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.
I don’t understand what your complaint here is. Microsoft invested a fuck ton of money into OpenAI, and OpenAI uses Azure servers to run their models. There’s nothing really nefarious there on OpenAI’s part. You can argue that Microsoft might be acting anit-competitive, in that they’re basically paying a company to use their cloud services instead of competitors, but Microsoft is still a pretty distant #2 to AWS in the Cloud, and OpenAI is not the one with obligations to not abuse their dominant market position.
If anything, OpenAI has gotten scammed out of this relationship as Microsoft engineers have gotten to work closely with them to get their models running efficiently, and now suddenly Microsoft has published very capable models in their Phi line.
I mean, the obvious answer is the exact same as every other form of automation, from steam engines to computers. The more tasks you can automate, then the more of people’s time you free up to work on other stuff.
That and AGIs have the potential to actually surpass in ways and make discoveries and insights that would take us decades.
You’re literally just describing every single software company, and quite frankly, most businesses. It’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s capitalism, which is also a pyramid scheme, but not an abnormal one.
Don’t believe that any for-profit company is altruistic, OpenAI included.