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Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

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Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#671

Honest question: Other than 1) Microsoft and 2) anyone building a product with the OpenAI api 3) OpenAI employees… …is OpenAI crashing a burning a big deal? This seems rather over hyped… everyone has an opinion, everyone cares because OpenAI has a high profile. …but really , alternatives to chatGPT exist now, and most people will be, really… not affected by this in any meaningful degree. Isn’t breaking the strangle h…

In time of Windows, around let's say mid 1990s, people thought Windows is irreplaceable.

Now turns out Linux is the workhorse everywhere for running workloads or consuming content. Almost every programming language (other than Microsoft's own SDKs) gets developed on Linux, has first class support for Linux and Windows is always an afterthought.

It has gone to that extent that to lure developers, Microsoft has to embed a Lunux in a virtual machine on Windows called WSL.

Local inference is going to get cheaper and affordable and that's for sure.

New models would also emerge.

So OpenAI doesn't seem to have an IP that can withstand all that IMHO.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#672
post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh hey there he is, cool. I had a typo in my search, I think. > That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post. Yes, almost as if "Lesswrong is a community blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality." > It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive. I don't think anybody either asked someb…

“The Sequences”? Yes, this doesn’t sound like a quasi-religious cult at all…

The message is that if you do math in your head in a specific way involving Bayes' theorem, it will make you always right about everything. So it's not even quasi-religious, the good deity is probability theory and the bad one is evil computer gods.

This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical", and then decide they need to spend their life fighting evil computer gods because the Bayes' theorem thing is weak to an attack called "Pascal's mugging" where you tell them an infinitely bad thing has a finite chance of happening if they don't stop it.

Also they invent effective altruism, which works until the math tells them it's ethical to steal a bunch of investor money as long as you use it on charity.

https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating

Bit old but still relevant.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want me to trust M$ in all this? Embrace, extend, extinguish. Fellow nerds, you really need to go into work on Monday and have a hard chat with your C levels and legal (Because IANAL). The question is: Who owns the output of LLM/AI/ML tooling? I will give you a hint, it's not you. Do you need to copyright what a CS agent says, no, you want them on script as much as possible. An LLM parroting your training data is…

Also, you might be given someone else’s proprietary IP, setting yourself up for a lawsuit.

If I grab something off GitHub, and the license there is GPL, but it was someone else's IP I do have some recourse and for my infraction.

In the case of an LLM handing it to me can I sue MS or OpenAI for giving out that IP, or is it on me for not checking first? Is any of this covered in the TOS?

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#674
post #592

Through all of this, no one has cogently explained why Altman leaving is such a big deal. Why would workers immediately quit their job when he has no other company, and does he even know who these workers are? Are these people that desperate to make a buck (or the prospect of big bucks)? It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting ou…

100% spot on.

The world is filled with Sam Altmans, but surely not enough Ilya Sutskevers.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this expected? Nearly everyone who joined post ChatGPT was primarily financially motivated. What is more interesting is how many of the core research team stays.

This. Very accurate. At the end of they day this is a battle between academics and capitalists and what they stand for. We generally know how this typically goes…

I don't see many academics indulge in sensationalist doomsaying. That's the real difference here. SETI wouldn't and couldn't seek grants by proposing to contact murderous aliens.

I think academics have a general faith in goodwill of intelligence.Benevolence may be a convergent phenomenon. Maybe the mechanisms of reason themselves require empathy and goodness

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one with the same name as the new CEO. Pretty straightforward. > Also lol "religious text", how dare people have didactic opinions. That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post. It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive.

Oh hey there he is, cool. I had a typo in my search, I think. > That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post. Yes, almost as if "Lesswrong is a community blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality." > It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive. I don't think anybody either asked someb…

Well, Berkeley isn't exactly San Francisco, but joining cults is all those people get up to there. Some are Buddhist, some are Leverage, some are Lesswrong.

The most recent case was notably in the Bahamas though.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#678
post #488

This will be an interesting test to see how fast you can bootstrap GPT-4 level performance with unlimited funds and talent that already has deep knowledge of the internals. With the initial adoption of ChatGPT alongside Copilot, OpenAI's data moat of crawled data & RLHF is pretty vast. And that's not leaving the walled garden of OpenAI. You can simulate a lot of this using other off-the-shelf LLMs (see Alpaca) but no…

Many of OpenAIs most talented people left to start Anthropic. They have billions in funding and have not yet got particularly close to GPT-4. I think that illustrates it will be a be a big uphill battle for any new entrant no matter how well funded or resourced.

The parent post is literally true yet keeps getting downvoted — what a mess HN has become, too

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Yes Microsoft uses OpenAI APIs. What is the point you're trying to make beyond that? It's still OpenAI software.

Microsoft doesn't "use" the APIs, they host them on their own servers and have a license to do so and re-license to Azure users. If something goes wrong with OpenAI (given that it sounds like many key employees are leaving), Azure will stay up and you can keep using the APIs from MS.

That may provide short term stability, but medium term (which in this field is a few months) how will Azure's offering move forward if OpenAI is in such crisis? I guess it really comes down to OpenAI's ability to continue without Altman and Co. I don't believe that Microsoft's license allows them to independently develop the models? Wouldn't this become a stale fork pretty quickly while the rest of the industry moves on (llama2 etc ..)?

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#680
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death. The default consequence of AGI's arrival is doom. Aligning a super intelligence with our desires is a problem that no one has solved yet. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." ---- Listen to Dwarkesh Podcast with Eliezer or Carl Shulman to know more about this.

I like science fiction too, but all of these potential scenarios seem so far removed from the low level realities of how these systems work. I'm not suggesting we don't see ASI in some distant future, maybe 100+ years away. But to suggest we're even within a decade of having ASI seems silly to me. Maybe there's research I haven't read, but as a daily user of AI, it's hilarious to think people are existentially concer…

> I like science fiction too, but all of these potential scenarios seem so far removed from the low level realities of how these systems work.

Today, yes. Nobody is saying GPT-3 or 4 or even 5 will cause this. None of the chatbots we have today will evolve to be the AGI that everyone is fearing.

But when you go beyond that, it becomes difficult to ignore trend lines.

Here's a detailed scenario breakdown of how it might come to be –https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/carl-shulman

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