Let's analyze these specific emails for manipulation patterns while being clear we're doing so to understand and prevent harm, not to learn manipulation:<p>Key manipulative behaviors shown in the emails:<p>1. Using artificial urgency to force decisions:
"Deepmind is going to give everyone massive counteroffers tomorrow to try to kill it"<p>2. Changing narratives to maintain control:
Sam Altman's reasons for wanting CEO title kept shifting according to Greg/Ilya<p>3. Information control and selective disclosure:
Sam being "bothered by how much Greg and Ilya keep the whole team in the loop"<p>4. Creating dependency through resource control:
Elon using funding as leverage - "I will no longer fund OpenAI until..."<p>5. Double binds and no-win situations:
Team had to choose between losing funding or accepting control terms<p>6. Triangulation between parties:
Playing Greg/Ilya against Sam, Sam against Elon, etc.<p>The patterns use control, artificial urgency, shifting narratives, and manipulation of relationships to maintain power.
"The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility."<p>Today I became a fan of Ilya Sutskever
Text-version of all the emails that this article refers to: <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr/openai-email-archives-from-musk-v-altman" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr/openai-ema...</a>
Just hope everyone takes a moment to consider: are the customer noncompete clauses at OpenAI, XAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft hypocritical?<p>If they learn from us, and we’re not allowed to learn from them, how is that good for safety? How much does that silo safety information?<p>Yes, I realize many folks just blow it off, and many more are normies who don’t know or care, but doesn’t it seem wrong to learn from humanity while telling humanity they can’t learn from you?<p>Thankful we have open AI models from Meta and Alibaba!
I have a theory that everything is BS politics now. (Maybe it always has been.)<p>Is Elon's new lawsuit still on?<p>Does Elon's new political situation affect it?<p>Altman recently wrote an X post showing an OpenAI model making a less left-leaning reply than Grok.<p>What I am really waiting for over the next couple of years is for someone to demonstrate real progress in scaling the next hardware paradigm. Probably something fairly different like a completely memory-focused type of computation. Built on memristors or something. There have been examples built by labs, but they had relatively tiny amounts of compute, albeit theoretically with the _potential_ for massive efficiency gains in some future form.<p>The next 100X or 1000X efficiency gain from a new hardware paradigm may make a lot of the current generation's infrastructure and bickering mostly irrelevant. And I think it will be a huge boost to open source AI.<p>In my opinion, what's relevant is not any particular deal or company, but that we develop and adapt to a nuanced cultural understanding of what types and levels of AI capability can help us and which will actually be dangerous sooner or later, and how to fairly deploy the beneficial and avoid the dangerous.<p>But I think it needs to be a broad understanding in society.
> Elon Musk to Shivon Zilis, (cc: Sam Teller) - Aug 28, 2017<p>> This is very annoying. Please encourage them to go start a company. I've had enough.<p>this is the gold bit for me because it signifies the stark difference between shitposting and reality in the mind of someone who knows which way is up. HN stands a chance to learn from this downward-spiral-esque email exchange, but something tells me the lessons won't come through.<p>pleasant to see dota mentioned, haven't heard that name in quite some time.