Same here. I soured on it a bit when I noticed them becoming a bit of a rhetorical stick, "well if you think you're right, go place a bet!". I guess that's good if you want people to only make claims they seriously believe in, but it had a tendency to shut down discussion, and I feel like there's something valuable in being able to discuss and debate without the expectation that being right should be rewarded with money, and being wrong should be punished with same.
The negative second-order effects I expected were more about people concealing information and analysis that they otherwise would have shared, replacing complex but informative discussions with a black-box oracle. Boy was I wrong.
That would be interesting. Probably works best as a non-profit with donations or grants. Be a normal gambling setup, but with the expected value of all the games zero instead of negative. Advertise to existing gambling addicts. You might also be able to invert some of the dark patterns to encourage less addictive behaviour.
I expect the main threat would be that it might be possible to extract money with the system with clever statistical tricks.
Facebook really didn't like that apple made device IDs optional, it's strange that they quieted down about that. They must have found an alternative fingerprinting method.
I believe it's why they went all-in on Metaverse/VR. They want to own the next platform so that could never happen to them again. IIRC, Zuck has stated the latter openly.
Reminds me this is the same reason Valve went half-in on Linux. I guess this force can be used for good or evil.
Valve started supporting Linux and making their own Linux gaming hardware because Microsoft briefly tried to lock down Windows so that games could only be installed from the Microsoft Store.
Spying on your own citizens enables certain sorts of anti-democratic abuses (and has been used that way in the past), so I can understand the specific opposition to it. Put somewhat melodramatically, they're okay with spying but don't want to create self-coup tools.
I agree that the killbots red line is somewhat odd, but I guess you have to draw the line somewhere, and I prefer them having that principle to having no principle at all. (Also, it's possible that the AI insiders understand something I don't about why a human in the loop is important.)
I would argue that isn't really a moral argument though, it's rather utilitarian. If someone at OpenAI disagreed with that risk assessment, that's a difference of opinion not a reason to quit and write letters talking about ethics.
Also it's a rather American-centric view. If a Canadian is working at OpenAI, should they care? Or would they care more about possible anti-democratic interference by the American government on Canada?
Utilitarianism is a moral system. If you disagree with the risk assessment and are utilitarian, you believe that OpenAI got it wrong and is thus doing bad stuff. If a company making bridges, say, or nuclear power plants, was doing risk assessments that appeared to ignore substantial risks in order to get a lucrative contract, I would fully expect engineers to quit and start writing letters talking about ethics.
Agreed on the America-centric view, to an extent. I will note that almost all countries have spied on each other since time immemorial, but serious efforts to spy on their own citizens tend to coincide with uniquely repressive and unpleasant regimes. I think having a norm against spying on your own citizens is good, even if it isn't a perfectly elegant principle. Also, countries can do more damage spying on their own citizens vs other citizens -- as a Canadian, I don't want the American government spying on me, but I'd probably be more worried if the Canadian government was spying on me.
I'm not convinced that "laziness" is a weakness of human nature. Businesses are ultimately a way to specialize production without central planning. Allocating some people to bake all the bread in a factory frees up other people who would otherwise have to spend an hour or two every day baking bread. Or from a market perspective, you're willing to pay a premium for not having to put in the labour. Businesses certainly can be exploitative, but I don't think all or even most of them are by nature.
That the author does not think generative AI can solve social problems shows a serious lack of imagination. Therapy, medical diagnosis, improved machine translation, and better information retrieval are all social benefits. There are social costs, too, but that doesn't mean the technology is a waste of time -- it means the technology needs to be regulated.
It is very hard to get good medical diagnosis. Doctors are overworked and can barely spend more than 10 minutes thinking about you. People with long complex medical histories get completely fucked over, so basically these social tasks already are not being performed properly by humans because the humans doing it are stretched way too thin.
AI is going to quickly surpass the quality of medical diagnosis by doctors, at which point hopefully people can see a the right kind of specialists faster and get treatment quicker.
> AI is going to quickly surpass the quality of medical diagnosis by doctors
High doubts. We're still talking about GPTs? The 'transformer' part will be an issue. I use it the enterprise version _a lot_, but one thing you really can't use it for is finding a bug, and considering how Transformers work, that's not a surprise.
ChatGPT finds about half of the bugs in the code it creates when the issue is described, which is more than I expected and still low enough for my job security.
Given the history of AI is written in examples of "machines can't ever… oh wait one did that must mean this never needed intelligence", I don't rule out any specific breakthrough on any particular time scale.
It seems to me that this would be life-changing for some people and great for others, but I fear that this is the emotional-intimacy version of refined sugar. It won't be the end of the world, but if everyone can press the intimacy button without gaining many of the less obvious benefits of a close relationship, it may be quite unhealthy.
The negative second-order effects I expected were more about people concealing information and analysis that they otherwise would have shared, replacing complex but informative discussions with a black-box oracle. Boy was I wrong.