Obligatory reminder that billionaires are not our friends. But also, donating to AI research in 2018 is quite a different matter than if he had done so in recent years. Most people in tech were somewhere between neutral and enthusiastic towards machine learning back then and few foresaw the monster it would become. Doubt he’s as enthusiastic nowadays, considering what it did to Valve’s hardware ambitions.
OpenAI, back then, was also a very different organization. They were mostly a non-profit, claiming to be a research organization who’s goals were to ensure AI benefited all of humanity. Hell, I’d say Whisper, which that OpenAI did release, was very positive for humanity. It was when Sam Altman saw big dollar signs in GPT2+ that things started changing fast.
Very much this, in 2023 there was a falling out between Altman and the board of OpenAI over this, and Altman was kicked out. However some big shareholders (Microsoft) made a stink and reversed it.
Altman took the money and then OpenAI abandoned the non-profit structure to become a for-profit entity (2 years ago)
The writing was on the wall for years. I remember memes about Altman in machine learning forums/chatrooms circa 2020, and especially 2021.
Nothing’s changed. Anyone in the space who actually looked at what he was doing, knew. Yet the bulk of the public (and investors) lapped the Tech Bro stuff up.
Aaron Swartz said Altman was a sociopath years before AI was a gleam in anyone’s eye.
The technologies with the worst potential outcomes will always be pioneered by people with no ethical or moral hangups getting in the way.
I love how everyone is so desperate to make Gabe to be a terrible person.
It’s crazy for people to take a stance against him considering how much he’s done to protect the hobby from less reputable corps.
God imagine the world we’d live in if he didn’t build modern child gambling with his own two hands
Are you mistaking him for the inventor of Pokémon cards, Richard Garfield, or the inventor of baseball cards, John Baseball?
Said ‘modern’ for a reason, but I guess telling someone they’re wrong is worth ignoring what they say
Pokemon cards aren’t modern? They came out in the US in 1999 and aren’t considered obsolete or old AFAIK.
God your self-righteous
Things to say when you want to make being a piece of shit into a good thing
Said the loser fighting a losing moralistic battle over nothing.
Two weeks later and you’re still crashing out about how I said it’s bad to prey on children and be a parasite
How do you reconcile having such a pathetic submissive personality and wanting to act big and tough on a forum like this?
“Ew morals”
- A piece of shit by definition
What would you call someone who has $1B worth of yachts while we’re all struggling to eat and pay bills?
I’m a lot less angry at him than the ones who seemingly use their wealth exclusively to make our lives worse. He just has a bunch of money to buy boats. He’s the last on the list for me
yes, but valve still exploits people. They put on steam sales explicitly to get people to buy more. Especially poor people. More, that they otherwise might not be able to afford just because “it’s on sale!”
Like Torvalds, Stallman and Wozniak, Gabe Newell had an idea of how he thought technology should work and has never let up on it, it’s a shame they couldn’t profit as much as Gabe.
The yacht hobby is a bit much but compared to the standard billionaire hobbies, destroying the planet, rape, and murder, he’s pretty mild.
You don’t call it a shame when it is a conscious choice:
“Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, “I didn’t want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values … I really didn’t want to be in that super ‘more than you could ever need’ category.””
A billionaire…
At that time it was still kind of a research project than a “it’s going to take over everything” hype and FUD machine.
His opinions on AI today seem more enthusiastic than I would be, but well clear of the delusional level of AI-boosters.
