What am I missing here?

"Civil War 1, 2, 3.... you never know,  so like,  which one you talkin' about?"   

"The Civil War. "

"Aight. So you wanna get technical."

It's not only ignorance, but the inability to think. It's actually quite sad to see.

Who's buried in Grant's tomb? The answers to that should be hilarious.

Q. How many people are on earth?

A. All of them.

Note ... Most of these folks have cell phones ... What am I missing here?

But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.” ― George Carlin

Our education system at work. Any questions?

It's all about the money/rev LX

Image by Getty / Futurism

About nine years ago, OpenAI seemed to a leading light in terms of AI and how it could benefit man in ways truly enlightening and cool as it was a non-profit appearing to have good intentions, eschewing money in the pursuit of research of the most powerful tech man has ever created. Well, that was not to be as OpenAI has been a rather questionable entity regarding ethics and the art of lying on the part of Sam Altman, the CEO of the company.

Sam Altman

More than six months after Sam Altman was fired, then rehired, one of OpenAI’s former board members is finally spilling the tea on what happened behind closed doors. Helen Toner, one of four people responsible for firing OpenAI’s CEO, says Altman’s incessant lying created a toxic culture that executives described as “psychological abuse.”

In her first long-form interview since Sam Altman’s firing, Toner tells The Ted AI Show that executives came to OpenAI’s board in October 2023 with serious allegations against the company’s CEO. According to Toner, two executives said they couldn’t trust Altman and showed the board screenshots of Altman’s manipulation and lying. These executives reportedly said they had no belief that Altman could or would change, and their testimonies pushed the Board to fire the CEO weeks later. This interview, released on Tuesday, comes after weeks of public backlash against OpenAI where the company’s truthfulness has been called into question by Scarlett Johansson and former employees.

It gets better.

Indeed, as Vice writer Chloe Xiang brilliantly put it, the current iteration of OpenAI is everything that the company once "promised not to be" — a pretty damn sleazy detail, especially considering that these are the folks who might just be the ones to bring AGI, if it's ever actually possible, into existence.

When the outfit launched back in 2015 — the brainchild of SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, alleged vampire-lite Peter Thiel, and Y Combinator co-creator Jessica Livingston, among other major industry players — it was open-source (hence the name) as well as firmly anti-profit, arguing that a revenue-dependant model would compromise the integrity of the tech.

"OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," reads OpenAI's introductory statement, published back in 2015. "Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact."

That statement almost reads a bit alien, considering where the firm is today. Corporate and fiscally motivated, moving with the familiar — and familiarly flawed — "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley approach, it's ventured so far from its original goal that even co-founder Elon Musk has become a vocal opponent of the company.

A looming presence

Now, the company needs more money.

OpenAI Admits It Needs Vastly More Money Than It Thought

Of course it does.

The former entirely-nonprofit-company known as OpenAI says it needs a boatload of more cash as it plans to transform its corporate structure to prioritize making money.

In an announcement Friday, the ChatGPT maker argued that by creating a for-profit corporation to control its commercial enterprises, it can make the dough it needs to keep up with other leading AI developers.

"The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies are now investing into AI development show what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission," OpenAI's board of directors wrote in a blog post.

"We once again need to raise more capital than we'd imagined," they continued. "Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need conventional equity and less structural bespokeness."

About a year ago, yours truly said Google would be the prime driver of AI because of Deep Mind and its deep connect into medical, imaging and science, along with possessing a data set larger than any other company due to its preeminent position as the premier search engine of the world. It seems this take may be right as OpenAI's showing cracks in its armor and it's about time.

Carlos Felipe Ramírez Mesa

Undercurrents

Capturing the wonders of winter's getting harder thanks to global warming but it can be done when polar vortexes are factored into the equation. CT got a brief one in December so winter did show up for a change. :)