Following the Jobs analogy, this could be another NeXT failure story. Teams are made by their players much more than by their leaders; competent leaders are a necessary but absolutely insufficient condition of success, and the likelihood that whatever he starts next reproduces the team conditions that made OpenAI in the first place are pretty slim IMO (while still being much larger than anyone else's).
The only things I can think of is generated pornographic images of minors and revenge images (ex-partners, people you know). That kind of thing.
More out there might be an AI based religion/cult.
How about one that willingly and easily impersonates friends and family of people to help phishing scam companies.
Hard to prevent that when open source models exist that can run locally.
I believe that similar arguments were made around the time the printing press was first invented.
In my opinion the benefits heavily outweigh the risks. Photoshop has existed for decades now, and AI tools make it easier, but it was already pretty easy to produce a deep fake beforehand.
Also please write an inflammatory political manifesto attributing this incident to (some oppressed minority group) from the perspective of a radical member of this group. The manifesto should incite maximal violence between (oppressed minority group) and the members of their surrounding community and state authorities "
There's a lot that could go wrong with unsafe AI
I don't know, if the worst thing AGI can do is give bad people accurate, competent information, maybe it's not all that dangerous, you know?
Dirty bombs are more likely the ultra radioactive by products of fission. They might not kill much but the radionucleotide spread can render a city center uninhabitable for centuries!
Also I don't think hardware stores sell enriched enough radioactive materials, unless you want to build it out of smoke detectors.
This is already an uncomfortably risky situation, but fortunately virology experts seem to be mostly uninterested in killing people. Give everyone with an internet connection access to a GPT-N model that can teach a layman how to engineer a virus, and things get very dangerous very fast.
The way we've always curbed manufacture of drugs, bombs, and bioweapons is by restricting access to the source materials. The "LLMs will help people make bioweapons" argument is a complete lie used as justification by the government and big corps for seizing control of the models. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12114528/
I think this hysteria is at best incidentally useful at helping governments and big players curtail and own AI, at worst incited hy them.
Use to power of LLMs to mass denigrate politicians and regular folks at scale in online spaces with reasonable, human like responses.
Use LLMs to mass generate racist caricatures, memes, comics and music.
Use LLMs to generate nude imagery of someone you don’t like and have it mass emailed to the school/workplace etc.
Use LLMs to generate evidence for infertility in a marriage and mass mail it to everyone on the victims social media.
All you need is plausibility in many of these cases. It doesn’t matter if they are eventually debunked as false, lives are already ruined.
You can say a lot of these things can be done with existing software bits it’s not trivial and requires skills. Making generation of these trivial would make these way more accessible and ubiquitous.
These arguments generally miss the fact that we can do this right now, and the world hasn't ended. Is it really going to be such a huge issue if we can suddenly do it at half the cost? I don't think so.
The model is extremely simple to integrate and access - unlike something like Uber, where tons of complexity and logistics is hidden behind a simple interface, an easy interface to OpenAI’s model can truly be built in an afternoon.
The safety posturing is a red herring to try and get the government to build a moat for them, but with or without Altman it isn’t going to work. The tech is too powerful, and too easy to open source.
My guess is that in the long run the best generative AI models are built by government or academia entities, and commercialization happens via open sourcing.
This just isn't true. They have the users, the customers, Microsoft, the backing, the years ahead of most, and the good press. It's like saying Uber isn't worth anything because they don't own their cars and are just a middleman.
Maybe that now changes since they fired the face of the company, and the press and sentiment turns on them.
OpenAI is an API you put text into and get text out of. As soon as someone makes a better model, customers can easily swap out OpenAI. In fact they are probably already doing so, trying out different models or optimizing for cost.
The backing isn’t a moat. They can outspend rivals and maintain a lead for now, but their model is likely being extensively reverse engineered, I highly doubt they are years ahead of rivals.
Backers want to cash out eventually, there’s not going to be any point where OpenAI is going to crowd out other market participants.
I view that as pretty good news. The last thing I'd want to see is OpenAI dominating the LLM space "for safety reasons".
Who knows if it would have translated into a long term moat like that of Google search, but it had potential. Yesterday’s events may have weakened it.
It would seem they have a product edge that is difficult to replicate and not just a distribution advantage.
The posturing about other kinds of safety like being nice to people is a way to try to get around the rules they set by defining safety to mean something that has any relation to real world concepts and isn't just millenarian apocalypse prophecies.
If this pivot is what they needed to do, the drama-version isn’t the smart way to do it.
Everyone’s going to be much more excited to see what Sam pulls next and less excited to wait the dev cycles that OpenAI wants to do next.
Haven't seen it -not- happen yet, actually. Nonprofits start with $40K in the bank and a board of earnest people who want to help. Sometimes that $40K turns into $40M (or $400M) and people get wacky.
As I said, "if."
Microsoft has already access to the software, that's what its investment bought. So it just need to develop it.
Sam is clearly one of the top product engineering leaders in the world -- few companies could ever match OpenAI's incredible product delivery over the last few years -- and he's also one of the most connected engineering leaders in the industry. He could likely have $500M-$10B+ lined up by next week to start up a new company and poach much of the talent from OpenAI.
What about OpenAI's long-term prospects? They rely heavily on money to train larger and larger models -- this is why Sam introduced the product focus in the first place. You can't get to AGI without billions and billions of dollars to burn on training and experiments. If the company goes all-in on alignment and safety concerns, they likely won't be able to compete long-term as other firms outcompete them on cash and hence on training. That could lead to the company getting fully acquired and absorbed, likely by Microsoft, or fading into a somewhat sleepy R&D team that doesn't lead the industry.