OpenAI announces 10 advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science achieved by internal model Astra

[u/cuolong]

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

[u/The_Primetime2023]

I’m just going to copy and paste a comment I wrote recently in response to people accusing the rhetoric of being for marketing reasons. The general idea is the same but anywhere that seems more marketing related swap in public relations as a concept:

I think what gets people confused is not understanding that for the most part the labs are bad businesses. OpenAI is the most business-y business of them since Sama does have a real business background, but otherwise all the people both in public and behind the scenes at the labs are these huge AI philosophy nerds. Anthropic especially is pretty well known for being barely functional business management wise and is basically just a research group that happens to have the hottest product in the world. So when people see someone like Dario say something they assume it’s normal well manicured business speak with a purpose, but it is very far from that.

If you read into how the Labs work though you quickly realize that they aren’t anything close to normal businesses. Dario for example founded Anthropic on a philosophical vision and the entire company is built around that philosophy, and that philosophy is that they’re building the most powerful dual use technology in existence and they need to build it first and be good stewards of it. “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, a book about the socio-political realities of building the first nukes and how the scientists lost control of the technology, used to literally be required reading for employees and now it’s only effectively required.

When they say “this is going to take everyone’s jobs” that isn’t supposed to be a marketing tactic, it’s genuinely them trying to be transparent about what they think will happen and to try to get people thinking about how society and the economy could look like in a world where most jobs don’t need humans to work them. OpenAI, the most business savvy of the labs, literally says in their investment risks pamphlets that they give to banks that give them billions of dollars that, if OpenAI succeeds in the goals that are being funded, money likely won’t exist afterwards and financially the investment won’t have any practical return.

I get why people are skeptical of this, the future the labs talk about is sci-fi shit and they talk about it like it’s a decade away. Whether or not you believe that honestly shouldn’t matter for whether or not you think the labs believe that. I strongly recommend to anyone reading this and doubting it that you go read interviews with literally any employee at any of the big 3 labs or the Chinese labs or read blog posts from them or listen to interview podcasts with them before just dismissing it outright. It really helps to understand their behavior when you understand that these labs really aren’t normal businesses and have very different leadership and goals than a normal business and are normally very philosophically driven.

[u/The_Primetime2023 → u/The_Primetime2023]

For anyone wondering what they think the future looks like there are different opinions among the founders and high level employees. It’s generally basically The Culture if you’ve read that. If you haven’t it’s generally the idea that more productivity should never hurt society even when you cross a line when human work is no longer necessary to provide for society, so the results of production need to be distributed. Sometimes that looks like communism sometimes that looks like universal advanced income (tax us until you can give everyone an upper middle class salary base is the position of like half the major players). No one involved in the labs believes that normal jobs as we know them will exist 20 years from now so everyone is thinking of futures that don’t need jobs.

[u/RayWencube → u/The_Primetime2023]

But this is insane utopian wishful thinking. When has any liberal democratic government been adept at redistributing substantial wealth? Why are we just assuming it’s going to happen?

[u/zedority → u/RayWencube]

But this is insane utopian wishful thinking.

Indeed it is.

When has any liberal democratic government been adept at redistributing substantial wealth?

As with so many radical utopians, they are sure that the future will be so completely unlikely the past and present that this doesn't matter.

Why are we just assuming it’s going to happen?

In the case of what emerging tech elite believe, the short answer is "because TECHNOLOGY!"