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Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

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Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#241

Post by detourdog »

bamboozled wrote: post #225
TeMPOraL wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to be steadily dumbing down GPT-4; eventually, improving performance of open source models and decreasing performance of GPT-4 will meet in the middle.

I'm almost certain this is because you're getting use to chat bots. How would they honestly be getting worse? Initially it felt like the singularity was at hand. You've played with it, got to know it, the computer was taking to you, it was your friend, it was exciting then you got bored with your new friend and it wasn't as great as you remember it. Dating is often like this. You meet someone, have some amazing intim…

Google search got worse.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#242

Post by clbrmbr »

dgellow wrote: post #212
danpalmer wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OpenAI will do fine, but I have doubts about ChatGPT as a product. It’s just a chat UI, and I’m not convinced the UI will be chat 3 years from now. Personally, the chat UI is the main limiting factor in my own adoption, because a) it’s not in the tool I’m trying to use, and b) it’s quicker for me to do the work than describe the work I need doing.

I interact with ChatGPT by voice pretty often, they have the best speech recognition I’ve ever seen. I can switch between languages (English, French, German) mid-sentence, think aloud, stop mid sentence, the correct what I just said, use highly technical terms (even describe code), I don’t even double check anymore because it’s almost always transcribed correctly. They can ~easily evolve the product to a more general…

This. Whisper is phenomenal. Have you tried the conversational mode? I would love to be able to use that in a more customized agent. I know you can use the conversation mode with a custom GPT but I’d prefer to write dynamic prompts programmatically. Would be great for a generalized personal assistant that can take notes, send/read email, texts, etc. could be a good filter on social notifications?

Though the TTS side has some trouble switching languages if only single words are embedded. A single German word inside an English sentence can really get butchered. More training needed on multilingual texts (and perhaps preserving italics). But anyways this is really only an issue for early language learning applications in my experience.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#243

Post by clbrmbr »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #145
skepticATX wrote: post #18

Frankly, OpenAI seems to be losing its luster, and fast. Plugins were a failure. GPTs are a little better, but I still don't see the product market fit. GPT-4 is still king, but not by that much any more. It's not even clear that they're doing great research, because they don't publish. GPT-5 has to be incredibly good at this point, and I'm not sure that it will be.

Custom GPTs like Grimoire or Cursor loaded on your repo are miles ahead of the competition for coding tasks at least.

How to load on your repo?

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#244

Post by nindalf »

LightBug1 wrote: post #232
OJFord wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the US, but the simple answer in the UK IMO is that politics doesn't pay enough. So you get egos, old money, and people with concurrent business interests. But try convincing a democracy that politicians should be paid more.

Doesn't pay enough? I believe the basic pay is £86k. They're not brain surgeons or rocket scientists, so even that is not that bad. But I believe the average gravy train bumps this up 3X with extras. It's a literal gravy train of subsidies and expenses and allowances! Sure the basic pay is, well, it's arguably not that bad ... but the gravy on top is tremendous. Not to mention the network contacts which plug their gr…

> They're not brain surgeons or rocket scientists

Yeah, voters don't want to pay MPs more. Yet when voters are asked, they want highly intelligent, motivated people. They want them to have technical expertise, which means time spent in higher education. Then they want them to work a full time job in Parliament during the week, but also be open to constituency concerns on the weekend. And once all of this is pointed out, voters concede that maybe MPs deserve to be paid on par with professionals like doctors. (It's a different matter that UK doctors are underpaid).

> But I believe the average gravy train bumps this up 3X with extras.

Citation needed. They're on a shorter leash now with expenses. Don't go citing one or two bad apples either, show us what the median MP claims as expenses. According to you, it should be around £170k a year.

In general, politicians and their aides in the UK are underpaid. Most capable people find they're better off working in Canary Wharf or elsewhere in London. An example is the head of economic policy for the Labour Party earning £50k while writing policy for a £2 trn economy. (https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/01/19/british-politic...)

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#245

Post by bayindirh »

al_borland wrote: post #156
skepticATX wrote: post #18

Frankly, OpenAI seems to be losing its luster, and fast. Plugins were a failure. GPTs are a little better, but I still don't see the product market fit. GPT-4 is still king, but not by that much any more. It's not even clear that they're doing great research, because they don't publish. GPT-5 has to be incredibly good at this point, and I'm not sure that it will be.

I know things keep moving faster and faster, especially in this space, but GPT-4 is less than a year old. Claiming they are losing their luster, because they aren’t shaking the earth with new models every quarter, seems a little ridiculous. As the popularity has exploded, and ethical questions have become increasingly relevant, it is probably worth taking some time to nail certain aspects down before releasing everyt…

You don't lose your luster only by not innovating.

Altman saga, allowing military use and other small things step by step tarnish your reputation and pushes you to the mediocrity or worse.

Microsoft has many great development stories (read Raymond Chen's blog to be awed), but what they did at the end to other competitors and how they behave removed their luster, permanently for some people.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#246

Post by vintermann »

OJFord wrote: post #204
danpalmer wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OpenAI will do fine, but I have doubts about ChatGPT as a product. It’s just a chat UI, and I’m not convinced the UI will be chat 3 years from now. Personally, the chat UI is the main limiting factor in my own adoption, because a) it’s not in the tool I’m trying to use, and b) it’s quicker for me to do the work than describe the work I need doing.

I suppose it depends what you use it for; my time in search engine has reduced massively - and so has time 'not in the tool I'm trying to use' because it's been so much faster for me to find answers to some queries with ChatGPT than a search engine. I'm not particularly interested in having it outright program for me (other than say to sketch how to do something as inspiration, which I'll rewrite rather than copy) be…

Coding assistants copy your style to a fault. You got to be careful about things like typos in comments, or it'll start suggesting sloppy code as well. And conversely you have to be careful about overly bureaucratic conventions (doc comments for things entirely described by their name, etc.), or it will suggest overly wrapped hypercorporate code.

But used as autocomplete, it's definitively a time saver. Most of us read faster than we type.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#247

Post by DJHenk »

bamboozled wrote: post #225
TeMPOraL wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to be steadily dumbing down GPT-4; eventually, improving performance of open source models and decreasing performance of GPT-4 will meet in the middle.

I'm almost certain this is because you're getting use to chat bots. How would they honestly be getting worse? Initially it felt like the singularity was at hand. You've played with it, got to know it, the computer was taking to you, it was your friend, it was exciting then you got bored with your new friend and it wasn't as great as you remember it. Dating is often like this. You meet someone, have some amazing intim…

> I'm almost certain this is because you're getting use to chat bots. How would they honestly be getting worse?

People say that, but I don't get this line of reasoning. There was something new, I learned to work with it. At one point I knew what question to ask to get the answer I want and have been using that form ever since.

Nowadays I don't get the answer I want for the same input. How is that not a result of declining quality?

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#248

Post by dustingetz »

passion__desire wrote: post #163
bobthepanda wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wish as a profession we valued teaching more. I would love to teach, but not do research, and make a living.

Become the next 3blue1brown. He has inspired many. Here's a gem of educator. Check out his other videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhYqflvJMXc

this is disrupting education. you can get a better undergraduate education in STEM on youtube than my paid education 20 years ago. I think those visualizations can even pull forward a bunch of stuff into high school.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#249

Post by TeMPOraL »

bamboozled wrote: post #225
TeMPOraL wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to be steadily dumbing down GPT-4; eventually, improving performance of open source models and decreasing performance of GPT-4 will meet in the middle.

I'm almost certain this is because you're getting use to chat bots. How would they honestly be getting worse? Initially it felt like the singularity was at hand. You've played with it, got to know it, the computer was taking to you, it was your friend, it was exciting then you got bored with your new friend and it wasn't as great as you remember it. Dating is often like this. You meet someone, have some amazing intim…

The author of `aider` - an OSS GPT-powered coding assistant - is on HN, and says[0] he has benchmarks showing gradual decline in quality of GPT-4-Turbo, especially wrt. "lazy coding" - i.e. actually completing a coding request, vs. peppering it with " ... write this yourself ... " comments.

That on top of my own experiences, and heaps of anecdotes over the last year.

> How would they honestly be getting worse?

The models behind GPT-4 (which is rumored to be a mixture model)? Tuning, RLHF (which has long been demonstrated to dumb the model down). The GPT-4, as in the thing that produces responses you get through API? Caching, load-balancing, whatever other tricks they do to keep the costs down and availability up, to cope with the growth of the number of requests.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39361705

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#250

Post by msp26 »

15457345234 wrote: post #90
skepticATX wrote: post #18

Frankly, OpenAI seems to be losing its luster, and fast. Plugins were a failure. GPTs are a little better, but I still don't see the product market fit. GPT-4 is still king, but not by that much any more. It's not even clear that they're doing great research, because they don't publish. GPT-5 has to be incredibly good at this point, and I'm not sure that it will be.

> Frankly, OpenAI seems to be losing its luster, and fast. Good. I have no idea what's really going on inside that company but the way the staff were acting on twitter when Altman got the push was genuinely scary, major red flags, bad vibes, you name it, it reeked of it.

For me it was Ilya burning a wooden effigy that represented 'unaligned' AI. Of course the firing and twitter stuff too. Something's fucked in this company for sure.
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