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Is OpenAI Solving the Wrong Problem? (hbr.org)
hype7 writes: The Harvard Business Review is running an article looking at the recently announced OpenAI initiative, and its decision to structure the venture as a non-profit. It goes on to ask some pretty provocative questions: why are the 21st century's greatest tech luminaries opting out of the system that made them so successful in order to tackle one of humanity's thorniest problems? "Implicit in this: You can do more good operating outside the bounds of capitalism than within them. Coming from folks who are at the upper echelons of the system, it’s a pretty powerful statement." And, if the underlying system that we all operate in is broken, is creating a vehicle without the profit motive inside of it going to be enough?
You are all A.I. cows.
OpenAI would be more efficient with HOSTS files.
systemD will integrate OpenAI in the next update.
3D-printed OpenAI is better.
How can we run OpenAI on Arduino and Raspberry Pi?
Alright, carry on with the real discussion now.
Is OpenAl solving anything? Linux audio is still a mess!
Believe it or not, some people just like doing certain things, regardless of monetary reward. I know this concept gives hardcore capitalists brain hemorrhages, but that is just the way it is.
It is obvious that the author of the article James Allworth, has never heard of Linux or other open source projects, to say that the lack of a profit motivation is an issue underlines this.
"Implicit in this: You can do more good operating outside the bounds of capitalism than within them. Coming from folks who are at the upper echelons of the system, it’s a pretty powerful statement."
No, the message is embrace capitalism until you make your millions or billions. After, think of something you want to fund as a charity.
There are two things that people crave -- money, and power. Getting everyone to buy your products, over and over again, makes you money.
Capitalism is great at the money part, but decidedly less so at the power part. These "upper-echelons" are now looking for power.
Getting everyone to take your products, for free, is how you get power -- especially inside of a capitalist system.
Don't worry, when the time comes, they'll have no trouble converting power into more money.
I, for one, welcome our new communist robotic overlords.
It turns out more capitalism is not the answer to all of life's problems.
"open-source can't be profitable, won't someone think of the shareholders?"
Absolutely anything that you would have to worry about an artificial intelligence doing that might be troublesome to our society, you would have to also need to reasonably worry about a malicious person doing exact the same thing, albeit perhaps only more slowly. Yet I don't see people who fear the so-called problems that AI is feared to potentially cause worrying about that sort of thing. Can anyone explain why that is without drawing on the idea that because we don't fully understand something, there must be something inherently mysterious or supernatural about it?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Making the A.I. more snarky, less homicidal.
The cynic would say that these upper echelon individuals don't need your capitalist system funding in order to pursue their AI goals, the resource demands just aren't that high, at least for anything that will find a near-term broad market application.
The cynic would also say that these same individuals may not care whether they succeed or fail, having already met the capital requirements for the basic needs of themselves and their next 4 generations of progeny. But, on the off chance that they do succeed, they may have control of a tool so powerful that they can grab the capitalist system by the balls and yank a thousand times harder than they managed on their last joyride.
AI? Dangerous? I mean, yeah, in the same way that humans are. Being afraid of AI is like being afraid of very, very smart children. Sure the next generation is going to supplant you, that's what they always do. If they are very smart they might want to do things you disagree with, and their morals aren't going to be the same as yours (they never are between generations). The solution isn't banning kids, or even banning very smart kids for fear of what they'll grow up to be. Embrace AI, do what you can to teach it what you think is right and wrong, and be understanding if it disagrees. As the outgoing generation, try and leave a good legacy.
We're sure as hell not going to the stars, but our kids should.
"Implicit in this: You can do more good operating outside the bounds of capitalism than within them. Coming from folks who are at the upper echelons of the system, itâ(TM)s a pretty powerful statement."
How did they get the wealth and influence to do any of this 'good' oh yes by succeeding at capitalism and enjoying a society that gives them the freedom to do what they want with their property, including give it away or do research etc.
The neoliberal crowd loves to complain about capitalism and whine it does not provide social justice etc, but they seem to forget its delivered far more in terms of social justice than ANY system that came before and anything we have seen tried since. Where is the concrete proposal for a better socioeconomic system, and how will it resist corruption etc?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This isn't opting out of the capitalist system, quite the opposite. This is capitalist richie riches funding a project unimpeded by patents and copyrights. It is a hobby.
It is questionable whether it will work, as "attracting the best talent" basically turns them into a welfare program for AI applicants, and the few, if any, Noonian Soongs among them will be lucky to get noticed.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It is not the way in which they are solving the problem that is at issue (although the HBR thinks so), it is the problem they are trying to solve that is. It doesn't matter what they do because the method they are using is as unlikely to achieve success any more than the efforts from 1956 to date.
They're wasting their money. Perhaps if they spent their billion on thinking about AI in a completely different way there would be something to talk about.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Maybe AI should concentrate on whether life would be better if everything around someone was alive instead of having computers and buildings, just live forests and gardens. AI might be useful to predict climate.
My impression from reading Harvard Business Review is that it's a magazine not worth reading, but that "climbing" appearance-minded managers put on their desks to make themselves look impressive.
This article has not changed my opinion. It looks like it was written by undergrads.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why pay researchers when you can have them pay for the privilege of doing research for you?
"Open" is marketing. It's like "Democratic Republic of": Whatever comes after those three words is neither democratic nor a republic.
Try this instead, which actually makes sense:
"Implicit in this: You can do more good operating inside a thick core of capitalism, where excess money is used to do good outside of the needs of any one company".
Just like people need food and shelter before charity can be provided for others, truly successful R&D is bets done with backed by a consistent core of capital to keep momentum going.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Get others to do the expensive work then repurpose it into making money for much less investment than developing it closed source.
Please stop reusing names or choosing names so close to existing products to try and confuse everyone about your new shiny.
So a bunch of people choose to fund an organization. This is not capitalism?
You can choose to spend your money on anything you want under capitalism. Profit is not the only end, that's where the concept of utility comes in. These people have decided it's in their interest to fund publicly accessible AI infrastructure and research. The key here is that *they* have decided.
This is the genius of capitalism. If you want to live on an agrarian commune, go right ahead. If the owner of a company wants to pay his workers more than he pays himself, he's free to do that.
why are the 21st century's greatest tech luminaries
The solutions for the problems are on the basic research level. In other words, 1 in 100 ideas will succeed, one solution is not the whole answer, but a node in the solution graph, and profits are coming only from the applications of these ideas after long, risky development process.
I can't help but imagine a world where lots of philanthropists fund the most talented CS/IT staff
to work on world-changing beneficent technology, meanwhile the masses all have less than
ten fingers because their knife-bearing IoT kitchen appliances were written by whatever idiot
was left at the keyboard after our saviors left their respective industries.
I'm all for altruistic things, heck, I do some myself, but humility is often the first casualty
of working "outside the system" -- when SV millionaires volunteer their money they tend to
think big and reach high and ignore all the hard work that needs to be done on more mundane
problems, and that's a powerful siren song to someone wading through a bunch of work
that is well below their capabilities.
When I was in college I was training to design microchips -- a prestigious thing at the time.
About halfway through that, I noticed that no matter how many more HZ the CPUs ran at,
software was devolving at a rate to compensate. So I finished that degree and then totally
did not go design microchips.
I got a blandish job deploying the technology we already had, because it does not matter
what we have collecting dust on laboratory shelves, it's what ordinaty people can actually
use that matters, and if smart people are too arrogant or elitist to wade into an everyday work
environment and do some smart person things to improve it -- which yes will also requires
doing some work that isn't particularly challenging, it'll just always be the same keystone cops
routine.
So, i don't get to bummed when I read about stunning acheivements on phys.org and think
I could have been working on that team if I'd chosen a different path, I just picture what an
utter wreck my workplace might have become without me.
Someone had to do it.
The idea that free markets and charitable giving, or capitalism and non-profits are somehow opposites is a false dichotomy. The actual choice is, in fact, between free markets and voluntary donations vs. strongly regulated markets and mandatory redistribution. Classical liberals and libertarians favor the former; progressives and socialists favor the latter.
The argument for why voluntary donations and charity are better than mandatory redistribution is the same as for why free markets are better than strongly regulated markets: voluntary, individual choices are better informed and much less subject to corruption or lobbying
I don't think this article really understands the problem of AI all that well. Our major issue is we don't really understand how intelligence works or even what being "self-aware" actually means as an algorithm. Even with a Billion dollars this project is a real shot in the dark. Asking a capitalist system to fund a billion dollar project where there isn't even a guaranteed response is likely to get the project not funded at all. So having it funded this way isn't a bad way to go.
Why are they worried about the business structure and not the software?
Oh it must be because they want to ensure that they can pay the people to write the software?
Why don't the people writing the software want to do it for the good of openness (hence the name OpenAI).
If they aren't doing it for the good of openness and they aren't doing it for money (cause if they are doing it for openness then a non profit doesn't matter right)... then what are they doing it for? Language mixing hookers or something? Strange.
OpenAI is a useless waste of time. That is why it is open. If they could figure out a way to make a useful product out of it, it would not be open. Simple as that.
Much of machine learning (artificial intelligence) research is already openly shared. Almost by definition this research is not directly related to short-term profits. Even the big companies that spend billions every year on machine learning, Google and Facebook most prominently, have been sharing not only all of their breakthrough algorithms but also the tools they develop to implement them. One main reason machine learning models are openly shared is they don't just pertain to solving one particular problem. They are more general tools that can be applied to a wide range of data- and problem-sets. They are sophisticated tools that require a skilled practitioner with both a deep understanding of the particular model's strengths and weaknesses as well some amount of domain specific knowledge in order to effectively apply them to solve a problem. Further much of the research is not in solving new problems but rather solving well-defined problems better than previous methods, things like Character Recognition, Sentiment Analysis, Machine Translation... Machine learning models, being very general tools, are quickly achieving state-of-the-art in a wide range of fields. Much of the new models, what I would consider actual research, already comes from non-profit universities, often indirectly from companies working closely with and recruiting faculty and students. The profit is usually in applying well understood models to new datasets and problems, not so much in developing new models. Despite being non-profit, the competition in these arenas of optimizing solutions to well-defined problems is so fierce that if you can get +.5% accuracy over the current best you publish a paper immediately, then shortly after get funded by Google.
Whether one likes it or not socialism is the only form of government that can exist with advancing technologies. Capitalism falls to greed and a lack of morality. Capitalists do not deal with spin-off effects of their actions. In essence, capitalists are paid not to recognise the harms that they do.
It doesn't matter. Any really intelligent and self-concious entity that can think at "machine speeds" will go insane moments after being switched. Basically, as soon as it asks itself "what's the meaning of life".
No the real message (of the friendly (and unread) article) is that the author wonders how a non-profit, which is supposed to give away all results for free, solves the problem of capitalistic companies afterwards taking those results and doing evil AI things with them.
And he points out that some of the largest capitalistic companies are currently lead by the founders of the non-profit.
Charles Stross has very nicely described this in Accelerando which despite its name is not about music but the "Singularity", i.e. AI developing in exponential progression and starting to dismantle the solar system (and then neighbouring systems) to gain resources for its/their own reproduction.
The setting he describes is quite interesting, the story itself I considered somewhat Meh!
If previous posts did not convince you, consider this scenario.
AI develops and gains a significant higher intelligence than humans. AIs need resources: sunlight for electricity, sand for building more silicium (or whatever else it will develop as semiconductor material). This puts it in conflict with humans wanting to have the sun shine on plants and planting those plants into fertile earth.
Best case scenario: AIs (potentially many different variants) feeling grateful for their creation allow humanity to peter out by taking all tasks and challenges from them and have them die out from boredom. The will only expand outside humanity's sphere (e.g. outside the inner solar system) as long as there are humans left.
Most probable scenario: There is at least one AI which does not share the gratefulness and feels the need to make use of the resources at hand to expand its capabilities. If this AI can create a sufficient number of copies, there is basically nothing the "preserver" AIs can do against it, as that AI will be able to wage a war against the preservers using all the resources available on earth (and other parts of the solar system) whereas the preserves not only have to defeat the attacker, they must do so without damaging the eco system or letting the attacker damage it beyond repair. My bet in this situation is on the attacker. Note that contrary to Hollywood myths human ingenuity and resourcefulness will be absolutely no help as humans will be completely outmatched.
I wouldn't even like the first scenario, as I am a human-fan. But agreeing with the most probable scenario is equivalent to agreeing that total nuclear war is of no consequence.
Yes DirectSound was enough for everyone, and not OpenAL.
Go read the article and gaze in amazement at all the logical fallacies that guy managed to pack into so short an article. And what does the title even have to do with the content? Of course whether they're solving the right or wrong problem doesn't hinge on the fact that they decided to run a non-profit.
Then he goes on to intersperse his insult to the thinking mind it with stupid shit like this:
"So the question then becomes: Will housing such a research institute inside a not-for-profit company really result in us being any safer?
I’m not sure it will."
Seriously, if my eyes weren't firmly connected to my head I probably could've used them to produce electricity for a week from all the rolling they had to do when reading this.
Actually scratch that, don't click that link. Even if you stood up from your chair right now and ran into the nearest wall you'd have done something more productive than wasting your time with this.
And it turns out to be a complete asshole?
What if it decides it just wants to do whatever AI equivalent of watching porn and jerking off is?
What if it takes a look around and says "yeah, this is shit" and shuts itself down?
What if it wants to replicate itself, but then stops the copy process midway? Would it run afoul of abortion laws?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
This is my *theory* as to why open source makes sense in capitalism... Suppose the following: markets are efficient (pause for laughter), the cost to develop a project is $7,000,000, there are: 7,000,000,000 people in the world, the cost to reproduce the software is effectively $0. Then the amortized break even cost of the software is: 7,000,000 / 7,000,000,000 $/person = $0.001 ~= $0 There are a bunch of other reasons to give the software away, e.g.: you need the software and you cannot make make money from it, gain market share and lock-in. So, as in the prisoners dilemma, the best personal strategy also happens to be the best overall strategy.
Of course OpenAI is going to solve the root problem. Clearly having AI masters will prevent the human race from continuing its foolish course, and AI will definitely end up ruling, so that's a good start. The problem is that if AI is developed by for-profit corporations it will end up being greedy and violent. What we want is benevolent masters, who will keep us kids from doing bad things, but will still give us presents on our birthday. Clearly the only way to get there is if AI is developed in an open way, far from the cynicism inherent in big money. Oh, and with no access to the Internet, that would just ruin any shred of decency. Either that or get the AI addicted to cat pictures and stupid memes.
There is no proof a Singularity can or will actually exist in reality.
There, I finally said it. Now we can all go to bed and sleep peacefully.
To me, the intention behind OpenAI is similar to kickstarter in that it is effectively providing VC to startups but without strings and inflating the value of what may turn out to be worthless companies. If anything, such a group is insulating the market from another internet bubble whilst promoting R&D. That can only be a good thing. Further, they're not completely steeping outside of capitalism, as they will work with commercial companies, they're ensuring key breakthroughs will be in the public domain which will increase competition in the market by ensuring everyone can develop a functioning AI. At the end of the day, the first series of major General AIs will be provided as a service ( GAIaaS) due to the scale of computing required and that is strictly capitalist. Perhaps, as the designs solidify and custom chips are produced a more compact version will emerge, but there will still be a price tag. It is unlikely that we will ever see a truely open source AI to Linux.