I've been a staunch supporter of Elon throughout all his scandals, especially the Twitter ones but I'm unable to come up with any justification for this.
Everything leads to him (and others) pressuring OpenAI to pause so they could catch up.
It doesn't take much smarts to deduce the cats already out of the bag. There is no stopping this, only pressuring/slowing-down/targeting certain players (OpenAI) as a competition tactic.
I often refer to the I, Robot quote "brilliant people often have the most persuasive demons" when it comes these situations with people like Elon or Ye but even then, all this just leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
But he's been consistently saying this for almost a decade, and thats one of the reasons he was involved in OpenAI in the first place (back when it was genuinely open)
I've been following his takes and predictions on AI for the better part of a decade and I tend to agree with him.
From what I heard, Elon wanted to take over OpenAI and the other founders refused. This is why he left the org and backed away from further committed funding.
Theres been an ongoing rumour that he brought together a bunch of people to develop a alternative (BasedAI) and to me this campaign looks like an attempt to slow down competition rather than an act of genuine concern.
I cant come up with any other reason to have OpenAI pause research for 6 months other than providing competition time to catch up.
Yeah. Frankly, coming at it from the opposite position where I think Elon absolutely deserved the criticism he courted with his "scandals" and think that the proposition that 'AI is such a unique threat that only people like Elon Musk can be trusted to be cautious enough with' is absurd for multiple reasons, I'll happily acknowledge that proposition is also something Elon has been consistent on and likely sincerely believes.
Sam Altman supposedly being an original signatory is - if true - a more interesting question mark
No I don't work on AI but as a dev, I would say I'm heavily invested in the outcome like everyone else on HN.
I fully agree with his concerns, but I believe that he is misleading the public about the motives behind this campaign and the recent petty tweets.
It is a competition tactic aimed at slowing down OpenAI so that he and others can catch up. Due to the exponential nature of the work involved, there is a reasonable chance that OpenAI will maintain its lead for some time and with each iteration the gap between OpenAI and its competitors will widen.
I admit I don't really understand how nonprofits (especially in US) work ownership-wise, but I do know that OpenAI has a for-profit subsidiary.
Microsoft invested ~10B into OpenAI, so apparently there is a way to own something. Also Raison claims they have purchased some pre-IPO shares: https://raison.ai/assets/openai (They even claim - perhaps wrongly - that Elon is one of the lead investors.)
It’s a bit more like a capitalist shoggoth mask on a non profit.
Microsoft’s investment return is capped at 100x then they have no more claim. (Curious if they even have search engine exclusivity then!)
So for now OpenAI acts capitalist, the for profit controls a lot. But we see the influence of the owning non profit, eg in the red teaming which presumably wouldn’t be as good otherwise
Whether this wild new structure works when it comes to it is but one of the huge gambles this organisation is making!
Maybe argumentative, but you really have to go out of your way to take at face value anything that narcissistic manchild says. It’s simply a questionable thing to do, the same way I couldn’t help but question every opinion of someone who is a flat-earther/takes ivermectin against COVID/insert another braindead conspiracy theory.
I will include some parts of the HN commenting guidelines here for my sibling commenters who disagree.
> Avoid generic tangents.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
the fact that someone wouldn't have an issue with all the petty bullshit Elon has engaged in over the years, but now does have an issue with him speaking out against a literal existential threat to our civilisation is pretty surprising
I think that 'only purpose' is well worthy of comment
Everything leads to him (and others) pressuring OpenAI to pause so they could catch up.
It doesn't take much smarts to deduce the cats already out of the bag. There is no stopping this, only pressuring/slowing-down/targeting certain players (OpenAI) as a competition tactic.
I often refer to the I, Robot quote "brilliant people often have the most persuasive demons" when it comes these situations with people like Elon or Ye but even then, all this just leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.