Comment by throwaway132448
4 months ago
If you think Amodei is significantly different you’re going to be disappointed. There is nothing he has done that can’t be adequately explained as furthering his own interests. Remember how Musk doesn’t like Altman too? It’s because they’re all the same people, competing for the same thing.
I can go with the thesis that individuals need community control (boards, regulations, laws) in order to be accountable but is there some specific evidence that Amodei is the same? It seems like a "both sides" argument.
Community control typically doesn't work to constrain great men, a group has more weak points than an individual (look for example how easily Sam dismantled the OpenAI board decision by applying the right pressure).
The greatest and often only check on power has always been competition or opposition by other great men.
Not great men. People with "perceived" high networth. Banks will fall over backwards to loan them money. See Chase and Musk. Let's not associate perceived networth with "great"
I don’t need to convince you, we’ve been through enough cults of personality, time will tell. But I’ve been right enough times to back myself. Maybe it’s because I grew up around a lot of people like them? They can’t hide that they would say whatever they think you want to hear.
Actually it’s funny: Their lack of empathy/emotional intelligence would also make them susceptible to thinking that talking to an LLM is like talking to a person, so maybe they really did think AGI was around the corner!
Behold! Plato's man
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This comment rings a bell quite a bit. It’s easy enough to see these kinds of people. I just was fired earlier this year for made up performance reasons after multiple years at Apple due to a guy like this.
These soulless people exist out there and they don’t care that your dog just passed away or your close family member gets cancer.
They just move forward with their agenda and are experts at telling you what they think you want to hear. 200%
Sam seems like a fun guy to be around. /s
I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company, founded another one, that one’s models refused to do things that the previous company would do, then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it.
Not small differences to me.
> I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company
Problematic why though? For the reasons publicly stated? Then why isn’t Anthropic just what OpenAI was “supposed” to be then? We know what that was from their charter, and Anthropic is not that.
> then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it
You’re sure about that are you? I don’t see how you possibly could be, unless you’ve taken the PR at face value, before it was all quietly swept away under the next headline.
Yes I am sure of the second part based on the government’s own publicly available tweets and lawsuits that have been filed.
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The only foundation model CEOs I trust are Demis and Yann
The problem with Altman isn't that he's "furthering his own interests". It's the deceitful behaviour he employs in the process.
There’s been enough divergence between words and actions from Amodei for me to also consider him deceitful, if that’s really the low bar you want to set. I’m not saying he’s worse than Altman, just to be clear.
Could you give some examples? It'd have to be pretty bad to get close to the reports about Altman.
He passed on a multi-billion dollar government contract on principle, so there's that.