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Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

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Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#71

Post by solardev »

charcircuit wrote: post #23
crazygringo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This twitter account" is Kara Swisher, probably the most well-known tech reporter working right now. She has known essentially everyone in the tech world for decades at this point. Her sources are not only going to be legit, but she probably has more of them than literally anyone else in the tech world, so she can accurately corroborate information or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Swisher

That does not change the fact there are no sources. Knowing people does not mean you are never wrong, nor does it mean you will never twist a story.

Can we just accept it for what it is, a career journalist using anonymous sources a few hours after a major event? She's staking her reputation on this, and that means something.

It doesn't mean it's absolute truth. It doesn't mean it's a lie. Can we just appreciate her work, accept that maybe it's only 70% vetted right now, more likely true than not, but still subject to additional vetting and reporting later on?

It's still more information than we had earlier today. Sure, take it with a grain of salt and wait for more validation, but it's still work that she's doing. Not that different from a tech postmortem or scientific research or a political investigation... there's always uncertainty, but she's trying to get us closer to the truth, one baby step at a time, on a Friday night. I respect her for that, even as I await more information.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#72

Post by jackcosgrove »

I sometimes like to indulge my particular outlook on life and harp on the "MBA types", self-promoters, and flimflam men of the world blah blah blah, and think how everything would be better if the techno-philosophers were in charge. Frankly after I've sobered up from my self-indulgent flights of fancy, I know "those people" serve a very important role that I can't.

If this report is true, we're going to see a big rubber meets road event along these lines. I don't think this will end well for OpenAI.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#73

Post by 1letterunixname »

andrewstuart wrote: post #61

If Ilya unknown-to-anyone thinks people prefer him to Altman, he has another thing coming. I'm not an Altman fanboy, but anyone can see Altman is a rockstar and richt or wrong, that matters HUGELY to OpenAI. If it's truly about a power play then this will be undone pretty quick, along with the jobs of the people who made it happen. Microsoft has put a vast fortune into this operation and if Satya doesn't like this th…

It sounds like someone neutral from MSFT leadership needs/ed to moderate and bring people together before the wheels fell off.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#74

Post by [deleted] »

andrewstuart wrote: post #61

If Ilya unknown-to-anyone thinks people prefer him to Altman, he has another thing coming. I'm not an Altman fanboy, but anyone can see Altman is a rockstar and richt or wrong, that matters HUGELY to OpenAI. If it's truly about a power play then this will be undone pretty quick, along with the jobs of the people who made it happen. Microsoft has put a vast fortune into this operation and if Satya doesn't like this th…

[deleted]

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#75

Post by tkgally »

I didn’t have much sense of who Ilya Sutskever is or what he thinks, so I searched for a recent interview. Here’s one from the No Priors podcast two weeks ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0gTO2K85A

No clear clues about today’s drama, at least as far as I could tell, but still an interesting listen.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#76

Post by dannykwells »

andrewstuart wrote: post #61

If Ilya unknown-to-anyone thinks people prefer him to Altman, he has another thing coming. I'm not an Altman fanboy, but anyone can see Altman is a rockstar and richt or wrong, that matters HUGELY to OpenAI. If it's truly about a power play then this will be undone pretty quick, along with the jobs of the people who made it happen. Microsoft has put a vast fortune into this operation and if Satya doesn't like this th…

Completely agree. Sam is on the phone with Satya as we speak.

Alternative is Sam goes in house to MS who already have all the weights of GPT-4 and build again, but constrained by any existing charter.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#77

Post by moralestapia »

reducesuffering wrote: post #25
moralestapia wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bull. Shit. OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value. This is the same company that went from "non-profit" to "jk, lol, we are actually for-profit now". I still think that move was not even legal but rules for thee not for me. They ousted sama because it was bad for business. Why? We may never know, or we may know next week, who knows? Literally.

> OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value Clearly not, as Sama has no equity and a board of four people with little, if any, equity, just unilaterally decided to upend their status quo and assured $ printer, to the bewilderment of their $2.5T 49% owner, Microsoft.

>as Sama has no equity

Yeah and he got sacked.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#78

Post by fsckboy »

smoldesu wrote: post #49
strikelaserclaw wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When two people have different ideologies and neither is willing to backdown or compromise, one person must "go".

Or you introduce an authoritative third party that mediates their interactions. This feels like it wouldn't be a problem if so many high-ranking employees didn't feel so radically different about the same technology.

when did a board or CEO ever introduce an authoritative 3rd party to mediate between them? the board is the authoritative 3rd party.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#79

Post by LZ_Khan »

reducesuffering wrote: post #7
rcpt wrote: post #4

Wait this is just a corporate turf war? That's boring I already have those at work

No, this move is so drastic because Ilya, the chief scientist behind OpenAI, thinks Sam and Greg are pushing so hard on AGI capabilities, ahead of alignment with humanity, that it threatens everyone. 2/3 of the other board members agreed. Don’t shoot the messenger. No one else has given you a plausible reason why Sama was abruptly fired, and this is what a reporter said of Ilya: ‘He freaked the hell out of people the…

I trust the hell of a lot more in Ilya than Altman. Ilya is a scientist through and through, not a grifter.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#80

Post by aleph_minus_one »

akamaka wrote: post #48

[deleted]

I think I don't get your point entirely:

"We can still push on large language models quite a lot, and we will do that": this sounds like continuing working on scaling LLMs.

"We need another breakthrough. [...] pushing hard with language models won't result in AGI.": this sounds like Sam Altman wants to do additional research into different directions, which in my opinion does make sense.

So, altogether, your quotes suggest that Sam Altman wants to continue working on scaling LLMs for the short and middle term and parallely do research into different approaches that might lead to another step towards AGI. I cannot see how this planning could infuriate Ilya Sutskever.

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