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.
I think many employees close to Altman also went to strike or theaten to leave. But I think he’s bad for the (now) company. They should’ve stayed non-profit
It wasn’t “many employees close to Altman”. It was the entire company, including the people who initiated the process of getting him kicked out. The whole thing made absolutely no sense.
And then they faked an employee letter and Lemmy sucked Altman’s dick as the board was forced to resign in turn for having principles.
I remember your sins, hive mind.
Wellllllll, I dunno about this take seeing as he’s still very enthusiastic about it as of less than a year ago, with some very… hype-style statements about it.
Right, he might be a little further down, but he’s absolutely still on the list. There are no good billionaires.
Obligatory reminder that billionaires are not our friends.
Why does this even come up?
Because lots of people worship Gabe despite the fact that he is ungodly wealthy.
I don’t think anyone thinks that. What I mean is, its obvious they are not our friends.
Those who you call “worship Gabe” I don’t think they are. In example I am a fan of what Valve as a company does. Gabe is just the manifestation and voice we have, so we talk about Gabe as a whole company in example. I do not think there is a “worship” involved or any cult in example. Often its just meme replies for the sake of jokes, that look like a worship…
Talking for me personally at least, I like in example that their goals mostly align with mine, relatively speaking from the entire gaming companies. I wouldn’t call myself a worship, but its the only gaming company I want to spent my money on. And its the only company that supports what I value (Open Source, Linux, PC, the way lot of things are handled in Steam). Just talking for myself here.
I was of course using the word “worship” in a non literal way. Let me rephrase to be more literal:
It comes up because there are many people who give Gabe a pass on being a billionaire because it is convenient for them. The choice between Gabe being a billionaire and Valve doing the awesome work for open source is a false choice and a nonsequiter. Gabe should not get a pass for his downright unethical amount of wealth just because he is the CEO of a company you like. Yet he very often does in gaming communities full of people who are, otherwise, in favour of eating the rich. For clarity, eating the rich is also not used literally.
You can appreciate the things Valve does and condemn Gabe for hoarding his vast wealth at the same time.
Lol, I think we had this discussion before. Nice to meet you again. :p
I mean I understand this position of yours. And yes, there can’t be rich people without poor people, so in that sense I agree being rich is evil by definition. But there is a difference in how to get rich, either by exploiting the weak or those who need it, or by creating good products people WANT to spend money on willingly, without getting exploited. They can get rich this way, which is not really unethical to me. Its a bit of paradox with this (my) argumentation.
I don’t think that Gabe is an evil person, or soulless like other CEOs. Especially because Gabe / Valve makes money by creating good products on a free and open market. Other CEOs make money by selling their soul and users to investors (remind you, Valve and Gabe doesn’t have investors).
However, there is something I hate Valve (and Gabe) for actually, and that is having lootboxes AND item market in Steam and their games available. If anything, this is what would I call the most evil thing and exploit Valve (and therefore Gabe) does.
You say that Gabe has earned his wealth ethically. In the next paragraph you defeat your own stance by providing an example of how he earned it unethically. We can agree on this point.
I would further say that no one can earn a billion dollar net worth ethically. No one, not even Gabe. Hence, to the root of the conversation, why this comes up.
I don’t think the majority of his money comes from those exceptions. Without the lootboxes and the item market, Valve (and Gaben) would probably make most of the amount of money they do right now. Just because I don’t like that part does not defeat my previous argument. My point is, the examples about item market and lootboxes in some of their games are not core to their strategy and their business does not stand on those legs.
Or is your argumentation that Gaben is a bad person, just because of these two points and everyone who hates him hate him for that? Are these the central points you are calling him an evil person? I don’t think so. That’s not the core issue. Your core issue is, that he is rich. So it does not matter in what ways he earns his money. Therefore reasoning alone how he earned his money is meaningless to discuss at this point. You just try to find a justification and point to it, after i pointed it out. Therefore I don’t know how rational it is to hate a person just for being rich (which is the main issue here, because you say nobody can get rich ethically).
Because a lot of people equate “some are less harmful than others” with “I fucking love this guy and think he’s a harmless saint!”
It’s 2026, open a window.
I’m on Linux, I do not use Windows.
They’re still called windows in Linux.
Those are applications, not the operating system. (Edit: I mean yes, you are right. I just desperately try to dodge it anyway.)
Just one of the reasons Windows should have had its trademark removed.
You forgot to say the distro, but it’s ok I know it’s Arch.
I don’t know if I am allowed to say that, because I use EndeavourOS which is almost exactly Arch. Maybe I should start doing that with an asterisk attached to it, as I use Arch, BTW*.
^*EndeavourOS
thx, bro
ha, gotta give you that one :)
(obligatory - same here)
I don’t think they’ve soured on it, but they use it a lot differently than OpenAI does. They still use it as one part of their anti-cheat solution for CS at least. Honestly, that’s a great use for it. You train it to watch for suspicious behavior, and then it can automatically be deployed to look at matches that have been reported. They don’t use it to replace people. They use it to augment what they do.
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.
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.
I love how everyone is so desperate to make Gabe to be a terrible person.
He may be a middle man rent seeking on the entire gaming industry, but you can’t hate him because of all those great game series he never finished
Oh no he runs a buisness, grow up.
A ‘business’ that doesn’t produce the thing that makes it profit.
You sound like my landlord
You mean a storefront that enables tons of indie devs to be noticed and actually compete with AAA publishers?
Are you asking because you’re confused what we’re talking about? We’re talking about Steam.
Tell that to every business that sells products they don’t make in house. Go on, I’ll wait.
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?
A billionaire…
insert “they’re the same thing” meme
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.””
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!”
Oh no, they lower prices sometimes. Whatever shall we do except buy, buy, buy!?
Right. Because valve puts games on special just because they are good people. It’s absolutely NOT so people will buy more games than they otherwise would have. Definitely not. Nope
How is selling stuff at a sale evil?
Because valve puts games on special just because they are good people.
Who said that? Please give a quote.
So don’t buy games outside of your means? I never said they do it to be ‘good people’ but the fact that the game is on sale doesn’t force you to buy it. Be a responsible adult.
We acting like people in the art community weren’t hyped up over AI until they started generating images. Before chatgpt, it was all about automating coding/it and other jobs that arent considered art. Back then it was all about how everyone could pursue their passions. The only people not excited were all the transportation employees and factory workers that had been told by the general public how excited they were to replace them
As a social scientist, pre Chat GPT NLP was like opening a whole new world of possibilities. We could finally at scale analyze one of the richest sources of behavioural data in an empirical statistically driven manner.
Now, even as I do research with NLP to continue these goals, I can’t bring myself to every defend these tools. If they disappeared tomorrow, we’d lose a tool but we’d prevent so much undue suffering
2018, the before times.
Insane how true this is.
No wonder 1999 feels like a million years ago.
I was there Gandalf. 1000 years ago. When neo deleated me.
In 2018 I was also enthusiastic about OpenAI, I didn’t expect them to try to destroy the world. They were litterally selling themselves on doing the exact opposite.
it likely was a grift from the start.
No, it used to be a non-profit that got literally taken over by Sam Altman and Microsoft and turned into a money-
printingburning machine
Was this article commissioned by Tim Sweeney?
Before OpenAI about faced on being open?
I forget but wasn’t anthropic mostly made up of former OpenAI engineers after Altman went off the deep end?
Not that it makes them any better, but I’m pretty sure GPT-3 was the nexus point in the current mess we have now, which means they hopped off right after it was internally finished and made their own company.
2018 was a full 2 years before that point, and back then AI was still primarily stuff like OpenCV, Pytorch projects, etc. that were things you could legitimately run on one or two workstation GPUs or even a cheap tensor core addon if you didn’t want to run on CPU.
2018 was a full 2 years before that point, and back then AI was still primarily stuff like OpenCV, Pytorch projects, etc. that were things you could legitimately run on one or two workstation GPUs or even a cheap tensor core a
It was around the time when OpenAI showcased OpenAI five. At that time I was still playing Dota 2 and I found it really impressive. Here’s a decent summary video
Remember that OpenAI were the people behind the DotA-playing model, back in 2017, called OpenAI Five.
Back then they were still deep into research and the Open part in their name actually meant something. I don’t like much about Musk but I feel like its true that they deceived people that supported their initial mission just to go private when the market went haywire for AI. I feel like them shedding their non-profit status shouldn’t have been an option as so many people donated to them in good faith
GPT-2 was released 14 February 2019 so they were actually cool gaming AI opensource research foundation in 2018.
Well aim FPS bro.
