What is going on with OpenAI?

It’s mystifying. I’m not a fan of the company, OpenAI — they’re the ones hyping up ChatGPT, they’re 49% owned by Microsoft that, as usual, wants to take over everything, and their once and future CEO Sam Altman seems like a sleazy piece of work. But he has his fans. He was abruptly fired this past week (and what’s up with that?) and there was some kind of internal revolt and now he’s being rehired? Appointed to a new position?. Confusion and chaos! It’s a hell of a way to run a company.

Here, though, is a hint of illumination.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was unexpectedly fired by the board on Friday afternoon. CTO Mira Murati is filling in as interim CEO.

OpenAI is a nonprofit with a commercial arm. (This is a common arrangement when a nonprofit finds it’s making too much money. Mozilla is set up similarly.) The nonprofit controls the commercial company — and they just exercised that control.

Microsoft invested $13 billion to take ownership of 49% of the OpenAI for-profit — but not of the OpenAI nonprofit. Microsoft found out Altman was being fired one minute before the board put out its press release, half an hour before the stock market closed on Friday. MSFT stock dropped 2% immediately.

Oh. So this is a schism between the controlling non-profit side of the company, and the money-making for-profit side. It’s an ideological split! But what are their differences?

The world is presuming that there’s something absolutely awful about Altman just waiting to come out. But we suspect the reason for the firing is much simpler: the AI doom cultists kicked Altman out for not being enough of a cultist.

There were prior hints that the split was coming, from back in March.

In the last few years, Silicon Valley’s obsession with the astronomical stakes of future AI has curdled into a bitter feud. And right now, that schism is playing out online between two people: AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky and OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman. Since the early 2000s, Yudkowsky has been sounding the alarm that artificial general intelligence is likely to be “unaligned” with human values and could decide to wipe us out. He worked aggressively to get others to adopt the prevention of AI apocalypse as a priority — enough that he helped convince Musk to take the risk seriously. Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit with Altman in 2015, with the goal of creating safer AI.

In the last few years, OpenAI has adopted a for-profit model and churned out bigger, faster, and more advanced AI technology. The company has raised billions in investment, and Altman has cheered on the progress toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI. “There will be scary moments as we move towards AGI-level systems, and significant disruptions, but the upsides can be so amazing that it’s well worth overcoming the great challenges to get there,” he tweeted in December.

Yudkowsky, meanwhile, has lost nearly all hope that humanity will handle AI responsibly, he said on a podcast last month. After the creation of OpenAI, with its commitment to advancing AI development, he said he cried by himself late at night and thought, “Oh, so this is what humanity will elect to do. We will not rise above. We will not have more grace, not even here at the very end.”

Given that background, it certainly seemed like rubbing salt in a wound when Altman tweeted recently that Yudkowsky had “done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else” and might someday “deserve the Nobel Peace Prize” for his work. Read a certain way, he was trolling Yudkowsky, saying the AI theorist had, in trying to prevent his most catastrophic fear, significantly hastened its arrival. (Yudkowsky said he could not know if Altman was trolling him; Altman declined to comment.)

Yudkowsky is a kook. What is he doing having any say at all in the operation of any company? Why would anyone sane let the LessWrong cultists anywhere near their business? It does explain what’s going on with all this chaos — it’s a squabble within a cult. You can’t expect it to make sense.

This assessment, though, helps me understand a little bit about what’s going on.

Sam Altman was an AI doomer — just not as much as the others. The real problem was that he was making promises that OpenAI could not deliver on. The GPT series was running out of steam. Altman was out and about in the quest for yet more funding for the OpenAI company in ways that upset the true believers.

A boardroom coup by the rationalist cultists is quite plausible, as well as being very funny. Rationalists’ chronic inability to talk like regular humans may even explain the statement calling Altman a liar. It’s standard for rationalists to call people who don’t buy their pitch liars.

So what from normal people would be an accusation of corporate war crimes is, from rationalists, just how they talk about the outgroup of non-rationalists. They assume non-believers are evil.

It is important to remember that Yudkowsky’s ideas are dumb and wrong, he has zero technological experience, and he has never built a single thing, ever. He’s an ideas guy, and his ideas are bad. OpenAI’s future is absolutely going to be wild.

There are many things to loathe Sam Altman for — but not being enough of a cultist probably isn’t one of them.

We think more comedy gold will be falling out over the next week.

Should I look forward to that? Or dread it?

It’s already getting worse. Altman is back at the helm, there’s been an almost complete turnover of the board, and they’ve brought in…Larry Summers? Why? It’s a regular auto-da-fé, with the small grace that we don’t literally torture and burn people at the stake when the heretics are dethroned.

Protests worldwide increase at Israel’s assault on Gaza

As the death toll from the Israeli assault on Gaze rises to horrifying levels, with bombing attacks on even hospitals and refugee camps, protests against those policies have also increased, both in the US and around the world. Many of the critical voices in the US have been Jewish.

Even before 7 October, support for Israel among American Jews – who constitute the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel – was shifting. One poll showed that while most Jews see caring about Israel as important to their Jewish identity, more than half disapprove of the country’s rightwing government. Another found that a quarter of American Jews agree Israel is an “apartheid state”, and one-fifth of those under 40 do not think the Jewish state has a right to exist.

These shifts have come with a surge in Jewish organizing on the left, with groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, which have long condemned Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, at the forefront of calls for a ceasefire and an end to US support of Israel’s war on Gaza. Since the war started, Jewish activists have shut down New York’s Grand Central station and been arrested for actions like occupying the halls of Congress and rallying in front of the home of the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who is also Jewish.

[Read more…]

Sympathy for Linda Yaccarino?

But not much sympathy. She eagerly jumped at her job at Xitter, and is being paid handsomely…it’s just that she’s trying to do something impossible.

Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X/Twitter, appeared to be trying some damage control this afternoon, as she posted, “X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board — I think that’s something we can and should all agree on. When it comes to this platform — X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.”

Yaccarino has been trying to convince advertisers that X/Twitter is a safe place for them to place their spots. She wrote on Tuesday, “We’re always working to protect the public conversation.”

And then Elon Musk started typing and said all the things Yaccarino claims to be opposing. It must be hard to work in a company run by a modern-day Nazi, while trying to pretend not to be a bunch of rich fascists.

At the rate things are going right now, though, she may not have the job for long. Either she’ll wise up and quit, or the company will melt into toxic sludge right there under her desk. It was already unprofitable, and now a lot of big companies are yanking their ads away.

Major blue-chip companies are announcing they will suspend all advertising on X (formerly known as Twitter) after owner Elon Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory and Media Matters reported that X was placing ads alongside white nationalist and pro-Nazi content.

So far, they’ve lost IBM, Disney, Lions Gate Entertainment, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Comcast, and Apple. Apple was their biggest advertiser (no wonder cables cost so much), shelling out $100 million per year on Twitter ads — that revenue has just evaporated.

In addition, the White House has condemned him, although that doesn’t immediately scorch his pocketbook.

Joe Biden has excoriated Elon Musk’s “abhorrent” tweets two days after the X owner posted his full-throated agreement with an antisemitic post.

A statement from the White House issued on Friday said: “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”

Musk’s response? He’s suing Media Matters for posting news about the loss of advertisers.

Worst. Businessman. Ever. Get out while you can, Linda! Unless you’re also a closet Nazi.

It’s not a good day for the social media Nazi. Another rocket blew up, and you should read his whining lawsuit in which he complains that the media are attacking free speech.

Great moments in parenting

Nancy Wilson is described as an expert in ‘Christian parenting’ and in this clip she describes how she spanked her four-year old child so that she would learn to look happy when her mother came to pick her up from a play date.

Apart from the awful practice of spanking children, it is disturbing that she is forcing her children to express feelings of happiness at seeing her that they may not feel. She is training her children to lie to her, presumably to make the mother feel good and impress any observers present.

I read some comments to the clip that say that the clip is quite old and that the child is now an adult and supports the idea of spankings to achieve goals such as this.

Good riddance, Xitter

Would you believe I have 150,000 followers on Twitter? A lot of them are just hate-following me, but still, it’s a large crowd.

I’m abandoning them now. I’ve made my last post on that hellsite.

Elon Musk has promoted so much garbage that I can no longer in good conscience use the social media site. It’s just vile, and the final straw that broke my interest was the raging anti-semitism that’s flourishing there.

Elon Musk is an impressive business guy. In the space of a year, he turned Xwitter from a sometimes-annoying but vital source of information and community-building into an antisemitic dumpster fire in the middle of a racist tire fire atop a shit-encrusted mountain of misinformation and conspiracy theories — all while losing money at it, too.

Wednesday night, the techno wunderscheißhaufen poured gasoline on one of those fires, boosting a vile antisemitic tweet that echoed the deadly rhetoric behind multiple mass shootings by white supremacists. But he later said he didn’t mean to do antisemitism to all Jews, just the ADL and a lot of others, so no harm, no foul stench, and advertisers will surely not be further put off spending money at Xwitter, right?

Here’s another take.

“You have said the actual truth” was Musk’s Wednesday night response to a paid X Premium user who, in explaining why “Hitler was right,” accused Jewish communities in the U.S. of “dialectical hatred against whites” and blamed them for “flooding their country” with “hordes of minorities.” Musk went on to clarify that he was not talking about all Jews, just the Anti-Defamation League (which has criticized Musk for white nationalist content on his platform) and unnamed others he claimed were “unjustly” focusing on “the majority of the West” rather than “the minority groups who are their primary threat.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, all of it bad. Musk is promoting the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, as many have noted. That blood-soaked fantasy was touted by tiki torchbearers chanting “Jews will not replace us” and echoed by several murderous white supremacists, including the terrorist who massacred Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue, even as it spread through Fox News and the right-wing media and became a fixture of GOP politics. And unlike others who have adopted a less explicit version of the theory, Musk is, in the parlance of the white nationalists who applauded his remark, explicitly “naming the Jew” as the source of the problem.

Enough, enough, enough. Fuck that guy, and fuck his company.

Anyone who wants to follow me on social media can find me here:

https://octodon.social/@pzmyers (@pzmyers@octodon.social)
https://bsky.app/profile/pzmyers.bsky.social (@pzmyers.bsky.social)

And if you don’t care about social media, that’s fine, I’ll also be right here.

The need to “pass the rule” is further stymying the GOP leadership

It is when things break down that one learns how things really work. In the case of the US House of Representatives, the highly dysfunctional GOP has resulted in me learning new things every day and the latest is the need to “pass a rule” in order to more easily pass legislation.

The House has two ways to pass legislation: By coming directly to the floor for an up-or-down vote, or making a quick pit-stop at the House Rules Committee.

What’s the difference?

Bills that come directly to the House floor for a vote and bypass the Rules Committee are passed “under suspension of the Rule” and require a two-thirds majority of the voting members to pass. Bills that make the pit-stop in the Rules Committee come to the floor with certain debate parameters that must be fulfilled, but this method enables those bills to pass the chamber with a simple majority. But those debate parameters, called “the rule,” must also first be debated and voted on before the House can debate and vote on the underlying bill.
[Read more…]

Suella strikes back

To no one’s surprise, Suella Braverman wasted no time in lashing out at UK prime minister Rishi Sunak who had fired her as home secretary for her intemperate remarks about demonstrators and the homeless. In what has been described as a ‘brutal’ three-page letter, she accuses Sunak of being a feckless betrayer of promises made to her to gain her support, and who would never have become prime minister without it.

The prime minister has also been accused by a group of “red wall” and rightwing Conservatives of abandoning the voters who brought the party to power in 2019, as anger among some backbenchers grew over Braverman’s sacking and the surprise return of David Cameron.

In her letter, Braverman claimed that Sunak had agreed to a secret pact to introduce key measures to secure her backing during the Tory leadership contest in October 2022, against Boris Johnson, but then “betrayed” the country by failing to deliver.
[Read more…]

I guess you could argue that corporate capitalism is a kind of religion

Ken Ham is pissed off at this song from an upcoming Disney movie.

I know nothing about the movie, nor am I interested in seeing it (maybe my grandkids will enjoy it, I don’t know). I don’t think it will turn anyone into worshippers of Sol Invictus. All it is saying is that the world around us is pretty nifty.

Not in Ken Ham’s feeble mind, though.

Imagine if public school students in their science classes were encouraged to worship the sun. And yet this is happening! But how do they get away with it? Well, they just call worshipping the sun “science,” and then claim they can teach this “science” in the public schools! Really the Disney song mentioned above is all about worshipping the sun and stars.

That’s quite a leap, from a cheerful bit of fluff to a sinister plot to inculcate sun worship in public school classrooms. No one is teaching kids to pray to and worship natural objects in the universe.

By the way, he also doesn’t like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“Our ancestors worshipped the sun. They were far from foolish. It makes good sense to revere the sun and stars because we are their children. The silicon in the rocks, the oxygen in the air, the carbon in our DNA, the iron in our skyscrapers, the silver in our jewelry—were all made in stars, billions of years ago. Our planet, our society, and we ourselves are stardust.”

That statement was made by Neil deGrasse Tyson in the Cosmos series he narrated. Evolutionists encouraged teachers to use this series in public school classrooms.

Oh, how awful: he was suggesting that pre-Christian people were not stupid, and were trying to understand the world as best as they could. Tyson is not an animist. He’s not saying it would be a good idea to worship rocks, but that we should try to understand why some people might have. Damn those public schools! They’re teaching tolerance and empathy! You won’t get any of that in a Ken Ham-approved homeschool.

He really is a fully coked-up conspiracy theorist.

I think it’s about time Christians woke up and understood that even though there are Christian missionaries in the public (Government) school system (and they need our prayers), by and large these schools are actually churches of atheism. Millions of students are being taught that all life and the universe arose by natural processes—by naturalism. But we need to call naturalism what it is—atheism.

Well, so, True Christians™ reject understanding of the natural world? There’s no difference between studying physics, chemistry, and biology and worshipping pagan gods and being an atheist? Good to know.

Please to stay out of education and politics, Ken.

Some people don’t understand free speech

Or how universities work. If they did, they’d see that this short video illustrates a perfectly normal, routine event. Someone asks to make an announcement in an MIT math class, waits politely for the professor to let them go, and then leads students in a chant as they march out of the classroom.

Oh yeah? So?

I’ve had students ask to announce an anti-abortion talk in my class. I am ferociously against that idea, but I let her speak…then I continued on.

I’ve had a student raise a hand in class in order to inform us all that there was a talk by a creationist in a local church that night. Fine. I wasn’t able to go to that one, but I’m sure it was entertaining.

I had students announce a protest march against the Iraq war…oh, wait, I agreed with that, and joined the march that afternoon.

I’ve had advocates for climate change protests, BLM, conservation, vegetarianism, gay & trans rights, etc. take a moment to make announcements in class. It’s fine.

I can’t emphasize enough how totally unremarkable this sort of thing is. Our students have diverse views, we’re at a goddamn university, and we encourage students to be aware, to be activists, to express themselves. What I see in that video is a tolerant professor giving a minute of time to let students voice their opposition to an ongoing violent political event, and they then left to protest.

And now assholes are showing that short clip and announcing that “wokeness” has gone too far, that anyone they disagree with is abusing free speech. I am unimpressed. I take that back — I am disgusted.