Sorry for the confusion.
I, personally, have a hard time picking sides here. On its face it seems that Ms Toner is more aligned with OpenAI’s stated mission.
However Sam seems much better suited to operating the company and being the “public face” of AI. One thing I’m pretty confident in is that the board isn’t capable of navigating OpenAI through the rough seas it’s currently in.
I think an argument could realistically be made to blow up the whole governance structure and reset with new principals across the board, that being said I don’t know who’d be a natural arbiter here.
At the end of the day the untenable spot Ms Toner is in is that the genie is out of the bottle which makes her position of allowing the company to self-destruct a bit tone deaf.
AGI is either just around the corner or it will be 50 years or more and if it is just around the corner you'd hope that parties that have at least some semblance of balance would end up in charge of the thing. Because if it is possible I expect it to be done given the amount of resources that are being thrown at this. Assuming it can be done weaponization of this tech would change the balance of power in the world dramatically. Everybody seems to be worried about the wrong thing: whether or not the AGI will be friendly to us. That doesn't really matter, what matters is who controls it.
No single individual (Altman, Toner, Nadella, or anybody else) should be taking the responsibility about what happens onto themselves, if anything the board of OpenAI has shown that this isn't a matter for junior board members because the effects range far further than just OpenAI.
> Assuming it can be done weaponization of this tech would change the balance of power in the world dramatically.
Yes it would, but it wouldn't be as bad as everyone dying.
> Everybody seems to be worried about the wrong thing: whether or not the AGI will be friendly to us. That doesn't really matter, what matters is who controls it.
No, "who controls it" is a problem best tackled after "will it kill everyone." You say "That doesn't really matter," but again, Sam Altman himself thinks "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."
Oh, ok. That makes it alright then. So, let's see those minutes of that meeting where this was decided with all of the pomp and gravitas required rather than that it was a petty act of revenge or to see who could oust who first from OpenAI. Because that's what it looks like to me based on what is now visible.
> Yes it would, but it wouldn't be as bad as everyone dying.
Not much is as bad as everyone dying. But for now that hasn't happened. It also seems a bit like a larger version of the 'think of the children' argument, you can justify any action with that reason.
> No, "who controls it" is a problem best tackled after "will it kill everyone." You say "That doesn't really matter," but again, Sam Altman himself thinks "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."
Then why the fuck is he trying to bring it into the world? Seriously, they should spend all of their talent on trying to sabotage those efforts then, infiltrate research groups and set up a massive campaign to divert resources away from the development of AGI. Instead they are trying as hard as they can to create the genie in the sure conviction that they can keep it bottled up.
It's delusional on so many fronts at once that it is isn't even funny, their position is so horribly inconsistent that you have to wonder if they're all right in the head.
EA is becoming a massive red flag in my book.
They seem to miss the fact that every weapon that humanity has so far produced has been used, and that those that haven't been used hang over us like shadows, and have been doing that for the last 70 some years. Those are weapons whose use you will notice. AGI is a weapon whose use you will not notice until you realize you are living in a stable dictatorship. The chances of that happening are far larger than the chances of everybody dying.
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the original founders of OpenAI believe AGI is an existential threat and are building it with the belief that it’s best they’re the ones who do it, rather than worse people, in an arms race. Eliezer is the one saying “you fucking fools, you’re speeding up the arms race and have now injected a shit ton of $ from all VC into accomplishing the naive capabilities with no alignment.”
People don’t even realize that Elon Musk founded Neuralink with the belief that AGI is such an existential threat, we’re better off becoming the AGI cyborgs than a separate inferior intelligence. But most of the people thinking theyre so smart and understand the AGI X risk landscape here, even Elon fans, don’t know that.
People really watch too many movies. The real risk isn't AGI killing us all, the real risk is that plenty of people will think they are smart enough to create it and then to contain it whilst the ruthless faction of humanity uses it to set up shop in a way that they can never ever be dislodged again. Think global Mafia or something to that effect, or a world divided into three chunks by three major power blocs each with their own AI core. That's a much more likely outcome and one that on account of an incompetent board has just become a little bit more likely.
Tone-deaf basically means "unpopular", doesn't it?
I'm old enough to remember when doing the right thing, even when it's unpopular, was considered a virtue.
NORTH AMERICAN
noun
a timid or feeble person. "Jennings plays him as something of a milquetoast"
adjective
feeble, insipid, or bland. "a soppy, milquetoast composer"
I only see negatives. Other entities with less of a brake on their ethics are gaining ground. Microsoft of all parties is strengthening their position and has full access to the core tech.
Did OpenAI actually have a meaningful brake though? Like, if all the employees apparently think that the success of the company is more important than the charter, can we be sure that OpenAI actually had a meaningful brake?
edit: Or that the board can't actually make a difference because whatever OpenAI doesn't do someone else will. But if people actually thought that were true they wouldn't have set up the board and charter.
It's amateur behavior. I'm sympathetic to her goals, less impressed by the execution.
Again, her mandate is not to help OpenAI deal with the FCC it's to prevent the company from building unsafe AI, one reasonable aspect of which might be to compare the methodologies of different companies.
You can justify pretty much anything with ends-justify-the-means logic and I have a hard time believing that the people who set up the charter would, a priori, have said that suppressing research comparing the safety approach of the company to a competitor in order to not make the company look bad so that the competitor wins because the company insists, without any basis, that they would be better for safety is in line with the principles of the charter. That is just trying to game the charter in order to circumvent it and is a textbook case of what the board was appointed to prevent.
This isn't a theoretical exercise where we get to do it all over again next week to see if we can do better, this is for keeps.
The point could have been made much more forceful by not releasing the report but holding it over Altman's head to get him to play ball.
> You can justify pretty much anything with ends-justify-the-means logic
Indeed. That's my point: the ends justify the means. This isn't some kind of silly game this is to all intents and purposes and arms race and those that don't understand that should really wake up: whoever gets this thing first is going to change the face of the world, it won't be the AGI that is your enemy it is whoever controls the AGI that could well be your enemy. Think Manhattan project, not penicillin.
> I have a hard time believing that the people who set up the charter would, a priori, have said that suppressing research comparing the safety approach of the company to a competitor in order to not make the company look bad so that the competitor wins because the company insists, without any basis, that they would be better for safety is in line with the principles of the charter. That is just trying to game the charter in order to circumvent it and is a textbook case of what the board was appointed to prevent.
That charter is and always was a fig leaf, I am probably too old and cynical to believe that it was sincere, it was in my opinion nothing but a way to keep regulators at bay. Just like I never bought SBF's 'Altruism' nonsense.
The road to hell is paved with the best of intentions comes to mind.
Given how Altman has responded to things throughout his career and in this, I fail to see how doing this would result in anything other than the same outcome: Altman won't be moved by that, but consider it extortion and move for her removal from the board, regardless. In the end, he wants criticism or calls for caution stifled.
That effort isn't critical to OpenAI other than to try to create a monopoly.
Would the destruction of OpenAI in 2023 be seen as bad or good with that hindsight?
It seems bad now but if you believe the board was operating with that future in mind (whether or not you agree with that future) it's completely reasonable imo.