They set out to do some cool stuff. They did. Company is now in the reality of they need to run a business and make revenue/profit which is, honestly, a lot less fun than when you were in “let’s change the world and do cool stuff” phase. AGI is much further away than thought. Was a good run and time to do something else and let others now do the “run a company” phase. Seems like nothing more to it than that and seems fair to me.
Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
341–350 of 644 posts
Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
#342What on Earth is going on that they keep losing their best people. Is it a strange work environment?
Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I won't expand on the rest, but this is simply nonsensical. The fact that Sora generates output that matches its training data doesn't show that it has a concept of gravity, collision between object, or anything else. It has…
My suspicion is that you're leaving some important parts in your logic unstated. Such as belief in a magical property within humans of "understanding", which you don't define. The ability of video models to generate novel video consistent with physical reality shows that they have extracted important invariants - physical law - out of the data. It's probably better not to muddle the discussion with ill defined terms…
"Allegory of the cave" comes to mind, when trying to describe the understanding that's missing from diffusion models. I think a super-model with such qualifications would require a number of ControlNets in a non-visual domains to be able to encode understanding of the underlying physics. Diffusion models can render permutations of whatever they've seen fairly well without that, though.
Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
#344OpenAI is shifting from “we did some really cool stuff” phase into the reality of needing to run a company, getting revenue, etc phase. Not common for folks to want to move on and go find the next cool thing. AGI is not around the corner. Building a company is a very different thing than building cool stuff and OpenAI is now in building a company mode.
Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI is a Microsoft play to get into power generation business, specifically nuclear, which is a pet interest of Bill Gates for many years. There, that's my conspiracy theory quota for 2024 in one comment.
I don't think Gates has much influence on Microsoft these days.
He controls approximately 1% of the voting shares of MSFT.
Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
$10M doesn't go as far as you'd think in the Bay Area or NYC.
$10M is never work again money literally anywhere in the world. Don't kid yourself. Buy a $3.5M house outright and then collect $250k per year risk free after taxes. You're doing whatever you want and still saving money.
Assuming they're 40, how far do you think $250k will go 20-30-40 years from now? It's not a stretch to think dollars could be devalued by 90%, possibly even worthless, within 30 years.
Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
#347It 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
it can actually solve problems though, its not just an illusion of intelligence if it does the stuff we considered mere years ago sufficient to be intelligent. But you and others keep moving the goalposts as benchmarks saturate, perhaps due to a misplaced pride in the specialness of human intelligence.
I understand the fear, but the knee jerk response “its just predicting the next token thus could never be intelligent” makes you look more like a stochastic parrot than these models are.
Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not aware of those beliefs. Could you provide a link to an article/ comment?
https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy TL;DR spoiler from someone else is: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a5e9arCnbDac9Doig/it-looks-l...
Are we sure it’s safe to suggest plans like this for the AI /s
Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI
#349It 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…
Exactly, Sam Altman wants group think, no opposition, no diversity of thought. That's what petty dictators demand. This spells the end of OpenAI IMO. Huge amount of money will keep it going until it doesn't