Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
If that’s the case then bad news for OpenAI’s “moat” (and for people arguing for restraint in general): there’s been some recent breakthroughs in getting open-source LLMs trained to understand math as well.
It’d be hilarious if OpenAI’s board went through huge turmoil, tanked tens of billions of dollars worth of investments, disrupted their partnership with Microsoft to protect this huge revolution they’ve got brewing in their most secret and secure of laboratories… and then someone posts “hey, I got my AI Waifu to count good, check out this github to see how I did it” on Reddit.
It also brings into question (well, it adds to the questions, they were already brought up) the whole premise of IP law that “if we don’t protect it properly, no one will want to invent things”. It seems to me like people like creating things and humanity has a strange habit of converging on new inventions from multiple directions. Kinda like how calculus was invented by two different people at the same time.