Probably the wrong venue for this sentiment, but it is incredible that a principled, remarkably accomplished scientist was able to stop his creation from getting co-opted (for now anyway). If you listen to the No Priors interview with Sutskever, the contrast between him and Altman couldn’t be more clear, but it’s quite rare that the former ever wins out over the latter.
Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
171–180 of 518 posts
Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
#172I suppose OpenAI had two futures in front of it. It could devote its resources completely to building AGI or it could continue to split its resources to also commercialize its current LLM offerings.
Perhaps an internal struggle over those futures was made public by CEO Altman at dev day. By publicly announcing new commercial features he may have attempted to get his way by locking the company into a strategy that wasn’t yet approved by the board. He can argue his role as CEO gave him that right. The response to that claim is to remove him from that role.
It will be interesting to see what remains of OpenAI as employees and investors interested in pure commercialization exit the company.
Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
#173US leadership in AGI race is under risk.
Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 will take Sam's calls in a heartbeat and personally ensure he has what he needs.
Exactly. Entire city blocks will be cleared for Sam. Anything he needs. Just give him a road.
Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry. Robust research says no. Remember, people thought Eliza was AGI too. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03762 If it was really AGI, there won't even be ambiguity and room for comments like mine.
It’s not AGI. But I’m not convinced we need a single model that can reason to make super powerful general purpose AI. If you can have a model detect where it can’t reason and pass off tasks appropriately to better methods or domain specific models you can get very powerful results. OpenAI already on the path to doing this with GPT
Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
no, I was replying to a comment that said it was a power struggle in which the board needed to act quickly before they lost power.
The board may very well have met for this very reason, or perhaps it was at this meeting that the lack of candor was found or discussed, but to hold a board meeting there is overhead, and if the board is already in agreement at the meeting, they vote.
It only seems sudden to outsiders, and that suddenness does not mean a "night of the long knives".
Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
#177This 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…
Palmer had some ridiculous perspectives. Don’t put that pos in the same bucket as Sam.
Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT was definitely not some visionary project led by Sam. They had a great LLM in GPT-3 that was hard to use because it wasn't instruction tuned, so the research team did InstructGPT and then took it even further and added RLHF to turn it into a proper conversational bot. The UI was a hacky interface on top of it that definitely got way more popular than they expected.
I don't know if it was led by Sam, and don't dispute that it may have been "hacky," but there is no denying it was a visionary project. Yes, other companies had similar models. I know Google, in particular, already had similar LLMs, but explicitly chose not to incorporate them into its products. Sam / OpenAI had the gumption to take the state of the art and package it in a way that it could be interacted with by the…
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Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sam is not an engineer. He can't do it without Ilya or Ilya-lite. And there are like 4 of those in the world.
Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
#180This 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 GP…
AI will decide our fate in a microsecond.