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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Exactly. I wonder if people really didn't get what I was saying 😄
I hate to say it, but even sneerclub can get a bit biased and tribal sometimes. He who fights with monsters and so on
I suspect watching the rationalists as they bloviate and hype themselves up and repeatedly fail for years on end have lulled people into thinking that they can't do anything right, but I think that's clearly not the case anymore. Despite all the cringe and questionable ethics, OpenAI has made a real and important accomplishment.
They're in the big leagues now. We should not underestimate the enemy.
(this gets dangerously close to the debate rule, so I’ll leave it to mods to draw the line in reply to this)
What, specifically, are you referencing as the accomplishment? Money? Access to power? Because while I’d agree on those things, it still isn’t really all that notable - that’s been the SFBA dynamic for years. It is why the internet was for years so full of utterly worthless companies, whose only claim of our awareness of them was built on being able to spend their way there.
For openai, the money: wasn’t free, still short, already problematic. I’ve seen enough of those going around, from the insides, to say fairly comfortably that I suspect the rosy veneer they present is as thorough as an oldschool film propfront.
The power? Well, leveraged and lent power, enabled by specific people… and, arguably, now curtailed - because he tried to assert his own views against that power. Because he tried to bite the hand that feeds, and he nearly had all his toys taken away
A team? Eh, lots of people who’ve built teams. A company? Same. Something of a product? Same. None of these elevate him to genius.
Do I think the man is in, in some manner, intelligent? Yes. In some particular domains he’s arguably one of the luminaries of his field (or, in a most extremely dark other possibility, an extremely good thief). I might be able to accept “genius” for this latter definition under some measure of proof, if that were the substantive point of argument. But: it is not.
There is no proof that anything openai has produced is anywhere near their claims. Every visible aspect is grifty, with notable boasts that again and again (so far) fall flat (arguably because the motivations for these boasts are done in self-serving interest).
As to “underestimating the enemy”: I hope the above demonstrates to you that I do not, and think of this fairly comprehensively. Which is why I can tell you this quite certainly: mocking the promptfans and calling them names for their extremely overcomplicated mechanical turk remains one of the best strategies available for handling these ego-fucking buffoon nerds and all their little fans
It's excellent at what it does, which is create immense reams of spam, make the internet worse in profitable ways, and generate at scale barely sufficient excuses to lay off workers. Any other use case, as far as I've seen, remains firmly at the toy level.
Taking a step back... this is far removed from the point of origin: @Hanabie claims Sutskever specifically is "allowed to be weird" because he's a genius. If we move the goalposts back to where they started, it becomes clear it's not accurate to categorise the pushback as "OpenAI has no technical accomplishments".
I ask that you continue to mock rationalists who style themselves the High Poobah of Shape Rotators, chanting about turning the spam vortex into a machine God, and also mock anyone who says it's OK for them to act this way because they have a gigantic IQ. Even if the spam vortex is impressive on a technical level!
I suppose the goalpost shifting is my fault, the original comment was about Sutskever but I shifted talking about OpenAI in general, in part because I don't really know to what extent Sutskever is individually responsible for OpenAI's tech.
I think people are missing the irony in that comment.
I'm still not convinced Hanabie was being ironic, but if so missing the satire is a core tradition of Sneer Club that I am keeping alive for future generations.
I think there's a non-ironic element too. Sutskever can be both genuinely smart and weird cultist; just because someone is smart in one domain doesn't mean they aren't immensely foolish in others.
but... it's not general at all. it just predicts text.
Very well said, thank you.