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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?

#141
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading about Ilya, it seems like he is fully bought into AI hysteria.

Did he buy into it after he took the money from Microsoft? Because it seems like there's no turning back after that point.

That must be it because obviously no knowledgeable person could honestly come to believe that the technology is dangerous.

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

#142
post #117

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…

Reading between lots of lines, one possibility is that Sam was directing this "insanely good thing" toward making lots of money, whereas the non-profit board prioritized other goals higher.

Sure, I get that, but to handle a disagreement over money in such a consequential fashion just doesn't make sense to me. They must have understood that to arrive in a position where they have to fire the CEO with little warning is going to have profound consequences, perhaps even existential ones.

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

#143

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…

Yeh I really wish they'd better articulate the "AI safety" directive in a way that is broader than deepfakes and nuclear/chemical winter. It feels like an easy sell to regulators. Meanwhile most of us are creating charming little apps that make day-to-day lives easier and info more accessible. The hand-wavey moral panic is a bit of a tired trope in tech.

Also.. eventually anyone will be able to run a small bank of GPUs and train models equally capable to GPT-4 in a matter of days so it's all kinda.. moot and hilarious. Everyone's chatting about AGI alignment, but that's not something we can lockdown early or sufficiently. Then embedded industry folks are talking about constitutional AI as if it's some major alignment salve. But if they were honest they'd admit it's really just a SYSTEM prompt front-loaded with a bunch of axioms and "please be a good boy" rules, and is thus liable to endless injections and manipulations by means of mere persuasion.

The real threshold of 'danger' will be when someone puts an AGI 'instance' in a fully autonomous hardware that can interact with all manner of physical and digital spaces. ChatGPT isn't going to randomly 'break out'. I feel so let down by these kinds of technically illfounded scare tactics from the likes of Altman.

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

#144
post #126

Sutskever: "You can call it (a coup), and I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity." Scoop: theinformation.com https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255

[dead]

It's really none of Microsoft's business, they invested knowing they wouldn't have a seat on the board.

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

#145

Sutskever: "You can call it (a coup), and I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity." Scoop: theinformation.com https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255

No one in this company is "consistently candid" about anything.

Yes, but Ilya is on the Board of Directors; and Sam is currently unemployed (although: not for long).

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

#146
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.

I kind of agree, but at the same time we can't be sure of what's going on behind the scenes. It seems that GPT-4 is a combination of several huge models with some logic to route the requests to the most apt models. Maybe an AGI would make more sense as a single, more cohese structure?

Also, the fact that it can't incorporate knowledge at the same time as it interacts with us kind of limits the idea of an AGI.

But regardless, it's absurdly impressive what it can do today.

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in a power struggle, you have to act quickly

I don't think it's that dramatic. In a board meeting, you have to act while the board is meeting. They don't meet every day, and it's a small rigamarole to pull a meeting together, so if you're meeting... vote.

are you suggesting they brought up a vote on a whim at a board meeting and acted on it same day

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

#148

These Kara Swisher's tweets aligns extremely closely with the following pseudonymous Reddit user Anxious_Bandicoot126 from 4 hours ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/17xoact/comment/k9p... > I feel compelled as someone close to the situation to share additional context about Sam and company. > Engineers raised concerns about rushing tech to market without adequate safety reviews in the race to capitalize o…

Or that Reddit post which has been circulating widely was the source for Kara’s tweets.

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

#149
post #114

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?

Even if sama and gdb raised $10B by early 2024, all of the GPU production capacity is already allocated years out. They'd have to buy some other company's GPUs at insane markups. And that's only on the hardware side.

Jensen/CoreWeave/Lambda/etc will ensure sama gets what he needs.

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

#150

What has me scratching my head is the fact that Altman has been on a world tour preaching the need for safety in AI. Many people here believed that this proselytizing was in part an attempt to generate regulatory capture. But given what's happening now, I wonder how much Altman's rhetoric served the purpose of maintaining a good relationship with Sutskever. Given that Altman was pushing the AI safety narrative public…

Altman was pushing that narrative because he’s a ladder kicker.

He doesn’t give a shit about “safety”. He just wants regulation that will make it much harder for new AI upstarts to reach or even surpass the level of OpenAI’s success, thereby cementing OpenAI’s dominance in the market for a very long time, perhaps forever.

He’s using a moral high ground as a cover for more selfish objectives, beware of this tactic in the real world.

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