Readit Newscoryfklein commented on My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth gatesnotes.com/home/home-... · Posted by u/nrvn
When the government doesn't do it, private parties have to; when there's a significant percentage of the population voting for "small government" parties, more responsibility goes to (wealthy) individuals.
> private parties have to
No they don't. It can also be that neither the government nor private parties give.
Making it an either/or often makes space for the individual to make excuses for why they don't share because out there somewhere there exists some government program that vaguely looks like charity.
coryfklein commented on My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth gatesnotes.com/home/home-... · Posted by u/nrvn
One of the great tragedies of the world is that while he is arguably the philanthropist with the highest positive impact in human history, a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
> a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
Beware that you don't fall into the trap of thinking the 1% of the population that makes 90% of the noise on the internet is "significant" or a representative sampling of the population. Most everyone else's views are quite boring and detached from extremism, they just don't shout their moderation on the rooftops.
coryfklein commented on Evolving OpenAI's Structure openai.com/index/evolving... · Posted by u/rohitpaulk
> Does the current AI give productivity benefits to writing code? Probably.
> If one exclusive group gets the benefit of developing AI with a 20% productivity boost compared to others, and they develop a 2.0 that grants them a 25% boost, then a 3.0 with a 30% boost, etc...
That’s a bit of a stretch, generative AI is least capable of helping with novel code such as needed to make AGI.
If anything I’d expect companies working on generative AI to be at a significant disadvantage when trying to make AGI because they’re trying to leverage what they are already working on. That’s fine for incremental improvement, but companies rarely ride one wave of technology to the forefront of the next. Analog > digital photography, ICE > EV, coal mining > oil, etc.
The "novel AGI code" probably accounts for <5% of work by time spent. If they can reduce the remaining 95% of grunt work (wiring yet another DB query to a frontend, tweaking the build pipeline, automating GPU allocation scripts) then that means they can focus more on that 5%.
Then it looks like Company A spends 90% of time on novel research work (while LLMs do all the busy work) and Company B spends 5% of time on novel research work.
Israel and Russia also want peace. China wants peace with Taiwan. The US wants peace with Greenland and Canada.
You have to be careful with that word, peace, because all wars are defensive.
I’m sorry, but this is getting really out of hand, we can’t even use the word “peace” now?
coryfklein commented on Evolving OpenAI's Structure openai.com/index/evolving... · Posted by u/rohitpaulk
I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI.
The intersection of the two seems to be quite hard to find.
At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output.
This isn't a nuclear weapon. We're not going to accidentally create Skynet. The only thing it's going to go nuclear on is the market for jobs that are going to get automated in an economy that may not be ready for it.
If anything, the "danger" here is that AGI is going to be a printing press. A cotton gin. A horseless carriage -- all at the same time and then some, into a world that may not be ready for it economically.
Progress of technology should not be artitrarily held back to protect automateable jobs though. We need to adapt.
Sounds a little too much like, "It's not AGI today ergo it will never become AGI"
Does the current AI give productivity benefits to writing code? Probably. Do OpenAI engineers have exclusive access to more capable models that give them a greater productivity boost than others? Also probably.
If one exclusive group gets the benefit of developing AI with a 20% productivity boost compared to others, and they develop a 2.0 that grants them a 25% boost, then a 3.0 with a 30% boost, etc...
The question eventually becomes, "is AGI technically possible"; is there anything special about meat that cannot be reproduced on silicon? We will find AGI someday, and more than likely that discovery will be aided by the current technologies. It's the path here that matters, not the specific iteration of generative LLM tech we happen to be sitting on in May 2025.
coryfklein commented on Evolving OpenAI's Structure openai.com/index/evolving... · Posted by u/rohitpaulk
I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market:
> Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale, but a change of structure to something simpler.
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
― Sun Tzu
This concern is virtually unheard of today, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they actually had a slight effect in the opposite direction: some of those youth getting trouble outside are now indoors playing harmless video games.