Everyone ate it too. The mockery was because
If you hate someone, anything they do can be something you use to express your hate, even if you do it to.
Oh, to me it just doesn’t remotely look like they’re interested in surveillance type stuff or significant analytics.
We’re already seeing growing commercial interest in using LLMs for stuff like replacing graphic designers, which is folly in my opinion, or for building better gateways and interpretive tools for existing knowledge based or complex UIs, which could potentially have some merit.
Chat gpt isn’t the type of model that’s helpful for surveillance because while it could tell you what’s happening in a picture, it can’t look at a billion sets of tagged gps coordinates and tell you which one is doing some shenanigans, or look at every bit of video footage from an area and tell you which times depict certain behaviors.
Looking to make OpenAI, who seem to me to be very clearly making a play for business to business knowledge management AI as a service, into a wannabe player for ominous government work seems like a stretch when we already have very clear cut cases of the AI companies that are doing exactly that and even more. Like, Palantirs advertisements openly boast about how they can help your drone kill people more accurately.
I just don’t think we need to make OpenAI into Palantir when we already have Palantir, and OpenAI has their own distinct brand of shit they’re trying to bring into the world.
Google doesn’t benefit by selling their data, they benefit by selling conclusions from their data, or by being able to use the data effectively. If they sell it, people can use the data as often as they want. If they sell the conclusions or impact, they can charge each time.
While the FBI does sometimes buy aggregated location data, they can more easily subpoena the data if they have a specific need, and the NSA can do that without it even being public, directly from the phone company.
The biggest customer doesn’t need to pay, so targeting them for sales doesn’t fit, whereas knowing where you are and where you go so they can charge Arby’s $2 to get you to buy some cheese beef is a solid, recurring revenue stream.
It’s a boring dystopia where the second largest surveillance system on the planet is largely focused on giving soap companies an incremental edge in targeted freshness.
Well, I’d contend that the same expertise isn’t just readily available. Yes, he’s uniquely positioned for connection to the surveillance apparatus, but the reputation of being the federal governments head security is also a unique credential.
Yes, neither of us is responsible for hiring someone for the OpenAI board of directors, making anything we think speculation.
I suppose you could dismiss any thought or reasoning behind an argument for a belief as “reasons” to try to minimize them, but it’s kind of a weak argument position. You might consider instead justifying your beliefs, or saying why you disagree instead of just “yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man”.
Those aren’t contradictory. The Feds have an enormous budget for security, even just “traditional” security like everyone else uses for their systems, and not the “offensive security” we think of when we think “Federal security agencies”. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Cisco will change products, build out large infrastructure, or even share the source code for their systems to persuade the feds to spend their money. They’ll do this because they have products that are valuable to the Feds in general, like AWS, or because they already have security products and services that are demonstrably valuable to the civil security sector.
OpenAI does not have a security product, they have a security problem. The same security problem as everyone else, that the NSA is in large part responsible for managing for significant parts of the government.
The government certainly has interest in AI technology, but OpenAI has productized their solutions with a different focus. They’ve already bought what everyone thinks OpenAI wants to build from Palantir.
So while it’s entirely possible that they are making a play to try to get those lines of communication to government decision makers for sales purposes, it seems more likely that they’re aiming to leverage “the guy who oversaw implementation of security protocol for military and key government services is now overseeing implementation of our security protocols, aren’t we secure and able to be trusted with your sensitive corporate data”.
If they were aiming for security productization and getting ties for that side of things, someone like Krebs would be more suitable, since CISA is a bit more well positioned for those ties to turn into early information about product recommendations and such.
So yeah, both of those statements are true. This is a non-event with bad optics if you’re looking for it to be bad.
Yeah, there are a ton of security experts. But none of them are the former head of the NSA.
Snowden is not exactly a font of expertise in this area, so I’m not sure that his opinion is particularly relevant. His only actual relevance is that he had access to classified data. He had no role in policy, and never had anything to do with business hiring practices.
I don’t think I implied that we couldn’t leave, or even that we shouldn’t. I said that Cuba’s not going to get us to leave by asserting that the agreement was never valid, because that’s just going to get the response of “yes it is”. For better or worse nations negotiate backed with weapons, and a power imbalance is inevitable.
It’s not even a matter of right or wrong, just reality. Few would argue that the Japanese constitution is illegitimate and that power should rightly devolve back to the Empire of Japan.
You have some misapprehensions about the embargo of Cuba. It’s sometimes called a blockade for rhetorical effect, but it’s not actually a blockade.
It’s not “enforced” from Guantanamo bay, it’s enforced by civil penalties levied by the Treasury department on US entities and their subsidiaries, and to a limited extent by the department of state through threats of potential trade or diplomatic consequences.
Cuba can and does trade with other nations, including US allies, and even the US. The harm the embargo does is via sharply limiting the availability of the lines of credit smaller nations rely on for continuing development of their infrastructure, not by literally preventing boats full of food from landing. Additional harm is done by denying them access to the largest convenient trading partner in the region for non-food, non-medical (embargo terms have excluded those items for decades) trades which further harms their economy by denying them a reliable cash influx their neighbors rely on, as well as making imports more expensive through sheer transport distance.
Justified or not, and regardless of poor negotiating position, refusal to engage in a dialogue is not helping Cuba’s position.
They have their own ideological motivations for refusing to engage. Even a tacit acknowledgement that maybe they shouldn’t have nationalized the assets of US companies without compensation would get them a lot of negotiation credit, and it costs them nothing, except for the ideological factors. The US doesn’t get much out of it, and $6 billion 1959 can be written off fairly easily for the PR win.
One side doesn’t need to budge, and the other one refuses, and they both have their reasons. I believe that was the point OP was going for.
It’s a bit of a non-story, beyond basic press release fodder.
In addition to it’s role as “digital panopticon”, they also have a legitimate role in cyber security assurance, and they’re perfectly good at it. The guy in question was the head of both the worlds largest surveillance entity, but also the world’s largest cyber security entity.
Opinions on the organization aside, that’s solid experience managing a security organization.
If open AI wants to make the case that they take security seriously, former head of the NSA, Cyber command and central security service as well as department director at a university and trustee at another university who has a couple masters degrees isn’t a bad way to try to send that message.
Other comments said open AI is the biggest scraping entity on the planet, but that pretty handily goes to Google, or more likely to the actual NSA, given the whole “digital panopticon” thing and “Google can’t fisa warrant the phone company”.
Joining boards so they can write memos to the CEO/dean/regent/chancellor is just what former high ranking government people do. The job aggressively selects for overactive Leslie Knope types who can’t sit still and feel the need to keep contributing, for good or bad, in whatever way they think is important.
If the US wanted to influence open AI in some way, they’d just pay them. The Feds budget is big enough that bigger companies will absolutely prostrate themselves for a sample of it. Or if they just wanted influence, they’d… pay them.
They wouldn’t do anything weird with retired or “retired” officers when a pile of money is much easier and less ambiguous.
At worst it’s open AI trying to buy some access to the security apparatus to get contracts. Seems less likely to me, since I don’t actually think they have anything valuable for that sector.
Unfortunately, there are no agreements between nations that don’t involve the presence of armies. One of the byproducts of the US fighting Spain to kick them out of Cuba is that the US army is necessarily involved. The alternative was continued Spanish colonialism, not an independent Cuba.
Do you find the German or Japanese surrender treaties to be illegitimate because they were made at gunpoint?
The article was also pretty non-inflammatory in my opinion.
They (governments) don’t do it because it’s taken as threatening, but more because it’s not. It’s a very specifically not belligerent way to push back on a country. “I can wander in here right up against your borders because your zone of exclusive control isn’t as big as you claim”.
We do the same thing with China to push back on their claims that certain waterways belong to them. (Ours looks a little different since we routinely patrol shipping lanes, so a more overt ship but also more common to just see tooling around looming at would be pirates, so it’s not the same message as if a Russian missile destroyer showed up off the Florida coast. We send that message with a carrier group.). By overtly and openly using a waterway we say “LOOK AT US JUST NORMALLY USING THIS PUBLIC ROUTE LIKE A NORMAL SHIP IN PUBLIC WOULD DO WHEN THEY WEREN’T VIOLATING CHINESE TERRITORIAL WATERS”.
We would rather other nations not send military vessels near the US mainland. Russia would rather not have a bunch of stuff happen that we regularly facilitate. So they discreetly give us the finger by doing the tamest version of what we don’t want while still having a perfectly normal excuse.
… It’s a preposterously easy to find bit of information.
Us fought a war with Spain. Spain lost and got booted from the Americas, Asia and Pacific, with the US taking Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
A few years later we stipulated that Cuba’s independence was conditional on allowing a navel base to remain under US control, Cuba reluctantly agreed, and a lease was signed with no end date with the US paying rent for the land.
When nations change governments, there is always a period of figuring out how treaties and debts are assumed. Usually the successor government assumes at least a portion of “fair” debt inherited from the previous government. (No, we’re not paying for the ammunition the previous government shot at us, yes we’re going to pay the interest on the loan for agricultural supplies). Same goes for treaties.
Post revolution Cuba did the usual and continued international relations as “Cuba”, and not a brand new entity. Hence their argument being that the lease treaty is and was illegitimate, not just “not recognized”, inapplicable or rejected. The US holds it’s a perfectly legitimate agreement and keeps sending payment on time. Everyone agrees there’s an agreement between the US and Cuba around the base, with the contention being about the legitimacy of the 1903 treaty, not it’s applicability.
Yes, Cuba has no leverage to pressure negotiations in their favor. This was true before the embargo as well as after. No, they did not really have a viable alternative to agreeing to the lease. The best option sucking is usually not considered to make a treaty invalid.
Fair or not, the treaty is generally regarded as legitimate, which limits Cuba’s options to use the law to compel the US to leave.
With no interest in negotiation, nothing to offer, no military force, and US complacency with the status quo, the odds of both parties agreeing to end the lease is pretty low.
I mean, it does learn, it just lacks reasoning, common sense or rationality.
What it learns is what words should come next, with a very complex a nuanced way if deciding that can very plausibly mimic the things that it lacks, since the best sequence of next-words is very often coincidentally reasoned, rational or demonstrating common sense. Sometimes it’s just lies that fit with the form of a good answer though.
I’ve seen some people work on using it the right way, and it actually makes sense. It’s good at understanding what people are saying, and what type of response would fit best. So you let it decide that, and give it the ability to direct people to the information they’re looking for, without actually trying to reason about anything. It doesn’t know what your monthly sales average is, but it does know that a chart of data from the sales system filtered to your user, specific product and time range is a good response in this situation.
The only issue for Google insisting on jamming it into the search results is that their entire product was already just providing pointers to the “right” data.
What they should have done was left the “information summary” stuff to their role as “quick fact” lookup and only let it look at Wikipedia and curated lists of trusted sources (mayo clinic, CDC, national Park service, etc), and then given it the ability to ask clarifying questions about searches, like “are you looking for product recalls, or recall as a product feature?” which would then disambiguate the query.
It will confidently report inaccurate information. It’s usually not so hilariously wrong, but it’s still wrong.
For example, I was talking with someone about what constituents a “fruit” botanically, and I searched “are beans fruit”, and it confidently told me that beans are not a fruit, botanically speaking, because they’re a legume. It seems to have adapted, but that’s a good example of a “small wrong” that’s not uncommon at all.
I mean, the idea wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t executed well.
It was supposed to provide a non-threatening way to help users access functionality of their device or software that they may have been unaware of that would be relevant to their current task. This would assist users in accomplishing their task more efficiently, and help Microsoft by increasing consumers perception of the value their software provides, which reduces their likelihood to want to use something else in the future.
A modern, potentially useful clippy would ideally be able to tell…
It’s still probably gonna suck ass and not be helpful, but at least it wouldn’t by vaguely mystifying why it even existed.
The best “digital assistants” I’ve seen recently are ones that actually acknowledge that these are language tools, not “knowledge” or “reasoning” tools.
They can legitimately do a good job figuring out a good response to what you ask it, ignoring the accuracy question. So if you set it up to know how to format data and what data you have available, you can get it to respond to questions like “are there trends in the monthly sales statistics for the past three years?” with a graph of those statistics broken down by product, rather than trying to let a language tool try to do reasoning on numerical data.
Talking good can sound like reasoning because right now things that talk good are usually humans that have basic reasoning skills. It’s why it so confusing when they just happily spout irrational nonsense: we’re used to rationality being a given in things that are confident and articulate.
Oh, totally. Don’t disagree with anything you said. 😊
To be clear, I was just trying to illustrate “how nations choose to act” and a bit of the context of “why Ukraine and not Palestine?”.
Location and advertising reliability as an ally are just the easiest to convey, but there are of course so many different things that go into everything a nation as big as the US does.
The state department has tens of thousands of workers, before you even get to the “boring” parts of what the CIA does to get them the data (analyzing public shipping records mostly) they need to make those policies and agreements. Any attempt to summarize the considerations of those people will have to cut some content.
“values” in this context was being used in the ethical or cultural sense not the economic sense.
“Equality” and “justice” are American Values, and “clear shipping routes” are something with utility. “Ideals” would have also worked for “American values”.
Basically because it’s not soft enough.
Your body “pushes” things out by squeezing in a “rolling” motion. Like running a rolling pin over a tube of toothpaste.
Picture each of those little segments contracting and relaxing in sequence to slowly move things along, until it gets dumped in the rectum, where it sits until you and it come to an understanding.
Bunch of muscles then move things around to get things lined up, since normally things rest in a way that helps keep things from just falling out. Anal sphincter also does this, but it’s the difference between folding the chip bag closed, using a chip clip or both.
Once it’s all lined up, it does that rolling squeeze again, takes off the chip clip and things proceed in a routine fashion.
So if instead of what it’s used to, it’s dealing with something like a cucumber, it can end up with the end up around that curve at the top of the rectum.
The tapered inside near the anal sphincter means that when your vegetable goes in, the muscle can squeeze against the end and make the situation more of a commitment than people had planned for.
Once there, it can run into a few more hurdles. The muscles near the top can’t really do anything but squeeze the sides. If it’s not squishy and there’s no angle, it’s not going to be able to do anything because it just doesn’t have the angle. Even if there is an angle, like your cucumber didn’t go all the way, it’s going to be squeezing at an awkward angle to try to push something inflexible through the opening in the stronger anal sphincter.
Usually the softness lets things find a way with some mutual give and take, but even normally things can get a bit firm and get some resistance that can be uncomfortable to work through.
Turns out I think I remember more of my anatomy and physiology classes than I thought.
I’m unfortunately not sure how much of it’s “values” and how much is “utility”.
People have values, nations don’t. Nations only exemplify their national values because the citizens will be outraged if they’re breached too far. Otherwise a nations foreign policy is better looked at through a lens of detached utilitarianism.
Usually our value of “supporting our friends” and the self image of being the hero (I think WW2 was America’s highschool football) lines up nicely with the utility it provides.
We get a lot of advantages out of our allies, not least of which is fat piles of sweet, sweet trade goods. We would never precondition military training exercises, intelligence sharing or sensitive service export regulation exemptions on getting a favorable trade deal on mangoes, but we do tend to reserve those things for our close allies, and trade agreements are a very efficient way to develop those bonds.
Waterway access lets us send our navy everywhere which massively reduces piracy, to the benefit of all, but to our benefit the most, as the leading consumer of oceanic transport goods.
A military base will get you very strong support, and furthers our security interests of global force projection.
Israel is very useful to us. The give us a naval port in the Mediterranean, military staging areas, and a regional toehold that would otherwise be significantly weaker. We also, again, get a lot of trade value from their medical supplies and electronics, and we get to sell them a lot of services.
Combined with the previously mentioned points about signaling strong resolve and unwavering support if you’ve earned it, it would be very costly for us to abandon Israel.
It’s why our politicians with constituents who care about human rights are trying very hard to walk the tightrope of supporting Israel against Hamas while opposing killing civilians. (The messaging is not going well).
The Palestinians, unfortunately, do not possess strategic value. Their “value” comes from internal political pressure to not allow or support evil, which is tempered by the opposing political view being to make the evil worse, which explains a relatively subdued response.
With goods, sales, power, influence and PR worth tens of billions one one side, and internal political pressure towards an ethical stance that might endanger some fraction of that value on the other, it’s a question of how much value we stand to loose by listening to that pressure, and exactly how strong that pressure is.
Putin is already irritated at us and there’s no advantage to preventing further irritation short of actually engaging in direct combat with NATO forces, and a general principle of not letting others control your escalation (We want to control when US weapons are used against Russia because it impacts our diplomatic stance, even if Ukraine is the one firing them).
There is advantage to us for Ukraine winning, particularly if it’s with our weapons and support. It reassures our allies, it drives interest in closer alliances with us, and generally reinforces the “aligning with the US brings trade, wealth, safety and protection” message we like to use to spread influence. See also: Finland and Sweden.
Israel on the other hand is a historical ally in a region of significance and contested influence.
Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians is unacceptable. Full stop.
From a political standpoint, the actions Hamas took that precipitated the current military campaign make it difficult to condemn the response without undermining the message that US allies get US support when they’re attacked. It’s why all the wording and messaging gets so verbose: how do you say “of course you can defend yourself and we’ll help” while also saying “maybe not the big guns, and stop with the civilian killings”.
If the region weren’t contested, weren’t important, we had significantly moreallies in the area, and it wasn’t important for domestic political reasons, it would be a different story.
Robots.txt isn’t even a rule, it’s a request.
“Please do not ask for the following content if you are a robot”.
If you don’t want someone to look at your content, you ultimately have to not give it to them, not just ask them to not ask.