Game theory 101 ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images

Back in 1983, probably the most realistic take on game theory, nerds, computers and nuclear war was,
IMHO, War Games where tech can go sideways if humans aren't in the loop.

 Now consider AI and the prospect of guys running said tech while having serious morality issues if the Futurism article titled OpenAI Staffers Horrified When Senior Leadership Hatched “Insane” Plan to Pit World Governments Against Each Other has "legs".

This anecdote of near comic-book-villainry comes from The New Yorker’s sweeping new investigation into CEO Sam Altman, which documents his alarming pattern of lying and manipulating to build his AI empire, a behavior that some insiders likened to that of an actual “sociopath.”

Altman’s second-in-command Greg Brockman features heavily. In 2017, according to the reporting, he hatched a geopolitical scheme which internally came to be known as the “countries plan.” Unimpressed by his ethics adviser’s suggestion to avoid a nuclear-like arms race by forming an international body to cooperate on AI safety, Brockman openly mused about playing world powers like China and Russia against each other, such as by starting a bidding war for its tech. According to the ethics adviser, Page Hedley, Brockman’s logic seemed to be, “It worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?”

“The premise, which they didn’t dispute, was ‘We’re talking about potentially the most destructive technology ever invented — what if we sold it to Putin?'” an exasperated Hedley told The New Yorker.

OpenAI’s then-policy director Jack Clark described it as a “prisoner’s dilemma, where all of the nations need to give us funding,” and that “implicitly makes not giving us funding kind of dangerous.”

A junior researcher recalled thinking at the meeting where the plan was discussed that it was “completely f*cking insane.”

And this ...

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images; Futurism

Every time yours truly listens to this guy, the word cringe comes to mind. Seems I'm not alone.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and the public face of ChatGPT, has carved out an image for himself as one of the preeminent AI whisperers of our age, whose influence supposedly extends to the White House on the strength of his ideas alone.

Or at least that’s the image he’s managed to cultivate. A new exposé in the New Yorker paints a different portrait, and it’s substantially more vexing. Drawing on interviews with numerous OpenAI insiders who worked with Altman, the article portrays the CEO not as a technical wiz, but as a skilled manipulator — and one with a surprisingly shallow grasp of the AI systems his company is building.

John Nash would find these musings modestly interesting. 

John Forbes Nash, Jr.

As a graduate student in the Princeton University Department of Mathematics, Nash introduced a number of concepts (including the Nash equilibrium and the Nash bargaining solution), which are now considered central to game theory and its applications in various sciences.