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Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

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Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#101

Post by chatcode »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #56
Imnimo wrote: post #7

It is hard for me to square "This company is a few short years away from building world-changing AGI" and "I'm stepping away to do my own thing". Maybe I'm just bad at putting myself in someone else's shoes, but I feel like if I had spent years working towards a vision of AGI, and thought that success was finally just around the corner, it'd be very difficult to walk away.

There is one clear answer in my opinion: There is a secondary market for OpenAI stock. It's not a public market so nobody knows how much you're making if you sell, but if you look at current valuations it must be a lot. In that context, it would be quite hard not to leave and sell or stay and sell. What if oai loses the lead? What if open source wins? Keeping the stock seems like the actual hard thing to me and I exp…

What would you do if

a) you had more money than you'll ever need in your lifetime

b) you think AI abundance is just around the corner, likely making everything cheaper

c) you realize you still only have a finite time left on this planet

d) you have non-AGI dreams of your own that you'd like to work on

e) you can get funding for anything you want, based on your name alone

Do you keep working at OpenAI?

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#102

Post by xabadut »

romanovcode wrote: post #51
Imnimo wrote: post #7

It is hard for me to square "This company is a few short years away from building world-changing AGI" and "I'm stepping away to do my own thing". Maybe I'm just bad at putting myself in someone else's shoes, but I feel like if I had spent years working towards a vision of AGI, and thought that success was finally just around the corner, it'd be very difficult to walk away.

Maybe she has inside info that it's not "around the corner". Making bigger and bigger models does not make AGI, not to mention exponential increase in power requirements for these models which would be basically unfeasible for mass market. Maybe, just maybe, we reached diminishing returns with AI, for now at least.

+ there are many untapped sources of data that contain information about our physical world, such as video

the curse of dimensionality though...

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#103

Post by agentcoops »

optimalsolver wrote: post #50
golergka wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among other perfectly reasonable theories mentioned here, people burn out.

This isn't a delivery app we're talking about. "Burn out" doesn't apply when the issue at hand is AGI (and, possibly, superintelligence).

Burnout, which doesn't need scare quotes, very much still applies for the humans involved in building AGI -- in fact, the burnout potential in this case is probably an order of magnitude higher than the already elevated chances when working through the exponential growth phase of a startup at such scale ("delivery apps" etc) since you'd have an additional scientific or societal motivation to ignore bodily limits.

That said, I don't doubt that this particular departure was more the result of company politics, whether a product of the earlier board upheaval, performance related or simply the decision to bring in a new CTO with a different skill set.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#104

Post by ForHackernews »

dartos wrote: post #91
tomrod wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that Altman recognizes LLM winter is coming and is trying to entrench.

I don’t think we’re gonna see a winter. LLMs are here to stay. Natural language interfaces are great. Embeddings are incredibly useful. They just won’t be the hottest thing since smartphones.

They're useful in some situations, but extremely expensive to operate. It's unclear if they'll be profitable in the near future. OpenAI seems to be claiming they need an extra $XXX billion in investment before they can...?

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#105

Post by nopromisessir »

aresant wrote: post #30
Imnimo wrote: post #7

It is hard for me to square "This company is a few short years away from building world-changing AGI" and "I'm stepping away to do my own thing". Maybe I'm just bad at putting myself in someone else's shoes, but I feel like if I had spent years working towards a vision of AGI, and thought that success was finally just around the corner, it'd be very difficult to walk away.

I think the much more likely scenario than product roadmap concerns is that Murati (and Ilya for that matter) took their shot to remove Sam, lost, and in an effort to collectively retain billion$ of enterprise value have been playing nice, but were never seriously going to work together again after the failed coup.

Highly speculative.

Also highly cynical.

Some folks are professional and mature. In the best organisations, the management team sets the highest possible standard, in terms of tone and culture. If done well, this tends to trickle down to all areas of the organization.

Another speculation would be that she's resigning for complicated reasons which are personal. I've had to do the same in my past. The real pro's give the benefit of the doubt.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#106

Post by aprilthird2021 »

Most comments posit that if OpenAI is so close to AGI, why leave and miss that payoff?

It's possible that the competitors to OpenAI have rendered future improvements (yes even to the fabled AGI) less and less profitable to the point that the more profitable thing to do would be capitalize on your current fame and raise capital.

That's how I'm reading this. If the competition can be just as usable as OpenAI's SOA models and free or close to it, the profit starts vanishing in most predictions

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#107

Post by tempodox »

tomrod wrote: post #54
xur17 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is arguably a good thing (having AGI spread amongst multiple entities rather than one leader).

The show Person of Interest comes to mind.

Samaritan will take us by the hand and lead us safely through this brave new world.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#108

Post by bookofjoe »

aresant wrote: post #30
Imnimo wrote: post #7

It is hard for me to square "This company is a few short years away from building world-changing AGI" and "I'm stepping away to do my own thing". Maybe I'm just bad at putting myself in someone else's shoes, but I feel like if I had spent years working towards a vision of AGI, and thought that success was finally just around the corner, it'd be very difficult to walk away.

I think the much more likely scenario than product roadmap concerns is that Murati (and Ilya for that matter) took their shot to remove Sam, lost, and in an effort to collectively retain billion$ of enterprise value have been playing nice, but were never seriously going to work together again after the failed coup.

"When you strike at a king, you must kill him." — Emerson

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#109

Post by ForHackernews »

hiddencost wrote: post #96
keeptrying wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you keep working past $10M net worth (as all these people undoubtedly are) its usually always for legacy. I actually think Sam's vision probably scares them.

$10M doesn't go as far as you'd think in the Bay Area or NYC.

...the only two places on Earth.
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