@manton Hmm, wasn’t the sales pitch for the internet that it would have a “democratizing effect, making the world’s knowledge available to more people”? How has that played out? For a while, it looked pretty good but nowadays? Far right extremism is stronger than it has been for the last 90 years in most western democracies, the US is on the brink of ceasing to be a liberal democracy, and wealth is even more concentrated than before, with most tech billionaires showing massive edgelord tendencies. So closest precedent provides a decidedly more negative forecast.

And if you want to look at AI (and Altman) specifically: How much of this work is done in the open, how much is closed? How does alignment figure in (other than Anthropic which has a much stronger story than the rest)? Also what does looking at the exploitative and scammy history of Altman’s orb startup tell us about his character? Why give him any benefit of the doubt given his record? Because he is powerful and rich?