Try the other way around, via negativa. We definitely can find plenty of examples of people stepping out of positions of power, deciding not to do something because of moral conflict, etc. Is there any case of such action from Sam?

Fuck, anyone with any semblance of moral fortitude would refuse to take money from the Saudis. But he had no problem to do it.

> joined an AI research organisation at a time when everybody thought the big advances were much further away than they turned out to be.

No, this is selection bias. What he did was to put himself in a position where he could have his fingers on any and every possible pie, and then when of these things turned out to be something believed to be valuable by people with money, then he manouvered himself to be in the driver seat.

You on the other hand are the one "being sure" about how everything will be fine and of course there is no way for you to bring actual evidence because all you have is conjecture. So, given there is no way for you to back up your argument with evidence, the next best thing you can do is to put some Skin In The Game: can you back up with beliefs with actions? Are you willing to take any substantial risk in case your bet doesn't pay off?

Quite simple: show me any single action took by Sam Altman which can not be construed as an attempt to get him more power/money/influence. You can't find it.

The difference between what he claims to believe and what he actually does is a textbook example of sociopathy.

- Registering an url handler?

- Asking the user?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664205

Points: 331

# Comments: 166

This was already a problem for Wikipedia (articles being written which upon further investigation were based on nothing but Wikipedia itself). With LLM themselves facilitating AI slop and plagiarism, this problem gets to a scale that it becomes impossible to control.

> I’m sure the students will manage.

The problem with your hubris is that you are not going to be the one solely facing the fallout when this blows up.

From a science standpoint, I'd say whatever "results" you got are completely worthless.

> I’ll generally have some sort of hypothesis of what kind of result I’m expecting, given that my understanding is correct

And how do you know if your understanding is correct, if you are only taking what the LLM gives to you and you are not able to verify independently?

> Science is what happens when you expect something, test something, and get a result.

Right, but has any LLM come up with any hypothesis on its own? Has any AI said "given all this literature that I read, I'd expect ?".

But to even *know* what is more useful, it is crucial to have walked the walk. Otherwise we will all end up with a bunch of people trying to reinvent the wheel, over and over again, like JavaScript "developers" who keep reinventing frameworks every six months.

> which nobody would buy for any other tool

I don't know about you, but I wasn't allowed to use calculators in my calculus classes precisely to learn the concepts properly. "Calculators are for those who know how to do it by hand" was something I heard a lot from my professors.

Maybe I should just remove it from the sign-up form altogether and use it as a honeypot.

Even if this approach doesn't work long term, the important thing is to establish product-market fit, and to get enough people committed to the idea that your product is their gateway out of the closed platforms.

I can think of at least three different ways to set up a system that can go around the API restrictions and re-serve the data to a different client that the user can control. But if I go and implement any of those, someone will try it and give up on my product until that approach gets shut down.

By selling lifetime subscriptions, the users get invested in the success of the product as well and they will be more willing to fight the restrictions that the companies impose with you.

This deserves a few qualifiers. I think this should be applied to any service that is

- "free" or "freemium"

- wrapped as a black box which gives no way out for customers.

There are plenty of companies out there who provide services based on FOSS, but we collectively shy away from paying them because it seems "silly" to pay for software that people can run for free.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47540626

Points: 19

# Comments: 0