Sam Altman Thanks Programmers for Their Effort, Says Their Time Is Over

[highplainsdem]

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-thanks-programmers-over

-snip-

In a Tuesday tweet that can only be described as twisting the knife, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that “I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character.”

“It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took,” he added. “Thank you for getting us to this point.”

It’s a particularly tone-deaf and borderline vindictive missive that suggests Altman has long given up on the idea of fairly compensating content creators and coders for their work. It’s no secret that OpenAI’s AI models were trained on data that was shamelessly scraped from the web, a controversial practice that has triggered a litany of copyright infringement lawsuits.

Altman’s remarks drew an overwhelmingly negative reaction.

-snip-

More at the link, including some of the responses. Sam deserved the negative reaction. I suppose it could have been worse - he could have posted video to deliver that message while posing in one of the two $20 million dollar McLaren F1s he drives around in occasionally to remind the peasants where the value of all their intellectual property is going. But just the plain text was bad, as Futurism said.

I found that article via Bluesky last night, then logged in to X quickly to check out the replies to @sama's tweet. A lot of them, very few of them neutral or positive.

The AI bros are NOT on our side, not on humanity's side, even if they're happy to offer freebies like limited use of their AI tools for a while, to amuse and distract and maybe impress or even addict users, until they can charge those users what they REALLY want to charge them, once they have much of society convinced their inevitably fallible, illegally trained tools are necessary.

But Sam let the mask slip there, as he did with a recent talk where he imagined AI as a utility everyone's billed for: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221097716

[Catlady123]

1. Serious character flaws in some of these techbros

[highplainsdem]

4. Some of them are delusional psychopaths.

[Prairie Gates]

2. On the one hand, fuck that guy

On the other hand, the "Just learn to code" bros have not comported themselves well either and there's a tiny margin of schadenfreude for their last several decades of arrogance.

[highplainsdem]

3. It's not just the programmers' intellectual property that was stolen, though. It's everyone's.

The AI companies are hurting the entire world, between the IP theft and all the other harm AI causes.

I've known a lot of nice techies over the years. Was even madly in love with one once. I might be wrong about how ethical all of them were, but I honestly don't think any of them would have approved of the tech lords peddling inevitably failing, hallucinating LLMs as "artificial intelligence" - especially with the LLMs only working at all because of the theft of the world's IP. It's such a sleazy, stupid tech. And I'm positive none of those techies would have approved of that hallucinating tech being used in weaponry.

[Prairie Gates]

5. Absolutely

This thread was about programmers, though.

Believe me, I have more sympathy for authors and musicians. They also haven't spent the last thirty years calling anyone who didn't cultivate their particular thing an idiot, though.

[blm]

6. Another evil Accelerationist

[highplainsdem]

9. Sam still pays a bit of lip service to AI safety, but he's proven himself to be untrustworthy.

[patphil]

7. He thanked them for creating their replacement as he kicked them out the door.

Coders are expensive, letting AI write the code is cheap.
Profit is the name of the game.
If AI writes the code, and maintains/revises the code, eventually there won't be anyone out there who is able to understand what has been built by AI.
What could go wrong?

[Kid Berwyn]

8. "Us" as in me, myself and I.

Billionaire Tech Bros likely will survive "the great replacement" ahead.

The rest of "Us," not so much.