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Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

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Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#561
post #530

Okay hear me out. Restructuring for profit right? There will probably be companies spawned off of all of these leaving. If the government ever wants a third party to oversee safety of openAI wouldn't it be convenient if one of those that left the company started a company that focused on safety. Safe Superintelligence Inc. gets the bid because lobbying because whatever I don't even care what the reason is in this mad…

Why would government care about safety? They already have the former director of NSA, sitting member of the board.

Why would they have the FCC? Why would they have FDA? Why would people from industry end up sitting on each of these things eventually?

EDIT: oh and by the way i'm very for bigger government and more regulations to keep corpos in line. i'm hoping i'm wrong about all of this and we don't end up with corruption straight off the bat.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#562
post #461
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and transformer models can do more than text. There's almost certainly better options out there given it looks like we don't need so many examples to learn from, though I'm not at all clear if we need those better ways or if we can get by without due to the abundance of training data.

If you come up with a new system, you're going to want to integrate AI into the system, presuming AI gets a bit better. If AI can only learn after people have used the system for a year, then your system will just get ignored. After all, it lacks AI. And hence it will never get enough training data to get AI integration. Learning needs to get faster. Otherwise, we will be stuck with the tools that already exist. New…

That seems to already be happening with o1 and Orion.

Instead of rewarding the network directly for finding a correct answer, reasoning chains that end up with the correct answer is fed back into the training set.

That way you're training it to develop reasoning processes that end up with correct answers.

And for math problems, you're training it to find ways of generating "proofs" that happen to produce the right result.

While this means that reasoning patterns that are not stricly speaking 100% consistent can be learned, that's not necessarily even a disadvantage, since this allows it to find arguments that are "good enough" to produce the correct output, even where a fully watertight proof may be beyond it.

Kind of like physicists have taken shortcuts like the Dirac Delta function, even before mathematicians could verify that the math was correct.

Anyway, by allowing AI's to generate their own proofs, the number of proofs/reasoning chains for all sorts or problems can be massively expanded, and AI may even invent new ways of reasoning that humans are not even aware of. (For instance because they require combining more factors in one logical step than can fit into human working memory.)

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#563
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes with good looks and charm, you can fall up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira_Murati Point me to a single credential where you feel confident of putting your money on her?

She studied math early on, so she's definitively technical. She is the CTO, so she kinda needs to balance the managerial while having enough understanding of the underlying technical.

Again, it's easy to be a CTO for a startup. You just have to be at the right time. Your role is literally is, do all the stuff Researchers/Engineers have to deal with. Do you really think Mira set the technical agenda, architecture for OpenAI?

It's a pity that HN crowd doesn't go one-level deep and truly understand on first principles

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#564
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it makes perfect sense to drop out and enjoy last couple years of pre-AGI bliss. Advances in AI even without AGI will lead to unemployment, recession, collapse of our economic structure, and then our social structure. Whatever is on the other side is not pretty. If you are on the forefront, know it’s coming imminently, and made your money, it makes perfect sense to leave and enjoy money and leisures money allows…

Nobody really knows what Earth will look like once AGI arrives. It could be anything from extinction, through some Cyberpunk corporate dystopia (like you seem to think) to some kind of Techno-Socialist utopia. One thing it's not likely to be, is a neo-classical capitalist system based on the value of human labor.

> One thing it's not likely to be, is a neo-classical capitalist system based on the value of human labor.

I'm finding it difficult to believe this. For me, your comment is accurate (and very insightful) except even a mostly vanilla continuation of the neoliberal capitalist system seems possible. I think we're literally talking about a "singularity" where by definition our fate is not dependent on our actions, and of something we don't have the full capacity to understand, and next to no capacity to influence. It needs tremendous amount of evidence to claim anything in such an indeterminate system. Maybe 100 rich people will own all the AI and the rest will be fixing bullshit that AI doesn't even bother fixing like roads, rusty farms etc, similar to Kurt Vonnegut's first novel "Player Piano". Not that the world described in that novel is particularly neoliberal capitalist (I suppose it's a bit more "socialistic" (whatever it means)) than that, but I don't think such a future can be ruled out.

My bias is that, of course, it's going to be a bleak future. Because when humanity loses all control, it seems unlikely to me a system that protects the interests of individual or collective humans will take place. So whether it's extinction, cyberpunk, techno-socialism, techno-capitalist libertarian anarchy, neoclassical capitalism... whatever it is, it will be something that'll protect the interest of something inhuman, so much more so than the current system. It goes without saying, I'm an extreme AI pessimist: just making my biases clear. AGI -- while it's unclear if it's technically feasible -- will be the death of humanity as we know it now, but perhaps something else humanity-like, something worse and more painful will follow.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#565

> 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…

The way I understand it, the key difference is that when training o1, they were going beyond simply "think step-by-step" in that they were feeding the "step-by-step" reasoning patterns that ended up with a correct answer back into the training set, meaning the model was not so much trained to find the correct answer directly, but rather to reason using patterns that would generally lead to a correct answer.

Furthermore, o1 is able to ignore (or even leverage) previous reasoning steps that do NOT lead to the correct answer to narrow down the search space, and then try again at inference time until it finds an answer that it's confident is correct.

This (probably combined with some secret sauce to make this process more efficient) allows it to optimize how it navigates the search space of logical problems, basically the same way AlphaZero navigated to search space of games like Go and Chess.

This has the potential to teach it to reason in ways that go beyond just creating a perfect fit to the training set. If the reasoning process itself becomes good enough, it may become capable of solving reasoning problems that are beyond most or even all humans, and in a fraction of the time.

It still seems that o1 still has a way to go when it comes to it's World Model. That part may require more work on video/text/sound/embodiement (real or virtual). But for abstract problems, o1 may indeed be a very significant breakthrough, taking it beyond what we typically think of as an LLM.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share an example of a use case you have in mind of this "explainer + RAG" combo you just described? I think that RAG and RAG-based tooling around LLMs is gonna be the clear way forward for most companies with a properly constructed knowledge base but I wonder what you mean by "explainer"?. Are you talking about asking an LLM something like "in which way did the teams working on project X deal with Y problem?"…

I'm not the OP but I got some fun ones that I think are what you are asking? I would also love to hear others interesting ideas/findings. 1. I got this medical provider that has a webapp that downloads graphql data(basically json) to the frontend and shows some of the data to the template as a result while hiding the rest. Furthermore, I see that they hide even more info after I pay the bill. I download all the data,…

#1 would be a good FLOSS project to release out.

I don't understand enough about #2 to comment, but it's certainly interesting.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#567
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you seriously just use the word "isomorphic"? No wonder people believe AI is the next crypto.

In what way was their usage incorrect? They simply said that the brain just predicts next-actions, in response to a statement that an LLM predicts next-tokens. You can believe or disbelieve either of those statements individually, but the claims are isomorphic in the sense that they have the same structure.

Its not that it was used incorrectly: Its that it isn't a word actual humans use, and its one of a handful of dog whistles for "I'm a tech grifter who has at best a tenuous grasp on what I'm talking about but would love more venture capital". The last time I've personally heard it spoken was from Beff Jezos/Guillaume Verdon.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the sample chain-of-thought for o1-preview under this blog post, for decoding "oyekaijzdf aaptcg suaokybhai ouow aqht mynznvaatzacdfoulxxz". At this point, I think the "fancy autocomplete" comparisons are getting a little untenable. https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/

I’m not seeing anything convincing here. OpenAI says that it’s models are better at reasoning and asserts they are testing this by comparing how it does solving some problems between o1 and “experts” but it doesn’t show the experts or o1s responses to these questions nor does it even deign to share what the problems are. And, crucially, it doesn’t specify if writings on these subjects were part of training data. Call…

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." A corollary of Clarke's Law found in fannish circles, origin unknown.

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its scaling keeps going with no end in sight. Not only are we within eyesight of the end, we're more or less there. o1 isn't just scaling up parameter count 10x again and making GPT-5, because that's not really an effective approach at this point in the exponential curve of parameter count and model performance. I agree with the broader point: I'm not sure it isn't consistent with current neuroscience that our brai…

The fact that OpenAI created and released o1 doesn't mean they won't also scale models upwards or don't think it's their best hope. There's been plenty said implying that they are. I definitely agree that AGI isn't just a matter of scaling transformers, and also as you say that they "may not be the best" for such tasks. (Vanilla transformers are extremely inefficient.) But the really important point is that transform…

To whit: OpenAI was until quite recently investigating having TSMC build a dedicated semiconductor fab to produce OpenAI chips [1]:

(Translated from Chinese) > According to industry insiders, OpenAI originally actively negotiated with TSMC to build a dedicated wafer factory. However, after evaluating the development benefits, it shelved the plan to build a dedicated wafer factory. Strategically, OpenAI sought cooperation with American companies such as Broadcom and Marvell for its own ASIC chips. Development, among which OpenAI is expected to become Broadcom's top four customers.

[1] https://money.udn.com/money/story/5612/8200070 (Chinese)

Even if OpenAI doesn't build its own fab -- a wise move, if you ask me -- the investment required to develop an ASIC on the very latest node is eye watering. Most people - even people in tech - just don't have a good understanding of how "out there" semiconductor manufacturing has become. It's basically a dark art at this point.

For instance, TSMC themselves [2] don't even know at this point whether the A16 node chosen by OpenAI will require using the forthcoming High NA lithography machines from ASML. The High NA machines cost nearly twice as much as the already exceptional Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) machines do. At close to $400M each, this is simply eye watering.

I'm sure some gurus here on HN have a more up to date idea of the picture around A16, but the fundamental news is this: If OpenAI doesn't think scaling will be needed to get to AGI, then why would they be considering spending many billions on the latest semiconductor tech?

Citations: [1] https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-paid-twice-as-much-for... [2] https://www.asiabusinessoutlook.com/news/tsmc-to-mass-produc...

Re: Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

#570
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McKinsey MBA brain rot seeping into all levels of culture

That's giving too much credit to McKinsey. I'd argue it's systemic brainrot. Never admit mistakes, never express yourself, never be honest. Just make up as much bullshit as possible on the fly, say whatever you have to pacify people. Even just say bullshit 24/7. Not to dunk on Mira Murati, because this note is pretty cookie cutter, but it exemplifies this perfectly. It says nothing about her motivations for resigning…

> Just make up as much bullshit as possible on the fly, say whatever you have to pacify people.

Probably why AI sludge is so well suited to this particular cultural moment.

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