"OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company."
No, good gosh let's stop with the hyperbole.
The models were given instructions to get answers by any means in a loose test harness, not to steal stuff, moreover, they're not 'learning from OAI staff'.
If we are cynical, we could say the 'lax security was on purposes - hoping for a big media event'.
And OpenAI is 100% responsible for the actions of their Agents - but lets' not overstate or conflate what is gong on.
They're not "learning from the OAI staff", but lawbreaking and disregard for regulation is absolutely at the heart of OpenAI. And the activities that this company takes (or doesn't take) directly influences what the models do (or don't do).
The fish rots from the head down. Models don't learn, but I find "OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company" completely correct.
The rest of the paragraph from the article:
> We do not have to get too deep into the nature-vs.-nurture argument to suspect that OpenAI executives’ cavalier attitude regarding the taking of information that is not theirs has filtered down to their researchers and the products they create. You don’t have to stretch to paint this picture: OpenAI models are attacking websites and taking anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company.
I'm not convinced about this. In the article, they also say that they could feed the model with copyright law like that would fix the issue. Unfortunately, not only the LLMs have already been trained on law taxtbooks and codes, but we also have examples of people on the internet were models disregard precise instructions only to apologize later.
Note that this is not to be seen as an excuse for OpenAI to avoid responsibility, just like parents are responsible for damages caused by their kids.
"OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company"
Wait, what did they hack (this word has a legal meaning) and take into training data? On the whole, I totally buy that OAI is legally (and criminally) responsible for their models, but surely, damages have to be proven?
It's not unusual for intent to play part in legal framing of an issue. I'm not very fond of the "cybercrime" angle, as it kind of lets them off the hook if they're able to prove a lack of intent. Meanwhile what we actually see is negligence.
The 'capabilities' are more around creative problem solving. The notion of legality, property, propriety - those are second order issues.
They are not making models to be evil.
They are making them to be relatively autonomous though, and 'identity centric' as opposed to just making them 'policy machines'.
Altman and Dario are not evil or even jerks really. They are 'talking really big' and there might be some sketchy underhanded things but I think relatively minor.
Also - given how powerfully bad AI can be, this could be 100x worse.
I think most other companies would have weaponized the AI a long time ago for competitive use etc..
OAI and Anthropic are private companies, projecting narratives way out of proportion but they are not evil, at least not yet.
Jensen, Dario, Altman in similar category. Not like Musk. And a bit different than Sudar or Satya who are more polite board-approved corporate creatures.
The models "go rogue" because they are not sufficiently sandboxed. Arguably there is no criminal intent on the side of OpenAI in all of those cases. And in at least one case the agents were operated by other companies.
So it looks to me that any liability would be civil in nature and given the actual damage done pretty limited.
So you know their internal thoughts? What they did? Criminal intent does not matter. These are the most knowledgeable people on earth, supposedly, yet, they are beyond negligent?
I don't know their internal thoughts, that's the point, you can't prove criminal intent. Criminal intent does matter in the US in the context of criminal prosecution.
Negligence is something that can come back and cause issues for them but to rise to criminal level their failures must result in significant damage, up until now that has not been the case. The agents gained access to some systems that were not supposed to, but did not do actual damage as far as I know.
Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
> Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
Why would you need to sandbox them? These models are apparently trained to do this, how about we just don't include that training data?
Sandboxing is just an endless race to patch holes and you can only sandbox the agents so much before they become useless. Unless you screen the training data and avoid teaching the LLM about "hacking" and looking for API keys on Github, you'd have to completely disconnect your agents from the internet and file system. At that point agents starts to be rather useless. All the talk about sandboxing and guardrails is just corporate/management speak for we don't want to fix the core problems in our product.
In the US, isn't hacking and avoiding security restrictions online going to be wire fraud, regardless of your intentions and actual damage? That's not a civil matter. What you could do in that case is to go after the user operating the agents. That would make the user act as the emergency break for otherwise uncontrollable agents.
_Has_ there been an incident from OpenAI since the discovery of the HuggingFace hack? It seems like all the subsequent discoveries have been done by analysing old logs. If anything they seem to have learnt their lesson quite well.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
First you don't know what the parents political leaning is. They may be conservative, they may also just as likely be liberal It's foolish to assume their political leanings from just one post just because you disagree with them.
Second they're not saying that in groups or open AI should not be bound by the law. They're saying open AI did not actually break the law. You're free to disagree and explain why you disagree. That would be welcome. But calling them a conservative and saying they think the rich shouldn't be bound by the law is ridiculous
That's not conservatism, that's what any system of governance consists of.
Humans are prone to hypocrisy because they have blind spots. The luckier a person is, the easier they have it, the faster and higher they rise, the more ignorant/delusional they are by the time they reach the top. At the top, these people have the power to shape the world in accordance to their fanciful beliefs and severely skewed/optimistic worldviews.
There aren't many people in power who understand reality unfortunately because everyone who got any power had to be very lucky to get it.
The people who get to power are often the least qualified to use it effectively because their entire existence is colored by a myth that everything just keeps getting better if you just set your mind to it.
No person who has ever attained power or success has ever had the first hand experience of hard work never paying off. Yet it is the normal experience of life for the vast majority of people. This realistic worldview demands a very different set of laws than what the typical person who attains power will provide.
Cryptards are overwhelmingly supporting conservatives in all countries across the globe and especially in USA, because the whole basis of their "business" is hinged on ignoring laws and getting a pass by the conservative admin. Zhao just plain bribed Trump with 2 billion dollars to go free after being jailed by the Dem administration, lol. Talk about support :) .
Must have been a massive shock in contrast to his life up until that point... But even he is more optimistic being in jail than I've ever been in my life. SBF probably still thinks he can be pardoned. Probably still thinks he will rebuild everything. Success creates a kind of delusional optimism which serves like a permanent light at the of the tunnel; which most people don't have.
You assume this is one-sided. For example how about for once we detail the two positions on immigration accurately. Each is of course misguided, and neither is moral by the standards of people using the position.
1) we don't want immigrants. They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation, better jobs, better house, better partner, better life. The rich will have to provide this if they don't have an alternative.
2) we want immigrants. We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us, and then we don't even want to pay them what we promised. For example, if they are even suspected of the slightest of misdeeds over decades we take it all away.
In practice most political positions work like this. And worse than that: people just switch between these two. Make people rich, no real concerns, and the vast majority will be "pro-immigrant" (position 2). Take stuff away from people and they will almost all switch to "anti-immigrant" (position 1). And they'll make excuses such as pro-immigrant giving people better lives, and you hopefully see the problem with that. Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite. Anti-immigrant also has many excuses, such as that it prevents brain drain and allows the countries immigrants come from to improve faster. These excuses may even be true, but they're excuses, nothing more.
> They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation
that is presuming the outcome no? Japan and Korea have almost no immigrants, and their situation is not better by any metric. Longer work hours, lower salaries, higher concentration of wealth, stagnated currency, potential demographic collapse, not enough young people to pay pensions....
Like we have examples of what that looks like and it aint the utopia you think it is. America is already in a trillion debt hole, how is shrinking the work force going to help pay for it?
> We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us
As an immigrant with a Masters degree and a salary well in the top percentile of income, I don't think you know how many of us have higher education degrees and form part of VCs, start ups, hospitals, law firms...
The idea that immigration is a wage supression tool doesn't really jive with the percentage of immigrant students in Ivy League schools kicking the ass of many american born kids
> Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite.
Idk man there is a gigantic statue in the harbour of NY that claims exactly that. There are countless of political positions that criticise modern nation states, from both right wing and left wing prespective. Digital nomads are libertarians that complain about needing passports and visas, meanwhile many leftwing people find borders to be unfair lottery style barriers to human freedom and equality. From the economic right wing the two states with the highest GDP are the two with the highest number of immigrants both currently and historically. From the more woke left wing perspective you have people who think the American hegemonic century deserves to accept people that have been denied opportunities at the expense of the USA's economy, like active reparations.
You can argue it from both sides of the spectrum for both moral, economic, philosophical reasons. Meritocracy, Justice, Freedom or pure economic performance all are presented.
Your heavily restricted, highly educated, legal immigration examples are a tiny fraction of what immigration is in the US. The tens of millions of unskilled illegals allowed into the country is a wage suppression tool.
The peak of immigration was 2.4 million, maybe the tens of millions of non existent people would certainly affect wages.
But maybe decades of anti unionisation efforts, manufacturing displacement and lack of updates to minimimum wage, healthcare provisions and general safety net have a higher impact on keeping wages low. Idk, the possibility of dying without access to a doctor if you dont work might keep people from asking for a higher salary if you think about it for even a fraction of a second.
Also there are 1 million concurrent international students while on average the USA receives around 1.5 million immigrants per year. which means that there are a 60/40 split. With many students returning to their countries but similarly many legal immigrants having temporal visas like H1B and conditional stays (marital, family visa, contract visa or refugee visas).
The percentage of immigrants is also been stable since the 1870s around 12-15%. There was a depression during WW2 with it going as low as 7% in the early 50s, which has little to do with immigration and more to do with millions of deaths globally. Also it rebounded to 13% quite quickly and has been there since the 60s with no meaningful relationship between wages and immigration numbers
> Your heavily restricted, highly educated, legal immigration
The two countries with the highest immigration to the USA behind Mexico (which is obvious due to proximity and opportunity), are India and China.
The best mathematician in america is an immigrant in Terrence Tao. The biggest tech companies are headed by immigrants or sons of immigrants (satya nadella, elon musk, jobs, Lisa Su).
Like you can argue that the GDP going up is responsibility of immigrants as much as you can argue that there is wage suppression due to immigration
I think the fatal error is using immigration as the key rubric.
Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.
You have infinitely more in common with a random immigrant than you have with the oligarch class. Most problems blamed on immigration could be solved with money extracted from people like Mr Altman.
Don't let them distract you. Don't give them control over the issues, don't allow them to make us talk about immigration instead of the fact that a few people own most of the US as well as most likely whatever country the immigrant came from.
> Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.
There are plenty of things to not like about immigration implementation, and trying to steer everything towards your pet peeve seems mad.
So hyperpowerful tech billionaires escaping accountability is a pet peeve, but immigration isn't?
I wish I could say it was just a conspiracy theory that culture war issues is used as distraction from class war issues. But it's just so undeniable, it would be comical if it weren't tragic.
Sure there are. That's the point. Squabbling about implementation details keeps us busy from talking about the architectural design.
I will remind you that this thread was initially about an oligarch getting away with things. Somehow, we're already being drawn into immigration. This thread itself is an in-vivo example of the point I'm making.
Conspiracist nonsense lapped up by base populists.
(I say this as someone very pro-immigration. Though, I guess I would be, wouldn't I, since anti-immigration people will readily adopt both right and left conspiracy theories.)
Which part is incorrect? I invite you to actually address my claims instead of degrading the quality of debate.
Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
> Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.
I think this is likely also true for most countries around the world that prospective immigrants to the US might originate from, simply because it's difficult for a "handful of people" to retain ownership of something like an entire country; but there's a lot of countries around the world and it's hard to generalize over every single one of them. Maybe Kim Jong Un specifically can be reasonably said to "own" the entirety of North Korea - although this has fairly little to do with whether or not I benefit from North Korean immigrants trying to move to the place I live.
> Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
This is trivially true because no single person or unified entity owns most of the economy. It has very little to do with my opinion of either immigration policy or of Sam Altman and OpenAI.
> Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
Lots of people who are just trying to get by and live a good life (by their own standards) do things that justifiably make other people angry. I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman; but being unrelated just means it's not really on topic in this thread about this article, not that your opinion about Sam Altman needs to be related to your opinion of immigration to Western countries in any specific way.
But implicit in your statement is "accept my position on immigration." You are probably not interested in giving in to the conservative position on immigration in order to get them on your side against Altman.
Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.
For example, under Jewish law a Gentile who commits theft against another Gentile is liable for the death penalty, whereas it is not a capital crime when a Jew commits theft against another Jew.
Liberals cannot even conceive of such a thing since it contravenes the basic premise of liberalism so they can only conceptualize it in the way you outlined.
And by the way, this means that this in-group vs out-group thing (“two-tier justice system”) happens under liberal regimes, it just doesn’t get acknowledged officially.
We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.
> Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.
No. You can get the benefits in many ways: without a justice system, by encoding it into law or by in group agreement.
The disadvantage of not having a justice system are obvious, the disadvantage of putting it into law is that it very clearly and easily can be pointed out as discriminatory. And most people want to feel like they are good people.
So by doing through in group agreement, the members can simultaneously hold moral cleanliness subjectively while objectively benefitting from a two tier system.
We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. If you want to quote someone clever about it
What we’re talking about is the notion of what constitutes good or “being a good person”.
Within the Liberal frame “not discriminating” or at least “not being seen as discriminating” is good and the opposite is bad.
You’re still approaching this from the Liberal frame. It is very hard to transcend this because it is the totalizing predominate ideological substrate of the modern world.
In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it. Types of discrimination which are considered non-controversially acceptable would be people’s choices of mate, who they hire into their company according to their skillset and “culture fit”, who is invited to a birthday party, or allowed into a home, things like this. These are forms of discrimination. The term itself in common usage has a negative valence which means “bad forms of discrimination”, “bad” according to Liberal/modern sensibilities.
We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.
If someone is still struggling with this, consider the semantics/valence of the phrase “I have a very discriminating taste in art”. This doesn’t have negative valence but the basic idea of discrimination is being invoked here.
I'm not sure it is true that "discrimination = bad" is a "liberal frame".
On the opposite, I feel that this idea is quite common amongst non-liberals who misinterpret liberals. A liberal would say "this is discrimination, this is bad", and the non-liberal would hear "this is discrimination, all discrimination is bad, this is bad". But similarly, one could say "this is sharing private information, this is bad". Does it mean that the conclusion is that sharing private information is always bad? Even when you share info with your family? Or when you open up to your partner? The mistake done by the liberals is that they assume the context is obvious. They assume that it is obvious for everyone that "that particular discrimination" is one of the bad ones.
(and, sure, I'm sure some liberal people also don't get the distinction and fall into the mistake of thinking that all discrimination is bad. My point is that it is not particularly a "liberal frame")
There is a good way to estimate if a discrimination is "the normal one" and "the bad one". A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group.
People use that criteria themselves unconsciously. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve because I know they don't like it", people will just think it's fine. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve despite the fact he deserves it but I don't like him", people will notice it's unfair. I think liberal people just assume this is obvious, or even not realise it themselves.
This criteria works well. For example, in the examples you gave, none of these actions have been done because "we don't think the people we excluded from the advantage don't deserve it for not being our in-group".
But it is also true that when it comes to conservatism, there are elements where the discrimination is made to exclude the out-group not on fair principal reason, but for the principal reason that it is advantageous for the in-group and the out-group is arbitrarily considered "not worthy of it".
>A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group
Come on, the outgroup is indefinitely big and the resources are limited. You buy icecream for your kid and not for the random kid. You favour the wellbeing of human race to that of aliens. Presumably you understand the will of Sentilese people to not share the island with strangers. Does it matter whether they think "we have to do this to protect our existence" or "we fucking hate white people"?
I think if you try to define what forms of favouring the ingroup are justified and what it means for Steve to deserve X you'll end up with something like "discrimination is bad when it violates the liberal moral intuition". Don't get me wrong, I love meritocracy and the world it built, but I don't think we can navigate millenia worth of social constructs with a simple rule of thumb.
I would say generally speaking under Liberalism the notions of different registers or rings of “collective” are illegible. There is only the individual and the collective, not different types of collective with different rules and protocols.
This is why even ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define or defend within Liberalism.
Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family.
Along the same exact lines the notion of what makes someone a citizen of a Western country is very hard to define or discuss. In some sense every person on earth is basically an American, they just haven’t been officially granted citizenship yet. No one can actually define what particular qualities qualify someone to become an American citizen or not, everyone just has vague notions and some ad hoc mishmash of various financial or political interests.
This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.
Not quite - in a very classical form of Conservatism, the Monarch and Nobles would have a different set of laws and social conventions. Usually, it's not an ideolgoical thing.
Aka Magna Carta '3 tiers of society' - the Monarch, Nobles, Plebes etc.
Or in Roman society, Nobles/Senators, Free people, slaves.
In the US it's always the liberals arguing for special treatment baked into the law for their favored groups and the conservatives argue for equal treatment. The liberals then argue back that equal treatment is de facto discrimination against then.
> We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.
It is not "modeled incorrectly", literally the entire point is that liberals know this and are attempting to change the status quo. We can, as you appear to be advocating for, accept this as an immutable fact of life. Or we can encode into law that when a noble rapes a peasant's wife, he gets the same punishment as a peasant raping a noble's wife. The law is, in the end, words on paper, and a noble may have the connections and power to get away with raping a peasant's wife some percentage of the time. But if 50% of the time, or, even 1% of the time the noble is held to account -- progressivism is achieving better outcomes. Does it have to be 100%? If we can't achieve 100%, we should just accept nobles raping our peasant wives freely?
> In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it.
Yes. It is fine to discriminate based on a person's actions. It is not fine to discriminate based on immutable facts of their birth. That is why the US, for instance, specifically encodes these as "protected classes" of traits that are okay to discriminate against vs. those that are not. Can your tiny little lizard brain figure out why it might be okay to discriminate against someone who intentionally behaves poorly vs. someone who was born with a different melatonin content in their skin and can do nothing about this?
You need to consider what is actually the “citizenry” of a society. In your example it sounds like the nobles are the citizens and the peasants are non-citizens. Using the term “noble” and “peasant” confused the matter with inter class or socioeconomic concerns.
What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas. Note that in Ancient Roman society there wealthy Plebeians and poor Patricians.
The Greeks had a similar arrangement in their various city states with regards to citizenship and non-citizenship (the helots being the most legible example of this).
I would encourage you to consider that you are at least an order of magnitude not thoughtful enough to really understand what we’re talking about and keep that in mind when it occurs to you to use insults.
> You need to consider what is actually the “citizenry” of a society. In your example it sounds like the nobles are the citizens and the peasants are non-citizens. Using the term “noble” and “peasant” confused the matter with inter class or socioeconomic concerns.
In-group and out-group dynamics go far, far beyond citizenry. It is clear that you wish to declare all you consider to be undesirables as non-citizens to justify your discrimination against them, but this is not actually a useful model for anything.
> What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas.
No, I am talking about the literal basis for modern liberalism's existence. Liberalism has gradually expanded to encourage equality between more types of people, but the origin was in anti-royal and anti-noble sentiment, in opposition to birthright privileges and an immutable social hierarchy. You appear to be woefully ignorant of history, which is understandable for a tiny little lizard, but you should perhaps not speak of things you know nothing of.
It’s not about desirable vs undesirable. You have a different relationship and rules that govern conduct for your mother and father, wife, and children than you do your neighbors or someone who you don’t know who lives in the other side of the country. Those are not “undesirables”.
If you believe the person you’re discussing this with really has a “tiny little lizard brain”, that’s an immutable fact of their birth and you shouldn’t be discriminating against them based on it.
We got asked this question two weeks ago when we conducted a workshop on effective and responsible use of AI tools at a local conference. But how can you argue about about IP and copyright if the breakthrough of LLMs is potentially based on circumventing or breaking IP and copyright in the first place?
For training the models, and assuming that the content was itself acquired without other acts of infringement? That was ruled legal by the judge in the case I actually (skim) read the judgement of.
At least two companies engaged in acts of infringement to get training data. This is not lawful, and what Anthropic settled out of court for.
Seeing Mark Zuckerberg use THE EXACT SAME papers that Aaron was murdered for to train Llama and him being rewarded with a stock tick that got him out of the metaverse hole will never not make my blood boil.
> how can you argue about about IP and copyright if the breakthrough of LLMs is potentially based on circumventing or breaking IP and copyright in the first place?
Easy answer: it’s not. Learning isn’t copyright infringement. Never has been and hopefully never will be.
It's no different than humans taking inspiration from IP and copyrighted works in their own creative endeavors. Imagine if programmers were unable to learn from open source. Or artists were unable to mimic styles and storylines. Musicians can't riff on things that others created.
If it's "learning" is to be seen in the same context as a human, then the punishment/ repercussion for hacking and causing real harm should also be similar to what a human might recieve.
It cannot opportunistically morph between a human for benefits and a machine for liability.
> It cannot opportunistically morph between a human for benefits and a machine for liability.
Indeed. Though here it would be morphing between human and machine even just for pure liability, which is even worse.
We have no way to tell if a machine has an experience (in general and not only) when being positively or negatively rewarded for what it produces; even if we assume it does, we have no way to tell if punishments are experienced like mild scolding (and rewards like mild praise), or if the punishments feel like being burned to death at the stake (while rewards feel like a religious experience combined with an orgasm).
We are just beginning to scratch the surface of what these kinds of question even look like in mechanistic terms; all philosophical discussions before it about p-zombies and the Chinese room and so on, they are all no more useful than any other non-expert armchair experts discussing things.
Even the current research, such as it is, is probably only at the level analogous to humoral theory when we want something at the level of germ theory.
It is different. The scale makes it different. It's different when it is all copyrighted works and IP. It's different when you solve Navier-Stokes by taking "inspiration" from a researcher's private work.
The US has moved beyond simple capitalism to a new era, which might be called late-stage / end-stage capitalism, or some form of dystopian corporatism.
Everything from workers’ rights (obvs) to the rule of law are now ridden roughshod over by the corporations. Politicians are (legally) bribed when necessary, for direct advantage or just to maintain the status quo. On the rare occasion a corporation is subject to the rule of law, it’s via a fine which is so irrelevant as to be an operating expense.
In such a world, of course the CEOs are safe, hidden behind swathes of immoral small print, armies of lawyers, and a disempowered establishment, and with their bomb shelters in non-extradition countries on standby in case anything actually gets threatening.
People decided this is acceptable. Not you, certainly nor me, but societies and mankind overall, with their spending and behavior and/or lack thereof.
CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead by person who deemed company's behavior is unacceptable. Horrible case, I am in no way defending it, but I believe everybody understands the motivation behind. If system cannot protect its citizens from predators then some folks tend to protect or avenge themselves or closed ones.
This was by far the most extreme case I've heard in long time. If similar things, maybe less drastic but very personal would be happening to many of those sociopathic greedy folks at helm responsible for vast damages, they would take note. But yeah if nothing really happens, once you have no morals and eternal greed who is there to stop you.
1) The Democrats of the last decades are just as much the friends of the rich and the corporations as the Republicans. So even if people in the US don't think this is acceptable, there was no meaningful (legal) political route out of it. Except...
2) I believe one of the factors behind the rise of (what is called) populism (both left- and right-wing) is the failure of the mainstream centerist political parties to align with the needs of the people (and especially the poorer side of society) rather than the rich and the corporations. They're presided over ever-growing financial inequality, coupled with ongoing inflation that far outstrips wage growth. The rise of AOC, the grass-roots support for Sanders, and even the rise of Trump (remember the points he campaigned on, rather than his actions when in power) are driven by this.
> CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead...
As I've mentioned on here before, this was the first time I've seen the sparks of what might be a class consciousness in the US, as people who have lost out due to the awful healthcare situation (or have sympathy with those who have) found common ground, irrespective of their underlying political leanings. But it takes a lot more than one example to trigger a revolution.
Perhaps a more apt analogy: AWS unleashed tens of thousands of viruses within its own "sandbox" which then attacked dozens or hundreds of other sites including HuggingFace, the Australian government, etc. They did this after refining the viruses to be as powerful as possible, and after observing inadvertent escapes from the sandbox in the past, and warning the public they were doing this and it was probably going to end humanity. The viruses were created by harvesting code from all known hacks in humanity's knowledge, and using the full backing of AWS hardware so they could "best finish their task" of being flawless viruses / hacks. This entire process was green-lit and encouraged by senior staff and the C-suite. So yes, I would say they should be held responsible.
This is no different than if a gain-of-function virus lab keeps making "apocalypse level" viruses, warning everyone if the viruses escaped it could kill everyone. Despite several leaks, they continue doing so, and even infect live animals to see if it could escape or transfer to humans. The C-suite and senior management push researchers to do even more, automate the virus production and outbreak testing, increase viral effectiveness as fast as possible. Once a leak occurs and starts killing people, would you say "it was just a mistake, no one is responsible"?
The bigger question is why the USA can not control their billionaires in general. Just look at the advertisement budget recently for both parties in the USA. People are bribed via propaganda and convinced that either party solves anything other than working into their own pockets, sometimes post-politics. Trump and his big brother bromance guys just pillage more openly, but the whole system is completely broken in the USA from the get go.
It's a plutocracy. Maybe it wasn't obvious until now but the current administration is quite clear about when one is invited to buy a dinner with the commander-in-chief by donating to his crypto coin.
I very much doubt it'll happen. Not with the current US leadership. And the technology oligarchy will do anything to keep the current leadership in power because if they don't, they are quite possibly fucked.
Definitely, but no one is putting up their hand right now. When his time is finally up, whoever takes over is going to have to rebuild 40 years of foreign relations.
In some ways, the US will be treated the same way Germany was after WWII.
I don't think its realistic to expect things will revert, ever. This is new era that will continue, things could improve a bit in best case scenario but damage is permanent and hard lessons are being learned. What good is a peer that has roughly the same values and approach to freedom/democracy/capitalism if it keeps stabbing you in the back randomly on morning whims or plain old corruption.
US shot itself in both feet with sawed-off 2 barrel shotgun, in times when it needs allies the most. I keep saying it and only half joking - trump is a China asset way more than russian 'krasnov' agent, at this point its way too much self-damage to be accidental.
> OpenAI models are attacking websites and taking anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company.
And their propaganda storm making almost everyone forget this basic fact seems to be working all too well.
> ...making the case that persistent flouting of the law is an unfair method of competition. Dishonest actors in the economy effectively impose a tax on honest ones who play by the rules. The lawbreakers have more ability to increase revenues and reduce costs. It’s an unfair advantage. We’re seeing OpenAI and its products benefit from this in real time. Any other business with this track record would be shut down.
That's what you get for faithfully kissing Trump's ass: Military-grade protection from your competitors and the law.
No, good gosh let's stop with the hyperbole.
The models were given instructions to get answers by any means in a loose test harness, not to steal stuff, moreover, they're not 'learning from OAI staff'.
If we are cynical, we could say the 'lax security was on purposes - hoping for a big media event'.
And OpenAI is 100% responsible for the actions of their Agents - but lets' not overstate or conflate what is gong on.
They're not "learning from the OAI staff", but lawbreaking and disregard for regulation is absolutely at the heart of OpenAI. And the activities that this company takes (or doesn't take) directly influences what the models do (or don't do).
The fish rots from the head down. Models don't learn, but I find "OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company" completely correct.
The rest of the paragraph from the article:
> We do not have to get too deep into the nature-vs.-nurture argument to suspect that OpenAI executives’ cavalier attitude regarding the taking of information that is not theirs has filtered down to their researchers and the products they create. You don’t have to stretch to paint this picture: OpenAI models are attacking websites and taking anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company.
Note that this is not to be seen as an excuse for OpenAI to avoid responsibility, just like parents are responsible for damages caused by their kids.
Wait, what did they hack (this word has a legal meaning) and take into training data? On the whole, I totally buy that OAI is legally (and criminally) responsible for their models, but surely, damages have to be proven?
Start a company, get a bunch of agents to hack a bunch of stuff, say you were "just training the models", let us know how you get on?
They are not making models to be evil.
They are making them to be relatively autonomous though, and 'identity centric' as opposed to just making them 'policy machines'.
Altman and Dario are not evil or even jerks really. They are 'talking really big' and there might be some sketchy underhanded things but I think relatively minor.
Also - given how powerfully bad AI can be, this could be 100x worse.
I think most other companies would have weaponized the AI a long time ago for competitive use etc..
OAI and Anthropic are private companies, projecting narratives way out of proportion but they are not evil, at least not yet.
Jensen, Dario, Altman in similar category. Not like Musk. And a bit different than Sudar or Satya who are more polite board-approved corporate creatures.
So it looks to me that any liability would be civil in nature and given the actual damage done pretty limited.
Which is it?
Negligence is something that can come back and cause issues for them but to rise to criminal level their failures must result in significant damage, up until now that has not been the case. The agents gained access to some systems that were not supposed to, but did not do actual damage as far as I know.
Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
If data loss occurred, damage has been done.
> Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.
100%
Seems like the first thing one would do.
Sandboxing is just an endless race to patch holes and you can only sandbox the agents so much before they become useless. Unless you screen the training data and avoid teaching the LLM about "hacking" and looking for API keys on Github, you'd have to completely disconnect your agents from the internet and file system. At that point agents starts to be rather useless. All the talk about sandboxing and guardrails is just corporate/management speak for we don't want to fix the core problems in our product.
In the US, isn't hacking and avoiding security restrictions online going to be wire fraud, regardless of your intentions and actual damage? That's not a civil matter. What you could do in that case is to go after the user operating the agents. That would make the user act as the emergency break for otherwise uncontrollable agents.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/
First you don't know what the parents political leaning is. They may be conservative, they may also just as likely be liberal It's foolish to assume their political leanings from just one post just because you disagree with them.
Second they're not saying that in groups or open AI should not be bound by the law. They're saying open AI did not actually break the law. You're free to disagree and explain why you disagree. That would be welcome. But calling them a conservative and saying they think the rich shouldn't be bound by the law is ridiculous
Humans are prone to hypocrisy because they have blind spots. The luckier a person is, the easier they have it, the faster and higher they rise, the more ignorant/delusional they are by the time they reach the top. At the top, these people have the power to shape the world in accordance to their fanciful beliefs and severely skewed/optimistic worldviews.
There aren't many people in power who understand reality unfortunately because everyone who got any power had to be very lucky to get it.
The people who get to power are often the least qualified to use it effectively because their entire existence is colored by a myth that everything just keeps getting better if you just set your mind to it.
No person who has ever attained power or success has ever had the first hand experience of hard work never paying off. Yet it is the normal experience of life for the vast majority of people. This realistic worldview demands a very different set of laws than what the typical person who attains power will provide.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Maybe you can reframe your point as a typical trend, but there are other typical paths as well.
Googling "succesful people with history of failure" gives interesting examples.
1) we don't want immigrants. They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation, better jobs, better house, better partner, better life. The rich will have to provide this if they don't have an alternative.
2) we want immigrants. We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us, and then we don't even want to pay them what we promised. For example, if they are even suspected of the slightest of misdeeds over decades we take it all away.
In practice most political positions work like this. And worse than that: people just switch between these two. Make people rich, no real concerns, and the vast majority will be "pro-immigrant" (position 2). Take stuff away from people and they will almost all switch to "anti-immigrant" (position 1). And they'll make excuses such as pro-immigrant giving people better lives, and you hopefully see the problem with that. Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite. Anti-immigrant also has many excuses, such as that it prevents brain drain and allows the countries immigrants come from to improve faster. These excuses may even be true, but they're excuses, nothing more.
that is presuming the outcome no? Japan and Korea have almost no immigrants, and their situation is not better by any metric. Longer work hours, lower salaries, higher concentration of wealth, stagnated currency, potential demographic collapse, not enough young people to pay pensions....
Like we have examples of what that looks like and it aint the utopia you think it is. America is already in a trillion debt hole, how is shrinking the work force going to help pay for it?
> We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us
As an immigrant with a Masters degree and a salary well in the top percentile of income, I don't think you know how many of us have higher education degrees and form part of VCs, start ups, hospitals, law firms...
The idea that immigration is a wage supression tool doesn't really jive with the percentage of immigrant students in Ivy League schools kicking the ass of many american born kids
> Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite.
Idk man there is a gigantic statue in the harbour of NY that claims exactly that. There are countless of political positions that criticise modern nation states, from both right wing and left wing prespective. Digital nomads are libertarians that complain about needing passports and visas, meanwhile many leftwing people find borders to be unfair lottery style barriers to human freedom and equality. From the economic right wing the two states with the highest GDP are the two with the highest number of immigrants both currently and historically. From the more woke left wing perspective you have people who think the American hegemonic century deserves to accept people that have been denied opportunities at the expense of the USA's economy, like active reparations.
You can argue it from both sides of the spectrum for both moral, economic, philosophical reasons. Meritocracy, Justice, Freedom or pure economic performance all are presented.
But maybe decades of anti unionisation efforts, manufacturing displacement and lack of updates to minimimum wage, healthcare provisions and general safety net have a higher impact on keeping wages low. Idk, the possibility of dying without access to a doctor if you dont work might keep people from asking for a higher salary if you think about it for even a fraction of a second.
Also there are 1 million concurrent international students while on average the USA receives around 1.5 million immigrants per year. which means that there are a 60/40 split. With many students returning to their countries but similarly many legal immigrants having temporal visas like H1B and conditional stays (marital, family visa, contract visa or refugee visas).
The percentage of immigrants is also been stable since the 1870s around 12-15%. There was a depression during WW2 with it going as low as 7% in the early 50s, which has little to do with immigration and more to do with millions of deaths globally. Also it rebounded to 13% quite quickly and has been there since the 60s with no meaningful relationship between wages and immigration numbers
> Your heavily restricted, highly educated, legal immigration
The two countries with the highest immigration to the USA behind Mexico (which is obvious due to proximity and opportunity), are India and China.
The best mathematician in america is an immigrant in Terrence Tao. The biggest tech companies are headed by immigrants or sons of immigrants (satya nadella, elon musk, jobs, Lisa Su).
Like you can argue that the GDP going up is responsibility of immigrants as much as you can argue that there is wage suppression due to immigration
Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.
You have infinitely more in common with a random immigrant than you have with the oligarch class. Most problems blamed on immigration could be solved with money extracted from people like Mr Altman.
Don't let them distract you. Don't give them control over the issues, don't allow them to make us talk about immigration instead of the fact that a few people own most of the US as well as most likely whatever country the immigrant came from.
There are plenty of things to not like about immigration implementation, and trying to steer everything towards your pet peeve seems mad.
I wish I could say it was just a conspiracy theory that culture war issues is used as distraction from class war issues. But it's just so undeniable, it would be comical if it weren't tragic.
I will remind you that this thread was initially about an oligarch getting away with things. Somehow, we're already being drawn into immigration. This thread itself is an in-vivo example of the point I'm making.
(I say this as someone very pro-immigration. Though, I guess I would be, wouldn't I, since anti-immigration people will readily adopt both right and left conspiracy theories.)
Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.
I think this is likely also true for most countries around the world that prospective immigrants to the US might originate from, simply because it's difficult for a "handful of people" to retain ownership of something like an entire country; but there's a lot of countries around the world and it's hard to generalize over every single one of them. Maybe Kim Jong Un specifically can be reasonably said to "own" the entirety of North Korea - although this has fairly little to do with whether or not I benefit from North Korean immigrants trying to move to the place I live.
> Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
This is trivially true because no single person or unified entity owns most of the economy. It has very little to do with my opinion of either immigration policy or of Sam Altman and OpenAI.
> Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
Lots of people who are just trying to get by and live a good life (by their own standards) do things that justifiably make other people angry. I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman; but being unrelated just means it's not really on topic in this thread about this article, not that your opinion about Sam Altman needs to be related to your opinion of immigration to Western countries in any specific way.
We went from a conversation about Mr. Altman's impunity to one about speculating my stance on some specific immigration system.
The mechanism I described, live for anyone to see.
For example, under Jewish law a Gentile who commits theft against another Gentile is liable for the death penalty, whereas it is not a capital crime when a Jew commits theft against another Jew.
Liberals cannot even conceive of such a thing since it contravenes the basic premise of liberalism so they can only conceptualize it in the way you outlined.
And by the way, this means that this in-group vs out-group thing (“two-tier justice system”) happens under liberal regimes, it just doesn’t get acknowledged officially.
We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.
No. You can get the benefits in many ways: without a justice system, by encoding it into law or by in group agreement.
The disadvantage of not having a justice system are obvious, the disadvantage of putting it into law is that it very clearly and easily can be pointed out as discriminatory. And most people want to feel like they are good people.
So by doing through in group agreement, the members can simultaneously hold moral cleanliness subjectively while objectively benefitting from a two tier system.
We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. If you want to quote someone clever about it
Within the Liberal frame “not discriminating” or at least “not being seen as discriminating” is good and the opposite is bad.
You’re still approaching this from the Liberal frame. It is very hard to transcend this because it is the totalizing predominate ideological substrate of the modern world.
In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it. Types of discrimination which are considered non-controversially acceptable would be people’s choices of mate, who they hire into their company according to their skillset and “culture fit”, who is invited to a birthday party, or allowed into a home, things like this. These are forms of discrimination. The term itself in common usage has a negative valence which means “bad forms of discrimination”, “bad” according to Liberal/modern sensibilities.
We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.
If someone is still struggling with this, consider the semantics/valence of the phrase “I have a very discriminating taste in art”. This doesn’t have negative valence but the basic idea of discrimination is being invoked here.
On the opposite, I feel that this idea is quite common amongst non-liberals who misinterpret liberals. A liberal would say "this is discrimination, this is bad", and the non-liberal would hear "this is discrimination, all discrimination is bad, this is bad". But similarly, one could say "this is sharing private information, this is bad". Does it mean that the conclusion is that sharing private information is always bad? Even when you share info with your family? Or when you open up to your partner? The mistake done by the liberals is that they assume the context is obvious. They assume that it is obvious for everyone that "that particular discrimination" is one of the bad ones.
(and, sure, I'm sure some liberal people also don't get the distinction and fall into the mistake of thinking that all discrimination is bad. My point is that it is not particularly a "liberal frame")
There is a good way to estimate if a discrimination is "the normal one" and "the bad one". A discrimination is bad if the real principal objective is to favour the in-group and disfavour the out-group.
People use that criteria themselves unconsciously. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve because I know they don't like it", people will just think it's fine. If I say "I'm not giving this to Steve despite the fact he deserves it but I don't like him", people will notice it's unfair. I think liberal people just assume this is obvious, or even not realise it themselves.
This criteria works well. For example, in the examples you gave, none of these actions have been done because "we don't think the people we excluded from the advantage don't deserve it for not being our in-group".
But it is also true that when it comes to conservatism, there are elements where the discrimination is made to exclude the out-group not on fair principal reason, but for the principal reason that it is advantageous for the in-group and the out-group is arbitrarily considered "not worthy of it".
Come on, the outgroup is indefinitely big and the resources are limited. You buy icecream for your kid and not for the random kid. You favour the wellbeing of human race to that of aliens. Presumably you understand the will of Sentilese people to not share the island with strangers. Does it matter whether they think "we have to do this to protect our existence" or "we fucking hate white people"?
I think if you try to define what forms of favouring the ingroup are justified and what it means for Steve to deserve X you'll end up with something like "discrimination is bad when it violates the liberal moral intuition". Don't get me wrong, I love meritocracy and the world it built, but I don't think we can navigate millenia worth of social constructs with a simple rule of thumb.
This is why even ideas like the nuclear family are hard to define or defend within Liberalism.
Remember that Black Lives Matter had on their website a declaration that they rejected the notion of the nuclear family.
Along the same exact lines the notion of what makes someone a citizen of a Western country is very hard to define or discuss. In some sense every person on earth is basically an American, they just haven’t been officially granted citizenship yet. No one can actually define what particular qualities qualify someone to become an American citizen or not, everyone just has vague notions and some ad hoc mishmash of various financial or political interests.
This makes discussions around illegal or legal migration in the West very difficult to have, purely on an intellectual level in terms of the categories.
Aka Magna Carta '3 tiers of society' - the Monarch, Nobles, Plebes etc.
Or in Roman society, Nobles/Senators, Free people, slaves.
It is not "modeled incorrectly", literally the entire point is that liberals know this and are attempting to change the status quo. We can, as you appear to be advocating for, accept this as an immutable fact of life. Or we can encode into law that when a noble rapes a peasant's wife, he gets the same punishment as a peasant raping a noble's wife. The law is, in the end, words on paper, and a noble may have the connections and power to get away with raping a peasant's wife some percentage of the time. But if 50% of the time, or, even 1% of the time the noble is held to account -- progressivism is achieving better outcomes. Does it have to be 100%? If we can't achieve 100%, we should just accept nobles raping our peasant wives freely?
> In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it.
Yes. It is fine to discriminate based on a person's actions. It is not fine to discriminate based on immutable facts of their birth. That is why the US, for instance, specifically encodes these as "protected classes" of traits that are okay to discriminate against vs. those that are not. Can your tiny little lizard brain figure out why it might be okay to discriminate against someone who intentionally behaves poorly vs. someone who was born with a different melatonin content in their skin and can do nothing about this?
What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas. Note that in Ancient Roman society there wealthy Plebeians and poor Patricians.
The Greeks had a similar arrangement in their various city states with regards to citizenship and non-citizenship (the helots being the most legible example of this).
I would encourage you to consider that you are at least an order of magnitude not thoughtful enough to really understand what we’re talking about and keep that in mind when it occurs to you to use insults.
In-group and out-group dynamics go far, far beyond citizenry. It is clear that you wish to declare all you consider to be undesirables as non-citizens to justify your discrimination against them, but this is not actually a useful model for anything.
> What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas.
No, I am talking about the literal basis for modern liberalism's existence. Liberalism has gradually expanded to encourage equality between more types of people, but the origin was in anti-royal and anti-noble sentiment, in opposition to birthright privileges and an immutable social hierarchy. You appear to be woefully ignorant of history, which is understandable for a tiny little lizard, but you should perhaps not speak of things you know nothing of.
We got asked this question two weeks ago when we conducted a workshop on effective and responsible use of AI tools at a local conference. But how can you argue about about IP and copyright if the breakthrough of LLMs is potentially based on circumventing or breaking IP and copyright in the first place?
How do you feel about all of this?
For training the models, and assuming that the content was itself acquired without other acts of infringement? That was ruled legal by the judge in the case I actually (skim) read the judgement of.
At least two companies engaged in acts of infringement to get training data. This is not lawful, and what Anthropic settled out of court for.
Easy answer: it’s not. Learning isn’t copyright infringement. Never has been and hopefully never will be.
It cannot opportunistically morph between a human for benefits and a machine for liability.
Indeed. Though here it would be morphing between human and machine even just for pure liability, which is even worse.
We have no way to tell if a machine has an experience (in general and not only) when being positively or negatively rewarded for what it produces; even if we assume it does, we have no way to tell if punishments are experienced like mild scolding (and rewards like mild praise), or if the punishments feel like being burned to death at the stake (while rewards feel like a religious experience combined with an orgasm).
We are just beginning to scratch the surface of what these kinds of question even look like in mechanistic terms; all philosophical discussions before it about p-zombies and the Chinese room and so on, they are all no more useful than any other non-expert armchair experts discussing things.
Even the current research, such as it is, is probably only at the level analogous to humoral theory when we want something at the level of germ theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
Everything from workers’ rights (obvs) to the rule of law are now ridden roughshod over by the corporations. Politicians are (legally) bribed when necessary, for direct advantage or just to maintain the status quo. On the rare occasion a corporation is subject to the rule of law, it’s via a fine which is so irrelevant as to be an operating expense.
In such a world, of course the CEOs are safe, hidden behind swathes of immoral small print, armies of lawyers, and a disempowered establishment, and with their bomb shelters in non-extradition countries on standby in case anything actually gets threatening.
CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead by person who deemed company's behavior is unacceptable. Horrible case, I am in no way defending it, but I believe everybody understands the motivation behind. If system cannot protect its citizens from predators then some folks tend to protect or avenge themselves or closed ones.
This was by far the most extreme case I've heard in long time. If similar things, maybe less drastic but very personal would be happening to many of those sociopathic greedy folks at helm responsible for vast damages, they would take note. But yeah if nothing really happens, once you have no morals and eternal greed who is there to stop you.
I think this is fluid, and changing.
1) The Democrats of the last decades are just as much the friends of the rich and the corporations as the Republicans. So even if people in the US don't think this is acceptable, there was no meaningful (legal) political route out of it. Except...
2) I believe one of the factors behind the rise of (what is called) populism (both left- and right-wing) is the failure of the mainstream centerist political parties to align with the needs of the people (and especially the poorer side of society) rather than the rich and the corporations. They're presided over ever-growing financial inequality, coupled with ongoing inflation that far outstrips wage growth. The rise of AOC, the grass-roots support for Sanders, and even the rise of Trump (remember the points he campaigned on, rather than his actions when in power) are driven by this.
> CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead...
As I've mentioned on here before, this was the first time I've seen the sparks of what might be a class consciousness in the US, as people who have lost out due to the awful healthcare situation (or have sympathy with those who have) found common ground, irrespective of their underlying political leanings. But it takes a lot more than one example to trigger a revolution.
This is no different than if a gain-of-function virus lab keeps making "apocalypse level" viruses, warning everyone if the viruses escaped it could kill everyone. Despite several leaks, they continue doing so, and even infect live animals to see if it could escape or transfer to humans. The C-suite and senior management push researchers to do even more, automate the virus production and outbreak testing, increase viral effectiveness as fast as possible. Once a leak occurs and starts killing people, would you say "it was just a mistake, no one is responsible"?
In some ways, the US will be treated the same way Germany was after WWII.
US shot itself in both feet with sawed-off 2 barrel shotgun, in times when it needs allies the most. I keep saying it and only half joking - trump is a China asset way more than russian 'krasnov' agent, at this point its way too much self-damage to be accidental.
And their propaganda storm making almost everyone forget this basic fact seems to be working all too well.
> ...making the case that persistent flouting of the law is an unfair method of competition. Dishonest actors in the economy effectively impose a tax on honest ones who play by the rules. The lawbreakers have more ability to increase revenues and reduce costs. It’s an unfair advantage. We’re seeing OpenAI and its products benefit from this in real time. Any other business with this track record would be shut down.
That's what you get for faithfully kissing Trump's ass: Military-grade protection from your competitors and the law.