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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?

#291

Post by mvkel »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #279
mvkel wrote: post #158

Sam wanted to commercialize stuff to shoot for revenue. Ilya wants to keep pushing for gpt 4.5 and beyond, to hell with the revenue. Ilya won the argument, Sam out. Hell yeah. It's not safetyism vs accelerationism. It's commercialization vs innovation.

Commercialization is innovation. Without it they will end up with a cute toy and a bankrupt company.

Eventually, sure. Right now, today, they have a blank check for compute and all the money they could ask for. It's not the time to try to monetize if AGI is the mission. Complete distraction

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

#292

Post by dannykwells »

dinobones wrote: post #248
andrewstuart wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

Did you see Greg Brockmann also quit? Who do you think has contributed more to OpenAI code base??

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

#293

Post by 015a »

mvkel wrote: post #158

Sam wanted to commercialize stuff to shoot for revenue. Ilya wants to keep pushing for gpt 4.5 and beyond, to hell with the revenue. Ilya won the argument, Sam out. Hell yeah. It's not safetyism vs accelerationism. It's commercialization vs innovation.

OpenAI's mission statement is "Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity".

How does an LLM App Store advance OpenAI toward this goal? Like, even in floaty general terms? You can make an argument that ChatGPT does (build in public, prepare the world for what's coming, gather training data, etc). You can... maybe... make an argument that their API does... but I think that's a lot harder. The App Store product, that's clearly just Sam on auto-pilot, building products and becoming totally unaligned with the nonprofit's goal.

OpenAI got really good at building products based around LLMs, for B2B enterprise customers who could afford it. This is so far away from the goal that, I hope, Ilya can drive them back toward it.

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

#294

Post by MVissers »

Cacti wrote: post #215
cuuupid wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh this reads a lot like Ilya thinking he’s Tony Stark and his (still impressive) language model is somehow the same as an iron man suit. Which is arrogance to the point of ignorance, reality isn’t that romantic. I can only hope this doesn’t turn into OpenAI trying to gatekeep multimodal models or conversely everyone else leaving them in the dust.

you seem to have confused the two. Sam’s entire reason for being there was to decrease transparency, make open research proprietary, and monetize it.

Don’t forget regulatory capture, lobbying with congress to decrease competition so only the deepest pockets can work on these things.

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

#295

Post by scrps »

epistasis wrote: post #236
scrps wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

I typically interpret "pissing match" to be a power struggle based off of competition unrelated to the core business. It sounds like the "disagreement" you are responding to asserts the exact opposite of that. Are you saying that there can be no credibility to the assertion that there were substantive differences about the non-profit nature of OpenAI?

You can dress it up however you'd like, quite frankly I enjoy the show regardless of being right or wrong. The point is they made it a show. If I were say a senator I might be having second thoughts of putting "AGI" (it really is a useful boogeyman!) in their hands.

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

#296

Post by chpatrick »

brigadier132 wrote: post #284
chpatrick wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the guy running the company that's got the closest to AGI, one of the top experts in his field, knows more about what the dangers are, yes. Especially if they have something even scarier that they're not telling people.

There is no secret hidden "scary" AGI hidden in their basement. Also, speculating at the "damage" true AGI can cause is not that difficult and does not require a phd in ML.

How would we know? They sat on GPT4 for 8 months.

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

#297

Post by KerrAvon »

jprete wrote: post #233
gizmo wrote: post #20

Ousting sama and gdb over something as petty as a simple strategy disagreement is totally unprofessional. sama got accused of serious misconduct. Even if he was too eager to commercialize OpenAIs tech that doesn't come close to justifying this circus act.

Strategy disagreements are absolutely central reasons to fire executives.

But you don’t accuse of them of lying on the way out because you have a strong disagreement. That’s a guaranteed ticket to a very expensive lawsuit.

Either there’s more to it or the board is staffed by very naive people.

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

#298

Post by lucubratory »

moralestapia wrote: post #276
lucubratory wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kara's reporting on motive: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028?t... Kara's reporting on who is involved: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294?t... Confirmation of a lot of Kara's reporting by Ilya himself: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725717129318560075?t... Ilya felt that Sam was taking the company too far in the direction of profit seeking, more than was nece…

I saw those tweets as well. Those are rumours at this point. The only thing that is real is the PR from OpenAI and the "candid" line is quite ominous. sama brought the company to where it is today, you don't kick out someone that way just because of misaligned interests. I'm on the side that thinks that sama screwed up badly, putting OpenAI in a (big?) pickle and breaking ties with him asap is how they're trying to c…

They're not rumours, they are reporting from the most well-known and creditable tech journalist in the world. The whole point of journalism and her multi-decade journalistic career is that when she reports something like that, we can trust that she has verified with sources who would have actual knowledge of events that it is the case. We should always consider the possibility that her sources were wrong, but that's incredibly unlikely now that Ilya gave an all hands meeting (that I linked you) which confirmed a majority of this reporting.

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

#299

Post by woeirua »

aliston wrote: post #138
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.

This is actually a semi-plausible angle. Given Sam's personality, I could see a scenario where there was disagreement about whether something in particular would be announced at demo day. He may have told some people he would keep in under wraps, but ended up going forward with it anyway. I don't understand how that escalates to the point that he gets fired over it, though, unless there was something deeper implied b…

It’s not a big enough issue for a normal board to fire the CEO over. Now maybe Ilya made a power play as a result, but that would be insane.

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

#300

Post by blovescoffee »

hilux wrote: post #125
strikelaserclaw wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Research from PRC (across all of science, not specific to AI) has a terrible reputation. They are rewarded for sheer quantity. You can easily find many articles discussing this phenomenon. So the volume of Chinese AI papers says little to nothing about their advancements in the field.

I regularly read really good papers that come out of China. For instance, there's great CV work out of China.
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