This is a collection of "OpenAI will boldly act in the abstract to provide air coverage for Texas leadership." With data centers under construction one would think they would have examples of successes or projects in progress available for reference. They'd claim credit if they had it so the silence is telling.

Big tech has consistently valued profit and growth above good stewardship; the onus is entirely on OpenAI to demonstrate that any of these claims aren't fluff with the projects that are already greenlit. When OpenAI presents plans to the communities prior to/alongside city counsels and drops the NDAs then there will be merit to this but our expectations should be somewhere between "super deep kola borehole" and "upper mantle".

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rayiner 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Building stuff is good stewardship. We complain about NIMBYs. But with a few relatively modest regulations data centers can be quite friendly. They don’t generate traffic, congestion, etc. They don’t strain school or police infrastructure. Basically need some noise regulations. But the NIMBYs will kill it.

	▲	alpha_squared 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		NIMBY is largely used for housing development discussions and to contort it in support of developing data centers is incredibly intellectually dishonest. If we're going to rebrand things to blur lines, I propose rebranding data centers to pedophile content hubs. The rest of your argument is full of similar cherry-picking for dishonest discourse.

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ertgbnm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah if they were so committed to doing good, you'd think the billions of dollars they have spent would bear some evidence of that by now.

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vrganj 5 hours ago | parent [-]

They must be "effective" "altruists".

The only way to do good is to first do all the bad and consolidate power, so you can then use all that power to do good, pinkie promise!

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mcmcmc 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Seems you’ve rustled some jimmies. I’ve always thought effective altruism was a nice way to rationalize insatiable greed.

	▲	cortesoft an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It has the exact same appeal and pitfalls as utilitarianism

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Centigonal 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Effective Altruism isn't very different from Randian objectivism.

	▲	nickff 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What do you mean by this? The two ideas/groups/perspectives seem completely unrelated.

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watwut 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I noticed the same thing about effective altruism. Its fans are really good at convincing themselves the most self-serving action amd goals are noble pursuits.

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godelski 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think that's the point. No one wants to be the villain in their own story. We all tell ourselves stories to paint ourselves as good. I don't think most people are evil, but I think most evil is created by people who have convinced themselves they are good.

So I see EA as a popular one of those stories. One that people can reinforce. Makes the world simpler than it actually is: climb the ladder, make money at whatever cost, there's no harm that you can do that can't be offset by giving it all away at the end. It is a vast over simplification and is inconsistent logic. If they used their own logic then they'd recognize helping people now also results in compounding effects. You fix the problems now, while they are small and manageable, rather than kicking the can down the road. Maintenance is a lot easier and cheaper than repair. But it also requires us to be nuanced and reflect on ourselves [0]

[0] there seems to be a great irony that those leading these big AI companies are not themselves able to deeply reflect on their own actions, yet ask the AI to. How can you design something that you aren't intimately familiar with?

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tclancy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’ve yet to hear of effective altruism from anyone less wealthy me. Seems to be weirdly lumped among the rich.

	▲	nickff 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		To be fair to its adherents (of which I am not one), the so-called philosophy espouses maximizing income, so that one can later allocate that wealth efficiently. Working in a low-earning field which directly provides aid to those in need would seem to violate a core precept of 'Effective Altruism'.