OpenAI Employees Say Firm's Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims
OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever reportedly likes to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company.
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He's the one cultist who actually accomplished something
Exactly. I wonder if people really didn't get what I was saying 😄
I couldn't tell what you were saying. Answering "yes" to the question of whether you were writing "in sarcasm or support" is not at all informative.
It means it was meant to be sarcastic and supportive. I thought answering "yes" to an "or" question is familiar to most people on the internet these days.
tbh, one thing I'm tired of from the internet, is exactly the post-ironic conflation of "just kinding but also sincerely" as wit. It's actually quite old (mid-late 2000's) and frequently a vehicle for the most vile views on the internet. And it's not clever.
I hate to say it, but even sneerclub can get a bit biased and tribal sometimes. He who fights with monsters and so on
I suspect watching the rationalists as they bloviate and hype themselves up and repeatedly fail for years on end have lulled people into thinking that they can't do anything right, but I think that's clearly not the case anymore. Despite all the cringe and questionable ethics, OpenAI has made a real and important accomplishment.
They're in the big leagues now. We should not underestimate the enemy.
(this gets dangerously close to the debate rule, so I’ll leave it to mods to draw the line in reply to this)
What, specifically, are you referencing as the accomplishment? Money? Access to power? Because while I’d agree on those things, it still isn’t really all that notable - that’s been the SFBA dynamic for years. It is why the internet was for years so full of utterly worthless companies, whose only claim of our awareness of them was built on being able to spend their way there.
For openai, the money: wasn’t free, still short, already problematic. I’ve seen enough of those going around, from the insides, to say fairly comfortably that I suspect the rosy veneer they present is as thorough as an oldschool film propfront.
The power? Well, leveraged and lent power, enabled by specific people… and, arguably, now curtailed - because he tried to assert his own views against that power. Because he tried to bite the hand that feeds, and he nearly had all his toys taken away
A team? Eh, lots of people who’ve built teams. A company? Same. Something of a product? Same. None of these elevate him to genius.
Do I think the man is in, in some manner, intelligent? Yes. In some particular domains he’s arguably one of the luminaries of his field (or, in a most extremely dark other possibility, an extremely good thief). I might be able to accept “genius” for this latter definition under some measure of proof, if that were the substantive point of argument. But: it is not.
There is no proof that anything openai has produced is anywhere near their claims. Every visible aspect is grifty, with notable boasts that again and again (so far) fall flat (arguably because the motivations for these boasts are done in self-serving interest).
As to “underestimating the enemy”: I hope the above demonstrates to you that I do not, and think of this fairly comprehensively. Which is why I can tell you this quite certainly: mocking the promptfans and calling them names for their extremely overcomplicated mechanical turk remains one of the best strategies available for handling these ego-fucking buffoon nerds and all their little fans
The accomplishment I'm referring to is creating GPT/DALL-E. Yes, it's overhyped, unreliable, arguably unethical and probably financially unsustainable, but when I do my best to ignore the narratives and drama surrounding it and just try out the damn thing for myself I find that I'm still impressed with it as a technical feat. At the very, very least I think it's a plausible competitor to google translate for the languages I've tried, and I have to admit I've found it to be actually useful when writing regular expressions and a few other minor programming tasks.
In all my years of sneering at Yud and his minions I didn't think their fascination with AI would amount to anything more than verbose blogposts and self-published research papers. I simply did not expect that the rationalists would build an actual, usable AI instead of merely talking about hypothetical AIs and pocketing the donor money, and it is in this context that I say I underestimated the enemy.
With regards to "mocking the promptfans and calling them names": I do think that ridicule can be a powerful weapon, but I don't think it will work well if we overestimate the actual shortcomings of the technology. And frankly sneerclub as it exists today is more about entertainment than actually serving as a counter to the rationalist movement.
