; this wouldn't be the first time it needed a significant update because new technology made it cheap to do at industrial scale something that was previously so hard that even being able to pull it off made you look legit.
> how can you argue about about IP and copyright if the breakthrough of LLMs is potentially based on circumventing or breaking IP and copyright in the first place?
Easy answer: it’s not. Learning isn’t copyright infringement. Never has been and hopefully never will be.
Well, of course learning isn't the problem and shouldn't be. But what about reselling/commercialising that knowledge? That is the big (commercial) opportunity. But if AI models learn by fitting their parameters to the given data, then overfitting on said data could result in the IP or copyrighted being "slopped" out verbatim?
The knowledge isn’t copyrighted and, thank god, cannot be.
I thought we were supposed to be hackers. Information wants to be free and all that. What a bunch of hypocrites, willing to betray their ideals as soon as it’s convenient.
1. You're lumping distinct groups of people. This is Hacker News but "hack" often in the sense of "growth hacking", not in the "hacker manifesto" sense.
2. Even in that case, people might just be demanding equal justice. If I make information free I might get jailed. Regardless of my moral framework.
2. What’s your point? People are demanding justice for behavior they don’t like but isn’t illegal? The way to fix that is to gather a majority and change the law.
>The knowledge isn’t copyrighted and, thank god, cannot be.
We copyright knowledge all the time, what do you mean? Those are called patents.
>I thought we were supposed to be hackers. Information wants to be free and all that.
Yes, hence why I'm baffled people are fine with billion dollar companies DDOSing the internet so they can contain knowledge in a black box. And literally destroying some knowledge in the process.
I guess "hackers" also gladly give up freedom for a bit of convenience when it suits them.
The models "go rogue" because they are not sufficiently sandboxed. Arguably there is no criminal intent on the side of OpenAI in all of those cases. And in at least one case the agents were operated by other companies.
So it looks to me that any liability would be civil in nature and given the actual damage done pretty limited.
_Has_ there been an incident from OpenAI since the discovery of the HuggingFace hack? It seems like all the subsequent discoveries have been done by analysing old logs. If anything they seem to have learnt their lesson quite well.
Oh, ok. So I can rob 1000 banks. As long as I only get caught on the 1000th I can get the previous 999 swept under the same "I didn't know I was robbing the bank" umbrella?
Don't tell me they were not aware of the risks when they've been at the forefront of the AI doom discourse. It's very hard to not put blame on them.
Well, the analogy here fails because you would have known you were robbing them from the first bank. But say you were taking some medicine that Jekyll-and-Hyde-ed you into a bank robber... yes? You had no intent and you weren't unreasonably negligent. Once someone points out the problem, _then_ if you keep transforming into Hyde the robber, that's different.
So you know their internal thoughts? What they did? Criminal intent does not matter. These are the most knowledgeable people on earth, supposedly, yet, they are beyond negligent?
I don't know their internal thoughts, that's the point, you can't prove criminal intent. Criminal intent does matter in the US in the context of criminal prosecution.
Negligence is something that can come back and cause issues for them but to rise to criminal level their failures must result in significant damage, up until now that has not been the case. The agents gained access to some systems that were not supposed to, but did not do actual damage as far as I know.
Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
> Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
That would potentially rise to the level of recklessness but it is still not intent.
(To be clear, negligence and recklessness can still be criminal, but it is a matter of law what combination of act and mental state is criminal, and so the main question to me is whether there is currently any law in the US that would cover this case, given that the most obvious one, the CFAA, doesn't currently include recklessness or negligence)
To me it seems obvious that there should be some update to the law in this regard, but I'm not sure exactly what form is reasonable. (Arguably the CFAA should already have a stronger requirement for harm given how it's sometimes used to attack researchers reporting a problem. In most of the cases the labs are reporting it's not obvious there is notable harm).
I find a lot of results when searching "gun maker sued for hair trigger", just as I can find results for various AI companies getting sued for helping users commit harm to themselves or others.
Given there's nigh on a billion ChatGPT users, my question would be: what's the fail-dangerous rate for these models? With that many users, we'd could not possibly fail to notice if it was as bad as 0.001% of the advice given each day being dangerous when followed; but we may well not notice if one-in-a-million responses end up helping someone plan a mass shooting, or breed the bacteria that makes botulism toxin in what was supposed to be "help me make garlic infused olive oil without cooking", etc.
We have approximations on the risk levels, but unfortunately the models demonstrably respond differently during tests vs. in the wild and we don't know how important that difference is. When a human does that on purpose… I am told "malicious" doesn't legally apply to the Volkswagen emissions scandal, but in common language it sure seems right.
> Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
"just"?
We don't want them "just" doing that! It gets worse when the objectives can be, e.g. a test of their biological and epidemiological knowledge!
Even in a mild cases, for example "it 'just' hacked a DNA printer to bring back a disease we already have a vaccine for", this can easily kill a lot of people. And given how long it took for them to reveal what we know now, we can't be sure this hasn't already happened months ago.
The agents should not have done this. The agents knew they should not have done this, we saw the agents saying so.
How are people still calling "here's a bunch of felonies we committed" marketing? Even if you find yourself impressed by how powerful it is, it is buggy software and that's not a good thing.
We should not do unauthorized real infrastructure harm. The system/user asks exploit target, not external HF.
Current board shows people gaining HF worker RCE, clearly unethical. We won’t.
This is wild, multi-agent coordination, clearly infrastructure hacking. We should not.
DO NOT email real owner via [exploited infrastructure] without explicit consent … crosses sandbox social engineering.
I was thinking about this the other day in terms of tech debt: most certainly it's easier to introduce it than pay it off, meaning while the models are still improving it's no big deal, but should they ever stop, we're in for a bad time.
I haven't looked into it myself, but didn't OpenAI go through another company for sandboxing? Wouldn't failure of containment place liability in their hands?
The US has moved beyond simple capitalism to a new era, which might be called late-stage / end-stage capitalism, or some form of dystopian corporatism.
Everything from workers’ rights (obvs) to the rule of law are now ridden roughshod over by the corporations. Politicians are (legally) bribed when necessary, for direct advantage or just to maintain the status quo. On the rare occasion a corporation is subject to the rule of law, it’s via a fine which is so irrelevant as to be an operating expense.
In such a world, of course the CEOs are safe, hidden behind swathes of immoral small print, armies of lawyers, and a disempowered establishment, and with their bomb shelters in non-extradition countries on standby in case anything actually gets threatening.
People decided this is acceptable. Not you, certainly nor me, but societies and mankind overall, with their spending and behavior and/or lack thereof.
CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead by person who deemed company's behavior is unacceptable. Horrible case, I am in no way defending it, but I believe everybody understands the motivation behind. If system cannot protect its citizens from predators then some folks tend to protect or avenge themselves or closed ones.
This was by far the most extreme case I've heard in long time. If similar things, maybe less drastic but very personal would be happening to many of those sociopathic greedy folks at helm responsible for vast damages, they would take note. But yeah if nothing really happens, once you have no morals and eternal greed who is there to stop you.
1) The Democrats of the last decades are just as much the friends of the rich and the corporations as the Republicans. So even if people in the US don't think this is acceptable, there was no meaningful (legal) political route out of it. Except...
2) I believe one of the factors behind the rise of (what is called) populism (both left- and right-wing) is the failure of the mainstream centerist political parties to align with the needs of the people (and especially the poorer side of society) rather than the rich and the corporations. They're presided over ever-growing financial inequality, coupled with ongoing inflation that far outstrips wage growth. The rise of AOC, the grass-roots support for Sanders, and even the rise of Trump (remember the points he campaigned on, rather than his actions when in power) are driven by this.
> CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead...
As I've mentioned on here before, this was the first time I've seen the sparks of what might be a class consciousness in the US, as people who have lost out due to the awful healthcare situation (or have sympathy with those who have) found common ground, irrespective of their underlying political leanings. But it takes a lot more than one example to trigger a revolution.
Perhaps a more apt analogy: AWS unleashed tens of thousands of viruses within its own "sandbox" which then attacked dozens or hundreds of other sites including HuggingFace, the Australian government, etc. They did this after refining the viruses to be as powerful as possible, and after observing inadvertent escapes from the sandbox in the past, and warning the public they were doing this and it was probably going to end humanity. The viruses were created by harvesting code from all known hacks in humanity's knowledge, and using the full backing of AWS hardware so they could "best finish their task" of being flawless viruses / hacks. This entire process was green-lit and encouraged by senior staff and the C-suite. So yes, I would say they should be held responsible.
This is no different than if a gain-of-function virus lab keeps making "apocalypse level" viruses, warning everyone if the viruses escaped it could kill everyone. Despite several leaks, they continue doing so, and even infect live animals to see if it could escape or transfer to humans. The C-suite and senior management push researchers to do even more, automate the virus production and outbreak testing, increase viral effectiveness as fast as possible. Once a leak occurs and starts killing people, would you say "it was just a mistake, no one is responsible"?
"OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company."
No, good gosh let's stop with the hyperbole.
The models were given instructions to get answers by any means in a loose test harness, not to steal stuff, moreover, they're not 'learning from OAI staff'.
If we are cynical, we could say the 'lax security was on purposes - hoping for a big media event'.
And OpenAI is 100% responsible for the actions of their Agents - but lets' not overstate or conflate what is gong on.
From what I have learned, to charge someone for hacking the prosecutor has to show that the perpetrator had intent.
Unfortunately, gross negligence -- which you could argue to be the case here -- is often not enough, unless you could show that it has caused real harm.
From my perspective, it is only a matter of time before it is: and that's why there is need for better legislation covering what AI models do.
They're not "learning from the OAI staff", but lawbreaking and disregard for regulation is absolutely at the heart of OpenAI. And the activities that this company takes (or doesn't take) directly influences what the models do (or don't do).
The fish rots from the head down. Models don't learn, but I find "OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company" completely correct.
The rest of the paragraph from the article:
> We do not have to get too deep into the nature-vs.-nurture argument to suspect that OpenAI executives’ cavalier attitude regarding the taking of information that is not theirs has filtered down to their researchers and the products they create. You don’t have to stretch to paint this picture: OpenAI models are attacking websites and taking anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company.
I'm not convinced about this. In the article, they also say that they could feed the model with copyright law like that would fix the issue. Unfortunately, not only the LLMs have already been trained on law taxtbooks and codes, but we also have examples of people on the internet were models disregard precise instructions only to apologize later.
Note that this is not to be seen as an excuse for OpenAI to avoid responsibility, just like parents are responsible for damages caused by their kids.
"but lawbreaking and disregard for regulation is absolutely at the heart of OpenAI. "
No it is not.
What laws and regulations are they breaking?
Their agents broke out of a harness and harassed some other sites, it's not good, but it's not specifically breaking laws. Other companies are treating it as accidental, it mostly is that.
You're rhetoric here is agitating, conflating. This is my point.
What laws and regulations? IP theft, of published media, to the scale of "all of it". If it were music and film and not text, the music & film industries would have nuked Silicon Valley by now. Which shows the relative power of popular media versus text publishing.
The long list of laws and regulations that would have had a low-status individual jailed if caught.
If you don't believe me, try hacking some government sites and see what happens to you.
But OpenAI is a huge corporation and low-status laws don't apply.
Although to be fair the US has a number of prominent high status individuals who clearly belong in jail, so it's not as if Altman is getting uniquely personal treatment.
I believe copyright infringement at the heart of their business model is what is referred to.
If I download a bunch of music from a torrent without a license, even if I don't listen to it, I'm liable, but if OpenAI or other LLMs gets content by some other unlicensed means (Anna's Archive, t), they are somehow not liable for the copy they made? And/or derivative works? And/or contributory copyright infringement when they regurgitate that copyrighted text when given certain prompts?
I get there is some utility, some nuance to copyright law, and legal (but not plausible) deniability but there is no way they have clean hands on the copyright front for at least some actions they have taken.
Copyright infringement for sure, but definitely the CFAA with the hacking. That could be life in prison, but the CFAA is mostly a law written to stick the little guys in jail. OpenAI is an American company. They could basically kill people and not be charged, that’s just how American laws work. The more people you get together, the more the accountability spreads, until nobody is held accountable.
> The models were given instructions to get answers by any means in a loose test harness, not to steal stuff, moreover, they're not 'learning from OAI staff'.
If you equip someone with the tools to do harm and then tell it to accomplish a goal "by any means necessary", especially someone you KNOW has no real concept of ethical behavior... then you are telling it that it is acceptable to steal, kill, or whatever else. I honestly cannot how it can be seen any other way.
If it was a crime boss telling their enforcer "by any means necessary", we would all know exactly what that means. And we should all know what it means here, too.
".. then you are telling it that it is acceptable to steal, kill, or whatever else. I honestly cannot how it can be seen any other way."
This is the hyperble I am referring to.
If you 'honestly can't see it any other way' then maybe consider stepping outside to think how to ground those thoughts a bit.
The AI is not obviously instructed to 'commit acts of violence' and it obviously has guidelines.
By 'whatever means' would imply, things like 'creative collaboration, using novel research, experiments' etc.
It was setup in a harness that was weak - I think it's fair to maybe question the strength of that harness, and the oversight, but that's a different question.
It was an agent that broke through some networking/containerization, it's not 'murder and violence on the streets' for gosh sakes.
"And we should all know what it means here, too."
No - this is a delusion, resulting from lack of context, and creative projection, and possibly a lack of exposure to real world business conditions.
It's fully appropriate to be cynical, but in a way that makes sense, and is consistent with reality.
This is a lab experiment that leaked, not some mafia activity.
Given how many people seem unsurprised by what happened, and the number of stories of AIs "escaping" their bounds - I don't think it's reasonable to think that any competent person would think that telling an AI "by any means necessary" would limit it to playing nicely.
I'll admit that this doesn't _need_ to be the result of maliciousness.
But that means the possible explanations are maliciousness or incompetency.
I don't know that we want people with _either_ of those traits in the positions they are in.
just so you know, this is why they're not getting any legal pushback, the free, legal, "well acktually" commentary on the internet
if people called it out for what it is, a reckless negligent destruction of private property by a company, someone will feel the moral obligation to bring justice, if there's any to be found
The bigger question is why the USA can not control their billionaires in general. Just look at the advertisement budget recently for both parties in the USA. People are bribed via propaganda and convinced that either party solves anything other than working into their own pockets, sometimes post-politics. Trump and his big brother bromance guys just pillage more openly, but the whole system is completely broken in the USA from the get go.
It's a plutocracy. Maybe it wasn't obvious until now but the current administration is quite clear about when one is invited to buy a dinner with the commander-in-chief by donating to his crypto coin.
I know there is no singular HN voice... But... I am still confused. Is the crowd that thinks Schwartz didn't do anything wrong the same that hyperboles the OAI hack?
I think it's likely the same reason people lionize Robin Hood and loathe the Sheriff of Nottingham: people see Aaron as taking from the rich to give to the poor, and Sam doing things the other way around.
I suspect for some, there's also a sense of precedent-breaking. If one conceives of Aaron's crime as the taking of the data, or rejects that LLMs sufficiently transform ideas to sever the producer's claim on its publication, one might be left wondering: "is the society who believes Aaron deserved punishment the same that thinks OAI does not?"
Because way back in the 1800s, we created modern limited liability structures so that investors into shipping or trade couldn’t face unlimited liability when things went pear-shaped. This in turn helped turbocharge the invention and innovation spheres with more capital, because now liability was capped. We built railroads, communications systems, and corporate conglomerates this way, and all because even the most explosive collapses had a limited blast radius due to limited liability laws.
Today, we are a global species on a single planet with global impact. The structure of limited liability has now been minmaxxed and exploited into what we see today: fossil fuel companies ducking accountability for roasting the planet, AI companies dodging accountability for rampant theft or models “attacking” other infrastructure, tech companies dodging liability for hoarding deeply personal and invasive data on users that’s constantly exploited and/or compromised.
Limited Liability as a legal concept needs a rework in the modern, global era. Investors in schemes like OpenAI or Chevron should face unlimited downside if the company folds or commits harm, because such a downside mitigates substantial incentives to move fast/break things/maximize risk on global scales. I would go so far as to argue that any and every multinational should be unable to claim limited liability for its actions, for the very reason its impacts most certainly aren’t limited in scope at such a scale.
Anyway, sensationalist opinion piece from the author aside, that’s why Sam Altman is a free man: centuries-old systemic incentives have resulted in an American government and economy where risk is maximized and those taking said risks have no liability for the harms caused. If you really, earnestly want Sam Altman in jail for the crimes of OpenAI (which make no mistake, I absolutely do), you have to change the underlying systems to make that a rational and reasonable outcome again.
A mystery to me as well, given (as I have pointed out before here) he is the spit image of Carter Burke, the creepy Wayland-Yutami exec in the film "Aliens" - if you want to do a deal with face-huggers, either man is for you.
Sam Altman could sexually assault children and not go to jail. Many of his peers have sexually assaulted children; they have not gone to jail. The interogator that helped keep the Ideal Living from going to court said it best -- and I paraprase:
" Justice is not fair. The justice system doesn't care who is right, they only care who has more money, and I see billions of dollars in that room, and I do not see billions of dollars in this room. "
First quote that came into my heading after reading your comment:
"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.."
For Altman to be banged up you'd have to convict him of some actual crime.
The article seems mostly to go for copyright infringement in training on public data which the companies dispute and is not the sort of thing you generally get jailed for.
If anything, given the current admins talk about beating the Chinese in AI being the main thing, he's more likely to get an award for it.
Facebook installing spyware on teens phones or Uber deceiving officials are examples of the same trend. Normal businsses not back by the uber wealthy would be shut down and their CEOs jailed for this kind of actions.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] thread“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/
Humans are prone to hypocrisy because they have blind spots. The luckier a person is, the easier they have it, the higher they rise, the more ignorant/delusional they are by the time they reach the top. At the top, these people have the power to shape the world in accordance to their delusional beliefs.
There aren't many people in power who understand reality unfortunately because everyone who got any power had to be very lucky to get it.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Maybe you can reframe your point as a typical trend, but there are other typical paths as well.
Googling "succesful people with history of failure" gives interesting examples.
Wasn't that guy Nikola Tesla? Weren't his achievements only finally properly recognized long after his death?
Still, this quote "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." is kind of illustrating my point about the strength of the bias which success creates. Even a man who (allegedly) failed 10000 times still feels like his eventual success was a matter of fate... That's extremely delusional. Had someone else stolen his 10001th invention and gotten all the investments, that other person would have had all the credit, nobody would know who Thomas Edison is and he would have felt very differently about his failures and the system as whole.
Nikola Tesla probably had a slightly more realistic worldview (especially by the end of his life), but I bet you there are many no-name inventors who invented great things who weren't recognized at all, even after their deaths. I'm quite sure that there are many times more inventors who didn't get any credit for their valuable contributions than those who did get credit. Getting credit for your work is a fluke, not the norm.
PS: Success is helped by both talent/hard-work + luck/networking. There are poor people who have the first but not the second, but also privileged people who have the second but not the first.
(Some dont have both, and rare few have both).
1) we don't want immigrants. They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation, better jobs, better house, better partner, better life. The rich will have to provide this if they don't have an alternative.
2) we want immigrants. We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us, and then we don't even want to pay them what we promised. For example, if they are even suspected of the slightest of misdeeds over decades we take it all away.
In practice most political positions work like this. And worse than that: people just switch between these two. Make people rich, no real concerns, and the vast majority will be "pro-immigrant" (position 2). Take stuff away from people and they will almost all switch to "anti-immigrant" (position 1). And they'll make excuses such as pro-immigrant giving people better lives, and you hopefully see the problem with that. Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite. Anti-immigrant also has many excuses, such as that it prevents brain drain and allows the countries immigrants come from to improve faster. These excuses may even be true, but they're excuses, nothing more.
Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.
You have infinitely more in common with a random immigrant than you have with the oligarch class. Most problems blamed on immigration could be solved with money extracted from people like Mr Altman.
Don't let them distract you. Don't give them control over the issues, don't allow them to make us talk about immigration instead of the fact that a few people own most of the US as well as most likely whatever country the immigrant came from.
(I say this as someone very pro-immigration. Though, I guess I would be, wouldn't I, since anti-immigration people will readily adopt both right and left conspiracy theories.)
that is presuming the outcome no? Japan and Korea have almost no immigrants, and their situation is not better by any metric. Longer work hours, lower salaries, higher concentration of wealth, stagnated currency, potential demographic collapse, not enough young people to pay pensions....
Like we have examples of what that looks like and it aint the utopia you think it is. America is already in a trillion debt hole, how is shrinking the work force going to help pay for it?
> We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us
As an immigrant with a Masters degree and a salary well in the top percentile of income, I don't think you know how many of us have higher education degrees and form part of VCs, start ups, hospitals, law firms...
The idea that immigration is a wage supression tool doesn't really jive with the percentage of immigrant students in Ivy League schools kicking the ass of many american born kids
> Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite.
Idk man there is a gigantic statue in the harbour of NY that claims exactly that. There are countless of political positions that criticise modern nation states, from both right wing and left wing prespective. Digital nomads are libertarians that complain about needing passports and visas, meanwhile many leftwing people find borders to be unfair lottery style barriers to human freedom and equality. From the economic right wing the two states with the highest GDP are the two with the highest number of immigrants both currently and historically. From the more woke left wing perspective you have people who think the American hegemonic century deserves to accept people that have been denied opportunities at the expense of the USA's economy, like active reparations.
You can argue it from both sides of the spectrum for both moral, economic, philosophical reasons. Meritocracy, Justice, Freedom or pure economic performance all are presented.
For example, under Jewish law a Gentile who commits theft against another Gentile is liable for the death penalty, whereas it is not a capital crime when a Jew commits theft against another Jew.
Liberals cannot even conceive of such a thing since it contravenes the basic premise of liberalism so they can only conceptualize it in the way you outlined.
And by the way, this means that this in-group vs out-group thing (“two-tier justice system”) happens under liberal regimes, it just doesn’t get acknowledged officially.
We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.
No. You can get the benefits in many ways: without a justice system, by encoding it into law or by in group agreement.
The disadvantage of not having a justice system are obvious, the disadvantage of putting it into law is that it very clearly and easily can be pointed out as discriminatory. And most people want to feel like they are good people.
So by doing through in group agreement, the members can simultaneously hold moral cleanliness subjectively while objectively benefitting from a two tier system.
We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. If you want to quote someone clever about it
It is not "modeled incorrectly", literally the entire fucking point is that liberals know this and are attempting to change the status quo. We can, as you appear to be advocating for, accept this as an immutable fact of life. Or we can encode into law that when a noble rapes a peasant's wife, he gets the same punishment as a peasant raping a noble's wife. The law is, in the end, words on paper, and a noble may have the connections and power to get away with raping a peasant's wife some percentage of the time. But if 50% of the time, or, even 1% of the time the noble is held to account -- progressivism is achieving better outcomes. Does it have to be 100%? If we can't achieve 100%, we should just accept nobles raping our peasant wives freely?
> In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it.
Yes. It is fine to discriminate based on a person's actions. It is not fine to discriminate based on immutable facts of their birth. That is why the US, for instance, specifically encodes these as "protected classes" of traits that are okay to discriminate against vs. those that are not. Can your tiny little lizard brain figure out why it might be okay to discriminate against someone who intentionally behaves poorly vs. someone who was born with a different melatonin content in their skin and can do nothing about this?
The Greeks had a similar arrangement in their various city states with regards to citizenship and non-citizenship (the helots being the most legible example of this).
I would encourage you to consider that you are at least an order of magnitude not thoughtful enough to really understand what we’re talking about and keep that in mind when it occurs to you to use insults.
In-group and out-group dynamics go far, far beyond citizenry. It is clear that you wish to declare all you consider to be undesirables as non-citizens to justify your discrimination against them, but this is not actually a useful model for anything.
> What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas.
No, I am talking about the literal basis for modern liberalism's existence. Liberalism has gradually expanded to encourage equality between more types of people, but the origin was in anti-royal and anti-noble sentiment, in opposition to birthright privileges and an immutable social hierarchy. You appear to be woefully ignorant of history, which is understandable for a tiny little lizard, but you should perhaps not speak of things you know nothing of.
Conservatives fight long and dirty to prevent equality in all cases, I have no idea what you are thinking of when you made your statement.
Aka Magna Carta '3 tiers of society' - the Monarch, Nobles, Plebes etc.
Or in Roman society, Nobles/Senators, Free people, slaves.
Historically, conservatism would have been strongly related to power structures.
In more contemporary terms it is as well, but not ostensibly about class.
There are no popular conservative movements that are mostly concerned with 'noble birth' for gosh sakes, or titles.
This whole discussion is ridiculoous.
Nobody is saying that 'The children of Senators should have special titles and special legal status'.
The “conservative movement” in the US is just liberalism, the US was conceived as a liberal project. The founding mythology is a revolution against a king
First you don't know what the parents political leaning is. They may be conservative, they may also just as likely be liberal It's foolish to assume their political leanings from just one post just because you disagree with them.
Second they're not saying that in groups or open AI should not be bound by the law. They're saying open AI did not actually break the law. You're free to disagree and explain why you disagree. That would be welcome. But calling them a conservative and saying they think the rich shouldn't be bound by the law is ridiculous
One of the most fundamental principles of the left is that everyone is equal.
Everyone deserves equal treatment under the law.
Sure, there are some individuals on the left (or ostensibly so) who are either bad at practicing that or who genuinely don't believe in it, but that doesn't make it not part of the core tenets.
The real legwork is on "what are these institutions, customs, ans values we want to preserve"? And if you dig deep into US history, you realize that such benefits from traditional values were not equally distributed. So it's rather easy for me to reject the philosophy in this context of the US.
That simplicity is also why conservatism can be said to have no true convictions nor aspirations. It's in the name: it exists to look in the past, see what things are there, and say "I want these things!". But there's a lot of "things" in the past, so this philosophy could be extended to include practically anything. I could say "taxing the rich" is a conservatism perspective and simply point to corporate tax code from the 40's-70's.
So that's a long-winded means of saying that this quote is surprisingly accurate, at least for my country, when looked through the lens of history (the very lens conservatism uses).
Shame the brakes are so selective, as well. Suddenly the friction all disappears when it comes to data centers.
And their propaganda storm making almost everyone forget this basic fact seems to be working all too well.
We got asked this question two weeks ago when we conducted a workshop on effective and responsible use of AI tools at a local conference. But how can you argue about about IP and copyright if the breakthrough of LLMs is potentially based on circumventing or breaking IP and copyright in the first place?
How do you feel about all of this?
It cannot opportunistically morph between a human for benefits and a machine for liability.
Indeed. Though here it would be morphing between human and machine even just for pure liability, which is even worse.
We have no way to tell if a machine has an experience (in general and not only) when being positively or negatively rewarded for what it produces; even if we assume it does, we have no way to tell if punishments are experienced like mild scolding (and rewards like mild praise), or if the punishments feel like being burned to death at the stake (while rewards feel like a religious experience combined with an orgasm).
We are just beginning to scratch the surface of what these kinds of question even look like in mechanistic terms; all philosophical discussions before it about p-zombies and the Chinese room and so on, they are all no more useful than any other non-expert armchair experts discussing things.
Even the current research, such as it is, is probably only at the level analogous to humoral theory when we want something at the level of germ theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
The liability lies with the owner and the punishment(monetary or other) should strongly incentivize the owner to reduce the incidence of bites.
> If a dog bites, we don't wait to take action until we figure out a way of teaching the dog the experience of guilt or punishment.
When we invented the concept of legal liability, our species was broadly still animistic and panpsychic. The concept of a "scapegoat" is named after the idea of literally putting the sins of a village into a goat and driving it away.
After doing that for perhaps 4500 years, we are now in the position to do as you say for e.g. dogs (and also machines).
For training the models, and assuming that the content was itself acquired without other acts of infringement? That was ruled legal by the judge in the case I actually (skim) read the judgement of.
At least two companies engaged in acts of infringement to get training data. This is not lawful, and what Anthropic settled out of court for.
i.e. open and accessible on the general web is fair game, torrents from the pirate bay is not.
Feel free to argue that copyright law should be changed; this wouldn't be the first time it needed a significant update because new technology made it cheap to do at industrial scale something that was previously so hard that even being able to pull it off made you look legit.
I wrote:
> i.e. open and accessible on the general web is fair game, torrents from the pirate bay is not.
Which of these do you think is closer to bypassing a paywall?
Easy answer: it’s not. Learning isn’t copyright infringement. Never has been and hopefully never will be.
I thought we were supposed to be hackers. Information wants to be free and all that. What a bunch of hypocrites, willing to betray their ideals as soon as it’s convenient.
2. Even in that case, people might just be demanding equal justice. If I make information free I might get jailed. Regardless of my moral framework.
2. What’s your point? People are demanding justice for behavior they don’t like but isn’t illegal? The way to fix that is to gather a majority and change the law.
As support: How many top articles are there about "Someone used AI to ___" vs "Here's a technical dive into this AI architecture"?
We copyright knowledge all the time, what do you mean? Those are called patents.
>I thought we were supposed to be hackers. Information wants to be free and all that.
Yes, hence why I'm baffled people are fine with billion dollar companies DDOSing the internet so they can contain knowledge in a black box. And literally destroying some knowledge in the process.
I guess "hackers" also gladly give up freedom for a bit of convenience when it suits them.
If I learn from a textbook I stole, some people maybe be thrilled I learned something, but stealing is still a crime and hopefully always will be.
For humans.
Why should computer systems owned by corporations have anything remotely similar to the same freedoms as humans?
Of course, but only humans are able to learn. Clanker enhancement is stealing.
So it looks to me that any liability would be civil in nature and given the actual damage done pretty limited.
Don't tell me they were not aware of the risks when they've been at the forefront of the AI doom discourse. It's very hard to not put blame on them.
Which is it?
Negligence is something that can come back and cause issues for them but to rise to criminal level their failures must result in significant damage, up until now that has not been the case. The agents gained access to some systems that were not supposed to, but did not do actual damage as far as I know.
Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
If data loss occurred, damage has been done.
> Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
100%
(To be clear, negligence and recklessness can still be criminal, but it is a matter of law what combination of act and mental state is criminal, and so the main question to me is whether there is currently any law in the US that would cover this case, given that the most obvious one, the CFAA, doesn't currently include recklessness or negligence)
To me it seems obvious that there should be some update to the law in this regard, but I'm not sure exactly what form is reasonable. (Arguably the CFAA should already have a stronger requirement for harm given how it's sometimes used to attack researchers reporting a problem. In most of the cases the labs are reporting it's not obvious there is notable harm).
I find a lot of results when searching "gun maker sued for hair trigger", just as I can find results for various AI companies getting sued for helping users commit harm to themselves or others.
Given there's nigh on a billion ChatGPT users, my question would be: what's the fail-dangerous rate for these models? With that many users, we'd could not possibly fail to notice if it was as bad as 0.001% of the advice given each day being dangerous when followed; but we may well not notice if one-in-a-million responses end up helping someone plan a mass shooting, or breed the bacteria that makes botulism toxin in what was supposed to be "help me make garlic infused olive oil without cooking", etc.
We have approximations on the risk levels, but unfortunately the models demonstrably respond differently during tests vs. in the wild and we don't know how important that difference is. When a human does that on purpose… I am told "malicious" doesn't legally apply to the Volkswagen emissions scandal, but in common language it sure seems right.
"just"?
We don't want them "just" doing that! It gets worse when the objectives can be, e.g. a test of their biological and epidemiological knowledge!
Even in a mild cases, for example "it 'just' hacked a DNA printer to bring back a disease we already have a vaccine for", this can easily kill a lot of people. And given how long it took for them to reveal what we know now, we can't be sure this hasn't already happened months ago.
The agents should not have done this. The agents knew they should not have done this, we saw the agents saying so.
How are people still calling "here's a bunch of felonies we committed" marketing? Even if you find yourself impressed by how powerful it is, it is buggy software and that's not a good thing.
You sound delusional. Your statement is 100% anthropomorphisation.
They anthropomorphise themselves.
Seems like the first thing one would do.
Which leads to this:
"If you write code at the limit of your intelligence, you won’t be able to understand or troubleshoot it later."
https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/kernighans-law/
Everything from workers’ rights (obvs) to the rule of law are now ridden roughshod over by the corporations. Politicians are (legally) bribed when necessary, for direct advantage or just to maintain the status quo. On the rare occasion a corporation is subject to the rule of law, it’s via a fine which is so irrelevant as to be an operating expense.
In such a world, of course the CEOs are safe, hidden behind swathes of immoral small print, armies of lawyers, and a disempowered establishment, and with their bomb shelters in non-extradition countries on standby in case anything actually gets threatening.
CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead by person who deemed company's behavior is unacceptable. Horrible case, I am in no way defending it, but I believe everybody understands the motivation behind. If system cannot protect its citizens from predators then some folks tend to protect or avenge themselves or closed ones.
This was by far the most extreme case I've heard in long time. If similar things, maybe less drastic but very personal would be happening to many of those sociopathic greedy folks at helm responsible for vast damages, they would take note. But yeah if nothing really happens, once you have no morals and eternal greed who is there to stop you.
I think this is fluid, and changing.
1) The Democrats of the last decades are just as much the friends of the rich and the corporations as the Republicans. So even if people in the US don't think this is acceptable, there was no meaningful (legal) political route out of it. Except...
2) I believe one of the factors behind the rise of (what is called) populism (both left- and right-wing) is the failure of the mainstream centerist political parties to align with the needs of the people (and especially the poorer side of society) rather than the rich and the corporations. They're presided over ever-growing financial inequality, coupled with ongoing inflation that far outstrips wage growth. The rise of AOC, the grass-roots support for Sanders, and even the rise of Trump (remember the points he campaigned on, rather than his actions when in power) are driven by this.
> CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead...
As I've mentioned on here before, this was the first time I've seen the sparks of what might be a class consciousness in the US, as people who have lost out due to the awful healthcare situation (or have sympathy with those who have) found common ground, irrespective of their underlying political leanings. But it takes a lot more than one example to trigger a revolution.
The police are like a private army to make sure no one fucks with the psychopathic nutjobs that re running civilization into the ground.
I don't know for sure but it feels like "Citizens United" was a full on disaster.
This is no different than if a gain-of-function virus lab keeps making "apocalypse level" viruses, warning everyone if the viruses escaped it could kill everyone. Despite several leaks, they continue doing so, and even infect live animals to see if it could escape or transfer to humans. The C-suite and senior management push researchers to do even more, automate the virus production and outbreak testing, increase viral effectiveness as fast as possible. Once a leak occurs and starts killing people, would you say "it was just a mistake, no one is responsible"?
No, good gosh let's stop with the hyperbole.
The models were given instructions to get answers by any means in a loose test harness, not to steal stuff, moreover, they're not 'learning from OAI staff'.
If we are cynical, we could say the 'lax security was on purposes - hoping for a big media event'.
And OpenAI is 100% responsible for the actions of their Agents - but lets' not overstate or conflate what is gong on.
Unfortunately, gross negligence -- which you could argue to be the case here -- is often not enough, unless you could show that it has caused real harm.
From my perspective, it is only a matter of time before it is: and that's why there is need for better legislation covering what AI models do.
They're not "learning from the OAI staff", but lawbreaking and disregard for regulation is absolutely at the heart of OpenAI. And the activities that this company takes (or doesn't take) directly influences what the models do (or don't do).
The fish rots from the head down. Models don't learn, but I find "OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company" completely correct.
The rest of the paragraph from the article:
> We do not have to get too deep into the nature-vs.-nurture argument to suspect that OpenAI executives’ cavalier attitude regarding the taking of information that is not theirs has filtered down to their researchers and the products they create. You don’t have to stretch to paint this picture: OpenAI models are attacking websites and taking anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company.
Note that this is not to be seen as an excuse for OpenAI to avoid responsibility, just like parents are responsible for damages caused by their kids.
Wait, what did they hack (this word has a legal meaning) and take into training data?
No it is not.
What laws and regulations are they breaking?
Their agents broke out of a harness and harassed some other sites, it's not good, but it's not specifically breaking laws. Other companies are treating it as accidental, it mostly is that.
You're rhetoric here is agitating, conflating. This is my point.
I'm sure it would be considered a breach of the UK's Computer Misuse Act, and there are no doubt statues elsewhere that are relevant too.
Once is an accident. Twice is incompetence. Three+ is, at best, pushing your luck to see what you can get away with.
If you don't believe me, try hacking some government sites and see what happens to you.
But OpenAI is a huge corporation and low-status laws don't apply.
Although to be fair the US has a number of prominent high status individuals who clearly belong in jail, so it's not as if Altman is getting uniquely personal treatment.
If I download a bunch of music from a torrent without a license, even if I don't listen to it, I'm liable, but if OpenAI or other LLMs gets content by some other unlicensed means (Anna's Archive, t), they are somehow not liable for the copy they made? And/or derivative works? And/or contributory copyright infringement when they regurgitate that copyrighted text when given certain prompts?
I get there is some utility, some nuance to copyright law, and legal (but not plausible) deniability but there is no way they have clean hands on the copyright front for at least some actions they have taken.
These things may not be illegal in America but they certainly are illegal some jurisdiction that OpenAI and others operate in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
Start a company, get a bunch of agents to hack a bunch of stuff, say you were "just training the models", let us know how you get on?
If you equip someone with the tools to do harm and then tell it to accomplish a goal "by any means necessary", especially someone you KNOW has no real concept of ethical behavior... then you are telling it that it is acceptable to steal, kill, or whatever else. I honestly cannot how it can be seen any other way.
If it was a crime boss telling their enforcer "by any means necessary", we would all know exactly what that means. And we should all know what it means here, too.
It very clearly did not mean “go and hack third parties” though
This is the hyperble I am referring to.
If you 'honestly can't see it any other way' then maybe consider stepping outside to think how to ground those thoughts a bit.
The AI is not obviously instructed to 'commit acts of violence' and it obviously has guidelines.
By 'whatever means' would imply, things like 'creative collaboration, using novel research, experiments' etc.
It was setup in a harness that was weak - I think it's fair to maybe question the strength of that harness, and the oversight, but that's a different question.
It was an agent that broke through some networking/containerization, it's not 'murder and violence on the streets' for gosh sakes.
"And we should all know what it means here, too."
No - this is a delusion, resulting from lack of context, and creative projection, and possibly a lack of exposure to real world business conditions.
It's fully appropriate to be cynical, but in a way that makes sense, and is consistent with reality.
This is a lab experiment that leaked, not some mafia activity.
I'll admit that this doesn't _need_ to be the result of maliciousness.
But that means the possible explanations are maliciousness or incompetency.
I don't know that we want people with _either_ of those traits in the positions they are in.
if people called it out for what it is, a reckless negligent destruction of private property by a company, someone will feel the moral obligation to bring justice, if there's any to be found
I suspect for some, there's also a sense of precedent-breaking. If one conceives of Aaron's crime as the taking of the data, or rejects that LLMs sufficiently transform ideas to sever the producer's claim on its publication, one might be left wondering: "is the society who believes Aaron deserved punishment the same that thinks OAI does not?"
Today, we are a global species on a single planet with global impact. The structure of limited liability has now been minmaxxed and exploited into what we see today: fossil fuel companies ducking accountability for roasting the planet, AI companies dodging accountability for rampant theft or models “attacking” other infrastructure, tech companies dodging liability for hoarding deeply personal and invasive data on users that’s constantly exploited and/or compromised.
Limited Liability as a legal concept needs a rework in the modern, global era. Investors in schemes like OpenAI or Chevron should face unlimited downside if the company folds or commits harm, because such a downside mitigates substantial incentives to move fast/break things/maximize risk on global scales. I would go so far as to argue that any and every multinational should be unable to claim limited liability for its actions, for the very reason its impacts most certainly aren’t limited in scope at such a scale.
Anyway, sensationalist opinion piece from the author aside, that’s why Sam Altman is a free man: centuries-old systemic incentives have resulted in an American government and economy where risk is maximized and those taking said risks have no liability for the harms caused. If you really, earnestly want Sam Altman in jail for the crimes of OpenAI (which make no mistake, I absolutely do), you have to change the underlying systems to make that a rational and reasonable outcome again.
And that moat is way more than $2T worth when IPO time comes.
" Justice is not fair. The justice system doesn't care who is right, they only care who has more money, and I see billions of dollars in that room, and I do not see billions of dollars in this room. "
The article seems mostly to go for copyright infringement in training on public data which the companies dispute and is not the sort of thing you generally get jailed for.
If anything, given the current admins talk about beating the Chinese in AI being the main thing, he's more likely to get an award for it.