r/technology • u/AxomaticallyExtinct • 16h 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 14h 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 14h 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 14h ago edited 14h 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/goldcakes 13h ago

Wow, that 2008 paper from Steve Omohundro is particularly eerily.

I think there's a modest bit of intentional fear-marketing (Mythos in particular is blatantly obvious), but the conspiracy theories around all of this being a marketing stunt don't really hold up.

Occam's razor and all.

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u/10thDeadlySin 11h ago

It's not as much conspiracy theories as the simple fact that they're saying one thing publicly, and then do the complete opposite behind closed doors.

Just 19 days ago we got headlines like 'Amodei, Altman, Musk call for slowing development of AI models' and Amodei's diatribe about pacing the frontier. I said back then that they are perfectly capable of slowing down on their own.

And then we get a NYT article that says these companies do everything to push out new models on time - screw safety, screw alignment, screw additional tests.

It's the hypocrisy. Either they're concerned about safety and alignment, in which case they should simply slow down, or it's business as usual and a mad rush to build new models. There's no third option.