nobody is against his moral stance. the problem is that he’s playing the “principled stand” game on a budget that cannot sustain it, then externalizing the cost like a victim. if you're a millionaire and can hold whatever moral line you want without ever worrying about rent, food, healthcare, kids, etc. then "selling out" is optional and bad. if you're joe schmoe with a mortgage and 5 months of emergency savings, and you refuse the main kind of work people want to pay you for (which is not even that controversial), you’re not some noble hero, you’re just blowing up your life.
> he’s playing the “principled stand” game on a budget that cannot sustain it, then externalizing the cost like a victim
No. It is the AI companies that are externalizing their costs onto everyone else by stealing the work of others, flooding the zone with garbage, and then weeping about how they'll never survive if there's any regulation or enforcement of copyright law.
The ceo of every one of those Ai companies drives an expensive car home to a mansion at the end of the workday. They are set. The average person does not and they cannot afford to play the principled stand game. Its not a question of right or wrong for most, its a question of putting food on the table
I want to sympathize but enforcing a moral blockade on the "vast majority" of inbound inquiries is a self-inflicted wound, not a business failure. This guy is hardly a victim when the bottleneck is explicitly his own refusal to adapt.
It's unfair to place all the blame on the individual.
By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.
But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.
>everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world.
Yeah we kind of are. So many chances to learn and push to reverse policy. Yet look how we voted.
>sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.
If it's between being homeless and joining ICE... I'd rather inflict the pain on myself than others. There are stances I will take, even of AI isn't the "line" for me personally. (But in not gonna optimize my portfolio towards that either).
>By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.
I mean, the Iraq War polled very well. Bush even won an election because of it, which allowed it to continue. Insofar as they have a semblance of democracy, yes, Americans are responsible. (And if their government is pathological, they're responsible for not stopping it.)
>But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.
Two things. One, you don't have to pay taxes if you're rich. Two, tax protests are definitely a thing. You actually don't have to pay them. If enough people coordinated this, maybe we'd get somewhere.
if the alternative to 'selling out' is making your business unviable and having to beg the internet for handouts(essentially), then yes, you should "sell out" every time.
Thank you. I would imagine the entire Fortune 500 list passes the line of "evil", drawing that line at AI is weird. I assume it's a mask for fear people have of their industry becoming redundant, rather than a real morality argument.
"Works with Google" in what way? And at what tome-frame? Even as someone who's actively decoupling from Google it's hard to truly de-Googlefy in this world as is.
Bingo. Moral grandstanding only works during the boom, not the come down. And despite being as big an idealist as they come, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. You can crusade, but you're just making your future self more miserable trying to pretend that you are more important than you think. Not surprising in an era of unbridled narcissism, but hey, that's where we are. People who have nothing to lose fail to understand this, whereas if you have a family, you don't have time for drum circles and bullshit: you've got mouths to feed.
"AI products" that are being built today are amoral, even by capitalism's standards, let alone by good business or environmental standards. Accepting a job to build another LLM-selling product would be soul-crushing to me, and I would consider it as participating in propping up a bubble economy.
Taking a stance against it is a perfectly valid thing to do, and the author is not saying they're a victim due to no doing of their own by disclosing it plainly. By not seeing past that caveat and missing the whole point of the article, you've successfully averted your eyes from another thing that is unfolding right in front of us: majority of American GDP is AI this or that, and majority of it has no real substance behind it.
I too think AI is a bubble, and besides the way this recklessness could crash the US economy, there's many other points of criticism to what and how AI is being developed.
But I also understand this is a design and web development company. They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons. They're refusing product marketing contracts; advertising websites, essentially.
This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them. I'll respect the decision, sure, but it very much is an inconsequential self-inflicted wound. It's more amoral to fully pay your federal taxes if you live in the USA for example, considering a good chunk are ultimately used for war, the CIA, NSA, etc, but nobody judges an average US-resident for paying them.
>They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons.
They very well might be. Websites can be made to promote a variety of activity.
>This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them
That's not what "marketing" is. This is OpenAI coming to your firm and saying "I need you to make a poster saying AI is the best thing since Jesus Christ". That very much will reflect on you and the industry at large as you create something you don't believe in.
> They very well might be. Websites can be made to promote a variety of activity.
This is disingenuous and inflamatory, and a manichaeist attitude I very much see in rich western nations for some reason. I wrote about this in another comment: it's sets people off on a moral crusade that is always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in these countries would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI as one of many examples.
The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty. Or one where profits, regardless of industry, matter more than sustainability. Or one where rich players can buy their way around the law— in this case copyright law for example. AI is just the latest in a series of products, companies, characters, etc. that will keep abusing an unfair system.
IMO over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment, and bound to keep moral players at a disadvantage constantly second-guessing themselves.
I fail to see how. Why would I not hold some personal responsibility for what I built?
Its actually pretty anti-western to have that mindset since that's usually something that pops up in collectivist societies.
>it's sets people off on a moral crusade that is always against the players but rarely against the system.
If you contribute to the system you are part of the system. You may not be "the problem" but you don't get guilt absolved for fanning the flames of a fire you didn't start.
I'm not suggesting any punishment for enablers. But guilt is inevitable in some people over this, especially those proud of their work.
>I wish more people in these countries would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims,
I can and do.
>The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty.
Sure. Doesn't mean AI isn't also a problem. We're not a singlethreaded being. We can criticize the symptoms and attack the source.
>over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment
I don't disagree. But the topic at hand is about AI, and talking about politics here is the only thing that gets nastier. I have other forums to cover that (since HN loves to flag politics here) and other IRL outlets to contribute to the community here.
Doesn't mean I also can't chastise how utterly sold out this community can be on AI.
I was curious about how he actually died and found an [1] article describing it:
> Kahneman used the services of Pegasos in the village of Roderis in Nunningen, Switzerland. In the death room with a view over green hills, wearing a suit and tie, he lay on the bed and turned on an infusion of sodium pentobarbital himself. A companion held his hand and told him they were holding it on behalf of his loved ones. Kahneman's last words were "I feel their love."
> Pegasos, a non-profit based in Basel, Switzerland, believes that it is the human right of every rational adult of sound mind, regardless of state of health, to choose the manner and timing of their death.
I found this bit "regardless of state" really interesting.
I wonder what their views would be for someone who wouldn't have a family and nothing much to do or explore after a certain age? Does it matter what nationality they are from? What if someone's reason is - they had savings and now they have run out of it and area already 55-60 or more and have no intention or plan to work anymore and don't want to go through the struggle of life? (Of course they would have had paid the euthanasia fees)
Well they did say “rational adult of sound mind”, and “rational” there easily disqualifies every human being on the planet, with all our evolved biases, heuristics, and common predictable misjudgments. I imagine its criteria applied arbitrarily.
>rational adult of sound mind”, and “rational” there easily disqualifies every human being on the planet, with all our evolved biases, heuristics, and common predictable misjudgments.
If only they had someone deeply familiar with the field who had been there.
i get that they're probably busy making AGI but surely they can spare a few hours to make a proper website? or is this some 4d-chess countersignalling i'm too stupid to notice?
I mean, I'd like at least a brief blurb about their entire premise of safety. Maybe a definition or indication of a public consultation or... something.. otherwise the insinuation is that these three dudes are gonna sit around defining it on instinct, as if it's not a ludicrously hard human problem.
On the contrary, I think it's a great website. They made it clear from the get go that they're not selling any products any time soon, why would they need a flashy website? They're looking for scientists, techies and the like, and the website reflects their target audience.
'Proper' websites are marketing and signalling. If you're creating a company that doesn't intend to do either of those till it has a product, why bother with more?
I’d suggest fitting an isotonic regression instead. I think it’s a reasonable expectation that online and FIDE ratings are monotonically related but it seems unlikely to me that they are linearly related even though it may be an ok approximation for players in a particular rating range.
I suspect that the online population — especially at lower ratings — is significantly different to the over the board population. I also expect — especially in the FIDE case — that ratings stratify the players into hobbyists, serious amateurs, professionals, etc and so different FIDE rating ranges are likely to scale to online ratings differently.
All of the above should be implicitly accounted for in an isotonic regression so long as monotonicity holds globally. You can easily do it with sklearn and I suspect it may give you better results.
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I would be more willing to "Sign in with Google" if OP provided any kind of gentle nudge or onboarding a la https://www.keybr.com/. It's too blatant and in-your-face as it is.
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