> Perhaps I'm just replying to weigh down the conversation and thread, dilute Altman's profiteering propaganda.
At least you're self aware enough to know that you've contributed noise but not any signal.
And by the way, when you talk to a stranger and immediately get horny to tell them "you sound unhinged" that only reveals that it is you who is in fact unhinged, for you don't know jack about the stranger, but you assume that you are smarter and more knowledgeable than you actually are.
You're the kind of person who says "I don't know what you're talking about" to your interlocutor, and imagine that you saying that statement somehow invalidates the existence of what they are talking about. It's a child's psychology: if you say something doesn't exist then it must not exist.
> It seems like you are confusing threads (again).
smh. There's only 1 thread but perhaps you're the one lost in the maze. There's a word for reprobates like you who, during a discussion, imagine they spot an error, then latch onto that assumed error in order to claim it characterises the entire conversation. Essentially it only shows bad faith and it's a retarded way for you to talk to people. I surely hope your parents will teach you how to talk to strangers. Show them this thread and your responses and ask them for their perspective. If they actually don't know how to teach you, then that's definitely too bad.
> They are, at minimum, information about a particular persons values and perspective. Collectively, those individual opinions are what shape elections and foment uprisings.
Ah. The good old communist dream: The masses are where the truth is. Just one more marginal voice and we will know of the glorious uprising that was foretold.
But of course one would say this, after all, this is the age of the influencer and the knee jerk reaction to any information is to turn to the nearest one and say "thoughts?"
Anyway, it doesn't matter. If you believe opinions are information, more power to you.
Not really. That's why there's a saying, "Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one."
Information has to correspond to reality, the only arbiter of truth. When I give you my opinion I can say pretty much anything, usually they correspond to feelings e.g. "I think if you ask her out she'll say yes. I think this because you're my friend and I like you so surely she will."
But I think you already know that opinions are not information and perhaps you're asking rhetorically and hopefully not trolling me?
> You strike me as the type to be unaware of social norms
You have a weird way of talking to strangers. But, you know what they say about assumptions.
> I have no idea what you're on about regarding sentient robots.
So you're ignorant about both the state and purpose of OpenAI's research as well as the state of the art in robotics. So why am I even talking to an ignorant person? smh.
> but if you feel that the mere opinions of the plebs are inconsequential^ and hence pointless, why participate in a public forum at all?
That gets to the heart of the matter, actually. Personally I participate in order to get new information and learn new ideas. But yeah, being human and flawed, I do end up giving opinions and I notice most people just want to talk about opinions.
But I digress. My question was specifically about the value of saying "I don't trust OpenAI".
> Nonprofits make a social contract, purporting to operate for the public good, not profit.
This is obvious (though I disagree that there is a social contract, and if there is, it's worth the paper it's printed on) and everybody is aware what a nonprofit is. But your reply still doesn't answer my question. Another way of asking it is: how many other non-profits have you audited for trustworthiness before this conversation? What was the impact of your audit?
Or is saying "we can no longer trust Sam Altman" just us twiddling our thumbs so we can signal our virtue to others or comfort ourselves in our own powerlessness? In less than a decade he'll have an army of humanoid sentient robots and probably be the wealthiest person on the planet, and we'll still be yelling "we can no longer trust him"?
My question, rephrased, is "so what"? What is my or our trust worth? What does us claiming we no longer trust Saudi Aramco achieve unless we are investors or perhaps other significant stakeholders?
> [T]he mythos of people having popped out from the same area or region that they their most recent ancestors have lived […]
>> Genetic studies have put an end to that kind of speculation. Only crackpots and
religious nuts are supporting alternatives.
David Reich (author of "Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past") says[^0]:
"
The modern human lineage, leading to the great majority of the ancestors of people today, was probably in sub-Saharan Africa for the last 500,000 years at least. It might be much more. Certainly our main lineage was in Africa, probably 3-7 million years ago.
But in a period between about 2 million to 500,000 years ago, it's not at all clear where the main ancestors leading to modern humans were. There were humans throughout many parts of Eurasia and Africa with a parallel increase in brain size and not obviously closer ancestrality to modern humans in one place than in the other. It's not clear where the main lineages were. Maybe they were in both places and mixed to form the lineages that gave rise to people today.
There's been an assumption where Africa's been at the center of everything for many millions of years. Certainly it's been absolutely central at many periods in human history. But in this key period when a lot of important changes happen—when modern humans develop from Homo habilis and Homo erectus all the way to Homo heidelbergensis and the shared ancestor of Neanderthals, modern humans, and Denisovans— that time period which is when a lot of the important change happened, it's not clear, based on the archaeology and genetics, where that occurred as I understand it.
" (emphasis mine throughout)
> I don't see why we should trust OpenAI's promises now, when they've broken promises in the past.
I don't see what "our" trust has to do with anything. Perhaps you're an investor in OpenAI and your trust matters to OpenAI and its plans? But for the rest of us, our trust doesn't matter. It would be like me saying, "I don't see why we should trust Saudi Aramco."
And yet, RLHF is a net helpful step of building an LLM Assistant. I think there's a few subtle reasons but my favorite one to point to is that through it, the LLM Assistant benefits from the generator-discriminator gap. That is, for many problem types, it is a significantly easier task for a human labeler to select the best of few candidate answers, instead of writing the ideal answer from scratch.
[…]
No production-grade actual RL on an LLM has so far been convincingly achieved and demonstrated in an open domain, at scale.
> What do you think the point of fiction often is?
Fiction is not obligated to reveal anything about reality. Mainly it's escapist. But I'm not trying to have some big debate. Clearly you're passionate in your belief. Ultimately, how to understand the world is something one figures out with life experience and time at which point history becomes your best source of instruction.
When you're young it may seem to make sense to get your morality from Harry Potter and Star Wars. But that's usually just availability bias and the fact that fiction is easy to consume.
But then you discover that the map is not the territory, sometimes that discovery is painful or brutal or destructive and the consequences of having misunderstood the world are permanent for you and those around you.
Anyway, not an argument. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, merely pointing a fact about competence in understanding the world.
> I got Severance vibes from this blog about Palantir.
If our most immediate means of understanding the world are by relating it to fiction rather than history then it's likely we have a poor understanding of the world and reality.
> An "AI Agent" replacing an employee requires intentional behaviour: the AI must act according to business goals, act reliably using causal knowledge of the environment, reason deductively over such knowledge, and formulate provisional beliefs probabilistically. However there has been no progress on these fronts.
This is a great example of how it's much easier to describe a problem that to describe possible solutions.
The mechanisms you've described are easily worth several million dollars. You can walk into almost any office and if you demonstrate you have a technical insight that could lead to a solution, you can name your price and $5M a year will be considered cheap.
Given that you're experienced in the field, I'm excited by your comment because its force and clarity suggest that you have some great insights into how solutions might be implemented but that you're not sharing with this HN class. I'm wishing you the best of luck. Progress in what you've described is going to be awesome to witness.
> And of course if you ask it anything related to the CCP it will suddenly turn into a Pinokkio simulator.
Smh this isn't a "gotcha!". Guys, it's open source, you can run it on your own hardware[^2]. Additionally, you can liberate[^3] it or use an uncensored version[^0] on your own hardware. If you don't want to host it yourself, you can run it at https://nani.ooo/chat (Select "NaniSeek Uncensored"[^1]) or https://venice.ai/chat (select "DeepSeek R1").
> First time I'm hearing about a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve"
You should definitely know what your government might be involved in, after all government is made up of people many of whom are bitcoiners. Here is a report that's a good primer: "Digital Gold: Evaluating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve for the United States" https://www.btcpolicy.org/articles/digital-gold-evaluating-a...
> Are these tasks really complex enough for people that they are itching to relegate the remaining scrap of required labor to a machine?
I think I sympathize with your feeling but I don't agree with the premise of the question. Do you have or have you ever had a human personal assistant or secretary?
An effective human personal assistant can feel like a gift from God. Suddenly a lot of the things that prevent you from concentrating on what you absolutely must focus on, especially if you have a busy life, are magically sorted out. The person knows what you need and knows when you need it and gets it for you; they understand what you ask for and guess what you forgot to ask for. Things you needed organized become organized while you work after giving minimal instructions. Life just gets so much better!
When I imagine that machines might be able to become good or effective personal assistants for everyone … If this stuff ever works well it will be a huge life upgrade for everyone. Imagine always having someone who can help you, ready to help you. My father would call the secretary pool to send someone to his office. My kids will probably just speak and powerful machines will show up to help.
> Why do we still hold Apple as a company in high regard […]
There is no "we". There's just a market (of products and of company shares) in which anyone can put their money where their preferences are and express their opinion.
> Writing a good argument requires 3 things: be logical, be compelling and likeable, and have a solid reputation. It does not require purple prose.
That's a common misconception that young writers have. Their prose is first purple and overwrought, then they overcorrect and try to be Hemmingway, then they master the craft and discover that form follows function.
As such, the "purpleness" of prose is not an indictment of any sort except if the style doesn't serve the substance. So yes, purple prose is sometimes required and can be used correctly, just ask James Joyce or Hitchens or remember that first sentence in Lolita, for example.
Furthermore, almost every piece of writing you've probably enjoyed went through an editor or several professional editors. You'd be shocked to read early or even late drafts.
(Also, a having "solid reputation" has f' all to do with whether you can construct a good argument. Wanting that as a prerequisite is what the cool kids used to call "appeal to authority". Anyway ...)
But wtf are we even talking about now?
> Besides, surpassing most humans in an area where most humans are unskilled is not a feat, not even AI companies flex on that.
I don't care what "AI companies flex". What I care about, as a programmer, and as an artist, and as a writer who won a tiny prize in my even tinier and insignificant niche on the planet, is what tools we can build for the average person and what tools I have access to.
If I have a robot that is 50% stronger than me or 10x better read than the average human or 20% better than the average mathematician, that's a huge victory. So yes, surpassing the average human is a feat.
But it's not merely the average human who has been surpassed: the average mathematician (skilled in mathematics) and the average artists (skilled in art) and the average writer, have all been surpassed. That is my testable claim. Play with the tools, and see for yourself.
At least you're self aware enough to know that you've contributed noise but not any signal.
And by the way, when you talk to a stranger and immediately get horny to tell them "you sound unhinged" that only reveals that it is you who is in fact unhinged, for you don't know jack about the stranger, but you assume that you are smarter and more knowledgeable than you actually are.
You're the kind of person who says "I don't know what you're talking about" to your interlocutor, and imagine that you saying that statement somehow invalidates the existence of what they are talking about. It's a child's psychology: if you say something doesn't exist then it must not exist.
> It seems like you are confusing threads (again).
smh. There's only 1 thread but perhaps you're the one lost in the maze. There's a word for reprobates like you who, during a discussion, imagine they spot an error, then latch onto that assumed error in order to claim it characterises the entire conversation. Essentially it only shows bad faith and it's a retarded way for you to talk to people. I surely hope your parents will teach you how to talk to strangers. Show them this thread and your responses and ask them for their perspective. If they actually don't know how to teach you, then that's definitely too bad.