alt Hacker NewsI don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?
Replies
jayd16 • today at 3:38 PM
These are Dr. Doom morals.
To the extent that that's true, it's true because Sam Altman did it at all.
It is not that hard to construct a scenario wherein an alternative version of Sam Altman pushed really hard for a genuinely ethical LLM—one trained only on data that he had full unclouded rights to, either because it was public domain or because he had bought or otherwise explicitly received the rights, among other measures—and had then made that competitive in the market with the rest of the existing crop of LLMs. In a scenario like that, whether his LLM did well or not, one could clearly see that Alt-Altman, as it were, was genuinely making an effort.
The reality doesn't look anything like that. In this reality, it doesn't matter whether Altman thought he was trying to get there first because others would make it worse: he made it worse, and his actions match up very, very well with what one would expect the actions of a man who just wanted money, control, and power to be.