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Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

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Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#221
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.

People still believe that a company that has only delivered GenAI models is anywhere close to AGI? Success in not around any corner. It's pure insanity to even believe that AGI is possible, let alone close.

What can you confidently say AI will not be able to do in 2029? What task can you declare, without hesitation, will not be possible for automatic hardware to accomplish?

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#222
post #136
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 feel like this is stating the obvious - but i guess not to many - but a probabilistic syllable generator is not intelligence, it does not understand us, it cannot reason, it can only generate the next syllable It makes us feel understood in the same ways John Edward used to in daytime tv, its all about how language makes us feel true AGI...unfortunately we're not even close

I truly think you haven't really thought this through.

There's a huge amount of circuitry between the input and the output of the model. How do you know what it does or doesn't do?

Humans brains "just" output the next couple milliseconds of muscle activation, given sensory input and internal state.

Edit: Interestingly, this is getting downvotes even though 1) my last sentence is a precise and accurate statement of the state of the art in neuroscience and 2) it is completely isomorphic to what the parent post presented as an argument against current models being AGI.

To clarify, I don't believe we're very close to AGI, but parent's argument is just confused.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#223
post #136
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 feel like this is stating the obvious - but i guess not to many - but a probabilistic syllable generator is not intelligence, it does not understand us, it cannot reason, it can only generate the next syllable It makes us feel understood in the same ways John Edward used to in daytime tv, its all about how language makes us feel true AGI...unfortunately we're not even close

While it's true that language models are fundamentally based on statistical patterns in language, characterizing them as mere "probabilistic syllable generators" significantly understates their capabilities and functional intelligence.

These models can engage in multistep logical reasoning, solve complex problems, and generate novel ideas - going far beyond simply predicting the next syllable. They can follow intricate chains of thought and arrive at non-obvious conclusions. And OpenAI has now showed us that fine-tuning a model specifically to plan step by step dramatically improves its ability to solve problems that were previously the domain of human experts.

Although there is no definitive evidence that state-of-the-art language models have a comprehensive "world model" in the way humans do, several studies and observations suggest that large language models (LLMs) may possess some elements or precursors of a world model.

For example, Tegmark and Gurnee [1] found that LLMs learn linear representations of space and time across multiple scales. These representations appear to be robust to prompting variations and unified across different entity types. This suggests that modern LLMs may learn rich spatiotemporal representations of the real world, which could be considered basic ingredients of a world model.

And even if we look at much smaller models like Stable Diffusion XL, it's clear that they encode a rich understanding of optics [2] within just a few billion parameters (3.5 billion to be precise). Generative video models like OpenAI's Sora clearly have a world model as they are able to simulate gravity, collisions between objects, and other concepts necessary to render a coherent scene.

As for AGI, the consensus on Metaculus is that it will arrive in 2023. But consider that before GPT-4 arrived, the consensus was that full AGI was not coming until 2041 [3]. The consensus for the arrival date of "weakly general" AGI is 2027 [4] (i.e AGI that doesn't have a robotic physical world component). The best tool for achieving AGI is the transformer and its derivatives; its scaling keeps going with no end in sight.

Citations:

[1] https://paperswithcode.com/paper/language-models-represent-s...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/15he3f4/el...

[3] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...

[4] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general...

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#224
post #91
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.

LLMs as programs are here to stay. The issue is with expenses/revenue ratio all these LLM corpos have. According to Sequoia analyst (so not some anon on a forum) there is a giant money hole in that industry, and "giant" doesn't even begins to describe it (iirc it was 600bln this summer). That whole industry will definitely see winter soon, even if all things Altman says would be true.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#225
post #80
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.

It's easy to have missed this part of the story in all the chaos, but from the NYTimes in March: Ms. Murati wrote a private memo to Mr. Altman raising questions about his management and also shared her concerns with the board. That move helped to propel the board’s decision to force him out. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executi... It should be no surprise if Sam Altman wants executives who opp…

> When you're firing a high-level executive in a polite way, it's common to let them announce their own departure and frame it the way they want.

You also give them some distance in time from the drama so the two appear unconnected under cursory inspection.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#226
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.

unless you didn't see it as a success, and want to abandon the ship before it gets torpedoed

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#227
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 you use 1 2 (or even 3) you use "a couple" A few is almost always > 3 and one could argue that upper limit 15 So, 10 years to 50 years

Personally speaking, above 10 thousand I'd switch to saying "a few tens of thousands". But the mere fact you say 15 is arguable does indeed broaden the range, just as me saying 1 broadens it in the opposite extent.

[deleted]

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#228
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't ASI > AGI?

Both are poorly defined. By all the standards I had growing up, ChatGPT is already AGI. It's almost certainly not as economically transformative as it needs to be to meet OpenAI's stated definition. OTOH that may be due to limited availability rather than limited quality: if all the 20 USD/month for Plus gets spent on electricity to run the servers, at $0.10/kWh, that's about 274 W average consumption. Scaled up to t…

Don't know why you're being downvoted, these models meet the definition of AGI. It just looks different than perhaps we expected.

We made a thing that exhibits the emergent property of intelligence. A level of intelligence that trades blows with humans. The fact that our brains do lots of other things to make us into self-contained autonomous beings is cool and maybe answers some questions about what being sentient means but memory and self-learning aren't the same thing as intelligence.

I think it's cool that we got there before simulating an already existing brain and that intelligence can exist separate from consciousness.

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