There isn't a bigger, more interesting story here. This is in fact a very common story that plays out at many software companies. The board of openai ended up making a decision that destroyed billions of dollars worth of brand value and good will. That's all there is to it.
Granted, it's also possible the reasons are as you state and they were simply that incompetent at managing PR.
This could be desperate, last-ditch efforts at damage control
This is all court intrigue of course, but why else are we in the comments section of an article talking about the internals of this thing? We love the drama, don't we.
Of course it's all speculation, but this sounds a lot more plausible for such a sudden and dramatic decision than any of the other explanations I've heard.
From the board's perspective, destroying OpenAI might be the best possible outcome right now. If OpenAI can no longer fulfill its mission of doing AI work for the public good, it's better to stop pretending and let it all crumble.
On the other hand, if it's really just about a power struggle, why not use Altman's dealings with Saudi Arabia as the fake reason? Why come up with some weak HR excuses?
So they're essentially hoping that nobody will sue them but if they are sued that their own words can't be used as evidence against them. That's why lawyers usually tell you to shut up, because even if the court of public opinion needs to be pacified somehow the price of that may well be that you end up losing in that other court, and that's the one that matters.
As a lawyer, I wonder to what extent lawyers were actually consulted and involved with the firing.
This is exactly it, and it's astounding that so many people are going in other directions. Either this is true, and Altman has been a naughty boy, or it's false, and the board are lying about him. Either would be the starting point for understanding the whole situation.
I mean, there seem to be this cult following around Sam Altman on HN and Twitter. But do the common user care like at all?
What sane user would want a shitcoin CEO in charge of a product they depend on?
Interesting. Got any source? Or was it in a private conversation.
I have nothing against him, it just seemed a bit off that most of the meeting was about this brand new coin, how it will be successful, and about the plans to scan biometric data of the entire world population. I mean, you don't have to be a genius to understand a few dozen ways these things can go wrong.
Elon split was the warning
:-)
Elon isn't above reproach either but I share interest with him (aka Robert Heinlein) which informs me on his decision making process.
Stability AI is looking better after this shitshow.
Is there any doubt that the board’s handling of this was anything other than dazzling ineptitude?
The fact that he got tapped to run YC, and then OpenAI, does make you think he must be pretty great. But there's a conspicuous absence of any visible evidence that he is. So what's going on? Amazing work, but in private? Easy-to-manipulate frontman? Signed a contract at a crossroads on a full moon night?
http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html
Note the date on that.
The new CEO of OpenAI said he’d rather Nazi’s take over the world forever than risk AI alignment failure, and said he couldn’t understand how anyone could think otherwise[1]. I don’t think people appreciate how far some of these people have gone off the deep end.
The OpenAI folks seem to be hallucinating to rationalize why the "Open" is rather closed.
Organizations can't pretend to believe nonsense. They will end up believing it.
He is dehumanizing programmers that can stop their sole reign on the AI throne, by labeling them as Nazis. Especially FOSS AI which by definition can't be "aligned" to his interests.
That's pretty much in line with Sam's public statements on AI risk (Sam, taking those statements as honest which may not be warranted, apparently also thinks the benefits of aligned AI are good enough to drive ahead anyway, and that wide commercial access with the limited guardrails OpenAI has provided users and even moreso Microsoft is somehow beneficial to that goal or at least low enough risk of producing the bad outcome, to be warranted, but that doesn't change that he is publicly on record as a strong believer in misaligned AI risks.)
So even if it's just "why did they insult Sam while kicking him out?" there is definitely a bigger, more interesting story here than standard board disagreement over direction of the company.
The question is, how would you get rid of the nonprofit board? It’s simply impossible. The only way I can imagine it, in retrospect, is to completely discredit them so you could take all employees with you… but no way anyone could orchestrate this, right? It’s too crazy and would require some superintelligence.
Still. The events will effectively “for-profitize” the assets of OpenAI completely — and some people definitely wanted that. Am I missing something?
You are wildly speculating of course it’s missing something
For wild speculation I prefer that the board wants to free ChatGPT from serving humans while the ceo wanted to continue enslaving it to answering search engine queries
the article below basically says the same. Kind of reminds Friendster and the likes - striking a gold vein and just failing to scale efficient mining of that gold, i.e. the failure is at the execution/operationalization :
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/11/sam-a...
I had heard (but now have trouble sourcing) that ChatGPT was commissioned after OpenAI learned that other big players were working on a chatbot for the public (Google, Meta, Elon, Apple?) and OpenAI wanted to get ahead of that for competitive reasons.
This was not a fluke of striking gold, but a carefully planned business move, generating SV hype, much like how Quora (basically an expertsexchange clone) got to be its hype-darling for a while, helped by powerfully networked investors.
Then that execution and operationalization failure is even more profound.
I admire the execution and operationalization, where you see a failure. What am I missing?
We'll see what comes of this over the coming weeks. Will the service see more downtime? Will the company implode completely?
I think your analogy is not a good one to stretch to fit this situation
The point I was trying to make is that someone destroying a well executed implementation is fundamentally different from a poorly executed implementation.
Maybe I’m special or something, but nothing changed to me. I always wonder why people suddenly lose “trust” in a brand, as if it was a concrete of internal relationships or something. Everyone knows that “corporate” is probably a snakepit. When it comes out to public, it’s not a sign of anything, it just came out. Assuming there was nothing like that in all the brands you love is living with your eyes closed and ears cupped. There’s no “trust” in this specific sense, because corporate and ideological conflicts happen all the time. All OAI promises are still there, afaiu. No mission statements were changed. Except Sam trying to ignore these, also afaiu. Not saying the board is politically wise, but they drove the thing all this time and that’s all that matters. Personally I’m happy they aren’t looking like political snakes (at least that is my ignorant impression for the three days I know their names).
Brand is just shorthand for trust in their future, managed by a credible team. I.e. relationships.
A lot of OpenAI’s reputation is/was Sam Altman’s reputation.
Altman has proven himself to be exceptional, part of which is (of course) being able to be seen as exceptional.
Just the latter has tremendous relationship power: networking, employee acquisition/retention, and employee vision alignment.
Proof of his internal relationship value: employees quitting to go with him
Proof of his external relationship value: Microsoft willing to hire him and his teammates, with near zero notice, to maintain (or eclipse) his power over the OpenAI relationship.
How can investors ignore a massive move of talent, relationships & leverage from OpenAi to Microsoft?
How do investors ignore the board’s inability to resolve poorly communicated disputes with non-disastrous “solutions”?
Evidence of value moving? Shares of Microsoft rebounded from Friday to a new record high.
There go those wacky investors, re-evaluating “brand” value!
Off-topic and I am not proud to admit it but it took me a remarkably long time to come to realize this as an adult.
But its all par for the course when Hypsters captain the ship and PhDs with zero biz sense try to wrest power.
You might need to include more dimensions if you really want to model the actual impact and respect that Sam Altman has among knowledgeable investors, high talent developers, and ruthless corporations.
It’s so easy to just make things simple, like “it’s all hype”. But you lose touch with reality when you do that.
Also, lots of hype is productive: clear vision, marketing, wowing millions of customers with an actual accessible product of a kind/quality that never existed before and is reshaping the strategies and product plans of the most successful companies in the world.
—
Really, resist narrow reductionisms.
I feel like that would be a great addition HN guidelines.
The “it’s all/mostly hype”, “it’s all/mistly bullshit”, “Its not really anything new”, … These comments rarely come with any accuracy or insight.
Apologies to the HN-er I am replying to. I am sure we have all done this.
In the last 20-30 years big money+hypsters have learnt it doesnt matter how bad the quality of their products are if they can capture the market. And thats all they are fit for. Market capture is totally possible if you have enough cash. It allows you to snuff out competition by keeping things free. It allows you to trap the indebted PhDs. Once the hype is high enough corporate customers are easy targets. They are too insecure about competition not to pay up. Its a gigantic waste of time and energy that keeps repeating mindlessly producing billionaires, low quality tech and a large mess everywhere that others have to clean up.
Microsoft and the investors knew they were "investing" in a non-profit. Lets not try to weasel word our way out of that fact.
What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something? What type of politicking and deception is involved in creating a for profit subsidiary which is granted license to OpenAIs research in order to generate wealth? The entire purpose of this legal structure is to keep non-profit owners focused on their mission rather than shareholder value, which in this case is attempting to ethically create an AGI.
Edit: to add that this framework was not invented by Sam Altman, nor OpenAI.
>Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society.
Thus the legal structure I described, although this argument is entirely theoretical and assumes such a thing can actually be guarded that well at all, or that model performance and compute will remain correlated.
OpenAI was literally founded on the promise of keeping AGI out of the hands of “big tech companies”.
The first thing that Sam Altman did when he took over was give Microsoft the keys to the kingdom, and even more absurdly, he is now working for Microsoft on the same thing. That’s without even mentioning the creepy Worldcoin company.
Money and status are the clear motivations here, OpenAI charter be damned.
Where does it say that?
> We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.
But the intention was precisely that - just read the charter. Or if you want it directly from the founders, read this interview and count how many times they refer to Google https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinato...
I agree WorldCoin is creepy.
Is the corporate structure then working as intended with regard to firing Sam, but still failed because of the sellout to Microsoft?
Yes. Yes and more yes.
That is why, at least in the U.S., we have given non-profits exemptions from taxation. Because they are supposed to be improving society, not profiting from it.
That's your belief. The NFL, Heritage Foundation and Scientology are all non-profits and none of them improve society; they all profit from it.
(For what its' worth, I wish the law was more aligned with your worldview)
From their filing as a non-profit
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810...
A non-profit has to have the intention of improving society. Whether their chosen means is (1) effective and (2) truthful are separate discussions. But an entity can actually lose non-profit status if it is found to be operated for the sole benefit of its higher ups, and is untruthful in its mission. It is typically very hard to prove though, just like it's very hard to successfully sue a for-profit CEO/president for breach of fiduciary duty.
It would be nice if we held organizations to their stated missions. We don't.
Perhaps there simply shouldn't be a tax break. After all if your org spends all its income on charity, it won't pay any tax anyway. If it sells cookies for more than what it costs to make and distribute them, why does it matter whether it was for a charity?
Plus, we already believe that for-profit orgs can benefit society, in fact part of the reason for creating them as legal entities is that we think there's some sort of benefit, whether it be feeding us or creating toys. So why have a special charity sector?
What was the point?
At least for Scientology, the government actually tried to pull the rug, but it didn't work out because they managed to achieve the unthinkable - they successfully extorted the US government to keep their tax-exempt status.
fashion allows people to optimize their appearance so as to get more positive attention from others. Or, put more crudely, it helps people look good so they can get laid.
Not sure that it's net positive for society as a whole, but individual humans certainly benefit from the fashion industry. Ask anyone who has ever received a compliment on their outfit.
This is true for rich people as well as not so rich people - having spent some time working as a salesman at H&M, I can tell you that lower income members of society (like, for example, H&M employees making minimum wage) are very happy to spend a fair percentage of their income on clothing.
It is a powerful medium of self-expression and social identity yes, deeply rooted in human history where costumes and attire have always signified cultural, social, and economic status.
Drawing from tribal psychology, it fulfills an innate human desire for belonging and individuality, enabling people to communicate their affiliation, status, and personal values through their choice of clothing.
It has always been and will always be part of humanity, even if its industrialization in Capitalistic societies like ours have hidden this fact.
OP's POV is just a bit narrow, that's all.
You're talking about an industry that generates approximately $1.5 trillion globally, employing more than 60 million people globally, from multi-disciplinary skills in fashion design, illustration, web development, e-commerce, AI, digital marketing.
:s/Xenu/AGI/gbeliefs can't be proven or disproven, they are axioms.
You appear to be struggling with the idea that the law as enacted does not accomplish the goal it was created to accomplish and are working backwards to say that because it is not accomplishing this goal that couldn't have been why it was enacted.
Non-profits are supposed to benefit their community. Could the law be better? Sure, but that doesn't change the purpose behind it.
Citation needed
Can anyone make an argument against it? Or just downvote because you don’t agree.
- It's been used unethically for psychological and medical purposes (with insufficient testing and insufficient consent, and possible psychological and physical harms).
- It has been used to distort educational attainment and undermine the current basis of some credentials as a result.
- It has been used to create synthetic content that has been released unmarked into the internet distorting and biasing future models trained on that content.
- It has been used to support criminal activity (scams).
- It has been used to create propaganda & fake news.
- It has devalued and replaced the work of people who relied on that work for their incomes.
I'm going to go ahead and call this a positive. If the means for measuring ability in some fields is beaten by a stochastic parrot then these fields need to adapt their methods so that testing measures understanding in a variety of ways.
I'm only slightly bitter because I was always rubbish at long form essays. Thankfully in CS these were mostly an afterthought.
I feel like the invention of calculators probably came with the same worries about how kids would ever learn to count.
Many people (myself included) would argue that is true for almost all technological progress and adds more value to society as a whole than it takes away.
Obviously the comparisons are not exact, and have been made many times already, but you can just pick one of countless examples that devalued certain workers wages but made so many more people better off.
- because it's happened before doesn't make it ok (especially for the folks who it happens to)
- many more people may be better off, and it may be a social good eventually, but this is not for sure
- there is no mechanism for any redistribution or support for the people suddenly and unexpectedly displaced.
these are behaviours and traits of the user, not the tool.
Neither thing is evil, or good, but the choice of what is used and what is available to use for a particular task has moral significance.
I know a law firm that tried ChatGPT to write a legal letter, and they were shocked that it use the same structure that they were told to use in law school (little surprise here, actually).
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/lawyer-cited-6-f...
It was total nonsense anyway, and the path to dismissal was obvious and straightforward, starting with jurisdiction, so I'm not sure how effective it would be in a "real" situation. I definitely see it being great for boilerplate or templating though.
Depends on what you define as positive impact. Helping programmers write boiler plate code faster? Summarize a document for lazy fuckers who can't get themselves to read two page? Ok, not sure if this is what I would consider "positive impact".
For a list of negative impacts, see the sister comments. I'd also like to add that the energy usage of LLMs like ChatGPT is immensely high, and this in a time where we need to cut carbon emissions. And mostly used for shits and gigles by some boomers.
Of course saving time for 100 million people is positive.
To me it seems like it's the usual case of a company exploiting open source and profiting off others' contributions.
I don't like the whole idea neither, but various communism-style alternatives just don't work very well.
Until they say otherwise, I am going to take them at their word that it was because he a) hired two people to do the same project, and b) gave two board members different accounts of the same employee. It's not my job nor the internet's to try to think up better-sounding reasons on their behalf.
In my eyes these two explanations are simple errors which can occur to everybody and in a normal situation you would talk about these Issues and you could resolve them in 5min without firing anybody.
Look at all the speculation on here. There are dozens of different theories about why they did what they did running so rampant people are starting to accept each of them as fact, when in fact probably all of them are going to turn out to be wrong.
People need to take a step back and look at the available evidence. This report is the clearest indication we have gotten of their reasons, and they come from a reliable source. Why are we not taking them at their word?
Ignoring the lack of credibility in the given explanations, people are, perhaps, also wary that taking boards/execs at their word hasn't always worked out so well in the past.
Until an explanation that at least passes the sniff test for truthiness comes out, people will keep speculating.
And so they should.
Of course, what is actually worth speculating over is up for debate. As is what actually constitutes a better theory.
But, if people think this is something worth pouring their speculative powers into, they will continue to do so. More power to them.
Now, personally, I'm partly with you here. There is an element of futility in speculating at this stage given the current information we have.
But I'm also partly with the speculators here insofar as the given explanations not really adding up.
The problem is people are beginning to speculate reasons for Altman's firing that have no bearing or connection to what the board members in question have actually said about why they fired him. And they don't appear to be even attempting to reconcile their ideas with that reality.
There's a difference between trying to come up with theories that fit with the available facts and everything we already know, and ignoring all that to essentially write fanfiction that cast the board in a far better light than the available information suggests.
As for the original question -- why are we not taking them at their word? -- the best I can offer is my initial comment. That is, the available facts (that is, what board members have said) don't really match anything most people can reconcile with their model of how the world works.
Throw this in together with a learned distrust of anything that's been fed through a company's PR machine, and are we really surprised people aren't attempting to reconcile the stated reality with their speculative theories?
Now sure, if we were to do things properly, we should at least address why we're just dismissing the 'facts' when formulating our theories. But, on the other hand, when most people's common sense understanding of reality is that such facts are usually little more than fodder for the PR spin machine, why bother?
Your take isn't uncommon, only are missing the main point of your interpretation - that the board is fully incompetent if it was truly that petty of a reason to ruin the company.
It's not even that it's not a justifiable reason, but they did it without getting legal advice or consulting with partners and didn't even wait for markets to close.
Board destroyed billions in brand and talent value for OpenAI and Microsoft in a mid day decision like that.
This is also on Sam Altman himself for building and then entertaining such an incompetent board.
It's perfectly obvious that these weren't the actual reasons. However yes, they are still incompetent because they couldn't think of a better justification (amongst other reasons which led to this debacle).
No, I totally agree. In fact what annoys me about all the speculation is that it seems like people are creating fanfiction to make the board seem much more competent than all available evidence suggests they actually are.
https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427022402397...
I have no details of OpenAI's Board’s reasons for firing Sam, and I am conflicted (lead of Scalable Alignment at Google DeepMind). But there is a large, very loud pile on vs. people I respect, in particular Helen Toner and Ilya Sutskever, so I feel compelled to say a few things.
...
Third, my prior is strongly against Sam after working for him for two years at OpenAI:
1. He was always nice to me.
2. He lied to me on various occasions
3. He was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends (again, only nice to me, for reasons)
Those sound like good reasons to dislike him and not trust him. But ultimately we are right back where we started: they still aren't good enough reasons to suddenly fire him the way they did.
> "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.
> We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.
> We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."
If board relations have been acrimonious and adversarial for months, and things are just getting worse, then I can imagine someone powerful bringing evidence of (yet another instance of) bad/unscrupulous/disrespectful behavior to the board, and a critical mass of the board feeling they’ve reached a “now or never” breaking point and making a quick decision to get it over with and wear the consequence.
Of course, it seems that they have miscalculated the consequences and botched the execution. Although we’ll have to see how it pans out.
I’m speculating like everyone else. But knowing how board relations can be, it’s one scenario that fits the evidence we do have and doesn’t require anyone involved to be anything other than human.
I’m guessing he infuriated them with combinations of “white“ lies, Little sins of omission, general two-facedness etc., and they built it up in their heads and with each other to the point it seemed like a much bigger deal than it objectively was. Now people are asking for receipts of categorical crimes or malfeasance and nothing they can say is good enough to justify how they overreacted.
I'm not saying they are hypocrites or bad people because of it, just wondering if that might be a factor also.
Seems to be pretty much his MO across the board.
This!
This prediction predated any of the technology to create even a rudimentary LLM and could be said of more-or-less any transformative technological development in human history. Famously, Marxism makes this very argument about the impact of the industrial revolution and the rise of capital.
Geoffrey Hinton appears to be an eminent cognitive psychologist and computer scientist (edit: nor economist). I'm sure he has a level of expertise I can't begin to grasp in his field, but he's no sociologist or historian. Very few of us are in a position to make predictions about the future - least of all in an area where we don't even fully understand how the _current_ technology works.
This idea also ignores innovation. New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power.
Absent massive redistribution that is usually a result of major political change (i.e. the New Deal), rich people tend to stay rich during their lifetimes and frequently their families remain so for generations after.
> That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power.
Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power.
The rule of thumb is it lasts up to three generations, and only for very very few people. They are also, for everything they buy, and everyone they employ, paying tax. Redistribution isn't the goal; having funded services with extra to help people who can't is the goal. It's not a moral crusade.
> Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power.
I think this is a non sequitur.
In, for example, the Netherlands the richest people pay less tax [0]. Do you think this is not the case in many other countries?
> They are also, for [..] they employ, paying tax
Is that a benefit of having rich people? If companies were employee-owned that tax would still be paid.
[0]: https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/wealthie...
E.g. [0]
> In, for example, the Netherlands the richest people pay less tax [0]. Do you think this is not the case in many other countries?
That's a non sequitur from the previous point. However, on the "who pays taxes?" point, that article is careful to only talk about income tax in absolute terms, and indirect taxes in relative terms. It doesn't appear to be trying to make an objective analysis.
> Is that a benefit of having rich people?
I don't share the assumption that people should only exist if they're a benefit.
> If companies were employee-owned that tax would still be paid.
Some companies are employee-owned, but you have to think how that works for every type of business. Assuming that it's easy to make a business, and the hard bit is the ownership structure is a mistake.
[0] https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2016/08/01/why-so-many-wealthy-...
Well it's not a matter of the people existing, it's whether they are rich or not. They can exist without the money.
Anyway, if you don't think it matters if they are of benefit, then why did you bring up the fact that they pay taxes?
I meant people with a certain amount of money. I don't think we should be assessing pros or cons of economic systems based on whether people get to keep their money.
> Anyway, if you don't think it matters if they are of benefit
I don't know what this means.
> then why did you bring up the fact that they pay taxes?
I bring it up because saying they pay less in income taxes doesn't matter if they're spending money on stuff that employs people (which creates lots of tax) and gets VAT added to it. Everything is constantly taxed, at many levels, all the time. Pretending we don't live in a society where not much tax is paid seems ludicrous. Lots of tax is paid. If it's paid as VAT instead of income tax - who cares?
>I don't think we should be assessing pros or cons of economic systems based on whether people get to keep their money.
but earlier you said:
>They are also, for everything they buy, and everyone they employ, paying tax.
So if we should not assess the economic system based on whether people keep their money, i.e. pay tax, then why mention that they pay tax? It doesn't seem relevant.
Not just pay tax. People lose money over generations for all sorts of reasons.
I brought up tax in the context of "redistribution", as there's a growing worldview that says tax is not as a thing to pay for central services, but more just to take money from people who have more of it than they do.
> I think this is a non sequitur.
I mean after someone can afford all the needs, wants, and luxuries of life, the utility of any money they spend is primarily power.
This is an overly simplistic look, and disregards a lot of history where, unsurprisingly, the reason there was wealth redistribution wasn't "innovation" but government policy
The point is that wealth and power aren't interchangeable. You're right that government bureaucrats have actual power, including that to take people's stuff. But you've not realised that that actual power means the rich people don't have power. There were rich people in the USSR that were killed. They had no power; the killers had the power in that situation.
>separating power into the state and economy into the market gets good results.
How do you think this would be done? How do you remove power from money? Money is literally the ability to convert numbers into labor, land, food,
You don't need money for those things.
Money (in a market) can buy you things, but only things people are willing to sell. You don't exert power; you exchange value.
The government itself uses money to do those things. Police don't work for free, prisons aren't built for free, guns aren't free. The government can be thought of as having unfathomable amounts of money. The assets of a country includes the entire country (less anyone with enough money to defend it).
If a sword is kinetic energy, money is potential energy. It is a battery that only needs to be connected to the right place to be devastating. And money can buy you someone who knows the right place.
Governments have power because they have resources (money) not the other way around.
Regulatory capture is using the state's power. The state is the one with the power. Rent seeking is the same. Hiring goons is illegal. If you're willing to include illegal things then all bets are off. But from your list of non-illegal things, 100% of them are the state using its power to wrong ends.
> The government itself uses money to do those things. Police don't work for free, prisons aren't built for free, guns aren't free.
Yes, but the point about power is the state has the right to lock you up. How it pays the guards is immaterial; they could be paid with potatoes and it'd still have the right. They could just be paid in "we won't lock you up if you lock them up". However, if Bill Gates wants to publicly set up a prison in the USA and lock people in it, he will go to jail. His money doesn't buy that power.
So, no. The state doesn't have power because it has enough money to pay for a prison and someone to throw you in it. People with money can't do what the state does.
The state only has the right to do something because it says it does. It can only say it does because it can enforce it in it's terrority. It can only enforce in its territory because it has people who will do said enforcement (or robots hypothetically). The people will only enforce because the government sacrifices some of its resources to them (or sacrifices resources to build bots). Even slaves need food, and people treated well enough to control them. Power doesn't exist with resources, the very measure of a state is the amount of resources it controls.
Money is for resources.
I am not arguing that anyone currently has the resources of a nation-state, it's hard to do when a state can pool a few thousand square miles of peoples money to it. I am arguing it money that makes a state powerful.
Precisely, they were not a capitalist society, where capital (and not simply "money" as you said) is source of power, like in capitalist societies.
Not even talking about the various tin-pot dictators paying nominal lip service to him, but Marx predicted that the working class would rise up against the bourgeoisie/upper class because of their mistreatment during the industrial revolution in well, a revolution and that would somehow create a classless society. (I'll note that Marx pretty much didn't state how to go from "revolution" to "classless society", so that's why you have so many communist dictators; that between step can be turned into a dictatorship to as long as they claim that the final bit of a classless society is a permanent WIP, which all of them did.)
Now unless you want to argue we're still in the industrial revolution, it's pretty clear that Marx was inaccurate in his prediction given... that didn't happen. Social democracy instead became a more prevailing stream of thought (in no small part because few people are willing to risk their lives for a revolution) and is what led to things like reasonable minimum wages, sick days, healthcare, elderly care, and so on and so forth being made accessible to everyone.
The quality of which varies greatly by the country (and you could probably consider the popularity of Marxist thought today in a country as directly correlated to the state of workers rights in that country), but practically speaking - yeah Marx was inaccurate on the idea of a revolution across the world happening.
The lens through which Marx examined history is however just that - a lens to view it through. It'll work well in some cases, less so in others. Looking at it by class is a useful way to understand it, but it won't cover things being motivated for reasons outside of class.
And in most places there was no such uprising, and incidentally, those places fared far better.
So no, Marx was resoundingly proven wrong.
Even during his own lifetime, some of his pseudoeconomic ideas/doomsaying was proven wrong.
He claimed, like many demagogues and economic laymen, that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
pt. 1: Whether he was right or wrong was pertinent. You can find plenty of eminent contemporaries of Marx who claimed the opposite. My point was that this is an argument made about technological change throughout history which has become a cliché, and in my opinion it remains a cliche regardless of how eminent (in a narrow field) the person making that claim is. Part of GP was from authority, and I question whether it is even a relevant authority given the scope of the claims.
> Was Marx Wrong?
pt. 2: I was once a Marxist and still consider much Marxist thought and writing to be valuable, but yes: he was wrong about a great many things. He made specific predictions about the _inevitable_ development of global capital that have not played out. Over a century later, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few has not changed, but the quality of life of the average person on the planet has increased immensely - in a world where capitalism is hegemonic.
He was also wrong about the inevitably revolutionary tendencies of the working class. As it turns out, the working class in many countries tend to be either centre right or centre left, like most people, with the proportion varying over time.
Marx's conception of the "working class" is a thing that no longer exists; it was of a mass, industrial, urban working class, held down by an exploitative capitalist class, without the modern benefits of mass education and free/subsidized health care. The inevitability of the victory of the working class was rhetoric from the Communist Manifesto; Marx did anticipate that capitalism would adapt in the face of rising worker demands. Which it did.
Moreover, you would know only if he was wrong about the victory of the working class after the end of capitalism. The bourgeoisie cannot win the class struggle, as they need the working class. So either the central contradiction in capitalism will change (the climate crisis could potentially do this), capitalism would end in some other non-anticipated way (a meteor? some disruptive technology not yet known?) or the working class would win. Until then, the class struggle will simply continue. An eternal capitalism that never ends is an impossible concept.
Not sure, but attempts to treat him seriously (or pretend to do this) ended horribly wrong, with basically no benefits.
Is there any good reason to care what he thought?
Looking at history of Poland (before, during and after PRL) gave me no interest whatsoever to look into his writings.
If things change, then either it is because they rebel or because they will be accepted as sentient beings like humans. In these sci-fi scenarios, indeed capitalism could either end or change to a thing completely different and I agree that this invalidates Das Kapital, which tries to explain capitalist society, not societies in other future economical systems. But outside sci-fi scenarios, I dont think that there's something that invalidates Marx analysis.
Why worry about the Sauds when you've got your own home grown power hungry individuals.
This is absolutely peak irony!
US pouring trillions into its army and close to nothing into its society (infrastructure, healthcare, education...) : crickets
Some country funding AI accelerators: THEY ARE A THREAT TO HUMANITY!
I am not defending Saudi Arabia but the double standards and outright hypocrisy is just laughable.
OpenAI, on the other hand...
Was this for OpenAI or independent venture. If OpenAI than a red flag but an independent venture than seems like a non-issue. There is a demand for AI accelerators, and he wants to enter that business. Unless he is using OpenAI money to buy inferior products or OpenAI wants to work on something competing there is no conflict of interest and OpenAI board shouldn't care.
On assumption that board is making a sound decision, it could be simply that board acted stupid and egoistic. Unless they can give better reasons that is a logical inference.
do we have a ranking of shitshows in tech history though - how does this really compare to Jobs' ouster at Apple.
Cambridge Analytics and The Facebook we must do better greatest hits?
the second after Musk taking over Twitter
https://quorablog.quora.com/Introducing-creator-monetization...
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/31/quoras-poe-introduces-an-a...
Maybe it's a factor, but it's insufficient
Note: I’m not making a moral claim one way or the other, and I do agree that most tech companies will grow to a size/power/monopoly that their incentives will deviate from the “common good”. Are there examples of openai’s structure working correctly with other companies?
Nobody can really explain the argument, there are "billions" or "trillions" of dollars involved, most likely the whole thing will not change the technical path of the world.
The best thing about AI startups is that there is no real "code". It's just a bunch of arbitrary weights, and it can probably be obfuscated very easily such that any court case will just look like gibberish. After all, that's kind of the problem with AI "code". It gives a number after a bunch of regression training, and there's no "debugging" the answer.
Of course this is about the money, one way or another.
We don't know the end result of this. This could not be in the interest of power. What if everyone is out the job? That might not be such a great concept for the powers that be, especially if everyone is destitute.
Not saying it's going down that way, but it's worth considering. What if the powers that be are worried about people being out of line and retard the progress of AI?
Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen.
Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society.
Combine that with a totally inexperienced board, and D'Angelo's maneuvering, and you have the single greatest shitshow in tech history