In the wake of this community's second major brush with a sketchy tech CEO named Sam, I'd like to offer two observations.
- Don't panic: 90% of EAs or alignment-friendly tech CEOs are good people. I don't know of anything bad Dario Amodei has done (knock on wood). This doesn't reflect a fundamental problem in EA or at AI companies.
- Corollary: 10% aren't.
After SBF, EAs panicked and began the ritual self-flagellation about what they should have done differently. For people who dropped the guy like a hot potato and recognized he was a psychopath: Not much. You think someone should've investigated him? Why? You investigate someone before you give them money, not before they give you money. I don't launch a full-scale investigation of my boss every time he sends me a paycheck.
But a substantial number of EAs spent the next couple of weeks or months making excuses not to call a spade a spade, or an amoral serial liar an amoral serial liar. This continued even after we knew he'd A) committed massive fraud, B) used that money to buy himself a $222 million house, and C) referred to ethics as a "dumb reputation game" in an interview with Kelsey Piper.
This wasn't because they thought the fraud was good; everyone was clear that SBF was very bad. It's because a surprisingly big number of people can't identify a psychopath. I'd like to offer a lesson on how to tell. If someone walks up to you and says "I'm a psychopath", they're probably a psychopath.
"But Sam Altman never said that. Could we really have predicted this a year ag—"
Clearly the quote was a joke, I don't think he actually did anything bad for AI safe—
While Sam Altman publicly claimed to support AI regulation, he was also spending millions of dollars killing any meaningful regulations.
Anyone would've done the same things, the incentives to race are—
"If my company doesn't do this thing that might destroy the world, I will lose a lot of money" is not a good defense for doing things that might destroy the world. In fact, doing unethical things for personal benefit is bad.
But did he do anything clearly unethical before—
For starters, he was fired from Y Combinator for abusing his position for personal profit.
Stop overthinking it: some people and organizations are unethical. Recognizing this and pointing out they're bad is helpful because it lets you get rid of them. It's not about getting angry at them; it's just that past behavior predicts future behavior. I wish Sam Altman the very best, so long as it's far away from any position of power where he can influence the future of humanity.
(In related advice, if a company builds an AI that is obviously violent and threatening towards you, you should probably go "Hmm, maybe this company will build AIs that are violent and threatening towards me" instead of finding a 12d chess explanation for why OAI is actually good for AI safety.)
The usefulness of the "bad people" label is exactly my point here. The fact of the matter is some people are bad, no matter what excuses they come up with. For example, Adolf Hitler was clearly a bad person, regardless of his belief that he was the single greatest and most ethical human being who had ever lived. The argument that all people have an equally strong moral compass is not tenable.
More than that, when I say "Sam Altman is a bad person", I don't mean "Sam Altman's internal monologue is just him thinking over and over again 'I want to destroy the world'". It means "Sam Altman's internal monologue is really good at coming up with excuses for unethical behavior".
Like:
I would like to state, for the record, that if Sam Altman pushes a "50% chance of making humans extinct" button, this makes him a bad person, no matter what he's thinking to himself. Personally I would just not press that button.