Agreed. And even after you’ve plucked all the low-hanging fruit, the high-hanging fruit may still offer the greatest marginal gains, justifying putting effort into small-improvement optimizations. This is particularly true if there are high switching costs to transition between top priorities/values in a large organization. Even if OpenAI is sincere in its “capabilities and alignment go hand in hand” thesis, they may find that their association with Microsoft imposes huge or insurmountable switching costs, even when they think the time is right to stop prioritizing capabilities and start directly prioritizing alignment.
And of course, the fact that they’ve associated with business that cares for nothing but profit is another sign OpenAI’s priority was capabilities pure and simple, all along. It would have been relatively easy to preserve their option to switch to a capabilities priority if they’d remained independent, and I predict they will not be able to do so, could foresee this, and didn’t care as much as they cared about impressive technology and making money.
That doesn’t always mean that you can’t make big improvements, because the goal it was optimized for may not fit your goals.
Agreed. And even after you’ve plucked all the low-hanging fruit, the high-hanging fruit may still offer the greatest marginal gains, justifying putting effort into small-improvement optimizations. This is particularly true if there are high switching costs to transition between top priorities/values in a large organization. Even if OpenAI is sincere in its “capabilities and alignment go hand in hand” thesis, they may find that their association with Microsoft imposes huge or insurmountable switching costs, even when they think the time is right to stop prioritizing capabilities and start directly prioritizing alignment.
And of course, the fact that they’ve associated with business that cares for nothing but profit is another sign OpenAI’s priority was capabilities pure and simple, all along. It would have been relatively easy to preserve their option to switch to a capabilities priority if they’d remained independent, and I predict they will not be able to do so, could foresee this, and didn’t care as much as they cared about impressive technology and making money.