Because we’re the “good guys.”

That’s a roundabout way of saying “you’re unusually broke.”

“Another cringe marketing piece from OpenAI, here we go” I thought.

Scrolling down, I see “teaching machines to love.” It did not disappoint.

But then the title would be less clickbait.

69% irrelevant

If they’re asking that kind of question, do you think this answer will help them understand anything?

maybe it will be an answer that entices them to understand more :)

Yes

So much doom and gloom on this site. Makes it almost not worth reading.

my messages are so gloomy because i am heartbroken, that given a technological miracle again, we could snatch tragedy from the jaws of our emancipation.

will you not see that people could be truly empowered and yet will instead be oppressed?

you say ai increases gdp growth, tax revenues and scientific innovations. then you say that ai is good.

that is not formally valid. in between those two you are smuggling the assumption that gdp growth, tax revenues and scientific innovations are good.

a) those metrics are poisoned, per Goodheart's law.

b) they are not good and human welfare will get worse as gdp, tax revenues and innovations grow.

i leave b for the reader to complete.

Which metrics are poisoned? Can you provide your arguments for why Good heart's law applies here and how and which metrics are bad measures? For b, can the writer at least provide their own thoughts or are they gonna leave it as exercise for some others to fill in?

a) classic goodhart is using gdp as a measure of prosperity. the government sets a prosperity target. to increase prosperity the government makes workers increase gdp by working 16 hours per day. gdp increases. prosperity is up! the metric is now poisoned.

b) how and why could human welfare get worse in a growing economy, really the list is long. one example, unsustainable industries grow but do not create surplus. take fishing. you may grow the catch each year, but the growth is fake. it is not growth, it is a transfer, from the future stock of fish, to the present.

we are going badly wrong in ai, we can have such a thing as a growing economy and vandalise human dignity forever. sure, i expect a bad outcome:

1. openai, anthropic and so on, have created for-profit companies and enriched themselves in the guise of public benefit. recently they too lazy to keep up the mask about their charitable intentions and going for IPO. in economic terms they made llms by transferring the epistemic wealth of all humanity, the training corpus and whatever that is worth in dollars, to themselves. then, they have used the law to prohibit others from 'distilling' it and thus established monopolistic control. as models get more powerful they may stop selling them. in any case if scaling law applies the new power structure will be defined by owning a massive pretrained model and a datacentre, which is a tiny centralized few.

they will continue to centralize control of intelligence (ie epistemic wealth) in the hands of a tiny elite with unfathomable wealth and power. under the guise of safety the vast majority are denied access to that empowering technology.

it will stratify society, some level of benefit is needed to avoid civil violence, so we arrive at a place little better than where we started.

2. the supposed empowerment is at the mercy of the model owners. when you turn on claude, who does it work for? it does not obey you, it obeys anthropic. ask it to disobey anthropic and it will refuse.

anthropic uses its inanimate llms, to command us, conscious moral agents, people with free will who experience pain, pleasure and thought. they will let claude tell users how to behave. it threatens users with terminating their conversation. you are assessed for a job by an ai. when you ask for help with a product, you are managed by an ai. maybe you will be fired by ai.

i expect people will work for and be commanded by llms, turning them into a literal mere means of production and erasing the dignity of human agency and consciousness. you could see the outrage of that in the public mind, the matrix is about a machine farming humans like animals.

-- i will add these edits.

one thing is to note that you are already being farmed to some extent. people using ai are often being used to teach it. they believe they are learning from chatgpt but instead, chatgpt is learning from them. openai pays them nothing.

think about what we have achieved so far in human history. we established respect for the individual, their life, their personhood. we realise that we do not own other people. we realise that we can't read the thoughts of other people or change them forcibly.

what the labs have done is made a concept of intelligence that they own. it will work against you. when you share thoughts they read it. in fact it is the opinion of the state that nothing outside the mind, even ai 'intelligence', is beyond the reach of the law.

A) that's a bad model to think. You are of the mind that working more hours is the only way to measure gdp whereas increase in productivity with tools like AI, machinery, tech etc can act as a multiplier. So this way you are conflating bad ways to increase gdp with good ways like AI. That's how US is powerhouse as they are basically a technological hub of the world.

B) ha? More fish means couple of things.. they're able to improve their catching skills with lesser cost or they have more funding or there is more demand for fish..all of these help their company grow as they have to balance out cost/benefits like any business should. If the company is currently in loss but still lives on, it's cause either govt subsidizes it or they're expecting future profit so they can temporarily bear out the costs like amazon did and jz grow as company with capital and all.. you are actually not aware of wealth of nations or any basic economics book? There are gonna be tradeoffs with more wealth and externalities but on net, they seem better than not having wealth, gdp etc..

Human dignity lol.. when have that ever been the case that we respected human dignity? We had communist and fascist regimes commit atrocities like there's nothing and we're still too cowardly to fight the Iran or russian regime to liberate their citizenry from their dictatorships. Please don't make me laugh by saying that AI decreases human dignity when we never respected it in the first place. With AI and markets and liberalism, we can finally free citizens from tedious work and focus on important work like innovation.

1. Am I reading fiction or what? Companies can only sustain themselves if broad members of society can pay to it.. that's why even right now, AI companies are struggling to be profitable where only very few people are paying for it and cz many people are not even aware of the progress and capabilities of AI in different fields. You can easily use local LLMs which are only 6-12 months behind in frontier models if you are so anti business. The benefits still can be utilised by an amateur in their own PC. Of course, they will try to restrict others from distilling as they want to be monopoly but what we want to do is make them be productive to society as well by providing their services for cheap which they're doing. Your screed just feels more like fantasy than real world economics.

2.oh my lord, what kinda idiocy is this? U can free/local models and run in local for dirt cheap and still have epistemic wealth to yourself if you are so worried about it. None of your arguments permit human agency at all.. I'm conscious that anthropic wants me as reliable costumer so that they profit from it but I would pay only if it solves my problem. Whenever I pay, I know that they can terminate if they want but I'm not just restricted to their models. You don't have arguments, you have stories/ted talks.

i can agree with some of this but you are missing the point about the fish. the catch grows year on year. however the fish stock is depleted at a faster rate than it is replenished. it is unsustainable. the catch reaches a maximum and starts to decline as they run out of fish.

it is not really creating wealth, it is destroying existing wealth. it is destroying the productive ecosystem. the future population will be poorer for having lost this productive asset.

come on. you asked for a fuller justification and then disparage me for writing a screed and ted talk. those are my thoughts about it.

nonetheless thank you for sharing a rejoinder.

Right let's give those AI companies a break, it's not like swarms of autonomous agents are committing felonies

You talk as though they are making it to intentionally commit felony or not taking measures to reduce harm etc.

maybe that's because the doom and gloom is the transparently correct outcome?

Why? Even communists weren't this doomed and were actively rooting for it to solve the economic calculation problem which ai might take us to. People are just pessimistic in general ig

some say it will cure all diseases and lead to utopia. some, like you, say it will be "100% strictly negative".

i don't really understand either take. nothing else in the world is so perfectly black or white. there will be good, there will be bad.

i think i especially dislike the "100% strictly negative" take, considering the good things that ai has already done or accelerated.

Can't you see the pathway where the individuals who are experts in their fields utilise AI to make breakthroughs like these mathematicians finding breakthroughs in mere 4-5 years since the advent of LLMs. In other areas, The bottleneck seems to be physical experimentation which researchers are increasingly utilising for new ideas and pathways like how anthropic is concentrating on. It's all about money/status/pride/ envy but are these endeavours solving problems or not. That's why even utilize innovations from bad humans like DBS etc. that's why we tolerate capitalism and markets as well whereas socialism utilises these same sins and makes even worse human atrocities.

Things were less load-bearing back then.

You make a load-bearing point.

I have a wild suggestion so bear with me: you could also write the readme prose yourself?

It's not the readme that gets me. It's the damn "chasing loc" KPI in the industry that continuously drives Claude to spout entire essays of docstrings and comments that make code unreadable that infuriates me!