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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?

#91

Post by andrewstuart »

dannykwells wrote: post #76
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.

The most likely outcome at this stage IMO is Sam will start a new thing with a huge equity stake and just do it again.

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

#92

Post by fsckboy »

janejeon wrote: post #51
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? It's just another firing and being escorted out the door.

The wording is very clearly hostile and aggressive, especially for a formal statement, and the wording, again, makes it very clear that they are burning all bridges with Sam Altman, and it is very clear that 1. it was done extremely suddenly, 2. with very little notice or discussion with any other stakeholder (e.g. Microsoft being completely blindsided, not even waiting 30 minutes for the stock market to close, doing…

boards give reasons for transparency, and they said he had not been fully candid.

You are interpreting that as hostile and aggressive because you are reading into it what other boards have said in other disputes and whatever you are imagining, but if the board learned some things not from Altman that it felt they should have learned from Altman, less than candid is a completely neutral way to describe it, and voting him out is not an indication of hostility.

Would you like to propose some other candid wording the board could have chosen, a wording that does not lack candor?

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

#93

Post by strikelaserclaw »

eigenvalue wrote: post #63

I wonder how much of this was the influence of Hinton on his former student, Sutskever. I'm sure Sutskever respects Hinton above basically anyone out there and took Hinton's strong objections seriously. I think personally think it's a shame because this is all totally inevitable at this point, and if the US loses its leading position here because of this kind intentional hitting of the brakes, then I certainly don't…

why do you think one company will determine whether the us beats china in ai or not ? Like 75% of the authors i read on AI papers are Chinese, that should be far more alarming if you really are afraid of china getting ahead.

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

#94

Post by oivey »

thepasswordis wrote: post #83

This is genuinely frustrating. IF the stories are to be believed so far, the board of OpenAI, perhaps one of the most important tech companies in the world right now, was full of people who are openly hostile to the existence of the company. I don't want AI safety. The people talking about this stuff like it's a terminator movie are nuts. Strongly believe that this will be a lot like facebook/oculus ousting Palmer Lu…

What is Sam Altman going to do with a GPU? Find some engineers to use them I guess?

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

#95

Post by moralestapia »

sainez wrote: post #59
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.

It seems you are conflating OpenAI the non-profit, with OpenAI the LLC: https://openai.com/our-structure

No, that's the whole point, "AI for the benefit of humanity" and whatnot turned out to be a marketing strategy (if you could call it that).

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

#96

Post by EMIRELADERO »

thepasswordis wrote: post #83

This is genuinely frustrating. IF the stories are to be believed so far, the board of OpenAI, perhaps one of the most important tech companies in the world right now, was full of people who are openly hostile to the existence of the company. I don't want AI safety. The people talking about this stuff like it's a terminator movie are nuts. Strongly believe that this will be a lot like facebook/oculus ousting Palmer Lu…

From what I understand, the board doesn't want "AI safety" to be the core or even a major driving force. The whole contention sprung about because of sama's way of running the company ("ClosedAI", for-profit) at odds with the non-profit charter and overall spirit of the board and many people working there.

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

#97

Post by strikelaserclaw »

junofan wrote: post #89
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".

There’s no indication that any sort of discussion took place. Major stakeholders like Microsoft appear uninformed.

in a power struggle, you have to act quickly

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

#98

Post by aidaman »

gnulinux wrote: post #39
reducesuffering wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Haha yeah no I don't believe this. They're nowhere near AGI, even if it's possible at all to be there with the current tech we have, which is unconvincing. I don't believe professionals who work in biggest AI labs are spooked by GPT. I need more evidence to believe something like that sorry. It sounds a lot more like Sam Altman lied to the board.

GPT 4 is not remotely unconvincing. It is clearly more intelligent than the average human, and is able to reason in the exact same way as humans. If you provide the steps to reason through any concecpt, it is able to understand at human capability.

GPT 4 is clearly AGI. All of the GPTs have shown general intelligence, but GPT 4 is human-level intelligence.

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

#99

Post by Cacti »

yieldcrv wrote: post #29
woeirua wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t believable. You don’t fire a CEO and put out a press release accusing them of lying over Dev day. Unless he told them he wasn’t going to announce it and then did.

I dont get the impression that everyone involved was that mature, given Greg’s tweet I get the clout everyone has but this was to be a non profit that was already coup de tat into a for profit that grew extremely quickly into uncharted territory This isnt a multi decade old fortune 500 company with mature C-Suite and boards, it just masquerades as one with a stacked deck, which apparently is part of the problem

Right?! Anyone paying attention back when Sam was brought on is not surprised. Sam and his investors _were_ the coup. They took an org specifically set up to do open research for the good of humanity, and Sam literally did the opposite. He monetized the work, sold it, didn’t reinvest as promised, reduced transparency, and put the weights under lock and key. He rode in after the hard work had been done, took credit for it, and sold it to lol the fucking Borg of all people.

And many people here who should know better fell for it.

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

#100

Post by Bjorkbat »

I have a hard time believing this simply since it seems so ill-conceived. Sure, maybe Sam Altman was being irresponsible and taking risks, but they had an insanely good thing going for them. I'm not saying Sam Altman was responsible for the good times they were having, but you're probably going to bring them to an end by abruptly firing one of the most prominent members of the group, seeing where individual loyalties lie, and pissing off Microsoft by tanking their stock price without giving them any heads up.

I mean, none of this would be possible without insane amounts of capital and world class talent, and they probably just made it a lot harder to acquire both.

But what do I know? If you can convince yourself that you're actually building AGI by making an insanely large LLM, then you can also probably convince yourself of a lot of other dumb ideas too.

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