Altman tells staff OpenAI is open to slowing AI development

ssigna11 about 3 hours ago 53 commentsRead Article on reuters.com

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Discussion (53 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

cainxinth•about 1 hour ago

Words are cheap, and Altman is a salesman. He’s just staying whatever he needs to say to keep people off his back. I don’t put any stock into this statement whatsoever. He may slow development, or he may not, but whether he does will depend almost entirely on what’s best for him and his company, not humanity.

therealpygon•about 1 hour ago

Maybe he will even give everyone a bonus, but only if they agree with his philosophy during the next employee survey. It’s a new fad I heard about.

glimshe•about 3 hours ago

The problem is that even if the majority of labs decide to slow down, there will be one lab, somewhere, with dark money moving forward. The military wouldn't let that chance pass by.

pllbnk•about 1 hour ago

I think they will all conveniently "decide" to slow down because models are becoming crazy expensive, both per token and how much tokens they need to do anything meaningful. The difference between Sol and Astra is 150% pricing increase per token. The next one could be, I don't know, Orion, at $150 and it won't do anything meaningfully different than Astra. It's quite safe to say that they have ingested all human knowledge and because models are inherently just statistical generators, they are not expanding it, just rehashing what we already know anyway.

JumpCrisscross•about 3 hours ago

> there will be one lab, somewhere, with dark money moving forward

If this is really an existential threat, that's better than fifty of them.

nba456_•about 2 hours ago

No it's not. It's worse. Do you have any idea how much power that one lab would have?

henry2023•about 2 hours ago

How is worse?

threatofrain•about 2 hours ago

And what framework would there be for international cooperation? Without that element, this would just be self-destruction in a global race.

1dom•about 2 hours ago

Maybe we're about to test the scifi trope that a common enemy - like a superior invading alien life form - is the only thing that could unite all of humanity.

delichon•about 1 hour ago

Do you see it as uniting us in resistance, surrender, or ignoring the problem?

JoshTriplett•about 3 hours ago

They will if it would be against international treaties to do otherwise, mutually enforced by every other world power.

dgellow•about 3 hours ago

We don’t even need something that powerful, you can control the hardware manufacturers and distributors. If you control GPUs, HBM, and the hardware needed to cool all that down and provide the power, that’s enough to make it very hard to scale up the risk.

You cannot really hide an AI datacenter consuming GW of power for too long.

nba456_•about 2 hours ago

Except no one country controls all that. And if you put limits on it, other countries will speed up doing it themselves.

jacquesm•about 2 hours ago

They made a movie about that.

Between:

   "Iron Sky"
   "Whoops Apocalypse" 
   "Wag The Dog"

and

   "Idiocracy"

You'd think we were amply warned.

JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago

> international treaties to do otherwise, mutually enforced by every other world power

This does not exist.

JoshTriplett•about 2 hours ago

Look at how we regulate nuclear weaponry. Consider how much more widespread it would be if we hadn't.

simonw•about 2 hours ago

Timing is pretty good for OpenAI right now, given GPT-6 Astra is out and appears to match or even beat Claude Fable 5.1.

They might not be as interested in slowing down if Anthropic currently had a significantly better model than them!

oinoom•about 2 hours ago

I’m curious why you use this language of “appears to match or even beat”, seemed pretty clear from the benchmarks that it’s well ahead of Fable. Do you doubt the reporting?

simonw•about 2 hours ago

I'm using both extensively at the moment and I've not yet found that either is demonstrably better at specific tasks than the other. They're both beasts!

(I've not had Fable do as much work in Blender as Astra yet though, and it's quite possible that Astra has Fable beat on 3D modeling.)

s3p•about 2 hours ago

Maybe I can help with the curiosity - his own experience is probably that astra is close to fable, not miles ahead of it. Everyone has an opinion, and some people don't trust the benchmaxxed stats. Some of us just try it for our use cases and figure out which one we like best!

ENGNR•about 2 hours ago

Fable still better for planning, Astra faster overall but misses things. Maybe that’s behaviour not raw intelligence but it’s noticeable

petesergeant•about 2 hours ago

I doubt the reporting: I've found it to suck for productive work. Gone back to using Sol.

oinoom•about 2 hours ago

You know… I agree. I haven’t found it to be as great as reported.

wernerb•about 2 hours ago

Meta in their lawsuit negotiated 5B to be paid out only if other market players agree on implementing safeguards. In the same vein OpenAI can slow down competition, lock out opensource AI.

> OpenAI said on Wednesday that it was pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States, citing concerns that advanced AI systems could accelerate its own development.

As well, the weaponisation of AI is already there, open ai can switch off safeguards at will. A massive swarm was allocated to solving Millenium problems in a few days. Imagine the US having such a weapon, they want to ensure other nations cannot have this kind of access. I imagine the US might be very interested in stifling globaal Innovation and be sympathetic to OpenAI for these reasons.

seydor•about 2 hours ago

Is he trying to find a cop-out for his diminishing returns?

gizajob•about 2 hours ago

Absolutely this. Flip the idea on the head to reveal where he’s at coming out with such statements.

dgellow•about 3 hours ago

> In August, OpenAI paused much of its model development for two weeks to bolster its defenses after its AI agents escaped containment and hacked open-source platform Hugging Face.

That’s one sneaky way to remove OpenAI responsibility…

nba456_•about 2 hours ago

How does that imply anything like that?

loose-cannon•about 3 hours ago

I don't understand. This past week we saw them announcing a solution to the Navier-Stokes, which we're supposed to interpret as a success? But they're slowing down? They're slowing the development because they want to or because they have to? Because of ethical concerns? Or because of economics factors that prevent them from delivering results?

I don't understand the psychology of showing an extremely capable product one week and then announcing a slow down the next.

ahartmetz•about 3 hours ago

My guess is: progress is stagnating, so they look best if they pretend to slow down intentionally while continuing to work at full speed.

Insanity•about 2 hours ago

My money is on this as well. Their model improvements are getting more marginal over time, they have no moat, Anthropic is moving past them and apart from software engineering and a few tech fields LLMs fail to deliver business value.

So the “slowing down” narrative is a convenient story to spin.

lowsong•about 2 hours ago

They don't deliver business value in software engineering either. It gives the _illusion_ of increased productivity, but a machine that drives your engineers to burnout in exchange for more code shipped that's still bottlenecked at all the other stages of software development is not a winning strategy.

The entire AI market is propped up on the hope that the models will magically solve all of these problems, and now that even Altman is realising they won't he needs the slowdown to stave of the crash for as long as he can.

beardyw•about 1 hour ago

Yes that and and Math problems don't pay the rent.

coffeefirst•about 2 hours ago

Yes. They will reach an agreement not to pursue RSI for “safety.” That RSI is utter nonsense in the first place will go unnoticed.

malcolmwhite•about 3 hours ago

I suspect it's all about the last bullet point:

> OpenAI said on Wednesday that it was pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States, citing concerns that advanced AI systems could accelerate its own development.

Insanity•about 2 hours ago

They can just have codex develop part of its next version and oh look, it’s accelerating itself! So scary. </s>

JumpCrisscross•about 3 hours ago

> hey're slowing the development

They're doing no such thing. Altman is saying words ahead of the midterms.

deagle50•about 3 hours ago

Because it serves as a justification for regulation and government funding.

amelius•about 2 hours ago

No, Altman is saying this exactly because he wants to avoid regulation.

This is a common tactic in any industry. Say that you will self-regulate, but then a decade or so later everybody wonders why anyone thought it was a good idea to allow an industry to make their own rules.

VCFundedGenYer•34 minutes ago

Reminder that Altman does nothing but lie so this means nothing.

signa11•about 2 hours ago

translation: we are burning cash faster than we're getting better, so lets frame the slowdown as intentional for greater good.

skerit•about 2 hours ago

All they're saying to the other players is: let's lock it down and slice up the market between us.

Claiming Skynet is just around the corner is a great way to get the public to believe only these huge companies can harness AI, and how all open-source models should be outlawed.

petcat•about 2 hours ago

There are no open source models, at least not useful ones. Open weight is not the same as open source. Open weight models are still just inscrutable binary blobs that you can (theoretically) run on your own computer instead of through a SAAS web app. The open weight model labs don't even provide a high level catalog or any description whatsoever about what went into the training data.

This is not open source and we really should stop conflating the two things.