Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down • Hacker News Board

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

#941

Post by bongodongobob » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:07 PM UTC

wg0 wrote: post #856

bongodongobob wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux isn't the workhorse in any business that isn't tech based. The dev bubble here is pretty strong. I've done IT for a couple MSPs now so I've seen 100s of different tech stacks. No one uses Linux for anything. ESXi for the hypervisors, various version of Windows server, and M365 for everything else. Graphics/marketing uses Macs sometimes but other than that, it's all Windows/MS. Seeing a Linux VM is exceeding rar…

True. You'll find Windows XP based terminals on many industrial machines. Its pervasive but outnumbered where "running the workloads" comea into picture. The dev bubble is not that small. This very website is I'm pretty sure not served from Windows. Other than stack overflow or few handful of exceptions, very little is actually served from Windows if I'm not wrong.

I'm consulting for a company with 5000 servers right now, and maybe a dozen run Linux. They've still got a few hundred Server 2008 boxes running with EoL licenses. We looked into migrating to Linux but it's not an option.

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

#942

Post by underlipton » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

jmerz wrote: post #699

bmitc wrote: 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…

I think he's not as known in the outside world but it's really difficult to understate the amount of social capital sama has in the inner circles of Silicon Valley. It sounds like he did a good job instilling loyalty as a CEO as well, but the SV thing means that the more connected someone at the company is to the SV ecosystem, the more likely they like him/want to be on his good side. This is kind of like the leaders…

>I think he's not as known in the outside world but it's really difficult to understate the amount of social capital sama has in the inner circles of Silicon Valley.

This definitely sounds like someone the average person - including the average tech worker, exceptionally income-engorged as they may be - would want heading the, "Manhattan Project but potentially for inconceivably sophisticated social/economic/mind control et al." project. /s

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

#943

Post by xcv123 » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:34 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #910

xcv123 wrote: post #906

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI did not invent the transformer architecture. It was not their original research, but they implemented it well. Sam Altman led the company that implemented and executed it. Deep learning is not a secret. It just needs a lot of resources to be executed properly. OpenAI doesn't have any secret methods unknown to the rest of the AI community. They have strong engineering and execution. It is certainly within the C…

I don't claim that OpenAI will be the same without Sam, but Sam will be powerless without OpenAI. What I say is, both lost their status quo (OpenAI as the performer, Sam as the leader), and both will have to re-adjust and re-orient. The magic smoke has been let out. Even if you restore the "configuration" of OpenAI with Sam and all employees before Friday, it's almost impossible to get the same company from these par…

> but Sam will be powerless without OpenAI

Sam will be leading a new division at Microsoft. He will do alright now that he has access to all of the required resources.

> better to observe rather than dig for an entity or a person

Yes agreed. I don't know much about Sam personally and don't care. OpenAI itself has not made any fundamental breakthroughs in AI research. AI is much bigger than these two.

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

#944

Post by famouswaffles » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:40 PM UTC

lucubratory wrote: post #858

famouswaffles wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unless they have some other technology that we don't know about, that maybe brought all this on, a GPT is not a clear path to AGI. So Ilya Sutskever, one of the most distinguished ML researchers of his generation does not understand the technology ? The same guy who's been on record saying LLMs are enough for AGI ?

To be clear, he thinks that LLMs are probably a general architecture, and thus capable of reaching AGI in principle with enormous amounts of compute, data, and work. He thinks for cost and economics reasons it's much more feasible to build or train other parts and have them work together, because that's much cheaper in terms of compute. As an example, with a big enough model, enough work, and the right mix of data yo…

This is wholly besides the point. The person I'm replying to is clearly saying the only people who believe "GPT is on the path to AGI" are non technical people who don't "truly understand". Blatantly false.

It's like an appeal to authority against an authority that isn't even saying what you're appealing for.

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

#945

Post by famouswaffles » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 5:41 PM UTC

fallingknife wrote: post #876

famouswaffles wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unless they have some other technology that we don't know about, that maybe brought all this on, a GPT is not a clear path to AGI. So Ilya Sutskever, one of the most distinguished ML researchers of his generation does not understand the technology ? The same guy who's been on record saying LLMs are enough for AGI ?

AGI doesn't exist. There is no standard for what makes an AGI or test to prove that an AI is or isn't an AGI once built. There is no engineering design for even a hypothetical AGI like there is for other hypothetical tech e.g. a fusion reactor, so we have no idea if it is even similar to existing machine learning designs. So how can you be an expert on it? Being an expert on existing machine learning tech, which Ilya…

This is wholly besides the point. The person I'm replying to is clearly saying the only people who believe "GPT is on the path to AGI" are non technical people who don't "truly understand". Blatantly false. It's like an appeal to authority against an authority that isn't even saying what you're appealing for.

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

#946

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 6:35 PM UTC

bmitc wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#947

Post by crooked-v » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 6:40 PM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #578

ah765 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be because of AI safety, but I think it's more likely because Sam was executing plans without informing the board, such as making deals with outside companies, allocating funds to profit-oriented products and making announcements about them, and so on. Perhaps he also wanted to reduce investment in the alignment research that Ilya considered important. Hopefully we'll learn the truth soon, though I suspect t…

It's to do with a tribe in openAI that believes ai will take over the world in the next 10 years so we need to spend much of our efforts towards that goal. What that translates to is strong prompt censorship and automated tools to ban those who keep asking things we don't want you to ask. Sam has been agreeing with this group and using this as the reason to go commercial to provide funding for that goal. The problem…

> What that translates to is strong prompt censorship and automated tools to ban those who keep asking things we don't want you to ask.

...which several subreddits dedicated to LLM porn or trolling could tell you is both mostly pointless and also blocks a ton of stuff you could find on any high school nerd's bookshelf as "unsafe".

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

#948

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 6:46 PM UTC

nearbuy wrote: post #660

didibus wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still surprised how little attention there has been on the fact that Sam Altman's sister is accusing him of sexually assaulting her when she was younger. His own sister, even if it's not true, it reflects poorly to have this kind of relationship with your sister that she'd say this, and if it's true, it's very problematic. And for some reason, very very little mention of this. I just find it suspicious from a med…

No, this is the proper way to handle accusations from someone who may not be credible. You investigate privately, and only report after, if the accusations seem credible. You don't blast across the media that so-and-so is accused of sexual assault, because then the damage is done, regardless of the truth. Signal boost it enough, and every lay-person's main association with the person will become, "oh, that guy accuse…

[deleted]

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

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Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 6:51 PM UTC

gizmondo wrote: post #904

didibus wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still surprised how little attention there has been on the fact that Sam Altman's sister is accusing him of sexually assaulting her when she was younger. His own sister, even if it's not true, it reflects poorly to have this kind of relationship with your sister that she'd say this, and if it's true, it's very problematic. And for some reason, very very little mention of this. I just find it suspicious from a med…

> even if it's not true, it reflects poorly to have this kind of relationship with your sister that she'd say this People making false accusations against you reflects poorly on _you_ now? What a world to live in.

[deleted]

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

#950

Post by LordDragonfang » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:02 PM UTC

idontwantthis wrote: post #753

LordDragonfang wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the cliched answer is "when it figures out how to override the nuclear launch process". And while that cliche might have a certain degree of unrealism, it would certainly be possible for a system with access to arbitrary compute power that's specifically trained to impersonate human personas to use social engineering to precipitate WW3. And even that isn't the easiest scenario if an AI just wants us dead; a s…

How can it call one of those labs and place an order for the apocalypse and I can’t right now? Also about the smart home devices: if a current iPhone can’t run Siri locally then how is a Roomba supposed to run an AGI?

You could if you were educated enough in DNA synthesis and customer service manipulation to do so, and were smart enough to figure out a novel rna sequence based in publicly available data. I'm not, you're not. A superintelligence would be. The base assumption is that any superintelligence is smarter than us, and can solve problems we can't. AI can already come up with novel chemical weapons thousands of times faster than us[1], and it's way dumber than we are.

And the roomba isn't running the model, it's just storing a portion of the model for backup. Or only running a fraction of it (very different from an iPhone trying to run the whole model). Instead, the proper model is running on the best computer from the Russian botnet it purchased using crypto it scammed from a discord NFT server.

Once again, the premise is that AI is smarter than you or anyone else, and way faster. It can solve any problem that a human like me can figure out a solution for in 30 seconds of spitballing, and it can be an expert in everything.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-...