My personal views as someone working in big tech who has recently been softened by seeing the upper echelons of big corporations: AI is not being used as a tool to help anyone, it’s just another example of capitalist greed. The thing that’s really concerning though is open AI began as some sort of non-profit claiming they are operating to help make the world a better place, for the public good, the benefit of everyone…
Then they suddenly started helping Microsoft exclusively, which has been criticized many times for being a monopoly, fairly so. Having a corporate sponsor is one thing. But being exclusively in Microsoft’s pocket and helping them improve a paid AI model and series of AI services that are not exclusively and freely available to the public, yet they are getting huge amounts of funding to operate there non-profit from public sources, it seems like a scam. Unbelievable that they are allowed to do this
But the part that’s really troubling is how they view general intelligence and the future of technology and especially AI. Sam Altman really wants to push for artificial general intelligence, that’s the goal. He wanted to be mobile so it’s accessible basically anywhere. But the thing he never mentions is how it benefits society at large. By society, I mean everyone, not just big companies but health care, wellness, well-being of the public, advancing medical technology, making food more accessible, making housing more accessible for people, improving the state of the world that we live in… None of these are concerns for Open AI
Open AI is basically just a scheme, a literal pyramid scheme. Users have realized that there’s a way to get easier work done in general, so they keep funding and paying for open AI services which fuels their organization. But they are not interested in doing anything beneficial or good for humanity at all. That’s pretty troubling to know.
It’s pretty well known at this point, they lied about their initial goals and nothing they’ve done in ages has been “open”. It’s all been closed research that they won’t share because they don’t want anyone else to catch up.
Also they had a lot of friction with their AI safety department because caring about safety would slow down business.
Honestly don’t see how they get away with this and don’t get sued into oblivion? Or why the justice system is letting this happen? Because when you start a non-profit and claim that you’re doing it for the public good, I thought there would be some sort of legal requirement that you’re actually doing that? Meta, which is a for-profit company, has chosen to release their AI models to the public for anyone to use, you can go get a copy of llama 3.1 right now to go and use all on your own and people are tweaking it and doing all these crazy open source changes to llama 3.1. It’s crazy.