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Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

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Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#331

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.

> The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the researchers involved didn't care because they wanted to be successful and figured they could just try to blame others for the consequences of their actions Such an absurdly reductive take. Or how about just like nuclear energy and knives, they are incredibly useful, society advancing tools that can also be used to cause harm. It's not as if AI can only be used for warfare. And like pretty much every technology,…

I think you're missing the point. I don't think we should have prevented the development of this tech. It's just absurd to complain about things that we always knew would happen as though they're some sort of great surprise. If we cared about preventing LLMs from being used for violence, we would have poured more than a tiny fraction our resources into safety/alignment research. We did not. Ergo, we don't care, we ju…

Safe or alignment research isn't going to stop it from being used for military purposes. Once the tech is out there, it will be used for military purposes; there's just no getting around it.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#333
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more of us would run for Congress. I'd much rather have a government of technocrats of various stripes than ex lawyers and rich business types. IMO governments, like websites, should be boring but effective, focused on small day to day improvements, not all flash and empty marketing chasing cultural trends...

This is like saying more lawyers should be writing software. Lawyers have extensive education and experience in the law and so work with..the law.

Well, that's how you get "laws by lawyers, for lawyers", like "software by engineers, for engineers".

Maybe Congress needs the equivalent of UX and product types who actually care about what the people want... and can explain how it works to us in fancy how-to videos.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? How were they acting? I was surprised and touched by their loyalty, but maybe I missed something you noticed.

It's not clear to me how many of the undersigned did so under some degree of duress. Apparently there was a lot of pressure from the senior employees (those who had the most $$$ to lose) to sign.

Well, to be fair, the board just tried to evaporate a lot of $$$ from most employees.

Any unionising effort consists of employees convincing other employees to join them. Some people will care more about the union's goals than others, and you can be certain that those who care more will pester those that care less to join their cause.

What happened at OpenAI was not a union effort, but I believe the comparison is excellent to understand normal dynamics of employee-based efforts.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more sensationalism than ethical issue. Whatever they did they could do, and probably do better, using publicly available tools like Stable Diffusion.

or just photoshop. The only thing these tools did was make it easier. I don't think the AI aspect adds anything for this comparison.

An argument can be made that "more is different." By making it easier to do something, you're increasing the supply, possibly even taking something that used to be a rare edge case and making it a common occurrence, which can pose problems in and of itself.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#336
post #233

> My immediate plan is to work on my personal projects and see what happens. Those of you who’ve followed me for a while may have a sense for what that might look like Does anyone here know?

His profile previously said building JARVIS @ OpenAI

Maybe he left because he finished building it.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#337

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.

Perhaps just me, but responses are way worse than it was few months ago. Now the system just makes shit up and says "Yes you are right" when you catch it on BS. It is practically unusable and I'll likely cancel paid plan soon.

It was always like this ("Now the system just makes shit up and says 'Yes you are right' when you catch it on BS."). The scales are just falling from your eyes as the novelty fades.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"allowing military use" That would actually increase their standing in my eyes. Not too far from where I live, Russian bombing is destroying homes of people whose language is similar to mine and whose "fault" is that they don't want to submit to rule from Moscow, direct or indirect. If OpenAI can somehow help stop that, I am all for it.

On the other hand, Israel is using AI to generate their bombing targets and pound Gaza strip with bombs non-stop [0]. And, according to UN, Turkey has used AI powered, autonomous littering drones to hit military convoys in Libya [1]. Regardless of us vs. them, AI shouldn't be a part of warfare, IMHO. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how... [1]: https://www.voanews.com/a/africa_possible-fi…

If it ever happens again, they'll develop the lists in seconds from data collected from our social media, intercept. What took organizations warehouses and thousands of agents will be done in a matter of seconds.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#339

Let me say, he's a great teacher! I took a CV class with him. He should teach more, and take it seriously. Being a popular AI influencer is not necessarily correlated with being a good researcher though. And I would argue there is a strong indication that it is negatively correlated with being a good business leader / founder. Here's to hoping he chills out and goes back to the sorely needed lost art of explaining co…

>He should teach more, and take it seriously. if only we compensated that knowledge properly. Youtube seems to come the closest, but Youtube educators also show how much time you have to spend attracting views instead of teaching expertise. > It makes you a target for offers and opportunities because of your name/influence, but not necessarily because of your underlying "best fit" That's unfortunately life in a nutsh…

I would pay for a course from him

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#340

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…

> How would they honestly be getting worse

To me it feels like it detects if the answer could be answered cheaper by code interpreter model or 4 Turbo and then it offloads them to that and they just kinda suck compared to OG 4.

I’ve watched it fumble and fail to solve a problem with CI, took it 3 attempts over 5 minutes real time and just gave up in the end, a problem that OG 4 can do one shot no preamble.

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