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Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

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Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#251
When multiple senior people resign in protest, it's indicative that they're not happy with someone among their own ranks who they vehemently disagree with. John Schulman and Greg left in the same week. Greg, opting to choose to take a sabbatical, may have chosen that over full-on resigning which would align with how he acted during the board-ousting - standing by Sam till the end.

If multiple key people were drastically unhappy with her, it would have shaken confidence in herself and everyone working with her. What else to do but let her go?

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#252
The disparity between size of the promise and the ambiguity of the business model creates both necessity and advantage for executives to leverage external forces to shape company direction. Everyone in the C-suite would be seeking a foothold, but it's unlikely any CTO or technologist would be the real nexus for partner and now investor relations. So while there might be circumstances, history, and personalities involved, OpenAI's current situation basically dictates this.

With luck, Mr. Altman's overtures to bring in middle east investors will get locals on board; either way, it's fair to say he'll own whatever OpenAI becomes, whether he's an owner or not. And if he loses control in the current scrum, I suspect his replacement would be much worse (giving him yet another advantage).

Best wishes to all.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#253

If OpenAI is the foremost in solving the AGI - possibly the biggest invention of mankind - it's a little weird that everyone's dropping out. Does it not look like that no one wants to work with Sam in the long run?

Doesn't (dyst)OpenAI have a clause that you can't say anything bad about the company after leaving?

I'm not convinced these board members are able to say what they want when leaving.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#254
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its usually always for legacy Legacy is the dumbest reason to work and does not explain the motivation of the vast majority of people that are wealthy. edit: The vast majority of people with more than $10million are completely unknown so the idea that they care about legacy is stupid.

What do you think their motivations might be?

Speaking for myself, I'd keep working even if I had 100M. As long as I am healthy, I plan to continue on being productive towards something I find interesting.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#256
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 corporate bullcrap, you're not supposed to believe it. What really matters in these statement is what is not said.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#257
post #213
post #195

I will never understand why people still take statements like these at face value. These aren't her personal thoughts and feelings. The letter was carefully crafted by OpenAI's PR team under strict direction from Sam and the board. Whatever the real story is is sitting under many layers of NDAs and threats of clawing back/diluting her shares, and we will not know it for a long time. What I can say for certain is no e…

> What I can say for certain is no executive in her position ever willingly resigns to pursue different passions/spend more time with their family/enjoy retirement or whatever else. Do you think that's because executives are so exceedingly ambitious, or because pursuing different passions is for some reason less attractive?

I would say that reaching this type of position requires exceeding amount of ambition, drive and craving in the first place, and all and any steps during the process of getting there solidify that by giving the dopamine hits to be addicted to such success, so it is not a case where you can just stop and decide "I'll chill now".

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#258
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just made a (IMHO) cool test with OpenAI/Linux/TCL-TK: "write a TCL/tk script file that is a "frontend" to the ls command: It should provide checkboxes and dropdowns for the different options available in bash ls and a button "RUN" to run the configured ls command. The output of the ls command should be displayed in a Text box inside the interface. The script must be runnable using tclsh" It didn't get it right the…

The issue (and I think what's behind the thinking of AI skeptics) is previous experience with the sharp edge of the Pareto principle. Current LLMs being 80% to being 100% useful doesn't mean there's only 20% effort left. It means we got the lowest-hanging 80% of utility. Bridging that last 20% is going to take a ton of work. Indeed, maybe 4x the effort that getting this far required. And people also overestimate the…

Thank You! You have explained the exact issue I (and probably many others) are seeing trying to adopt AI for work. It is because of this I don't worry about AI taking our jobs for now. You still need somewhat foundational knowledge in whatever you are trying to do in order to get that remaining 20%. Sometimes this means pushing back against the AI's solution, other times it means reframing the question, and other times its just giving up and doing the work yourself. I keep seeing all these impressive toy demos and my experience (Angular and Flask dev) seem to indicate that it is not going to replace any subject matter expert anytime soon. (And I am referring to all the three major AI players as I regularly and religiously test all their releases).

>And people also overestimate the utility of a solution that's randomly wrong. It's exceedingly difficult to build reliable systems when you're stacking a 5% wrong solution on another 5% wrong solution on another 5% wrong solution...

I call this the merry go round of hell mixed with a cruel hall of mirrors. LLM spits out a solution with some errors, you tell it to fix the errors, it produces other errors or totally forgets important context from one prompt ago. You then fix those issues, it then introduces other issues or messes up the original fix. Rinse and repeat. God help you if you don't actually know what you are doing, you'll be trapped in that hall of mirrors for all of eternity slowly losing your sanity.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#259
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its usually always for legacy Legacy is the dumbest reason to work and does not explain the motivation of the vast majority of people that are wealthy. edit: The vast majority of people with more than $10million are completely unknown so the idea that they care about legacy is stupid.

What do you think their motivations might be?

There's also addiction to success. If you don't keep getting the success in magnitudes you did before, you will get bored and depressed, so you have to keep going and get it since your brain is wired to seek for that. Your brain and emotions are calibrated to what you got before, it's kind of like drugs.

If you don't have the 10M you won't understand, you would think that "oh my if only I had the 10M I would just chill", but it never works like that. Human appetite is infinite.

The more highs you get from success, the more you expect from the future achievements to get that same feeling, and if you don't get any you will feel terrible. That's it.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#260
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its usually always for legacy Legacy is the dumbest reason to work and does not explain the motivation of the vast majority of people that are wealthy. edit: The vast majority of people with more than $10million are completely unknown so the idea that they care about legacy is stupid.

What do you think their motivations might be?

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