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Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

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Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#631
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And none of them build AI companies in Toronto. I’m Canadian and disappointed at how ineffective we are at building successful companies.

As another Canadian, I feel the same but I'm not surprised one bit. Canada is actively hostile towards tech and suffers from crippling salaries and investments. The idea of "business" in this country is buying a house and renting its basement. Our government's incompetence is comical, we are nothing but more than a tech talent / immigration proxy for United States at this point.

Its a mix of "Easy" things to fix: Streamline tax code, build desirable office centers, Have good internet infrastructure

and "Hard" Things: The work culture, Cost of living

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#632
post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except OpenAI hasn’t yet finished discovery on its true goal: AGI. I wonder if they risk plateauing at a local maximum.

I'm genuinely curious: what do you expect an "AGI" system to be able to do that we can't do with today's technology?

self consciousness?

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#633
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it even clear what is the next big leap after LLM? I have the feeling many tend to extrapolate the progress of AI from the last 2 years to the next 30 years but research doesn't always work like that (though improvements in computing power did).

Not saying it’s going to be the same, but I’m sure computing progress looked pretty unimpressive from, say, 1975 to 1990 for the uninitiated. By the 90s they were still mainly used as fancy typewriters by “normal” people (my parents, school, etc) although the ridiculous potential was clear from day one. It just took a looong time to go from pong to ping and then to living online. I’m still convinced even this stage i…

It was only 11 years from pong to ping.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another Canadian, I feel the same but I'm not surprised one bit. Canada is actively hostile towards tech and suffers from crippling salaries and investments. The idea of "business" in this country is buying a house and renting its basement. Our government's incompetence is comical, we are nothing but more than a tech talent / immigration proxy for United States at this point.

I don't know, Canada and every-other-country-that's-not-the-US. When there's a neighbor that is flush with cash, where make-or-break is a kind of national disease ... what can you do? (I'm an American, FWIW.)

FWIW, Israel and China are the other two hotspots for building startups. It’s worth looking at how Israel did it since their model could work elsewhere. For example they have a government funded delegation that goes around to conferences solely to meet with large companies and investors and promote Israeli startups.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#636
post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious: what do you expect an "AGI" system to be able to do that we can't do with today's technology?

Some first ideas coming to mind: Engineering Level: Solve CO2 Levels End sickness/death Enhance cognition by integrating with willing minds. Safe and efficient interplanetary travel. Harness vastly higher levels of energy (solar, nuclear) for global benefit. Science: Uncover deeper insights into the laws of nature. Explore fundamental mysteries like the simulation hypothesis, Riemann hypothesis, multiverse theory, an…

Do you believe the average human has general intelligence, and do you believe the average human can intellectually achieve these things in ways existing technology cannot?

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#637
post #518
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Einstein wasn't arguing just against the Copenhagen interpretation, he was arguing against the very notion of physical nondeterminism. In fact, his arguments against nonlocality were later disproven experimentally in the '80s, as quantum mechanics allowed for much higher fidelity predictions than could be explained by a hidden variable theory [0]. I don't think anyone _likes_ the Copenhagen interpretation per se, it'…

Many-worlds is not necessarily impossible to verify experimentally, because it predicts that there is no collapse of the wave function, whereas Copenhagen claims that there is. Many-worlds is not just an interpretation in that sense, it’s a theory that makes predictions (by reasoning about what happens when the wave function is all there is and always evolves according to the Schroedinger equation — it is a determini…

One of the key phrases I said was "(if you have to make one at all)" -- wavefunction collapse is inherently messy, since the notion of measurement is not well-defined or understood. I would argue that "don't care" is likely a more common interpretation among practicing physicists (of which I am emphatically not!), as this is very much in a realm where general intuition largely does not apply.

Copenhagen is basically an admission that we have no good intuition for why QM behaves the way it does, and wavefunction collapse is merely a way of justifying existing observations within the framework of QM.

IMO all the discussion about how wavefunction collapse doesn't scale to larger ensembles of particles, or the boundary between QM and Newtonian mechanics being ill-defined is noise -- the bridge between the two is statistical mechanics, where classical mechanics only arises from sufficiently large macrostates such that you can aggregate out any quantum mechanical properties. And QM is generally understood to be a toy model in the same way that Newtonian mechanics is a toy model -- it's useful in the realm where we use it, but when you push beyond the limits of that realm, its deficiencies become apparent.

That's why I don't think the proposed experiments to test many-worlds are particularly meaningful (since AFAIK they all seem to involve performing interference on enormous ensembles on the scale of entire humans) -- it's well beyond the limits of where QM is useful (also, I personally don't think we'll ever be able to operate quantum-mechanically at that scale).

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#638
post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI has a thousand employees and almost unlimited money You could say the same about Google - and yet they missed the consequences of their own discovery and got behind instead of being leaders. So you need specific talent to pull this off even if in theory you can hire anybody.

I am just curious how it happened to Google? Like who were the product managers or others who didn't see an opportunity here exactly where the whole thing was invented and they had huge amounts of data already, whole web basically and the amount of video that no one else can ever hope to have?

Well for one, Ilya was poached from Google to work for OpenAI to eventually help build SOTA models.

Fast forward to today and we a discussing the implications of him leaving OpenAI on this very thread.

Evidence to support the notion that you can’t just throw mountains of cash and engineers at a problem to do something truly trailblazing.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#640
post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying it’s going to be the same, but I’m sure computing progress looked pretty unimpressive from, say, 1975 to 1990 for the uninitiated. By the 90s they were still mainly used as fancy typewriters by “normal” people (my parents, school, etc) although the ridiculous potential was clear from day one. It just took a looong time to go from pong to ping and then to living online. I’m still convinced even this stage i…

Computing progress from 78 to 90 was mind-blowing. 1978: the apple ][. 1mhz 8 bit microprocessor, 4kb of ram, monochrome all-,caps display. 1990:Mac IIci, 25mhz 32-bit CPU, 4MB ram, 640x480 color graphics and an easy to use GUI. Ask any of us who used both of these at the time: it was really amazing.

Honestly mobile totally outstrips this.

One day at work about 10-15 years ago I looked at my daily schedule and found that on that day my team were responsible for delivering a 128kb build of Tetris and a 4GB build of Real Racing.

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