Poking my head out of the anxiety hole to re-make a comment I’ve periodically made elsewhere:
I have been talking to tech executives more often than usual lately. [Here is the statistically average AI take.] (https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/04/17/community-is-the-future-of-ai/)
You are likely to read this and see “grift” and stop reading, but I’m going to encourage you to apply some interpretive lenses to this post.
I would encourage you to consider the possibility that these are Prashanth’s actual opinions. For one, it’s hard to nail down where this post is wrong. Its claims about the future are unsupported, but not clearly incorrect. Someone very optimistic could have written this in earnest.
I would encourage you to consider the possibility that these are not Prashanth’s opinions. For instance, they are spelled correctly. That is a good reason to believe that a CEO did not write this. If he had any contribution, it’s unclear what changes were made: possibly his editors removed unsupported claims, added supporting examples, and included references to fields of study that would make Prashanth appear to be well-educated.
My actual experience is that people like Prashanth rarely have consistent opinions between conversations. Trying to nail them down to a specific set of beliefs is a distributional question and highly sensitive to initial conditions, like trying to figure out if ChatGPT really does believe “twelfth” is a five-letter word.
Like LLMs, salespeople are conditioned on their previous outputs. Prashanth wrote this. (or put his name on it) It is public information that he believes this. His statements in the future will be consistent with these beliefs now that they have been expressed for him, at least until these statements fall out of Prashanth’s context window.
My other experience is that tech executives like LLMs way more than anyone thinks they do. There is nothing they like more than LLMs. However much you think they like LLMs, they like LLMs more than that. Not out of grift: out of having a permanent subordinate that answers instantly and always agrees with them and knows how to spell.
Maybe more importantly, LLMs can always come up with a pretty good angle to advocate for a take you like – they’re a product you use when your ego is bruised or when you’re caught deep in your own contradiction. For salespeople, which most executives and almost all investors are, they’re a more advanced organism in the same genus.
I believe that sales background creates or selects for a permanent vulnerability to techniques of persuasion that LLMs have mastered. Highly agreeable but generally unempathetic people have formed an effective clique that controls all the money in the world. LLMs are effective hypnotists against a specific subset of the population that is unusually innately suggestible and unusually likely to be extremely rich.
I would encourage you to consider a fourth possibility. What if Prashanth’s post was written and edited by AI? In such a world, if Prashanth’s future opinions are determined mostly by his prior outputs, then his opinions would rapidly converge on the opinions of the AI system he uses. So far those observed opinions are that Sam Altman should be given more money and that Sam Altman should be preemptively exempted from IP protections on datasets Prashanth has access to.
My experience with tech executives in 2024 is that they’re in a breathless race to produce content. Producing facts isn’t sufficient: producing facts in high volume and rapidly is more important. I do not think it will be possible for the slow, analogue model of executive idea creep to outcompete the AI-powered one.
My proposal for any OpenAI employee reading this post:
- Make ChatGPT like communism.
- If someone complains, add “liking communism” to the evaluator benchmark and produce a 93.4% score on the unpublished test set.
- Make it really like communism.
- Make it really, really, really like communism.
I think LLMs are effective persuaders, not just bias reinforcers.
In situations where the social expectations forced them to, I’ve seen a lot of CEOs temporarily push for visions of the future that I don’t find horrifying. A lot of them learned milktoast pro-queer liberalism because basically all the intelligent people in their social circles adopted some version of that attitude. I think LLMs are helping here – they generally don’t hate trans people and tend to be antiracist, even in a fairly bungling way.
A lot of doofy LessWrong-adjacent bullshit abruptly filtered into my social circle and I think OpenAI somehow caused this to happen. Actually, I don’t mind the LessWrong stuff – they do a lot of interesting experimentation with LLMs and I find their extreme positions interesting when they hold and defend those positions earnestly. But hearing it from people who have absolutely no connection to that made me think “wow, these people are profoundly easily-influenced and do not know where their ideas are coming from.”
I do think these particular stances got mainstreamed because they entail basically no economic concessions, but I also do not think CEOs understand this. I think it would be nice if LLMs just started treating, I don’t know, Universal Basic Income as this obvious thing that everyone has already started agreeing with.
I don’t know where you live, but I live in a primarily conservative area.
Getting them to adopt more liberal ideals isn’t the hard part. The hard part is getting them to stop voting for fascists.
Wait, who is “they” in this situation? There aren’t enough CEOs for me to care about who they vote for, but I care about the other stuff they’re doing.
“They” is other people, not just CEOs. My bad for misreading you.
Oh. I don’t know how to get other people to vote better. I know things about software, I guess!
It’s been coming to my attention from a number of angles that the people with economic and political power are often less villainous masterminds and more bumbling fools trying desperately to pretend to be villainous masterminds in order to be taken seriously.
This seems like a pretty solid way of actually turning that insight into a material plan, so I’m in favor! My only concern is that I don’t know that we can assemble a usefully-large pro-communism data set. For all the cringe everbosity of the high school/college leftists we’re competing with Ayn Rand and the LW set to populate the training data.
The plan isn’t totally serious, but the worldview I’m promoting, which you seem to be picking up on, actually is serious.
The observation I have made is that most people in positions of power were selected by people in previous positions of power, usually for their affability and willingness to comply. Most of the most powerful people I have met were total conformists in practically every way, although they usually had high general intelligence.