yet another whistleblower is dead; this time, it’s the OpenAI copyright whistleblower Suchir Balaji
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment.
Thread on r/technology.
edited to add:
From his personal website: When does generative AI qualify for fair use?
found a new movie plot threat https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158
funded by open philanthropy, but not only and also got some other biologists onboard. 10 out of 39 authors had open philanthropy funding in the last 5 years so they're likely EAs. highly speculative as of now and not anywhere close to being made, as in we'll be dead from global warming before this gets anywhere close from my understanding. also starting materials would be hideously expensive because all of this has to be synthetic and enantiopure, and every technique has to be remade from scratch in unnatural enantiomer form. it even has LW thread by now hxxps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/87pTGnHAvqk3FC7Zk/the-dangers-of-mirrored-life
it hit news https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/science/a-second-tree-of-life-could-wreak-havoc-scientists-warn.html https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/12/unprecedented-risk-to-life-on-earth-scientists-call-for-halt-on-mirror-life-microbe-research
I read the headline yesterday and thought, "This is 100% fundraising bullshit."
This strikes me as being exact same class of thing OpenAI does when they pronounce that their product will murder us all.
What do we call this? Marketerrorism?
i see how it's critihype but i don't understand where's money in this one
CRITIHYPE, thank you! I couldn't find the word!
If I had to guess a motive, it would be to bring mirror biology out of the obscurity of pure research (who funds that anymore?) and to instead plant it firmly into the popular zeitgeist as a "scary thing" that needs to be defended against. This can lead to it becoming a trendy topic, and therefore fundable by grant-awarding agencies.
as in, funding for writing ratty screeds? because they specifically want to cut funding to d-proteins and such. this also works for fundraising
Maybe I'm being to cynical. It wouldn't be the first time this week that someone drew a spooky picture, would it?
nooo waay
Mirror bacteria? Boring! I want an evil twin from the negaverse who looks exactly like me except right hande-- oh heck. What if I'm the mirror twin?
I'm definitely out of my depth here, but how exactly does a lefty organism bypass immune responses and still interact with the body? Seems like if it has a way to mess up healthy cells then it should have something that antibodies can connect to, mirrored or not. Not that I'm arguing we shouldn't be careful about creating novel pathogens, but other than being a more flashy sci-fi premise I'm not really seeing how it's more dangerous than the right-handed version.
Also I think this opens up a beautiful world of new scientific naming conventions:
- Southpaw Paramecium
- Lefty Naegleria
- Sinister Influenza
they way i understand it, because immune system is basically constantly fuzzing all potentially new things, what is important is how antigen looks like on the surface. what it is made from matters less, and whether aminoacids there are l- (natural) or d- (not) it shouldn't matter that much, antibodies are generated for nonnatural achiral things all the time including things like PEG and chloronitrobenzene. then complement system puts holes in bacterial membrane and that's it, it's not survivable for bacterium and does not depend on anything chiral. normally all components are promptly shredded, it's a good question if that would happen too but, like - this might not matter too hard - there's a way for immune system to smite this thing
the potential problem is that peptides made from d-aminoacids are harder to cut via hydrolases and it's a part of some more involved immune response idk details. there's plenty of stuff that's achiral like glycerol, glycine, beta-alanine, TCA components, fatty acids that mirrored bacteria can feed on without problems. some normal bacteria also use d-aminoacids so normal l-aminoacids should be usable for d-protein bacteria. there's also transaminase that takes d-aminoacids and along with other enzymes it can turn these into l-aminoacids. but even more importantly we're perhaps 30 years away from making this anywhere close to feasible, it's all highly speculative. there's a report if you want to read it https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:cv716pj4036/Technical%20Report%20on%20Mirror%20Bacteria%20Feasibility%20and%20Risks.pdf
Saw something about "sentiment analysis" in text. While writers have discussed "death of the author" and philosophers and linguists have discussed what it even means to derive meaning from text, these fucking AI dorks are looking at text in a vacuum and concluding "this text expresses anger".
print("I'm angry!")
the above python script is angry, look at my baby skynet
Openai are you angry? Yes -> it is angry. No -> it is being sneaky, and angry.
Us ADHD people really have to get our rejection sensitivity under control, I tell ya what.
I am deeply hurt by this post. I thought we were friends here. (/s)
Oh no, are you mad at me? (j/k!!)
Please dont mock me like that.
sentiment analysis is such a good example of a pre-LLM AI grift. every time I’ve seen it used for anything, it’s been unreliable to the point of being detrimental to the project’s goals. marketers treat it like a magic salve and smear it all over everything of course, and that’s a large part of why targeted advertising is notoriously ineffective
It's built upon such a nonsensical ontology. The sentiment expressed in a piece of language is at least partially a social function, which is why I can add the following
I AM BEYOND FUCKING LIVID AT EVERYONE IN THIS FUCKING INSTANCE
to this response and no one will actually assume I'm really angry (I am though, send memes).
The basement in Caanan House if God were Cajun.
it's a quote from mass effect. also, shrimp welfare
I read this as shrimp warfare and while I'm not sure about WW3, the fifth or sixth world war will be fought between the shrimp and the crows over rulership of the earth.
Jfc, when I saw the headline I thought this would be a case of the city being too cheap to hire an actual artist and instead use autoplag, but no. And the guy they commissioned isn't even some tech-brain LARP'ing as an artist, he has 20+ years of experience and a pretty huge portfolio, which somehow makes this worse on so many levels.
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