A Year in Revulsion

OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead + Face Reveal

Author

AI For All
December 20, 2024

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Hello readers,

Welcome to the last edition of 2024. As the holidays encroach on our mundane lives, threatening to fill us with joy and wonder (yuck), let’s end the year with the tragic story of Suchir Balaji, a recap of all that has happened, and a vision for the future.

A Year in Revulsion

Face reveal

Now that you know who writes this newsletter, let’s begin by remembering Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI researcher turned whistleblower who was found dead in an apparent suicide. I had intended for this to be one of my more cheery newsletters given the approaching holidays, but alas, the universe waits for no one.

Suchir Balaji left OpenAI some months ago before publicly arguing in a blog post and in an interview with The New York Times that OpenAI violated U.S. copyright law. Balaji was named in a lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft that accused the companies of copyright infringement. An attorney for the Times requested that Balaji be added as a “custodian” in the lawsuit and described Balaji as someone with “unique and relevant documents” that could support their case.

The stakes here cannot be understated. Should The New York Times be victorious, the ensuing legal precedent would represent an existential threat to the generative AI industry. Since I don’t care to airdrop fuel on the wildfire of conspiracy thinking that has deranged much of our political discourse, I’m not even going to mention how convenient Balaji’s death is for OpenAI. Do you see what I did there? I mentioned something by saying I wouldn’t mention it. That’s called paralipsis. The more you know.

What better way to end the year than to recap all that has happened, such as the viral case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome that afflicted our tech billionaires or the predictable plateauing of LLMs that rendered a global AI race entirely pointless, torching hundreds of billions of dollars in the process. Never again let it be said that there isn’t enough budget for fair wages and good working conditions. It’s hard to see how this can go on. Without real breakthroughs, the AI industry’s best days are probably behind it.

Many imagine AI to be the wild card that could potentially course correct our unsustainable civilization instead of AI being the ultimate manifestation of our unsustainable civilization. If I see generative AI as such an opportunity cost, then what do I propose as an alternative? I suspect training neural networks on massive amounts of data will always fall short — regardless of architecture. I am in alignment with the computer scientist Joscha Bach, that emulating nature by starting with consciousness could birth machines that learn like we do but with none of the limitations of a mushy brain confined to the skull of a primate. Also, no, I am not Joscha Bach. As you saw in my picture, I am a cheerful, non-threatening man of pale complexion.

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Source: AI For All

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