It's a very strongly worded statement. Given how connected Altman is, it's very interesting that Irving would publicly state this.
It's either very courageous and in service to changing silicon valley, or also very manipulative and in service of benefiting his company. It feels like it could be both.
I'm left feeling like there are no angels here. (That's actually funny given how investors love to call themselves angels.)
In the end it appears Altman has looked out for himself above all else, which probably enrages his mentors and investors who don't like to lose control, including pg.
It's difficult to conceptualize someone who is ruthless, self-interested, and skilled enough to overcome all problems... except your control over them.
Eventually they look at you and decide you're the problem to be overcome.
Might not happen for a while, but inevitably will.
That's my feeling after watching all this play out over the last few days. I don't trust any of these people to be good stewards of anything that is supposed to benefit humanity.
He personally does not like the color yellow, so he required it not used in safety contexts just because of that. So he put workers' safety at risk because he may have to see pictures or tour the area once every quarter. There are more stories like this ad nauseum. Or, you could just read his Twitter feed.
You guys just believe whatever you read.
Things that can easily be debunked with common sense. For example, there's a lot of yellow in this factory tour he did:
I indeed see fairly minimal safety colors and patterns in that video. I don't know where you see "a lot".
And you do realize that there have been investigative journalists, federal inspections, and lawsuits regarding this? So all those people are just making it all up so that I can just believe whatever I read?
musk fanboyism is a religion, it doesn't have to be grounded in facts to be true to people who believe in it
musk is sending strike breakers to sweden to make it so that unions there can't do their job to protect workers so he obviously can't give a damn about his employees' safety
doesn't change the fact that people will still log on blogs and websites everyday to defend him like he's the second coming of jesus
"Middle management" gets a bad rap I think, I moved from big company middle management positions to startup founding teams and back my entire career. More senior managers in big companies typically lacked operational chops.
Just the questions show you may be on the right path. I'd look for emotional blocks inhibiting the implementation/coding work. In my aged experience virtually all procrastination is based in emotion.
"If you were to heed Timnit’s warnings you would have to significantly change the business and the structure of these companies. If you heed Geoff’s warnings, you sit around a table at Davos and feel scared."
Trying to be diplomatic, but this is such an unnecessary snarky, useless response. Google obviously did go slow with their rollout of AI, to the point where most of the world criticized them to no end for "being caught flat footed" on AI (myself included, so mea culpa).
I don't necessarily think they did it "right", and I think the way they set up their "Ethical AI" team was doomed to fail, but at least they did clearly think about the dangers of AI from the start. I can't really say that about any other player.
> Google obviously did go slow with their rollout of AI, to the point where most of the world criticized them to no end for "being caught flat footed" on AI (myself included, so mea culpa).
they were criticized because they are losing competition not because of rollout, their current tech is weaker than ChatGPT.
Their current tech is weaker because they couldn't release the full version due to the additional safeguards (partly to prevent more people claiming their AI is sentient) and partly also due to cost cutting.
> We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power
Translation: we cannot release our full model because it costs too much. We are giving the world a cheap and worse version due to cost cutting.
> It’s critical that we bring experiences rooted in these models to the world in a bold and responsible way. That’s why we’re committed to developing AI responsibly
Translation: we value responsible AI so much that we'd nerf the capability of the AI to be "responsible"
If someone more ambitious than Sundar were to be CEO I'm sure the recent events would turn out very differently.
where they didn't create positive revenue products yet despite billions of investments, while putting main cash cow (search) into risk by neglecting that area.
They use a lot of machine learning for ads and YouTube recommendations - the TPU makes sense there and if anything shows how hard they try to keep costs down. It’s a no-brainer for them to have tried keeping Search as high-margin as possible for as long as possible.
Cade Metz is the same muckraker who forced Scott Alexander to preemptively dox himself. I don’t know Hinton apart from the fact that he’s a famous AI researcher but he has given no indication that he’s untrustworthy.
I’ll take his word over Metz’s any day of the week!
I've always thought about leaving a little text file buried somewhere on my website that says "Here are all of the things that Future Me really means when he issues a press statement after his product/company/IP is bought by a billion-dollar company."
More like HR said, “Well, there is option A where you leave and are free to do what you wish. And then there is option B (points at bag of cash) where you pretend none of this ever happened…”
I assume Geoffrey Hinton has enough bags of cash for his lifetime and a few more on top of that. IDK why someone so well compensated and so well recognized would agree to limit themselves in exchange for a, relatively speaking, tiny bit more cash. That doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.
"It doesn't matter if you take the bags of cash or not, we will do our best to destroy your life if you mess with us after you are gone. The bags of cash are a formality, but you might as well accept them because we have the power to crush you either way"
Large corporations like Google have a lot of resources and connections to really mess up a single persons life if they really want to, with expensive legal action and PR campaigns.
Yeah, they might cause their reputation some damage by going after the wrong person, but let's be real here.. the worst outcome for Google would likely be miles ahead of the worst outcome for Hinton.
Edit: Note that I'm not actually saying that I think Google and Hinton have this level of adversarial relationship.
I'm just saying that big companies may come after you for speaking out against them regardless of if you've accepted hush money or not.
Given that, it's usually worth
being tactful when talking about former employers regardless of any payouts you may have accepted or agreements you may have signed.
