Are there statements or predictions which you believe have been falsified by recent events because of these four points?
The things you are saying all sound to me like things people would have agreed with in 2015. The oldest EA-ish post I can find about OAI specifically concludes that the author is distrustful of Sam (though not for the reasons you state). This 2017 post says:
I’ve talked with a lot of people about this in the AI risk community, and they’ve often attempted to steelman the case for OpenAI, but I haven’t found anyone willing to claim, as their own opinion, that OpenAI as conceived was a good idea.
Prominent safety-oriented people have left OAI (Paul Christiano, Dario Amodei, etc.), which maybe could be interpreted as them having been mistaken about what to expect at OAI, but I’m not sure to what extent the four points you listed above were causal in their decisions.
It feels to more to me like people were aware that their priorities differed from OAI’s, but thought it was still net positive to work there. And I’m not sure that any of them actually disagree with that take now? I’d be interested to hear comments from those more knowledgeable than me.
Thanks. I would be interested on others’ thoughts on that point as well.
To clarify, I didn’t read the post’s question as “What did EA do wrong with OpenAI?” but instead as “What should we learn from Altman ‘showing his true colors’?” So it wasn’t intended as a postmortem of OpenAI per se. I strongly suspect that most EAs would have agreed with my general points in 2015 . . . but how much weight did they give them versus other considerations? I wasn’t there, so will have to rely on others to say.
Looking at the posts you shared, both seem to take Altman and OpenAI mostly at their world that the mission was . . . open (as opposed to proprietary) AI. That doesn’t seem to be the mission anymore, and I’d argue OpenAI is more dangerous as a result.[1] So it seems there may have been inadequate consideration of the principles I listed in analyzing the risk of that particular failure mode. Given that OpenAI was primarily funded elsewhere, it’s not clear how much EA could have done about this risk, other than perhaps being more wary about encouraging people to work for/with OpenAI.
Whatever the downsides of publicly releasing AI information, an organization focused on that mission isn’t likely to rake in the massive amounts of $$$ needed to be where OpenAI is now on capabilities. At some point, OpenAI pivoted to acting much more like any for-profit company would be expected to act, as opposed to an organization acting in the public interest.
Are there statements or predictions which you believe have been falsified by recent events because of these four points?
The things you are saying all sound to me like things people would have agreed with in 2015. The oldest EA-ish post I can find about OAI specifically concludes that the author is distrustful of Sam (though not for the reasons you state). This 2017 post says:
Prominent safety-oriented people have left OAI (Paul Christiano, Dario Amodei, etc.), which maybe could be interpreted as them having been mistaken about what to expect at OAI, but I’m not sure to what extent the four points you listed above were causal in their decisions.
It feels to more to me like people were aware that their priorities differed from OAI’s, but thought it was still net positive to work there. And I’m not sure that any of them actually disagree with that take now? I’d be interested to hear comments from those more knowledgeable than me.
Thanks. I would be interested on others’ thoughts on that point as well.
To clarify, I didn’t read the post’s question as “What did EA do wrong with OpenAI?” but instead as “What should we learn from Altman ‘showing his true colors’?” So it wasn’t intended as a postmortem of OpenAI per se. I strongly suspect that most EAs would have agreed with my general points in 2015 . . . but how much weight did they give them versus other considerations? I wasn’t there, so will have to rely on others to say.
Looking at the posts you shared, both seem to take Altman and OpenAI mostly at their world that the mission was . . . open (as opposed to proprietary) AI. That doesn’t seem to be the mission anymore, and I’d argue OpenAI is more dangerous as a result.[1] So it seems there may have been inadequate consideration of the principles I listed in analyzing the risk of that particular failure mode. Given that OpenAI was primarily funded elsewhere, it’s not clear how much EA could have done about this risk, other than perhaps being more wary about encouraging people to work for/with OpenAI.
Whatever the downsides of publicly releasing AI information, an organization focused on that mission isn’t likely to rake in the massive amounts of $$$ needed to be where OpenAI is now on capabilities. At some point, OpenAI pivoted to acting much more like any for-profit company would be expected to act, as opposed to an organization acting in the public interest.