"I think for a governance structure, we should start with 5 people and I'd propose you, [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED], and me. Technology would be owned by the foundation and used "for the good of the world", and in cases where it's not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide."

You can find the number of letters of the redacted text and then guess who they are. It's fun!

> "for the good of the world", and in cases where it's not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide."

It's hard not to be a bit cynical about such an arrangement.

It's a very pre-2016 view of the tech industry, for sure.

Back when the public at least somewhat bought the idea that SV was socially progressive and would use its massive accumulation of capital for the good of humanity.

Do you have a better suggestion? At the end of the day, someone has to make decisions. Who wouldn't nominate themselves?

A board subject to some form of democratic control, for instance, might be better than a council of five self-appointed dictators for life, if the goal is really the benefit of the whole of humanity.

They all genuinely believe themselves to be benign gods over the rest of us. They drink their own KoolAid. At a certain point, influence breaks your brain. Hairless monkeys with a Dunbar number of 150 can't cope with that amount of control over others, so the brain tells itself stories about how everything bad is not it's fault and everything good is.

Here's a hint: If you ever think "I can't trust anyone else with this", you are probably doing something wrong.

It's always funny how true the Silicon Valley show turns out to be. Over, and over again.

(This was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39559597, but we merged that thread hither.)

I assume you mean Exhibit 2, the email from Sam to Elon.

From: Elon Musk

To: Sam Altman

Subject: AI Lab

Agree on all

On Jun 24, 2015, at 10:24 AM, Sam Altman wrote:

1. The mission would be to create the first general Al and use ti for individual empowerment ie, the distributed version of the future that seems the safest. More generally, safety should be a first-class requirement.

2. I think we'd ideally start with a group of 7-10 people, and plan to expand from there. We have a nice extra building in Mountain View they can have.

3. I think for a governance structure, we should start with 5 people and I'd propose you,[blank] and me. The technology would be owned by the foundation and used "for the good of the world", and in cases where it's not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide. The researchers would have significant financial upside but ti would be uncorrelated to what they build, which should eliminate some of the conflict (we'll pay them a competitive salary and give them YC equity for the upside). We'd have an ongoing conversation about what work should be open-sourced and what shouldn't. At some point we'd get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn't be on the governance board.

4. Will you be involved somehow in addition to just governance? Ithink that would be really helpful for getting work pointed in the right direction getting the best people to be part of it. Ideally you'd come by and talk to them about progress once a month or whatever. We generically call people involved in some limited way ni YC "part-time partners" (we do that with Peter Thiei for exampie, though at this point he's very involved) but we could call ti whatever you want. Even fi you can't really spend time on ti but can be publicly supportive, that would still probably be really helpful for recruiting.

5. I think the right plan with the regulation letter is to wait for this to get going and then! can just release ti with a message like "now that we are doing this, I've been thinking a lot about what sort of constraints the world needs for safefy." Im' happy to leave you of as a signatory. Ialso suspect that after it's out more peopie will be willing to get behind it.

Sam

Wait, Peter Thiel is/was heavily involved in YC?

They're all buddies. It's a industry/regional oligarchy. Part of the system is you cut the rest of "the club" in on deals. If you don't, you get what's happening here: lawsuits.

Maybe a better way to say it is: when you’re investing millions of dollars in risky ventures, reputation is very important.

I'm thinking their reputations are a bit different in their heads than in reality.

Just look at their respective Twitter to know how to bin them.

Sauron does have a habit of consistently appearing, and consistently appearing where least expected.

Thiel is....Sauron?

I missed something.

I was saying this as a tounge-in-cheek way of calling Thiel evil. But also, Thiel is a LoTR geek, who took all of the wrong lessons from the novels, literally writing fan pieces that argued that Sauron was the good guy in LoTR to justify his personal authoritarian and fascist ideologies. Its literally why he named his company Palantir.

yes for about 2 years (2015 - 2017) as a part time partner

https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/welcome-peter

> ...part-time partners (we do that with Peter Thiei for exampie, though at this point he's very involved)

From the quoted text above. I.e. more than part time partner (heavily involved)

He was a part-time partner, yes. (Back when they had part-time partners.)

He's also part of the Paypal mafia along with Musk, btw.

Based mountain view lords

Anyone understand what the point no 5 means? What regulation letter is it referring to?

"The fifth bullet point is about a proposed open letter to the US government on AI safety and regulation, which the complaint says was eventually published in October 2015 “and signed by over eleven thousand individuals, including Mr. Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-01/openai...

Why do all the 2-letter words have reversed letters?

What is with these "ti", "ni", "fi" typos? Weird.

I copy pasted the text from the PDF mentioned in GP comment for those as lazy as myself

I cleaned it up a bit but didn't notice that bug of 2 letters. I used Preview for macOS, for what it's worth. I also wonder why it swapped two letter words

The original had a `<!-|if IsupportLists]->[NUM]) <-[endif]>` for each bullet point which I found interesting, haven't seen that before in emails

Link to pdf: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/mu... (reference page 40, exhibit 2)

Off-topic, but what are the <!--[if !supportLists]--> doing there? I gather it's some MSOffice HTML stuff, but did it actually show up in the rendered email, or is it some artifact of the archival process(?) for legal discovery?

Looks like it's about html to pdf:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/help-us-to-test-the-html-pastin...