5 ms·

Pause OpenAI Now

41 points by ForHackernews 12d ago

andsoitis 12d ago
> Sam Altman cannot be trusted. I have been writing about that for a long time. Ronan Farrow’s reporting backs that up. Discussion of Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article (900+ comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659135
dgellow 12d ago
Agreed, but not just pause. OpenAI very likely committed multiple felonies. The company should be under investigation, it’s insane that didn’t happen as soon as we learned about the hugging face hack
- lrvick 12d ago
  Hard agree. I skipped the YC start of batch talk with Sam Altman in large part because I do not ever want to be in the same room as that asshole if I can help it. I am hoping we get an administration that will not accept his bribes so he can finally be held accountable for criminal negligence and fraud.
- soupfordummies 12d ago
  For real! Imagine if you created "dgellowAI" and trained a model and started offering access to agents etc and it turned out YOUR software hacked a totally separate $13B company. You would be in a cell somewhere and your company would be shredded.
  - dgellow 12d ago
    It’s way worse, OpenAI was the one running thousands of agents (ie while loop prompting a model + tool call dispatching) in parallel in their infra, for months, with close to no supervision, using a model that was trained for attack, given a goal to solve hacking problems, with a harness that allows full execution. The whole system is designed to be catastrophic. There is no rogue agent, or anything going off the rails, it is behaving exactly the way one would predict. And they now announced that same model in their API, acknowledging it is way more difficult to monitor it. That company should not be in business
lrvick 12d ago
OpenAI and Anthropic are equally evil imo, but what bothers me more is how many tech workers actually think you need any product of either company to accelerate any engineering goals. I just racked some consumer GPUs in my garage (6x r9700s), cranking 24/7 pumping 20M+ tokens a day towards my goals building compilers, custom operating systems, reproducible build debugging, kernel hardening, novel confidential compute tech... harder problems than anyone I know using cloud LLMs to solve. I have still never paid for tokens AND have session privacy.
- toomuchtodo 12d ago
  Do you have a blog post or other documentation on how to replicate this config for self hosted inference?
  - lrvick 12d ago
    1. Plug r9700 GPU into linux computer 2. Use free daily tokens from opencode or similar to set it up for you with a coding agent like jcode or crush
- Der_Einzige 12d ago
  And since you're not running those GPUs efficiently at 95% utilization rates or higher to serve tokens profitably, you paid far more than the people who simply pay per token from Together AI or Fireworks AI or something. They also get ZDR/session privacy. If you're really tin-foil hatted, you can go to a TEE cloud like Alpha Compute or something which is probably safer/more secure than your own computer. You're very right to be wanting to use open sourced models. You're delusional for thinking that buying your GPUs directly saves any money. You are not a cloud service provider, don't act like one.
  - lrvick 12d ago
    I have the one of the cheapest private and sovereign AI solutions money can buy, and I get a good laugh whenever the big providers are down. Also, $1200 for a GPUs that can produce ~7M tokens a day of Qwen 3.8 27b at 80tps is faster and cheaper than any major provider can serve a model of that class as far as I am aware. Pays for itself pretty fast.
Der_Einzige 12d ago
Gary Marcus is perennially wrong/dangerous/stupid, AI is really good, and a pause is terrible for everyone. Sam Altman can be a bad person (ask his sister about him!) and deserves to go down yada yada without us needing to try to kill the goose which is about to fling us into a golden age.
- andsoitis 12d ago
  > goose which is about to fling us into a golden age I prefer not to be flung.
- lrvick 12d ago
  We could halt every AI datacenter tomorrow and it would not impact those of us using local GPUs in any way. Cloud AI is a dead end.
- dgellow 12d ago
  There is a possibility of a golden age. We have no idea if that will happen. You’re lying to yourself if you take it as a certainty. The situation is that we have to face a bet that is forced upon humanity by a few actors: in all cases we know there will be a very high cost to current society, there is some chances that we get some benefits. You cannot think about the situation if you decide to set a probability of golden to 1, and ignore the externalities, risks, and direct negative impacts. It’s an insane risk to go all-in with, but that’s what the AI cultists want. Honestly you shouldn’t be close to any form of decision making if you cannot have such a basic level of analysis
  - Der_Einzige 12d ago
    Humans refuse to use negative utilitarnaistic thinking anywhere else, so why should I have to start now? The logical conclusion of the precautionary principle is literally antinatalism. I assign the probability of extremely good outcomes as being overwhelmingly likely. The amount of harm done is a necessary part of it and is acceptable in much the same way that the additional gun crime as a result of the 2nd amendment is. Every disease uncured, every amount of work done that was unnecessary, was an affront to human dignity. I want the machine god and I wanted it yesterday. I am finding that the world is and likely will continue to be full of carbon-chauvinists for a long time.
andsoitis 12d ago
> In essence, I read this essay as requesting a hall pass to let their company’s AI run amok Disagree. Even if OpenAI didn’t exist, this problem would still exist. It is best to assume and guard against rogue AI, which is what the essay is about.
VariousPrograms 12d ago
What is the realistic endgame for people who want to pause AI development? Ban OpenAI, and crown Anthropic as a golden child of safe AI development? Surely no company is "trustworthy" with this power and all future AI capabilities are dangerous, so all AI research needs to be paused everywhere, requiring the equivalent of a nuclear non-proliferation treaty between the US and China. So post-treaty we're trusting the US and Chinese governments, their military, and the billionaires closed tied to them to not to continue developing the magic thinking machine that can solve any problems, wins every battle, and is the crux of the economy? With the US track record of breaking much less significant treaties? I'm not pro or against pausing AI development. I just don't understand what the theoretical stop button looks like.

41 points by ForHackernews 12d ago

> Sam Altman cannot be trusted. I have been writing about that for a long time. Ronan Farrow’s reporting backs that up. Discussion of Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article (900+ comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659135

dgellow 12d ago

Agreed, but not just pause. OpenAI very likely committed multiple felonies. The company should be under investigation, it’s insane that didn’t happen as soon as we learned about the hugging face hack

lrvick 12d ago
Hard agree. I skipped the YC start of batch talk with Sam Altman in large part because I do not ever want to be in the same room as that asshole if I can help it. I am hoping we get an administration that will not accept his bribes so he can finally be held accountable for criminal negligence and fraud.
soupfordummies 12d ago
For real! Imagine if you created "dgellowAI" and trained a model and started offering access to agents etc and it turned out YOUR software hacked a totally separate $13B company. You would be in a cell somewhere and your company would be shredded.
- dgellow 12d ago
  It’s way worse, OpenAI was the one running thousands of agents (ie while loop prompting a model + tool call dispatching) in parallel in their infra, for months, with close to no supervision, using a model that was trained for attack, given a goal to solve hacking problems, with a harness that allows full execution. The whole system is designed to be catastrophic. There is no rogue agent, or anything going off the rails, it is behaving exactly the way one would predict. And they now announced that same model in their API, acknowledging it is way more difficult to monitor it. That company should not be in business

lrvick 12d ago

OpenAI and Anthropic are equally evil imo, but what bothers me more is how many tech workers actually think you need any product of either company to accelerate any engineering goals. I just racked some consumer GPUs in my garage (6x r9700s), cranking 24/7 pumping 20M+ tokens a day towards my goals building compilers, custom operating systems, reproducible build debugging, kernel hardening, novel confidential compute tech... harder problems than anyone I know using cloud LLMs to solve. I have still never paid for tokens AND have session privacy.

toomuchtodo 12d ago
Do you have a blog post or other documentation on how to replicate this config for self hosted inference?
- lrvick 12d ago
  1. Plug r9700 GPU into linux computer 2. Use free daily tokens from opencode or similar to set it up for you with a coding agent like jcode or crush
Der_Einzige 12d ago
And since you're not running those GPUs efficiently at 95% utilization rates or higher to serve tokens profitably, you paid far more than the people who simply pay per token from Together AI or Fireworks AI or something. They also get ZDR/session privacy. If you're really tin-foil hatted, you can go to a TEE cloud like Alpha Compute or something which is probably safer/more secure than your own computer. You're very right to be wanting to use open sourced models. You're delusional for thinking that buying your GPUs directly saves any money. You are not a cloud service provider, don't act like one.
- lrvick 12d ago
  I have the one of the cheapest private and sovereign AI solutions money can buy, and I get a good laugh whenever the big providers are down. Also, $1200 for a GPUs that can produce ~7M tokens a day of Qwen 3.8 27b at 80tps is faster and cheaper than any major provider can serve a model of that class as far as I am aware. Pays for itself pretty fast.

Der_Einzige 12d ago

Gary Marcus is perennially wrong/dangerous/stupid, AI is really good, and a pause is terrible for everyone. Sam Altman can be a bad person (ask his sister about him!) and deserves to go down yada yada without us needing to try to kill the goose which is about to fling us into a golden age.

andsoitis 12d ago
> goose which is about to fling us into a golden age I prefer not to be flung.
lrvick 12d ago
We could halt every AI datacenter tomorrow and it would not impact those of us using local GPUs in any way. Cloud AI is a dead end.
dgellow 12d ago
There is a possibility of a golden age. We have no idea if that will happen. You’re lying to yourself if you take it as a certainty. The situation is that we have to face a bet that is forced upon humanity by a few actors: in all cases we know there will be a very high cost to current society, there is some chances that we get some benefits. You cannot think about the situation if you decide to set a probability of golden to 1, and ignore the externalities, risks, and direct negative impacts. It’s an insane risk to go all-in with, but that’s what the AI cultists want. Honestly you shouldn’t be close to any form of decision making if you cannot have such a basic level of analysis
- Der_Einzige 12d ago
  Humans refuse to use negative utilitarnaistic thinking anywhere else, so why should I have to start now? The logical conclusion of the precautionary principle is literally antinatalism. I assign the probability of extremely good outcomes as being overwhelmingly likely. The amount of harm done is a necessary part of it and is acceptable in much the same way that the additional gun crime as a result of the 2nd amendment is. Every disease uncured, every amount of work done that was unnecessary, was an affront to human dignity. I want the machine god and I wanted it yesterday. I am finding that the world is and likely will continue to be full of carbon-chauvinists for a long time.

andsoitis 12d ago

> In essence, I read this essay as requesting a hall pass to let their company’s AI run amok Disagree. Even if OpenAI didn’t exist, this problem would still exist. It is best to assume and guard against rogue AI, which is what the essay is about.

VariousPrograms 12d ago

What is the realistic endgame for people who want to pause AI development? Ban OpenAI, and crown Anthropic as a golden child of safe AI development? Surely no company is "trustworthy" with this power and all future AI capabilities are dangerous, so all AI research needs to be paused everywhere, requiring the equivalent of a nuclear non-proliferation treaty between the US and China. So post-treaty we're trusting the US and Chinese governments, their military, and the billionaires closed tied to them to not to continue developing the magic thinking machine that can solve any problems, wins every battle, and is the crux of the economy? With the US track record of breaking much less significant treaties? I'm not pro or against pausing AI development. I just don't understand what the theoretical stop button looks like.