I don't get this take. No matter how good you are at managing people, you cannot manage clowns into making wise decisions, especially if they are plotting in secret (which obviously was the case here since everyone except for the clowns were caught completely off-guard).
Consider that Altman was a founder of OpenAI and has been the only consistent member of the board for its entire run.
The board as currently constituted isn't some random group of people - Altman was (or should have been) involved in the selection of the current members. To extent that they're making bad decisions, he has to bear some responsibility for letting things get to where they are now.
And of course this is all assuming that Altman is "right" in this conflict, and that the board had no reason to oust him. That seems entirely plausible, but I wouldn't take it for granted either. It's clear by this flex that he holds great sway at MS and with OpenAI employees, but do they all know the full story either? I wouldn't count on it.
If he has great sway with Microsoft and OpenAI employees how has he failed as a leader? Hackernews commenters are becoming more and more reddit everyday.
There’s a LOT that goes into picking board members outside of competency and whether you actually want them there. They’re likely there for political reasons and Sam didn’t care because he didn’t see it impacting him at all, until they got stupid and thought they actually held any leverage at all
Can't help but feel it was Altman that struck first. MS effectively Nokia-ed OpenAI - i.e. buyout executives within the organization and have them push the organization towards making deals with MS, giving MS a measure of control over said organization - even if not in writing, they achieve some political control.
Bought-out executives eventually join MS after their work is done or in this case, they get fired.
A variant of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Guess the OpenAI we knew, was going to die one way or another the moment they accepted MS's money.
Didn't OpenAI close new ChatGPT Plus signups just 2 days ago? Strange coincidence in timing... Maybe the board just learned that costs were wildly over what Sam told them? I guess we'll find out...
Thanks, I don't care to follow car news so I wasn't aware of that.
Though, it seems Tesla reincorporated radar from their post '21 models on, so the premise of this sub-thread is at best outdated and at worst a half-truth. Oh well.
It makes perfect sense for people who are willing to accept that ChatGPT/GPT-4 is a revolutionary technology that will upend lots of jobs/people/companies, just as horse coaches / coachmen in the early 1900's got pay raises just before being out of a job. For people who are in denial, it will make no sense. https://blogs.microsoft.com/today-in-tech/day-horse-lost-job...
Studying human athletic performance was also done by some eugenics movements, so by your logic we should stop all studies of human athletic performance?
You’re right, you got me. I can’t think of anything which modern intelligence researchers are proposing but sport scientists aren’t. No policy proposals or claims about say a general athletic factor which the elite class has but the impoverished doesn’t, or anything like that. These things are entirely equivalent /s
It still doesn't occur to me that the 1-3% smartest people in the world would be attracted to LLM/AI just because they're intelligent. The most intelligent people I know are variously uninterested in AI because AI threatens many of their beloved interests in which the confluence of their intelligence can be expressed, i.e creative activities like music, composition, visual art, interactive works like games, and writing.
Perhaps I'm outing myself as a so-called unintelligent person here, but I don't see how AI is a threat to creative hobbies of mine like music and writing. AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too?
And if I can't tell the difference between a human generated piece of art and an AI generated one, then I find that fascinating, not threatening. It says a lot about 1) your own tastes and perceptions, 2) the meaning of art in general, and 3) what exactly it means when activities previously considered solely human are mastered by programs, such as what happened in the past with chess engines, etc.
I think these are all exciting developments, and I look forward to seeing how art will evolve in the way the emergence of chess engines changed strategy for humans moving forward.
It makes it so that the actual intellectually interesting analysis of art, when viewed through the lens of an LLM, becomes a cognitively simple to understand puzzle of matching prompts to effects. There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition.
The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with: why does neon genesis rebuild movies use live action camera techniques and what does that do to the overall themes of the work? Why does one painting use the texture of the paint instead of the color theory of the paint as a message conveyor? How is the use of reflective or matte surfaces communicating an environment in an installed art piece?
Furthermore, of the very smart people I know, the intellectually stimulating stuff is kind of bizarre, and avenues of finding this stuff or funding this stuff is being drowned out by comparatively understimulating works. Artists usually fund their more unusual pursuits with the commercial work that MidJourney/Stable Diffusion targets.
> There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition. The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with
For some, this is an important aspect of art appreciation, and I would expect those people to continue to gravitate toward human produced art. For other people who don't have that background, and don't think about those things, the difference won't be relevant to them, and they'll judge the end product based on their own personal and arbitrary criteria. What's interesting about an artwork to one person makes it banal to another, and no amount of academic study or criticism will change peoples' tastes.
Let's not forget that often creators themselves aren't always actively thinking about composition, texture, color, etc, and part of the work for them can be as black box out of their subconscious as the creation of a neural network.
Similar to people being fooled by white wine dyed red, I think we'll also have critics who remark on how absolutely human a work of art has to be due to X/Y/Z, only for it to be revealed to be an AI work. That I think encapsulates a lot of what I look forward to in terms of the debate over what exactly about art is human-specific and what it means for something, human or not, to have artistic capabilities.
I'm just pointing out, in my anecdotal experience, that the smartest people I know don't have interest in AI because of the way AI clashes with the things they find the most intellectual stimulation from. None of what you said really addresses any of that, and I really have no interest in debating the subjectivity of AI art on the internet, as there's nothing about it that hasn't already been said.
I spoke to an artist the other say, he just said, in true artists style, that maybe he can collaborate with the bots, otherwise he doesn’t care about AI art.
I thought it would be upset so I kind of introduced the topic lightly.
I was relieved how much he didn’t care.
I completely agree with you. A button click image will never relate to most people like a real work of art.
I think the same about television. I think we all like Seinfeld because we know he is a real person with real experiences that we can relate too. I think this is important.
> AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too?
The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works. A completely trivial and laughable concern if you don't live in a society that believes you have to "earn a living".
> The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works.
Although I see a comparison to previous technologies replacing human jobs, I'm willing to put that point aside and focus solely on AI.
Will AI generated content be cheaper? Will AI content be more interesting and engaging than anything a human could create? If there is no economic demand for human generated artwork, then should it still be viable to make money from it? Is there reason to believe the people who remain in the art market won't be able to make more money by occupying niches that AI art doesn't serve, or by selling to "hipsters" or "luddites" who are anti-AI art? It used to be the only way to make real money through art was having a patron. Perhaps there will be wealthy people who will still be willing to patronize human artists.
Historically, we are in a special place in history where average people can make a living through creative work, but it's not at all an easy industry to break into, even today, and it has always been competitive and everchanging, just as art itself. Economics aside, people have always produced art for intrinsic purposes, and they will continue to do so even when the profit motive is gone.
I don't disagree with any of that. The GP said they didn't understand why people would be afraid of AI art. The reason is that many people pay rent by producing art, and that will no longer be possible for many of them in an age of (good) AI art
> are you able to name many great artists in history who died rich
That's not relevant. There are tons of working artists today and there have been for decades. But if a person can't pay rent by selling their art, things suddenly change for millions of people.
It is hard for people to comprehend the rate of change. Over the short term, it feels like we are on a gentle slope upward with respect to change. But the reality is the slope is near vertical. Even your analogy is a huge understatement. It will be more like Nokia today, and iPhone next week.
