Digest 14: Why are Sam Altman and Elon not talking?; Balaji and U.S. hyperinflation; George Kennan and Ukraine
So many things are happening in the world right now.
Today I share only three topics – that feel like the most important things.
Why are Elon and Sam Altman not talking?
I’m inferring a lot here from tweets, and so am likely wrong. But having read all of Elon and Sam Altman’s tweets the past several months, why does it appear Elon is passively aggressively tweeting about OpenAI – and Sam Altman – instead of directly confronting him?
It seems there are two issues:
1) The speed at which OpenAI is shipping products, and safety concerns around this. GPT-4 was let loose on 5,000+ plugins last week.
2) That OpenAI has transitioned from being a not-for-profit to a (capped) for-profit.
The stakes for this appear FAR TOO HIGH for passive aggression. Why has Elon not confronted Altman and asked for a public discussion?
Some are putting forward sentiment such as:
But the way forward likely needs to be much more delicate. Eliezer Yudkowsky here heavily criticising Elon for his zeal co-founding and funding OpenAI in the first place (and that this might have accelerated humanity’s demise). Clip a few minutes:
A sensible solution does not appear to be ‘make another actually open OpenAI’.
I consider a necessary first base would be a public conversation between Elon and Sam Altman:
> How is shipping GPT-4 so rapidly with access to 5,000+ plugins safe?
> What happened to the company structure?
UPDATE: Lex Fridman has just interviewed Sam Altman and put these points to him.
18:32 - Building AI in public (1 min)
23:11 - How much goes into OpenAI’s AI safety (1 min)
1:46:20 - Can an AI model be ‘rolled back in’? (1 min)
1:13:34 - Transitioning away from being a non-profit and why
1:22:07 - Twitter tension with Elon (rather than ‘hit back’, surely the two could just get in a room and talk?)
Balaji’s warning of impending U.S. hyper-inflation
(Listening to this as long as it keeps your attention…)
Balaji goes on to argue:
‘America as the new Argentina is not a bad mental model in my view.’
(This happening in the next three months!)
‘Could it be that Taiwan is captured without a shot, and TSMC sanctions are now on the West? Quite possible.’
(Though from Chris Miller, I tend to think the U.S. would sooner bomb the TSMC fabs than let them fall into the hands of the CCP.)
There’s the old saying from Neil Gaiman about editors and writing: ‘When somebody tells you something is wrong, they’re usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re usually wrong.’
Balaji is telling people to put a large chunk of their savings into Bitcoin. This might seem questionable, but arguments I’ve seen thus far about why his core thesis of Western banks being even more underwater than they appear to be have been tame.
Sebastian Mallaby last week (in my mind furthering Balaji’s case):
Erica Jiang of the University of Southern California and co-authors, presents a scenario in which customers withdraw just half their uninsured deposits. It finds that 186 banks would be forced to realize losses that would render them bankrupt.
If anyone has seen anything authoritative on why Balaji is wrong, and why many more banks are not imminently going to go under, please share.
George Kennan – what would he advise today on Ukraine?
Continuing to watch through the Ken Burns series on Vietnam, I feel compelled to share this. It’s a remarkable clip.
(Interesting on media censorship then, too – the White House pressuring the TV networks not to air the hearings!)
Further, from Christopher Caldwell:
‘The progress of technology has imperceptibly eroded a longstanding distinction between supporting a combatant and entering the fray as a combatant oneself...
…the role of technology in the lethality of a weapon has grown to the point where the role of the human warrior is, relatively speaking, rendered negligible…
In these HIMARS artillery strikes, in the assassinations by drone of Russian officers, in the sinking of naval ships with advanced missiles, it is the United States, not Ukraine, that has become the battlefield adversary of Russia.
The U.S. should change tact and negotiate a peaceful resolution now.
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