YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Accept 'bad things' in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman

35 points samizdis 1 hour ago 86 comments

2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hour ago | parent

Bad things like what? Armed psychopaths targeting AI executives?

jeanpah 1 hour ago | parent

Good things like what? Mass unemployment and concentration of power?

Joker_vD 1 hour ago | parent

It really is the best of all the possible worlds, you know.

DarkWiiPlayer 1 hour ago | parent

Why just the psychopaths? What about the risk of perfectly healthy, reasonable armed people targeting AI executives?

ejee 1 hour ago | parent

I sometimes wonder if the optimal outcome is - the industry leaders have at it and go for accelerated progress but accept they then place themselves in danger.

I have a lot of interest in seeing how the common person response in this scenario.

GolfPopper 56 minutes ago | parent

With the increasing development of capable drones, I keep wondering how long it's going to be before we start seeing people who have given up on law and regulation resorting to drone-enacted vigilantism.

jackb4040 35 minutes ago | parent

Drone warfare relies on large numbers of drones overwhelming enemy electronic warfare countermeasures, in urban or open landscapes that haven't been specifically designed against it. A billionaire in a western country against a rag-tag group of guerrillas making drones from commodity radios is just about the least favorable conditions for it that could exist. You may catch a couple of them on accident up front, but they're very well-suited to adapt to it.

jackb4040 41 minutes ago | parent

Effective altruist / rationalist doctrine is that the best thing a person can do is become ultrawealthy and use that wealth to fund technological progress. It is an ideology tailor-made for those who strive to become the richest person alive, and / or want to worship that person as a god.

When they speak of "existential consequences", it is not as members of humanity. It is a projection of their control over humanity. Personal risk for them is just being made into a regular human (no longer being ultrawealthy). They can't even contemplate physical risk. Case in point, this exact same class of people are buying up private islands and literally purchasing the blood of poorer people.

They would never accept your wager. It's the kind of thing Elon Musk would say "sounds interesting" to on Joe Rogan ten years ago, and then the only consequence after that would be his fanboys reminding everyone how cool it was that he said that.

jackb4040 59 minutes ago | parent

Targeting? I think you meant to say "upstanding citizen in the vicinity when chemical reaction leads to AI-CEO-involved incident"

hagbard_c 52 minutes ago | parent

Don't go there. One of the things separating functional states - warts and all - from failed ones is that the populace does not turn to deadly violence to settle disagreements and griefs. Yes, there are people who shoot/stab/${kill_method} other people but they are prosecuted as criminals, i.e. the opposite of those perfectly healthy, reasonable armed people you mention.

Increased acceptance of political violence begets more political violence which in turn seems to increase its acceptance, see e.g. the killing of the healthcare CEO and subsequent arrest of the killer which significantly increased "democrats" support for political violence [1] so be careful what you ask for.

[1 https://academic.oup.com/poq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/poq...

mdp2021 47 minutes ago | parent

> separating functional states - warts and all - from failed ones

Systemic failure triggers the parasystemic shortcuts. Lack of justice and fairness has grave consequences - they must be curbed with justice and fairness (and their roots) exactly.

hagbard_c 37 minutes ago | parent

What systemic failure? That term, 'systemic', is used rather often without explaining where things actually go wrong ('systemic racism' etc.) and keeps on being used after the supposed 'systemic failures' have been proven to be incorrect. That the wheels of Justice move slowly does not imply 'systemic failure', it is inherent to the institution when confronted with a fast-moving development like 'AI'. Move fast and break things works in software development and rocket science but it is anathema to the system of justice. If it weren't many of us would have been imprisoned already for supposed 'crimes' just because some activist cobbled up a new law under which to prosecute us. That might be fine for the parasites/lawyers but it would be the end of public trust in the system of justice which in turn would bring the acceptance of mob justice closer.

harimau777 27 minutes ago | parent

I don't think it is black and white. There's a difference between the reasonable need for justice to move slowly and moving so slowly that it effectively never materializes for those being hurt. Relief is not useful if you are long dead before it arrives.

Is it possible that you might be in a bit of a bubble? At least in the community that I live in there is already virtually no public trust in our "justice" system.

hagbard_c 46 minutes ago | parent

OK, cowardly down-voter, please explain why you think I'm wrong here instead of just hiding behind that button. This is a discussion site, not a Party Congress, we're here to discuss things. As it stands now I can only assume you want more political violence. Do you? If so, why?

harimau777 36 minutes ago | parent

I can't speak to the person who downvoted you, but one possibility is that they see that political violence is already common; the only thing that has changed recently is that it is becoming more evenly distributed. Queer people, protesters, ethnic and religious minorities, the poor, etc. have long been subject to various forms of harm by those in power. All that has changed is that those in power are now also experiencing harm.

hagbard_c 20 minutes ago | parent

Good that you respond, better than pressing that stupid button. Having said that:

> Queer people, protesters, ethnic and religious minorities, the poor, etc. have long been subject to various forms of harm by those in power

That sounds like something taken straight out of a 'progressive' party program.

If anything those groups receive preferential treatment, at least where I live (Sweden, Europe). State subsidies, positive discrimination, hiring quotas, publicly funded facilities and festivals and more. Far above average representation in public media and culture.

> All that has changed is that those in power are now also experiencing harm.

'harm' is also a word often seen in 'progressive' discourse where it seems to serve the purpose of enabling those who use it to equate minor inconveniences like dirty looks to physical and (in this case) lethal violence. In the current discussion on public executions of 'AI' (etc.) execs I don't think the term is applicable.

2OEH8eoCRo0 33 minutes ago | parent

> This is a discussion site, not a Party Congress

> Don't go there.

Which is it? Discuss or don't go there.

harimau777 45 minutes ago | parent

What's the alternative? The system is completely nonresponsive to the poor and oppressed. Right or wrong, it is only natural that people turn to violence when they have no other option.

jackb4040 18 minutes ago | parent

The American state is the most militaristic and violent state on the planet today, and the American people are the most armed in human history and regularly experience mass shootings and even school shootings.

GolfPopper 1 hour ago | parent

The AI executives are the psychopaths.

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

No, we should not "accept" bad things. We can look forward to benefits, but BENEFITS ARE NOT AN EXCUSE FOR THE BAD THINGS. Ever.

Edit: I mean that we should continue to shun antisocial behavior even when it involves LLMs, not that we should blame the technology. The technology isn't an excuse, no technology should ever be an excuse -- that's what I mean by not "accepting" bad things. I don't mean that LLMs are not "worth it" thanks to the abuse, just that we should continue to treat abuse as such rather than giving anybody a free pass.

RealityVoid 1 hour ago | parent

This is kind of how the world works. We have a set of tradeoffs to make and the downside of the tradeoff we accept in exchange of the advantages.

herrherrmann 1 hour ago | parent

Not really. Rich entitled tech bros don’t dictate how the world works. There is lots of progress possible without needing the vast majority of people to pay a huge price for it.

RealityVoid 1 hour ago | parent

I've said nothing about who dictates. I have said that everything in life is a tradeoff and making a tradeoff requires talking the bad with the good. It's effectively something we can't escape. If we want to do this tradeoff with AI, I did not take a positions as well. But I posit there will be tradeoffs.

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

No, the benefits of AI do not mean anything like we have to accept AI slop contributions to open-source projects. We can still shun the blatant abuse. We don't have to just shut up about it because we might stop frontier development. We won't.

To me, "accept" means to socially tolerate it. No. Bad. It's not socially tolerable. It is still wrong to use LLMs for evil. I don't think that means LLMs are a fundamentally evil technology, but that does NOT mean anyone should get a free pass to use them FOR evil.

nailer 1 hour ago | parent

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

They're twisting my definition of the word "accept". I was clarifying what I meant with an example. I think instances of evil behavior need to be shunned regardless of the other benefits of the technologies being used for evil. No one should get a free pass to do evil based on the technology.

I also believe the technology itself deserves to be improved so that it can be used for good. That doesn't mean I want more evil or to be more accepting towards evil. Evil should still be shunned.

harimau777 1 hour ago | parent

Can you expand on this? It is not clear what part of the post you regard as attacking a strawman.

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

It probably looked like I was equating "accepting the tradeoffs" to "condoning LLM slop contributions to open source projects". I was referring to enabling individual instances of abuse though, not accepting the technology overall in spite of the bad behavior. It's enabling the individual instances that I'm protesting, because I firmly believe we shouldn't. I should've been clearer, my bad.

iAMkenough 1 hour ago | parent

Exactly. We accept the downside of being monitored and manipulated by the billionaire class in order to enjoy the fruits of social media.

ejee 1 hour ago | parent

Trade offs start with comparing two goods btw.

I suppose monitoring is a good in the eyes of those who influence society.

iAMkenough 1 hour ago | parent

Social media isn’t a good? I don’t understand your point.

harimau777 40 minutes ago | parent

I think it ceased to be a good when it switched from empowering users to force feeding users. For example, Facebook's early "people you may know" algorithm was spectacular. It allowed me to reconnect with a long lost childhood friend and made it easy to find members of my community. However, that changed when it switched from being something that I could choose to use to the algorithm force injecting stuff into my feed.

iAMkenough 35 minutes ago | parent

That’s a good point. The Billionaire class lures us in to accept the trade-offs, and then they can do whatever they want after we’ve long accepted the downsides of trading away our privacy.

harimau777 1 hour ago | parent

Who gets to make that decision?

RealityVoid 1 hour ago | parent

Nobody and everyone. Usually the incentives and local constraints and culture meld to have people in an area converge on a set of practices.

harimau777 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think that's how it actually works in practice. In practice it is dramatically more likely that the rich and powerful get to decide who makes the tradeoffs. That is dangerous in normal times but especially considering the revealed nature and priorities of the tech bros and fascists currently in power.

palmotea 1 hour ago | parent

> Who gets to make that decision?

Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, David Sacks, etc. All the rest of you proles can fuck off. Stay in your lane.

ejee 1 hour ago | parent

Nice try. Try going deeper.

mschuster91 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah thanks but no thanks. Society does not have to accept "bad things". Society can pass laws to prohibit bad things.

And society will pass laws. Europe has already begun doing so, and the US will once this goddamn corrupt administration is gone. People are already protesting against AI, especially against datacenters and surveillance like Flock. It's only a matter of time until individual actors end up in the focus of protests.

omnicognate 1 hour ago | parent

I was with you up to the last sentence.

mschuster91 1 hour ago | parent

Think of society as a pressure cooker and Sam Altman, OpenAI etc. as the oven's fire.

There's now just three possible futures:

- the fire is extinguished, aka the AI actors go bust. Nothing bad happens. Well, a bunch of rich people will be less rich, but society as a whole will be somewhat all right.

- the relief valve (society passing laws) is activated, pressure escapes.

- there is no pressure relief. Eventually, the pressure cooker bursts, aka revolution.

tikimcfee 1 hour ago | parent

You are correct. I appreciate your willingness to say it's societal and therefore by construction political. And, the idea that "we accept the bad things" is so prevalent in this community that it's baffling. I have been more vocal (and emotionally representing, to admit) about how this community is willing to condemn the abuse of privacy, but then share excitement about agents and LLM work from Facebook and the like. The reasoning is usual, "yeah well someone is going to do it," or, "well it's hard or impossible to make people not use it, so what's your solution?" I've been finding that mentality is both a blockade to progress, and maddening to boot. If those same minds instead did something about it by sharing the difficulty with others, proselytizing the importance of sharing your opinion about what the bad thing is, and then standing by it whether it's hard or not - that would actually help things be not so bad.

trollbridge 1 hour ago | parent

Note that the regulation he’s pushing back against is simply having third party defined and reviewed guardrails, as opposed to “just trust us bro”.

jackb4040 1 hour ago | parent

They shift between

"we need the government to halt model training for us (and potential competitors who are currently behind us) due to hypothetical sci-fi future bad things"

on the one hand, and then

"we should not face consequences for that time we helped a teenager plan a mass shooting"

on the other so effortlessly, so instantaneously. And virtually the entire media helps them do it!

bunderbunder 35 minutes ago | parent

Which is generally accepted for organizations that have the ability to cause modest harm in the financial markets. He's claiming to have the ability to wipe out humanity, and should have the courage of his convictions.

Hamuko 1 hour ago | parent

I'll consider it when Sam starts accepting getting Molotov cocktails thrown at his house. Surely we all need to accept bad things, right?

DarkWiiPlayer 1 hour ago | parent

I believe the world should accept the "bad things" that result from allowing me to take other people's property, because of all the good I'd do with the money I'd take from the rich.

Hear me out, I know common sense says theft is bad, but just think about the hungry children I could feed if the world just agreed to let me take whatever I wanted.

...except AI won't even feed hungry children, it will only make the rich richer and flood the internet with slop.

reallymental 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting, I wonder what the public's opinion would be if every plastic/chemical maker out there says the exact same thing.

mdp2021 1 hour ago | parent

...They do, implicitly? If the "public opinion" changed perspective in either way after such statement, they would have missed the facts.

monideas 54 minutes ago | parent

There are thousands of active plastic and chemicals plants in the US and yes occasionally there are accidents, yet there are still thousands of active plastic and chemical plants in the US.

reallymental 41 minutes ago | parent

Both the child comments to my parent allude to the same thing. The chemical companies are under mountains of regulations, all reinforced with engineering societies (which may be just as toothless, but at least they're guaranteeing that the universities that adopt their standards, have a certain level of education their students absorb, about the dangers of what they're working on and how to make it safer.), education, societal pressure etc.

Mech engineers always overbuild things with safety factors in the 2x and 10x levels.

Why not just remove the neural/earth wires from all buildings and sockets? That'll do a whole lot of good by saving a bunch of copper, that's a tight resource I hear.

Also, screw air/sea regulation as well. We'll all just stand in the cabins, that'll increase Ryan air's failing profitability. Charge me for bringing my shoes on board too, I'm too rich anyway, skim any change off of my pocket please.

This slope is very very slippery.

mdp2021 36 minutes ago | parent

Good point - but I would not be able to easily define good obvious universal constraints for the technologies relevant to the submission.

monideas 29 minutes ago | parent

This culture around rigor and safety in chemical plants came many decades after their introduction as a general class of industry. They used to just dump the waste directly into the rivers and it wasn’t even illegal.

This is a new type of technology, there is no real sense of its limits or capabilities. Regulating it appropriately or even just understanding best practices for using it is still way out by many years.

And also every country is working on it so it will get built and used for economic and military purposes, by someone.

This is just the nature of it. And yes there’s nothing at all that stops the US from doing something self destructive in terms of over regulation. I suspect this will happen eventually but Chinese models are really good.

mdp2021 7 minutes ago | parent

> new type of technology [...] it will get built and used for economic and military purposes, by someone

Frank Rosenblatt, the Perceptron: 1957, planned for military purposes. Perfected image recognition came 15 years ago. I cannot understand why some people are talking about "new technologies" - all I may see is that the Military may inquire and solicit, given the hype, "Can you prepare something new for us". Otherwise, I cannot see the "novelty" about AI employment in the military now.

(I see specific areas of boost of NNs in the military - but nothing for the mainstream.)

fourseventy 1 hour ago | parent

Every technology advancement comes with good things and bad things. Fire - Good: can cook food, Bad: can be used for war.

agos 1 hour ago | parent

If fire was invented today, it would be a subscription

DarkWiiPlayer 1 hour ago | parent

> If fire was invented today

You know you're starting to be personally affected by the decline of civilization when your brain can conjure up the notion of fire being "invented".

mdp2021 1 hour ago | parent

"You know there is trouble when reality surpasses fantasy" (~~ Berke Breathed)

We know we are in trouble.

fwlr 1 hour ago | parent

OpenFlame’s latest model has really good scores on FahrenBench but I’m having a lot of trouble keeping it contained. I use a proper firepit but it keeps spreading to nearby homes and vehicles.

harimau777 1 hour ago | parent

That doesn't mean that the good and bad things are equitably distributed, that the good and bad things happen at the same time, or that the bad outweighs the good. All three issues are at play here: The benefits are likely to disproportionately help the rich and the pain is likely to disproportionately help the poor. New prosperity is likely to come too late for the people whose lives are being disrupted. It seems likely that the benefits of culture being consumed by AI slop outweighs the benefits (I'd like to be more detailed, but honeslty it isn't completely clear what the benefits are).

JohnFen 7 minutes ago | parent

But not every technological advancement provided benefits that were in excess of the costs.

neonnoodle 1 hour ago | parent

'Bad things' [for you] in return for benefits [for me].

palmotea 1 hour ago | parent

"Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."

teekert 1 hour ago | parent

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"

datsci_est_2015 1 hour ago | parent

I’ll add one to the pile:

“Socialize the costs, privatize the profits.”

delis-thumbs-7e 1 hour ago | parent

I think the AI provider whose model does “bad things” should be held responsible of such things, going to a “bad place” - such as a prison - if the “bad things” are bad enough. Let’s see how that affects your IPO.

E: typos

jameskilton 1 hour ago | parent

I will accept the "bad things" if and only when Sam Altman exposes himself to those bad things first e.g., living next door to an AI data center, being subjected to 24/7 surveillance, and having everything he says and does scrutinized for illegal activity, ticketing and jailing him appropriately.

Until that happens, no. Sam Altman is here telling us to accept the cruelty of his actions and his company so that he can be more wealthy.

delis-thumbs-7e 57 minutes ago | parent

I don’t think he needs or wants any more money. These guys already have so much moolah that it is virtually meaningless to them. They want power. Remember when Zuck tried to run for president?

Lerc 37 minutes ago | parent

>Remember when Zuck tried to run for president?

No. Which election?

einszwei 13 minutes ago | parent

Never happened. Zuck considering running for president was just hearsay.

Surprised that people are still quoting a decade old rumor.

damnesian 36 minutes ago | parent

this is how extreme wealth bewitches the brain.

I'm no communist, but by all measures extreme disparity has nothing but bad consequences for any society.

JohnFen 10 minutes ago | parent

> They want power.

More money equals more power.

mdp2021 56 minutes ago | parent

> being subjected to 24/7 surveillance, and having everything he says and does scrutinized for illegal activity, ticketing and jailing him appropriately

That thing has been rising for decades - why should Sam Altman now become the culprit and scapegoat?

That of surveillance and the use of pattern matching is a legislative matter (not e.g. a matter of regulating RnD, which I understand as more relevant to this submission).

harimau777 32 minutes ago | parent

I think that there is something to what you are saying, but I don't think it is that simple. A new technology could change things by making previous abuses much more common. To give an extreme example, mass murder has always been possible; however, we restrict nuclear weapons because they make it so much more easy and therefore so much more ripe for abuse.

Similarly, there is a big difference between the police keeping a physical record book of mugshots, the police employing experts to maintain a database, and AI allowing nearly anyone to perform in depth surveilance.

mdp2021 20 minutes ago | parent

> and AI allowing nearly anyone to perform in depth survei[l]lance

Which, as I have said:

-- is a field that has been developed for many decades - automated processing is classical AI. Why should it be now attributed to Sam Altman, whose company mainly does LLMs. If Sam Altman shouts "little risks much reaps", I would not think as surveillance as the first relevant rebuttal.

-- if the peoples do not want surveillance (what awakened them, a large number of places that were supposed to be civilized are cashless societies now), that would be a political matter, from which consequential legislation should be the goal.

Lerc 1 hour ago | parent

Is this essentially a claim of the form that we should accept that car accidents happen if we are to drive cars?

It is certainly pitched as if it is a claim we should be accepting of individual instances. Which is not the same as accepting that they occur.

There's a big difference between acknowledging that something cannot be universally beneficial and claiming that the bad aspects are inconsequential.

tarkin2 1 hour ago | parent

Is that title absent of meaning? Or at least highly misleading.

Every invention has positives and negatives. But no inventor or factory is at liberty to force the negatives upon society without regulation, or in Sam's case without being subject to the laws on theft and hacking.

He may as well come out and say "the ends justify the means" and the ends of course benefit Sam, and those subject to injustice, or negative externalities, should be happy that they can pay Sam for a subscription.

Or perhaps "Look, yes I stole, and yes I hacked, but now I've got this amazing tool you can use for free, and when you use it, and give me money for the full version, it will eventually replace you in the workplace and it will reduce you and your kids intellect after you outsource your thinking to it, and become dependent on it, which will be fine because you can just use the tool even more to make up for that."

Of course with a president who believes him to be above the law and American institutions, is it any wonder the people at the top of American society also believe it to be true? Not to mention their cheerleaders in the populous.

mdp2021 52 minutes ago | parent

> Is that a sentence absent of meaning? Or at least highly misleading.

Do you mean:

> “I wouldn’t take a trade of saying we will make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams or all the other bad things that will happen because I think that people will do tremendously – orders of magnitude – more good stuff than bad stuff.”

metalman 1 hour ago | parent

someone could, as a favor, tell them to check the best before date on the rationalists koolaid, or maybe go back to the old formula that had a lot more woooo in it, in any case it's still too early on a monday to be indulging so heavily.

snazz 1 hour ago | parent

> “There’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems,” he said, adding that actions taken over the next two to 10 years would be decisive.

What’s the mechanism by which this happens? I feel like people making these predictions live on a different planet.

harimau777 53 minutes ago | parent

It seems notable to me that the tech bros ignore the obvious solution:

If we assume that they are right: AI is inevitable and certain significant negatives cannot be avoided, then the obvious solution is for society to put together a social safety net for those who are effected. Altman could easily decide to campaign for and donate to a party which made serious strides towards establishing such a safety net.

The fact that they ignore the obvious solution suggests to me that they aren't quite being honest about their motives.

pupppet 44 minutes ago | parent

And if the bad things happen, just mosey on down to your private island or doomsday bunker.

r-u-serious 36 minutes ago | parent

The "benefits" being Sammy's bottom line, I guess.

LaSombra 35 minutes ago | parent

How about no? The benefits are not really benefits, are they really? Can't seem to find a benefit out of it, so, no. I don't need to accept any of it.