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.

  • paw@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    My understanding of the whole “being beneficial for humanity” is that:

    1. It’s kind of a meme that you need to have as a silicon valley start-up. Like Google’s niw dropped “don’t be evil”.
    2. If the founders and the investors, the share holder, get rich or richer, then this is already beneficial to humanity. In a net positive way similar to trickle-down-economics. At least thatvis what I think their line of thinking is.

    Having said that, I think LLMs or Machine Learning can be used for useful things but I also think - as stated - the message " being beneficial for humanity" is hollow in a broader sense.

    • huginn@feddit.itEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Google never dropped that phrase btw - it’s still in the employee manual.

      They just act like they dropped it

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Silicon Valley (the HBO show) was joking about this a decade ago. “Making the world a better place through highly scalable caching and consensus algorithms”, “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do”, etc.

      • datavoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I watched this show with my brother, who then went on to create massive tech company. We fell out of touch, and when we finally reconnected he told me how much money he was worth within 5 minutes (presumably 8 figures by now), followed by how his only goal was to make the world a better place…

        I hate corporations 🙂