The only potential danger of said technology is that it may be confused as something trusted, but as shown above, trust is a fundamentally flawed concept. Which means that if danger actually arises, it was self-inflicted.
While I get the sentiment, things have a way of working out. Maybe he is actually the best person to do it...no one knows who the best person for an undefined situation will be.
Does it matter if the person is the best or if people think they are? Even our government is led by people that think the person is the best for the role even if they really are not. Why would anyone care about this particular company when that's their view on the gov't?
I would submit that if we care about outcomes then it matters if someone is the best suited for the role.
There will always be subjectivity, and “the best” is going to be at least partly defined in terms of who is available. Nevertheless we could insist upon certain standards. Not being a pathological liar, a sociopath, deeply conflicted or self-interested, and so on, seem like good starting positions.
I’m not arguing that we live in a reality that reflects this, of course. Just that it would be nice to.
The definition of survivorship bias because you literally are alive to say this.
Tens of millions have been killed by CEOs of tobacco companies, and that's just one industry. Energy companies will likely cause the death of billions.
We got rid of many dangerous American oligarchs in the Gilded Age by using govt to break them up. Things don't "just work out," people sacrifice huge amounts of time and energy to fix them.
didn‘t the “tens of millions” of humans who died have any agency? And by definition, aren’t “energy companies” helping fix the problem of “energy poverty” which increases human welfare?
In both cases, the agency of individuals was undermined by regulatory capture and the publishing of false studies (despite having real studies that the companies buried).
For decades, people didn't even know it was dangerous to smoke or have lead in gasoline or burn fossil fuels because the information was systematically suppressed by the producers of those products.
I worked at a ~$20M food company where we had a new CEO coming in. Management/Board were over the moon, saying "This guy has been running a multi-billion $$ company for years."
Curious as to why someone would transition so abruptly from the major leagues to the minors, I searched on his name and the first hits were about an active SEC investigation into him for witholding payments to suppliers (small and medium farmers) to inflate the balance sheets to give it a higher valuation for a buyout. He actually turned out to be more effective than the previous 2 CEOs and I forged a perfectly fine working relationship with him, but it made me aware that business people will ignore any variety of moral/legal issues when the dollar signs are in their eyes.
I believe he put the SEC thing behind him, avoiding jail time by not quite admitting nor denying guilt and writing a ~$2M personal check.
I think it’s abundantly clear that if OpenAI fails, powerful people will face prosecution. It’s an uncomfortable but unavoidable part of our justice system that we don’t like to prosecute people until they’re no longer winners.
Dozens of finance executives wiped a decade worth of economic growth off the United States the year before I graduated high school. My generation will never recover. They left their jobs with more money that I'll make in an entire lifetime. None went to prison.
If someone in your generation (graduating high school 2009) obtained in demand credentials or skills, then they should have reaped enormous returns from 2013 to 2024.
The only people who really “lost” in 2008 were those who were overleveraged from going into debt for houses or education, and then had to default due to income loss in 2008 to 2011 or so. Or those who panic sold all their equities.
From entering a hot labor market with rising wages and investing?
The alternative is entering a cool labor market with stagnant or decreasing wages.
Obviously, people who already had assets made out better, but that is not a possibility for 99% of high school/college graduates, so useless to consider.
From plumbers to programmers, there probably was not a better time in history to get paid. That is the nature of a decade of 0% interest rates, unprecedented in US history.
If you did not get paid, it was because you were not shopping around for a buyer willing to pay more (not ascribing blame).
IMO nobody highly typical reaped major returns from '2013 - 2019' unless they already had excess income.
Even restricting to CS (and I haven't tracked my graduating CS classes that closely from the '08 - '11 range) my memory is that many of the smartest ones didn't end up working in CS for reasons that were never clear to me and sort of muddled by for years. (To a certain extent I'm still not sure how college grads who didn't get internships or work in the field are supposed to land their first job in the field if they're great at c and algorithms but can't and won't market themselves or move.) The only ones who made out like bandits were the ones who landed internships at places like Google or MS or had preexisting connections or niche interests of some form. A solid chunk ended up at big old companies, like IBM, Lockheed Martin, etc. They mostly made out well because getting paid $60k - $90k out of college around then made it easy to buy a house, and because they worked somewhere that made a job switch or career progression work out well enough to start getting paid more circa mid '10s. That said, a solid chunk ended up in smaller companies, government, or non-tech companies that needed devs, and I think for many of them it didn't work out or lead to years of low pay before being able to get more on track. For many, it seems like things didn't really lead to big benefits until the pandemic, which I think unlocked opportunities for more folks to work remote.
Back to speaking more generally, I think many more people probably could have reaped the benefits of home ownership than did so in the '08 to '19 interval because houses seemed to stay cheap all over the country for much of that period. But many folks in the age bracket seem like they either (a) didn't realize they could afford to when houses were quite cheap, (b) actually couldn't (student loans?) or (c) were afraid to, because that whole generation never feels secure in a job or their ability to find a job if their current one cuts them, and got somewhat chilled by the foreclosures they saw in the '08 crash. Many of these folks I think only realized how this was screwing them when rents started to skyrocket, though I don't think I clearly have a sense of how student loans play out - I do think college enrollment as a percentage of high school graduates was pretty high, but I'm not sure how big a percentage of those enrolled in high cost vs low cost situations in both absolutes and loans.
But IMO it's important to realize that for most typical workers in those years, median income was not high enough for single income to invest significantly beyond their house if they did save towards home ownership. The number of folks who didn't know how to find anything gainful to do with their degrees and so went back to school for master's or higher in those '08 - '11 years seems significant to me. I personally know plenty of folks who got masters degrees or better in various fields and basically eke out a living doing stuff like writing website copy, teaching at charter schools, and various other things that don't pay well and seem likely to be sort of demoralizing for someone with an advanced degree.
So IMO it's only with two income households and above median incomes that you can realistically do both (invest and own housing) over those years, particularly if there are any student loans. And during those years marriage ages have gone up.
The thing I'm seeing now is that folks who did get housing are kind of stuck doubling or tripling their payment to get a large place if they want to have kids, etc. Which will likely further negate many folks' ability to participate in the market. Or lead to further birth rate decline.
I'm not familiar with the whole situation - what would they be prosecuted for? Violation of copyright? Or is this some sort of 'everything is securities fraud' situation?
Was Holmes ever bulletproof? Anyone with scientific experience was calling BS on her from the beginning due to the reality of current technology and physics.
I remember only knowing her because there were posts on this website calling her out very early on.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/29/ex_openai_board_membe...
https://www.wheresyoured.at/sam-altman-is-full-of-shit/