Recently, Microsoft announced that it will be investing a significant amount of money in OpenAI again. While they had initially invested 1 billion US dollars at the time of OpenAI's founding, it seems that this round will involve even more billions, with some sources mentioning as much as 10 billion US dollars (source).
While all of this is well and good, the first thought that came to my mind was, "What happened to OpenAI's original mission? Wasn't the goal for OpenAI to serve the general public? To not take a corporate and commercial approach?"
A Perfect Deal for Microsoft
For Microsoft, this is a perfect deal. The agreement includes OpenAI's exclusive use of Microsoft's cloud resources, specifically, the Azure platform. Microsoft has also announced that it will be developing many different applications that will include AI as a significant component. OpenAI's development of ChatGPT will be commercialized in a variety of products in various product categories, including chatbots. I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see ChatGPT in voice form, in applications such as robots in education. But also in robots that will be used in our healthcare system, and possibly even as companions or helpers in our homes. And of course, all powered by Microsoft.
Something to do with Control and Centralized Power
Does this mean that Microsoft will gain too much control over us? It will be Microsoft executives who decide what goes into the AI algorithms, where the limits and boundaries are set, and where they are broken. How ethical is the management of Microsoft? How moralistic are they? What about all the other people (Microsoft's employees) working on these AI products and services? Can we trust them? Even if we can, there is still the management that can decide what is and isn't executed. Knowing that management addresses only one stakeholder category, the shareholders, we must fear for what is to come if we continue on this path.
The Heart: AI
In my opinion, it is necessary for AI to be in the public domain. This is for the simple reason that AI will become a part of everything we see, hear, smell, feel, and use in our daily lives. AI will form the heart of all products and services that we can imagine. We are not there yet, but when we take a step into the future, let's say 50 years from now, I am convinced that every product or service is powered by AI. Whether it's in production, development, or even innovation. At some point in time, AI will be all-encompassing.
AI will thus form the heart of a product or service. When we put that heart into private hands, we are making ourselves very dependent on those same private hands.
That cannot and should not be our intention!
OpenAI: from Good Intentions to Bad Execution
The "we are here for the public" goal of OpenAI at the time of its establishment is also the reason why I was so enthusiastic back then. However, I do not cheer the 180-degree change of course. I am referring to the addition of a commercial branch. The recent deal with Microsoft also raises big concerns for me. This only shows that OpenAI will not do what is necessary for our societies. They achieve quite the opposite. This makes the OpenAI initiative one where knowledge and power are placed in private hands instead of public hands. Unfortunately! A missed opportunity.
Advantages of Private Companies
Private companies are not all bad. I do see the benefits. Normally, we see an acceleration of development when private companies take on something. Commercial companies have a goal and an organizational model after all. The goal, of course, is to make money. The organizational model provides a more harmonious approach from A to Z and executes in efficient ways. Additionally, a private company provides products guarantees for what they deliver and foremost a servicemodel. They do not do that just like that. They do that because the market not only expects it, but also demands it. Just think about what you buy or rent yourself. Would you buy a car without a warranty? Would you buy that car if you couldn't get it serviced? Would you buy that car if it could be serviced, but it's not sure where and when? Apply this to everything you buy, use and consume.
Why do we need organizations?
In terms of organization, we could question the initial approach of OpenAI. Although the goal of OpenAI was cool, namely to serve society, all of us, its organizational model was and still is not democratic enough.
Some will argue the need for an open-source approach. Now, I fully support open-source when it comes to AI itself, the technology, the training models, the data that feeds the training models, and so on. But I do not support the organizational model of many open-source communities. Normally, there is no organizational model at all. Furthermore, there is often no guarantee given on the products and services that are produced by these open-source communities. In addition, a service model is often hard to find. It is commercial companies that often build a service model around open-source software. Service models that are essential for mass adoption.
The relatively new sector, the crypto world, which is built on the idea of no central entity or control, has its advantages. But it has also shown that it often lacks the power to act. The lack of an organization is one of the key reasons. The result is often that individuals do what they want to do, want to do everything themselves, do not seek cooperation enough. And when cooperation is sought, it is often thought in terms of: "When you don't do what I want, I'll just go on alone."
The bundling of forces is not promoted in this way. While bundling of forces is essential. It is better to work on a few services with the right set of people than to let these people all work on their own versions of a service. And that's exactly what happens too often in, for example, the crypto world. Too many projects with too few skilled people in terms of knowledge and expertise to invent, develop, package, market, sell and so on. The same applies to the open-source communities that emerged long before bitcoin was invented.
Democratic Organizations: Have Existed for Longer Than Today
In the distant past, I was very charmed by Ricardo Semler. A Brazilian entrepreneur who, as early as the 1980s and 1990s, stood for the democratization of companies. He was a driving force behind new forms of organizations. Forms of organization in which the employee has much more influence on the management of the company. Semler has shown that his approach has been very successful. From a more or less bankrupt estate that he inherited from his father, he created a billion-dollar empire. Many of his businesses proved they were able to deal with bad times, such as the financial crisis of a decade and a half ago. After the disaster had occurred, his companies have shown they dealt much better with this crisis. No bankruptcies within the Semler empire. Cases are known in which employees voted for a (temporary) salary reduction or even agreed fully to suspend salary payments. A joint decision to help the company and therefore all employees in the company and themselves. Even if it is at the expense of acquired rights, including the salary. Democratic and social at the same time, while the ideology of the free market and free choice is embraced still. Perfect! Right? However, for AI and our future, such organizational models are not good enough. At least, that's what I think.
New Forms of Democratic Organisationmodels: EdenOS
Recently, I came across an interesting democratic organization model called EdenOS. To be honest, I haven't delved too deeply into this model yet. From what I know, EdenOS is primarily an organization that manages a validator/witness node within the EOS network. What I also know is that EdenOS is trying to set up an organization with a high degree of democracy. In this model, leaders are elected by the community. Nothing new. However, the method as well as the frequency of re-elections are quite unique. Elections take place in different rounds and work towards the final elected leaders, with random factors included to prevent manipulation. Additionally, elections take place every three months, which is very frequent. The high frequency prevents the reduction of many forms of abuse.
The concept is very interesting, in my opinion. Time will tell whether this model works for what EdenOS has in mind. Whether this is the correct model for developing and running software, products, and/or services from an open-source perspective remains the question.
Let's Discuss: AI
I'm very curious about your perspective on the world when it comes to AI. What do you think is necessary for the development of AI? What will it bring us? What are the dangers? What should we steer clear of? What will we have to accept? And what do we want to embrace? I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts, ideas, arguments, and opinions.
Quote by R.
Brief and Powerful: I like that analogy 😉
I need sometimes to censor myself ^^ 😇😉
Get me tons of HP and I'll try and help you censor. Just let me know when and where 😂 😂 😂
OK.
😱 🙇 in the mean time NJOY as much as possible 😉
System are designed by people, people have biais, that doesnt mean any design have biais, but we should care.
Care means for example creating frameworks for pedagogy and not for control. Control shows fast the limits of our capacity to deal with a problem while we did not think through before hands.
I believe forms of control is unavoidable, therefore control forms shall be as democratic as possible.
That said, I for sure believe the concept of decision-making based on stakeholders' value is something that is important. However, stakeholders shall not be just shareholders, but all those stakeholders businesses and corporates address back in the days, including employees, the wellbeing of the village is the home of its employees, the small business like bakeries, groceries and whatnot providing the goods and services for the corporate employees and so on and so forth. In the 80s and early 90s, I was taught 360 degrees of business decision-making. Since then, I believe, we went down fast towards just taking care of shareholders and ourselves in terms of financials.
In the end am wondering if companies shall not become large. But I have no idea how to prevent from business to grow into large corporates unless we move away from the freedom to grow in one or the other way. Which results in more rules. And more abuse.
That said if we all evolve towards having more respect for everything and everyone, we may not need rules for the majority to behave as good actors. But probably this is a bit of an idealistic thought.
Maybe solutions could be reliable by design through education as mean for value creation.
Certainly something to explore and try ;)
That was what I thought too! but billions in the horizon and potentially could help the team develop AI more as they get more funding, who wouldn't be compelled to sign the deal?
Aside from the discussion above, I generally think that people fear something that they can't understand yet but then they'd gladly use/accept it as long as it benefits them. Although I remain skeptical with the use of AI but it's a nice simple virtual assistant that could be beneficial to help me with solving mundane tasks. The AI that we have now isn't just what I wanted yet but we're getting there. I think that the problem with private companies to me would be the data that we can control. What are they going to use it for? especially when we perhaps train the AI to cater into our specific interest and needs. How vulnerable is our data to potential malicious activities?
True, peeps tend to have all sort of fears. I thnk, mostly when it leads to changes. I suppose, most humans don't like change.
In the shorter term, I agree with you. Maybe best for corporates, like OpenAI to lead the development.
But what when we reached singularity? When AI will be not only all around as, but actually be able to handle all tasks humans are executing? Even the creative side of things? Am 100% sure AI will do this at some point in time. I believe that when we get there, we must make sure AI is in public hands. Maybe the latter is the only way for us to be able to live in coexistence with AI. When we leave it to private commercials companies, the fears of Hawking, Musk, and the like may become true: AI whipping out human race.
Dont' get me wrong, I am mostly a glass-is-half-full type of person. I take the same approach to AI. My world looks perfect in that scene when AI is doing all the tasks for us humans. None of us has an obligation to work. We somehow created this new system in which we all can get to at least our basic necessities (food, roof, healthcare and whatnot) without any obligations to 'work' for it. We made sure any base resources are distributed fairly. Energy is free (a must-be in a such scenario). We can spend 24x7 doing the things we want to. We enjoy absolute freedom. We need some BIG changes to make all this happen though 😉
ps did you see my way too late reaction to the books I promised you to share? here: https://hive.blog/hive-180164/@edje/row6vi
Good intentions often leads to bad outcomes and I think that's where Open AI is headed. Microsoft shouldn't have own a large chunk of that organization. I'm not sure if the code will be left open source forever. New progress that's been made by the team might not be open source in the future.
Centralized entities have a knack for unilaterally getting things done but the tradeoff is always in its centralized structure. That's where the merits of decentralized structures come in. However, I think a decentralized structure doesn't always need a decentralized team in a sense that a centralized entity could be build on a decentralized structure and it will 'work' fine. In my opinion, having a decentralized base structure is the most important thing.
That's an interesting take. Centralised teams building on a decentralised foundation. I suppose we are seeing this all around the crypto space these days.
How do you see this centralised being formed? I mean, is it ok for such centralised leadership to consist of individuals that get into and keep such positions without being subject to some community governance?
Not really. That will not be okay. An analogy could be renting an apartment/condo in a building. Yes, you can do whatever you want inside your condo but you're still subject to the rules of the building.
Then I misinterpreted your wording regarding 'decentralised base'. Actually, this is what Fractally and EdenOS are experimenting with. Read a bit more about those two yesterday evening and understand slightly more what they are trying. Kinda what I thought already when I wrote the post, but since yesterday having a bit more information about it. As we know from Dan Larimer, he believes in a community in combination with a governance structure that is as democratic as possible, but at the same time, he (like I) understands that abuse and misuse shall be prevented. A setup in a trustless system is mighty difficult. Hence I start to like more and more the EdenOS setup (in combination with Fractally). Not saying that is the holy grail at all, just that they are trying to evolve what Dan learned from the projects he was involved in previously.
Yes, I've heard about fractally before but haven't dive deeper on what it is about. That's very true. There is really no one way to go about things. We can explore the concept of decentralization in different angles. Dan has a knack of bringing a fresh perspective to the discussion. It's always inspiring to read his posts.
👍
When I hear AI ….I get the shivers.
Maybe I am too oldschool …
I listened to a great Musk Interview about this topic just recently
Everything can be used for good and for bad. I think it is reasonable, even necessary, to feel scared about AI. Only when we feel afraid, we'll be given the push to try and prevent AI from being net-negative towards us humans. Technology advancements can not be stopped, in any way, hence we shall get ourselves ready to live in co-existence with AI.
I'll be watching this interview since I believe I didn't see it yet.
Interestingly, Elon co-founded OpenAI to try and prevent AI from overtaking humans by addressing the ethical and moralistic sides next to bringing AI into the public domain. Seems OpenAI decided to change course though. Hopefully, other OpenAI-like initiatives will be established, without those steering their ships into the private sector.
Around 2014 we've made the Internet of Ideas.
Who is 'we' and 'where' can I find it?
Such as Blockchain
Natalie Nixon, Director of the Strategic Design MBA at Philadelphia University and Principal of Figure 8 Thinking, LLC
Coool, will look into this 🙇
Rob Van Kranenburg, President and Chairman of The Internet of Things Council
Ina Homeier, Head of the Smart City Wien Project
We shall see ……
❤️🌺 Namasté 🌺❤️
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🙇 🎶 🕺
fantastic post and plenty food for thought. Bill Gates does NOTHING for anyone except for him, his cronies and his interests ... so say good bye to the 'for the general good' idea.
I have been having fun with chatGTP .... and have also taken a few positions in AI crypto tokens such as DyDx and AgIX
We shall see where it goes.
MickeySoft is doing what it always does indeed.
Though, it shouldn't be Billy anymore making these decisions. But maybe he still is the driving force behind this all, who knows. As a business person, I can't do anything else than admire him. Though many times he/Mickeysoft wasn't playing too fair, his achievements are for some kind of hall-of-fame 😉
AI and crypto. Must admit, I never really looked into the projects. Do you believe those two (DyDx and AgIX) are the best out there? Will have a better look at them myself, can be interesting indeed.
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