154 pointsby mmaia6 hours ago17 comments
  • kennywinker5 hours ago
    Anybody who stays at openai is signing on to build machines that will be used to kill innocent people and control people who think that’s a bad idea.
    • ed_mercer5 hours ago
      I’m worried that China will build said killing machines and that we’ll be unprepared.
      • dbtc5 hours ago
        I'm worried that China will build said killing machines only because they see that we are and feel the need to be prepared.
        • sidcool4 hours ago
          Game theory in action
        • 4 hours ago
          undefined
        • bilbo0s4 hours ago
          This.

          Everyone will do this, because everyone will believe that everyone will do this.

          Even worse, there really is no guarantee that the great powers will create the best terminators. Everyone talks about China and the US. (And we should.) At the same time however, we should all keep in mind that nations from India and Indonesia, to North and South Korea will not be simply sitting on their hands while the US and China forge ahead.

          A future where 4 million dollar American or Chinese terminators are easily overwhelmed by thousands and thousands of 5 dollar Indian autonomous devices is not at all outside the realm of future possibilities.

          That's what makes it all so concerning. We can kind of see where it leads in terms of enhanced capability potential for non-state actors, but we can't really see a way to avoid that future.

      • nerfbatplz3 hours ago
        The last time China bombed a foreign country was 1979, 47 years ago. Has the US gone even 47 days in the last 80 years without bombing another country?
        • GauntletWizard2 hours ago
          The last time China bombed a foreign country openly and it made the news. I assure you, China has bombed foreign countries within the last two years, they just prefer funding small scale terrorists rather than open displays of power. This is not better.
          • idiotsecant2 minutes ago
            Ya, this is in fact quantifiably better. Insofar as number of deaths = level of badness.

            Neither is a picnic but I'll take a small proxy conflict over massive direct air campaign and definitely boots-on-the-ground Freedom campaigns any day.

          • cherry_tree30 minutes ago
            Are you suggesting the USA has not funded proxies?
            • nozzlegear5 minutes ago
              I think they were suggesting that China has bombed foreign countries through the use of proxies. They didn't actually say anything about the USA.
          • platevoltage28 minutes ago
            Wouldn't catch the USA fighting a proxy war. /s
      • suzzer994 hours ago
        I got scared when I saw China's synchronized drone swarms at the Beijing Olympics, which I believe was the point.
        • platevoltage27 minutes ago
          My thoughts were "why do we still buy fireworks. This is way cooler, and not really annoying"
        • tartoran3 hours ago
          [flagged]
          • suzzer992 hours ago
            Why would you think my comment has anything to do with defending Trump or the US attacking Iran? It was about technology.
      • orwin5 hours ago
        Unless you're living in Taiwan, I don't think you have a lot to prepare for.
        • ethbr1an hour ago
          Just wait until China gets to the next stage of capitalism.

          They're investing their trade surplus in assets around the world, especially the third world.

          When those assets start to go bad and/or the government nationalizes them?

          We'll see if China responds any differently than any of the other colonial powers with business interests.

      • jatari5 hours ago
        China is currently a more morally virtuous country than the US.
        • idiotsecanta few seconds ago
          Let's not get crazy here
        • jimmydoe4 hours ago
          Believe me, China hasn't show its true face yet, but it will, just wait.

          And while we are waiting, there're another few wars to be done.

          • platevoltage25 minutes ago
            It's gonna take a LOT for them to match the USA's depravity.
          • throw3108224 hours ago
            Maybe the true face of China so far is that it hasn't shown its true face. While the true face of the US is what it has shown again and again.
        • rockskon4 hours ago
          They welded shut the doors to Uyghur Muslims and had a bunch of donated food for them stacked outside their homes in one giant pile that they couldn't get to. It either rotted away or was eaten by animals.
          • foosteran hour ago
            Jack booted thugs shot a women in the face for the crime of sitting in her car and the administration called her a terrorist. Nothing happened to the thug.

            Jack booted thugs shot a man in the back for the crime of defending a woman and the administration called him a terrorist. Nothing happened to that thug either.

        • onetokeoverthe4 hours ago
          [dead]
      • henry20235 hours ago
        “I’m afraid my neighbor would kill my son, therefore, I’ll kill my son myself”
      • t0lo5 hours ago
        The myth of american moral superiority had been dead for a while. Why would china be any more evil than the US, which has waged far more colonialist wars and killed far more foreign lives in recent times (look at the news today for inspiration)
        • afavour5 hours ago
          I don’t see any contradiction with what the OP said, though. You don’t have to be morally superior to still be concerned about a country’s forces killing you.
          • t0lo3 hours ago
            It's a reversal of the more likely situation which is the us getting it and china following in response. Nuclear weapons anyone? Remember who started those.
        • 3 hours ago
          undefined
        • smallnix4 hours ago
          Uighur concentration camps? Falun Gong organ harvesting?
          • ceejayoz4 hours ago
            ICE is building a bunch of concentration camps as we speak.
          • hackable_sandan hour ago
            Nice! You got two!
          • t0lo3 hours ago
            Vietnam war, iraq war, afghanistan war, iran war, gaza war, allowing iraq to get and use chemical weapons on iran, forced regime change in south america (then and now). Get real it's not equivalent in any way
        • lakrici882845 hours ago
          [dead]
      • jimmydoe4 hours ago
        while you are worried about China, USI have done a genocide and started a new war.
    • SilverElfin2 hours ago
      Or onto mass surveillance which is a pathway to social credit score style oppression. See this mass surveillance demo:

      https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8f42e48f-1b35-450d-8dda-2...

      • 2 hours ago
        undefined
    • 4 hours ago
      undefined
    • aaron695an hour ago
      [dead]
    • rvz4 hours ago
      That's fine. But they shouldn't be lecturing to anyone about "principles" or moral superiority and at the same time being either paid or holding RSUs as well, since that would make them completely dishonest themselves.

      It just shows that they have done poor research about the company before joining (Meta is just as bad) and are in on the grift (joined OpenAI only after post-ChatGPT) and this employee does not believe what they are saying.

    • niruian hour ago
      A lot of people despite the idea of killing, but as technology advances, and the cost of weapon systems increases, it is less and less likely that these expensive systems will be used to target innocent people, since doing so is likely a waste of resources. On the other hand, usually it is those less-advanced weapons that inflects most mass casualties.

      Some country can perform a successful head hunt in the span of an afternoon tea party, while some other country have to level cities for few years and yet still fails to even touch the opposition leader. That's the difference between advanced and less-advanced systems.

      If people here loves peace, good. But if we can always reasoning our way out of conflict, then why do we also invented the career of professional police force?

      Of course, it is possible that countries advanced too far ahead might bully those less-advanced ones. But then, maybe the less-advanced countries should look inward and reflect on the question why can't they themselves create such advanced weaponries. I don't know, maybe these countries instead of forcing their own people to wear an obeisant smelling face mask, it's time to gave back the power and opportunities so their people can actually grow and gain and eventually contribute.

  • ta90004 hours ago
    “I don’t think we should spy on Americans and I don’t think we should kill people without human oversight but I still have respect for the guy willing to do that”. Please, make it make sense.
    • smilebot2 hours ago
      It’s not you, it’s me.
  • replwoacause16 minutes ago
    Good. Proud of her. We need more like her who have principles.
  • wrs5 hours ago
    I have a hard time with this separation of “principle” from “people”. Isn’t it people who have principles?
    • 000ooo0005 hours ago
      Easier to remain in the industry if you are shittalking principles instead of people.
      • skeeter20205 hours ago
        yep - it really softens your actions, which in this case seem like a big step. So if you respect the people, why didn't you stay? or if you disagree this strongly with their actions, how can you still respect them?

        I get that there's nuance, but this feels like they want to make a big ethical stand without burning any bridges. You can have one of those.

        • pdpi5 hours ago
          There are people I've worked with who I'll never worth with again. There are others I'd be willing to work with if they got their act together.

          "If you disagree this strongly with their actions, how can you still respect them?" is a decent description of the latter.

    • Aurornis5 hours ago
      “It’s not X, it’s Y” is a common ChatGPT trope used to give a sense of depth to a statement but the specific contrast is generally murky like this. This Tweet was either written by ChatGPT or heavily influenced by ChatGPT style.
    • rvz5 hours ago
      There are no "principles" in big tech and I call bullshit on this tweet and their reasoning.

      OpenAI already had military contracts while this employee was at the company and there was no open letter last year about that.

      Prior to that, they were at Meta and joined OpenAI after ChatGPT took off.

      If they thought that AGI was about "principles" then not only they were naive, but it leads me to believe that they were only there for the RSUs, just like their time at Meta.

      Why is it so hard to be honest and just say you were there for the money, fame and RSUs and not for so called "AGI"?

      • paulryanrogersan hour ago
        > Why is it so hard to be honest and just say you were there for the money...

        Because then you miss opportunities like this in which to market yourself. A kind of hedging your bets in order to get more money and/or stay out of jail if the winds change. (Jail can be expensive.)

        Or it could be honest cognitive dissonance.

    • culanuchachamim2 hours ago
      It's not that complicated... People have much more depth and sides than one particular idea or principle that they have (specially if you don't know all the context that force them to chose one decsion over another). I'm sure Sam in many ways he's also a great person, so in that case you judging the idea and not the person.
  • voganmother424 hours ago
    Respect for standing up
  • slopinthebag2 hours ago
    I can't help but to feel like this is an odd moral position to take. OP is apparently fine with building technology to spy on civilians in other countries, and I don't see a moral relevance to citizenship on this matter. If spying on civilians is fundamentally wrong, it doesn't become OK when the people live in a different region of the world. If spying on civilians is fundamentally OK, then why would there be a moral exception for civilians who live inside the geographical region in which the company is legally registered? Perhaps someone can enlighten me here.

    The autonomous killing thing is more reasonable, but still, if you're OK building death technology, I'm not exactly sure what difference having a human in the loop makes. It's still death.

  • mrcwinn5 hours ago
    Whatever happened to this all powerful non profit that would ensure OAI is doing right? Something tells me they just cashed in and run a corrupt shell at this point.
    • paulryanrogersan hour ago
      The board did try. That's why OAI has a new board.
  • monkaiju5 hours ago
    Always surprised when these "smart people" didn't see these things coming from several years away... Its honestly hard for me to believe it.

    Going to work for these big SV corps is and always has been directly in service of US empire, that's literally what built the valley in the first place.

    • conartist65 hours ago
      Haha that's what I thought, but my thought was that I can't believe Sam Altman didn't see a serious backlash coming when Anthropic rejected a contract saying "the only two things we won't do are mass surveillance and autonomous killer drones" and within 6 hours Sam was all over that.
      • gre2 hours ago
        The only thing that can stop a bad ai with a guy is a good ai with a gun.
    • pan695 hours ago
      It's easier to defer principled decision making to the future while you can rake in the cash in the meantime.
      • monkaiju4 hours ago
        Yeah i think this is pretty much it tbh
  • structuredPizza6 hours ago
    Autocomplete > Automurk
  • camillomiller5 hours ago
    If you don’t wanna upset your stomach, don’t make the mistake of reading the replies. What a cesspool of humanity X is.
  • lostmsu5 hours ago
    To save a click

    > I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I’m proud of what we built together.

    • naveen994 hours ago
      With open borders, how do you differentiate Americans from aliens. How do you differentiate criminals from innocents ?
      • afavour3 hours ago
        I don’t see the relevance in the question, the US does not have open borders. And if you’re suggesting AI is somehow magically able to detect citizen from non-citizen then your understanding of AI is woeful.
      • brayhite4 hours ago
        If it wasn’t for the space before the question mark, I’d have assumed you were a bot.
        • naveen994 hours ago
          I am not. But irrelevant.
      • tastyface3 hours ago
        It's trivially easy to find our criminals. After all, we made one our president.
  • mrcwinn5 hours ago
    Good for Caitlin. Sam Altman is awful. He literally admitted on Twitter that they rushed their military contract to get it done. Are you kidding me? You rushed your military contract?

    Any employee who stays, especially given the financial cushion they have, is complicit. Shame on all of them.

    But here’s the sad truth: most of the knowledge workers at OpenAI won’t be of any value sometime soon because of the very tool they’re building.

    • sudo_cowsay4 hours ago
      You cant just blame everyone at OpenAI

      Everyone has their own unique situation

  • ClaudioAnthrop5 hours ago
    [dead]
  • threethirtytwo5 hours ago
    That twitter post was clearly written by AI along with the instructions for the AI to avoid "tells" and other tropes common to AI.

    Absolutely nothing wrong with something written with AI. Just pointing it out.

    • tadfisher2 hours ago
      There is something wrong with humanity losing the willingness to think and type out a four-sentence paragraph, I would wager.

      Generated comments are banned on HN, FWIW.

    • bombcar5 hours ago
      But was it written with an OpenAI AI?
    • add-sub-mul-div3 hours ago
      We're nearing or at an inflection point where people like this are dependent on it.
    • fredoliveira4 hours ago
      and you say this based on?
      • threethirtytwo4 hours ago
        The way everyone else can tell. My instincts. AI has a flavor.
    • Aeglaecia4 hours ago
      if that's the case, ai failed to remove the negative parallel construction (my current top ai smell aside from slanted inverted commas). what signs are there of this being ai asked not to sound like ai?
      • threethirtytwo4 hours ago
        Right, that's the sign. Ai often fails to do what it's told. So that's the sign of it asked to not sound like an AI. I told AI to do this for my current post as well.
        • Aeglaecia4 hours ago
          ok. do you see any more concrete signs? to me it smells like openai output with newlines removed. but aside from smell (and the negative parallel construction), one could argue that this may be the output of a human who has been influenced by the prose of ai.
  • LeoPanthera5 hours ago
    Their justification rings hollow when they continue to use X.
    • jmull5 hours ago
      Doesn't seem to be an equivalency there.
      • idlerig5 hours ago
        There isn't, just inserting politics into a discussion on principles.
    • cozzyd5 hours ago
      Leaving a job is easy. Social media on the other hand...
  • usr11064 hours ago
    In Germany it made it even to the general news https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/openai-manager...

    So it wouldn't even be worth a HN submission. Well, I think it can still go under exception for exceptional news.