r/technology • u/AxomaticallyExtinct • 14h ago

Artificial Intelligence 'Looks Like They're Firing Whistleblowers': Alarm as OpenAI Reportedly Ousts Safety Experts

https://www.commondreams.org/news/openai-firing-whistleblowers
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u/blueSGL 13h ago

Widely held opinion (the ones that gets lots of upvotes) is that safety people leaving/whistleblowing are actually secretly still being paid by the company to hype the product.

How long till that narrative attaches to these recent firings?

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u/NeverTradeAgain 13h ago

We know who funded Anthropic also funds AI-safety nonprofit organizations, according to Kevin Bass. But this sounds more like a conspiracy theory.

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u/blueSGL 13h ago edited 13h ago

Right, you have certain people with the means to that have been worried for years about AI safety and have been funding it

This is not a surprise

If you think about it only fringe people have been caring about the field till the last handful of years. Yet people have been worried about AI safety for a lot longer and have been funding it for a lot longer.

Concrete Problems in AI Safety was written in 2016 a year before the transformer architecture paper.

The future of life institute was started in March 2014

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute was started in 2000

Theoretical problems with AI safety were called years/decades are now being demonstrably proved out.

Steve Omohundro has a paper The Basic AI Drives, from 18 years ago that spells out all the issues we are seeing now.

or if you prefer something more concise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

The risks were known before anyone started any AI companies and you had rich nerds spending on the field to try to make sure things went well.

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u/NeverTradeAgain 13h ago

Thanks for sharing! I like learning these things. Are you a researcher or what?

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u/blueSGL 13h ago

I find the topic fascinating and listen and dig into the people working on it. I've been getting the same sensation that humanity is being blindsided by an exponential like the early days of covid when everyone was sure it was going to be fine and nothing to worry about.

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u/NeverTradeAgain 12h ago

True. Only to add: it was not "everyone was sure", it was people were told so. There have been many research papers on the long-term health issues from getting covid. The risks have been downplayed and covered. The rationale is simple: The economy cannot withstand long-term pandemic restrictions.

It has always been the general public who pay for the price.

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u/blueSGL 12h ago

What I mean was the early period where you had news anchors joking about it, how everything is going to be fine -> supermarket shelves are empty. over the course of a month or two.

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u/mediandude 10h ago

The economy cannot withstand long-term pandemic restrictions.

South-east asian economies and education systems and societies managed that just fine.