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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?

#241

Post by strikelaserclaw »

nickv wrote: post #218
Cacti wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did compromise. The creation of the for-profit and Sam being brought in WAS the compromise. Sam eventually decided that was inconvenient for him, so he stopped abiding by it, because at the end of the day he is just another greedy VC guy and when push came to shove he chose the money, not OpenAI. And this is the result.

Sam literally has 0 equity in OpenAI. How did he “choose money”?

Who knows how these shady deals go, even SBF claimed effective altruism. Maybe Sam wasn't in it for the money but more for "being the man", spoken of in the same breath as steve jobs, bill gates etc... for building a great company. Building a legacy is a hell of a motivation for some people, much more so than money.

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

#242

Post by mensetmanusman »

nradov wrote: post #229
convexstrictly wrote: post #13

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

The funny thing is that so far OpenAI has made zero demonstrable progress toward building a true AGI. ChatGPT is an extraordinary technical accomplishment and useful for many things, but there is no evidence that scaling up that approach will get to AGI. At least a few more major breakthroughs will probably be needed.

It’s impossible to predict.

No one predicted feeding LLMs more GPUs would be as incredibly useful as it is.

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

#243

Post by manyoso »

reactordev wrote: post #174
andrewstuart wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pure hero worship based on nothing. Dude got himself fired and the board accused him of lying.

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

#244

Post by MVissers »

spacemadness wrote: post #164
gnulinux wrote: post #39

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.

We barely understand the human brain, but sure we’re super close to AGI because we made chat bots that don’t completely suck anymore. It’s such hubris. Are the tools cool? Undoubtedly. But come down to earth for a second. People have lost all objectivity.

Objectively speaking, we’re talking exponential growth in both compute and capabilities year over year.

Do you have any data that shows that we’ll plateau any time soon?

Because if this trend continues, we’ll have superhuman levels of compute within 5 years.

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

#245

Post by manyoso »

cj wrote: post #108
SilverSlash wrote: post #87

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?

Or maybe he was a "manager" who took the credit

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

#246

Post by icelancer »

user432678 wrote: post #240
icelancer wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, and then they will do what? Type the model learning data by memory? Run stolen python scripts? How exactly this hardware supposed to be used?

What do you think Brockman did as co-founder of OpenAI, exactly?

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

#247

Post by Eji1700 »

malwarebytess wrote: post #196

Ilya Sutskever really seems to think AGI's birth is impending and likely to be delivered at OpenAI. From that perspective it makes sense to keep capital at arms length. Is there anything to his certainty? It doesn't feel like it's anywhere close.

My money, based on my hobby knowledge and talking to a few people in the field, is on "no fucking way".

Maybe he believes his own hype or is like that guy who thought ChatGPT was alive.

Maybe he's legit to be worried and has good reason to know he's on the corporate manhattan project.

Honestly though...if they were even that close I would find it super hard to believe that we wouldn't have the DoD shutting down EVERYTHING from the public and taking it over from there. Like if someone had just stumbled onto nuclear fission it wouldn't have just sat in the public sector. It'd still be a top secret thing (at least certain details).

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

#248

Post by dinobones »

andrewstuart wrote: post #197
dinobones wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>>He can't do it without Ilya or Ilya-lite. The wrongest thing I've read on HN for a long while. The world has alot more smart people in it than you realise, and Sam's rockstar profile gives him direct access to them.

How many people do you think are capable of pushing the state of the art in AI research?

There is a massive amount of tooling and infrastructure involved. You can't just get some Andrew Ng Coursera guy off the street and buy 50,000 H100s at your local Fry's electronics. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't even enough GPUs in the world for Altman to start a competitor in a reasonable amount of time.

I stand by my number, there are like 4 people in the world capable of building OpenAI. That is, a quality deep learning organization that pushes the state of the art in AI and LLMs.

Maybe you can find ~1,000 people in the world who can build a cheap knock-off that gets you to GPT3 (pre instruct) performance after about two years. But even that is no trivial effort.

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

#249

Post by strikelaserclaw »

synergy20 wrote: post #85

As far as I can tell, it eventually boils down to this: Ilya is jealous. After all Sam took all the spot lights away from him who actually made the model behind OpenAI. It's human nature. OpenAI can continue without Sam, but not without Ilya for the moment. On the other hand, Sam could have been a little more "humble".

I mean, maybe Ilya really believes that AGI will happen and should benefit all people not just rich / powerful.

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

#250

Post by ziyao_w »

I know the HN crows idolizes people like pg and sama, but so many people appear to not even know who Ilya Sutskever is makes me think somehow this isn't "hacker" news anymore.

Obviously sama is a very productive individual, but I would think obviously a research lab would have to keep one of the princes of deep learning at all costs. Somewhat reminds me of when John Romero got ousted by John Carmack at id - if you are doing really hard technical things, technical people would hold more sway.

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