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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?

#101
post #5

I wonder if Sam knew he was going to lose this power struggle and then started working on an exit plan with people loyal to him behind the boards back. The board then finds out and rushes to kick him out ASAP to stop him from using company resources to create a competitor.

There is no way Sam doesn't have the street cred to do a raise and pull talent for a competitor. They made the decision for him.

(pleb who would invest [1], no other association)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306929

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

#102

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…

Sorry, what do you mean by "unknown -to-anyone"?

Ilya is a co-founder of OpenAI, the Chief Scientist, and one of the best known AI researchers in the field. He has also been touring with Sam Altman at public events, and getting highlights such as this one recently:

https://youtu.be/9iqn1HhFJ6c

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

#103

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.

It's like a religion for these people.

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

#104
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You are interpreting that as hostile and aggressive because you are reading into it

Uhh no, I'm seeing it as hostile and aggressive because the actual verbiage was hostile and aggressive, doubly so in the context of this being a formal corporate statement. You can pass the text into NLP sentiment analyzer and it too will come to the same conclusion.

It is also very telling that you are being very sarcastic and demeaning in your remarks as well to someone who wasn't even replying to you, which might explain why you might have seen the PR statement differently.

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

#106

Can anything actually back this up please? This twitter account is just posting stuff and then crediting "Sources".

"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

> probably the most well-known tech reporter

I imagine Walt Mossberg saying "hold my beer"

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

#107

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…

People don't know who Ilya is?

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

#108

My biggest question is: If Sam Altman starts a new company by next month, and him and Greg Brockman know all details of how GPT4/5 works, then what what will this mean for OpenAI's dominance and lead?

In other words, if SamA did it once, would $50 billion in funding enable him do it a 2nd time?

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

#109
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only thing GPT 4 is missing is the ability to recognize it needs to ask more questions before it jumps into a problem.

When you compare it to an entry level data entry role, it's absolutely AGI. You loosely tell it what it needs to do, step-by-step, and it does it.

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

#110
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…

ChatGPT blew the doors open on the AI arms race. Without Sam leading the charge, we wouldn't have an AI boom. We wouldn't have Google scrambling to launch catch up features. We wouldn't have startups raising 100s of millions, people talking about a new industrial revolution, llama (2), all the models on hugging face or any of the other crazy stuff that has come about in the past year.

Was the original launch of ChatGPT "safe?" Of course not, but it moved the industry forward immensely.

Swisher's follow up is even more eyebrow raising: "The developer day and how the store was introduced was in inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast. My bet: He’ll have a new company up by Monday."

What exactly from the demo day was "pushing too far?" We got a dall-e api, a larger context window and some cool stuff to fine tune GPT. I don't really see anything there that is too crazy... I also don't get the sense that Sam was cavalier about AI safety. That's why I am so surprised that the apparent reason for his ousting appears to be a boring, old, political turf war.

My sense is that there is either more to the story, or Sam is absolutely about to have his Steve Jobs moment. He's also likely got a large percentage of the OpenAI researcher's on his side.

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