I think it’s great for prominent alignment / x-risk people to summarize their views like this. Nice work!
Somewhat disorganized thoughts and reactions to your views on OpenAI:
It’s possible that their charter, recent behavior of executive(s), and willingness to take public stances are net-positive relative to a hypothetical version of OA which behaved differently, but IMO the race dynamic that their founding, published research, and product releases have set off is pretty clearly net-negative, relative to the company not existing at all.
It also seems plausible that OpenAI’s existence is directly or indirectly responsible for events like the Google DeepMind merger, Microsoft’s AI capabilities and interest, and general AI capabilities hype. In a world where OA doesn’t get founded, perhaps DeepMind plugs along quietly and slowly towards AGI, fully realizing the true danger of their work before their is much public or market hype.
But given that OpenAI does exist already, and there are some cats which are already out of the bag, it’s true that many of their current actions are much better relative to the actions of what the worst possible version of an AI company looks like.
As far as vilifying or criticizing goes, I don’t have strong views on what public or “elite” opinion of OpenAI should be, or how anyone here should try to manage or influence it. Some public criticism (e.g. about data privacy or lack of transparency / calls for even more openness) does seem frivolous or even actively harmful / wrong to me. I agree that human survival probably depends on the implementation of fairly radical regulatory and governance reform, and find it plausible that OpenAI is currently doing a lot of positive work to actually bring about such reform. So it’s worth calling out bad criticism when we see it, and praising OA for things they do that are praiseworthy, while still being able to acknowledge the negative aspects of their existence.
I think it’s great for prominent alignment / x-risk people to summarize their views like this. Nice work!
Somewhat disorganized thoughts and reactions to your views on OpenAI:
It’s possible that their charter, recent behavior of executive(s), and willingness to take public stances are net-positive relative to a hypothetical version of OA which behaved differently, but IMO the race dynamic that their founding, published research, and product releases have set off is pretty clearly net-negative, relative to the company not existing at all.
It also seems plausible that OpenAI’s existence is directly or indirectly responsible for events like the Google DeepMind merger, Microsoft’s AI capabilities and interest, and general AI capabilities hype. In a world where OA doesn’t get founded, perhaps DeepMind plugs along quietly and slowly towards AGI, fully realizing the true danger of their work before their is much public or market hype.
But given that OpenAI does exist already, and there are some cats which are already out of the bag, it’s true that many of their current actions are much better relative to the actions of what the worst possible version of an AI company looks like.
As far as vilifying or criticizing goes, I don’t have strong views on what public or “elite” opinion of OpenAI should be, or how anyone here should try to manage or influence it. Some public criticism (e.g. about data privacy or lack of transparency / calls for even more openness) does seem frivolous or even actively harmful / wrong to me. I agree that human survival probably depends on the implementation of fairly radical regulatory and governance reform, and find it plausible that OpenAI is currently doing a lot of positive work to actually bring about such reform. So it’s worth calling out bad criticism when we see it, and praising OA for things they do that are praiseworthy, while still being able to acknowledge the negative aspects of their existence.