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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?

#431

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

ryandrake wrote: post #390
clnq wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite gauche for a company to burn bridges with their upper management. This bodes poorly for ever hoping to attract executives in the future. Even Bobby Kotick got a more graceful farewell from Activision Blizzard, where they tried to clear his name. It is only prudent business. Certainly, this is very immature. It wouldn't be out of context in HBO's Succession. Whether what happened is right or just in some s…

People get fired all the time: suddenly, too. If I got fired by my company tomorrow, they wouldn't treat me with kid gloves, they'd just end my livelihood like it was nothing. I'd probably find out when I couldn't log in. Why should "upper management" get a graceful farewell? We don't have royalty in the USA. One person is not inherently better than another.

Because upper management have more power than you or I. If either of us were fired, it's unlikely to be front page news all over the world.

It sucks, but that's the world we live in, unfortunately.

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

#432

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

015a wrote: post #269
Bjorkbat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AGI is existential. That's the whole point, I think. If they can get to AGI, then building an LLM app store is such a distraction along the path that any reasonable person would look back and laugh at how cute an idea it was, despite how big or profitable it feels today.

Sure, but you need money for compute to get to AGI, so selling stuff is a well accepted way of getting money.

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

#433

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

mvkel wrote: post #355
anon291 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI's mission statement is "Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity". Well an app store let's people... use it. Look at UNIX. UNIX systems are great. They have produced great benefit to the world. Linux, as the most common Unix-like OS, also does. However, most people do not run any of the academic 'innovative' distros. Most people run the most commercialized version you can possibly think of Android and…

The thing is custom gpts are not useful. They are repackaged system prompts meant for non techy people. They were a distraction from the mission of OpenAI (a non profit). The commercial arm is a capped profit company anyway

NVIDIA don't take payment in research papers, unfortunately.

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

#434

Post by tucnak »

jzl wrote: post #341
smharris65 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some insider details that seem to agree with this: https://www.reddit.com/user/Anxious_Bandicoot126/

Wow, all the comments and responses to that person's comments are a gold mine. Not saying anything should be taken as gospel, either from that poster or the people replying. But certainly a lot of food for thought.

Reads like lesswrong fan-fiction

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

#435

Post by capableweb »

MVissers wrote: post #301
capableweb wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is OpenAI's current success attributed more to its excellent business and startup management, or does it stem from its superior technology and research that surpasses what others have developed?

Both IMO. The first leads to attractong world-class talent that can do the second. Until you go off the rails and the second kicks you out it seems.

You don't think already starting with world-class talent (Sutskever, Karpathy, Zaremba and more being part of the founding team) lead to OpenAI being able to get more world-class talent, rather than world-class talent joining because of Altman?

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

#437

Post by PartiallyTyped »

edgyquant wrote: post #386
HlessClaudesman wrote: post #366

Here's my preferred theory, it's a tale as old as time. Sam Altman, like Icarus, flew too close to Microsoft's giant pot of money. He pivoted the company away from it's founding mission, unleashing the very djinn they originally set out to harness. Turns out there were people at OpenAI who really believed in the original vision.

I hope this is the truth, it would give me a little more faith in humanity than I currently have

The 4 board members still there are all pro-safety and alignment, so it seems likely.

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

#438

Post by janejeon »

racketcon2089 wrote: post #363
janejeon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 deme…

When you look at the written word and find yourself consistently imputing clear intent which is hostile, aggressive, sarcastic, and demeaning which no one else but you sees, a thoughtful person would begin to introspect.

Again, I'm not sure why you and the other person are just out for blood and keep trying to make it personal, but you can clearly feed it into NLP/ChatGPT and co and even the machines will tell you the actual wordings are aggressive.

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

#439

Post by clnq »

watwut wrote: post #412
clnq wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mature, as in the opposite of ingenuous. It does no good to harm a company further. Kotick did enough damage, he left, all that needed to be said about him was said, tirelessly. Every effort to get him to offer some reparations - expended. So what was there to gain from the company speaking ill of their past employee? What was even left to say? Nothing. No one wants to work in an organization that vilifies its own pe…

> Mature, as in the opposite of ingenuous To tell it in an exaggerated way, maturity should not imply sociopathy or completely disregard for everything. Obviously I am referring here to Kottick situation. But, the definition where it is immature to tell the truth and mature to enable powerful bad players is wrong definition of maturity.

I respect your belief that maturity involves elevating morality above corporate sagacity. It is noble.

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

#440

Post by GaunterODimm »

eigenvalue wrote: post #63

I wonder how much of this was the influence of Hinton on his former student, Sutskever. I'm sure Sutskever respects Hinton above basically anyone out there and took Hinton's strong objections seriously. I think personally think it's a shame because this is all totally inevitable at this point, and if the US loses its leading position here because of this kind intentional hitting of the brakes, then I certainly don't…

I don't know if it's bad or good for the long-term interests of the humankind, but right now it feels like a Klaus Fuchs moment.
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