I’m skeptical of OpenAI’s net impact on the spirit of cooperation because I’m
skeptical about the counterfactual prospects of cooperation in the last 6 years
had OpenAI not been founded.
The 2000s and early 2010s centralized and intermediated a lot of stuff online,
where we trusted centralized parties to be neutral arbiters. We are now
experiencing the after effects of that naivete, where Reddit, Twitter and
Facebook are censoring certain parties on social media, and otherwise neutral
infrastructure like AWS or Cloudflare kick off disfavored parties. I am at the
point where I am scared of centralized infrastructure and try to minimize my
reliance on it because it allows third parties to apply pressure on me.
These general trends are much larger than Elon Musk and would have happened
without him. I’m uncertain to what extent Elon was just reacting to this trend
and was ahead of the curve.
Darkly humorous, but OpenAI’s recent destruction of otherwise entirely benign
users of GPT-3 is teaching people to not rely on centralized AI. Now that
OpenAI is large, the Blue Egregore can apply media pressure on the tech
company to extract submission, in this case censorship demands. The downstream
effects of this demand to think of the non-existent children was the
destruction of trust in AI Dungeon leading people to mostly switch to
various GPT-J alternatives (including local setups) and the shutdown of the
Samantha, which Mr. Rohrer is taking hard.
I’m skeptical of OpenAI’s net impact on the spirit of cooperation because I’m skeptical about the counterfactual prospects of cooperation in the last 6 years had OpenAI not been founded.
The 2000s and early 2010s centralized and intermediated a lot of stuff online, where we trusted centralized parties to be neutral arbiters. We are now experiencing the after effects of that naivete, where Reddit, Twitter and Facebook are censoring certain parties on social media, and otherwise neutral infrastructure like AWS or Cloudflare kick off disfavored parties. I am at the point where I am scared of centralized infrastructure and try to minimize my reliance on it because it allows third parties to apply pressure on me.
These general trends are much larger than Elon Musk and would have happened without him. I’m uncertain to what extent Elon was just reacting to this trend and was ahead of the curve.
Darkly humorous, but OpenAI’s recent destruction of otherwise entirely benign users of GPT-3 is teaching people to not rely on centralized AI. Now that OpenAI is large, the Blue Egregore can apply media pressure on the tech company to extract submission, in this case censorship demands. The downstream effects of this demand to think of the non-existent children was the destruction of trust in AI Dungeon leading people to mostly switch to various GPT-J alternatives (including local setups) and the shutdown of the Samantha, which Mr. Rohrer is taking hard.