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Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

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Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#362
post #39

Plain-text version for those who can’t read images: “ Hi all, I have something to share with you. After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. My six-and-a-half years with the OpenAI team have been an extraordinary privilege. While I'll express my gratitude to many individuals in the coming days, I want to start by thanking Sam and Greg for their trust in me to lead the technical organiz…

Thank you, this comment should be pinned at the top.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#363

> we fundamentally changed how AI systems learn and reason through complex problems I'm not an AI researcher, have they done this? The commentary I've seen on o1 is basically that they incorporated techniques that were already being used. I'd also be curious to learn: what fundamental contributions to research has OpenAI made? The ChatGPT that was released in 2022 was based on Google's research, and IMO the internal…

I think it's inarguable that OpenAI have at least at times over the last 3 years been well ahead of other companies. Whether that's true now is open to debate, but it has been true. This suggests they have either: made substantial breakthroughs, that are not open , or that the better abilities of OpenAI products are due to non-substantial tweaks (more training, better prompting, etc). I'm not sure either of these opt…

I left pretty soon after a Google engineer decided the internal chat bot was sentient but before ChatGPT 3.5 came out. So I missed the entire period where Google was trying to catch up.

But it seemed to me before I left that they were struggling to productize the bot and keep it from saying things that damage the brand. That's definitely something OpenAI figured out first.

I got the feeling that maybe Microsoft's Tay experience cast a large shadow on Google's willingness to take its chat bot public.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#365
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…

There may be a story, and I'm sure she worded the message carefully, but I don't see any reason to doubt she worded it herself. "Create the time and space to do my own exploration" is beautiful compared to the usual. To me means she is confident enough in her ability to do good in the world that the corporate identity she's now tethered to is insignificant by comparison.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#366
post #360
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.

This was the company that made all sorts of noise about how they couldn't release GPT-2 to the public because it was too dangerous[1]. While there are many very useful applications being developed, OpenAI's main deliverable appears to be hype that I suspect when it's all said and done they will fail to deliver on. I think the main thing they are doing quite successfully is cashing in on the hype before people figure…

GPT-2 and descendants have polluted the internet with AI spam. I don't think that this is too unreasonable of a claim.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#368
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die." - Cersei Lannister

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#369
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI President and co-founder is also on extended leave of absence. And John Schulman, and Peter Deng are out already. Yet the company is still shipping, like no other. Recent multimodal integrations and benchmarks of o1 are outstanding.

> Yet the company is still shipping, like no other If executives / high level architects / researchers are working on this quarter's features something is very wrong. The higher you get the more ahead you need to be working, C-level departures should only have an impact about a year down the line, at a company of this size.

Funny, at every corporation I've worked for, every department was still working on last quarter's features. FAANG included.
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