I'm amazed OpenAI made these disclosures. My main takeaway was how wrong all the predictions of Sutskever and Brockman turned out to be, and how all their promises have been broken. Also interesting that up to 2019 OpenAI was focused on RL rather than LLMs.
Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
#412I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys. The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship". Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment…
> Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? Yes, frequently and loudly. When Altman was collecting the award at Cambridge the other year, protesters dropped in on the after-award public talk/Q&A session, and he actively empathised with the protestors . > So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much l…
In my opinion the difference is that a recent graduate knows to say “I don’t know” to questions they’re not sure on, whereas LLMs will extremely confidently and convincingly lie to your face and tell you dangerous nonsense.
Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
#413From Musk's email: "Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn’t sound super hard. High-level linking of a large number of deep nets sounds like the right approach or at least a key part of the right approach." Genuine question I've always had is, are these charlatans conscious of how full of shit they are, or are they really high on their own stuff? Also…
Amongst people who think probabilistically, this isn't a weird statement. It's a very low precision guestimate. There is a qualitative difference between 50-50, 90-10, 99-1 etc, and it's only their best guess anyway.
Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine that's what he's doing. He's willing to put a lot of company money into getting the city on Mars started, because if he's first there, he's gonna set himself (or his dynasty?) up to make hundreds of billions of dollars. Being effectively in control of your own planet? Neat. Scary too.
He's already made hundreds of billions of dollars though? A permanent Martian colony is an incredibly ambitious endeavor and even with a trillion dollars there's a reasonable chance the colony fails.
I don't think Elon is driven by money per se. I think he just wants to see expensive cool shit happen in his lifetime.
Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't he fired for questionable reasons? I thought everyone wanted him back, and that's why he was able to return. It was, as I remember, just the board that wanted him out. I imagine if he was doing something truly nefarious, opinions might have been different, but I have no idea what kind of cult of personality he has at that company, so I might be wrong here.
> Wasn't he fired for questionable reasons? There were a number of concerns, including for-profit projects he was pursuing despite his public insistence on OpenAI being non-profit as well as generally deceptive behaviour on his part. The last part at least is consistent with what others have said about Altman previously, including what allegedly led to his exit from YC, although they have kept those stories pretty qu…
Don’t pay much particular attention to AI but I’m not seeing the knock on him saying “no.”
What human in the world could be trusted with AI? Only delusional people could say yes to that question.
Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public. Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others . 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri a…
Consciousness is a stupid and unreasonable goal, it is basically impossible to confirm that a machine isn’t just faking it really well. Singularity is at least definable…Although I think it is not really the bar required to be really impactful. If we get an AI system that can do the work of like 60% of hardcore knowledge workers, 80% of office workers, and 95% of CEOs/politicians and other pablumists, it could be rea…
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Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scrutiny without the ability to exert oversight, control or any modicum of restraint is... utterly useless to everyone except the historians.
No immediate ability to exert oversight, but scrutiny can be a major factor in how things go 4 years, when the voters get to exert control.
>... when the voters get to exert control.
If*. We hope we can.
Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
#418> You can’t sue your way to AGI. We have great respect for Elon’s accomplishments and gratitude for his early contributions to OpenAI, but he should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom. Isn't that exactly what he's doing with x.ai? Grok and all that? IIRC Elon has the biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right now, and is currently training the next major version of his "competing in the mar…
> biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right now This is wildly untrue, and most in industry know that. Unfortunately you won't have a source just like I won't, but just wanted to voice that you're way off here.
The distinction is that larger installations cannot form a single network. Before xAI's new network architecture, only around 30k GPUs could train a model simultaneously. It's not clear how many can train together with xAI's new approach, but apparently it is >100k.
Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
#419It's amusing how Sutskever kept musking Musk over the years (overpromising with crazy deadlines and underdelivering): In 2017 he wrote "Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs, and there should be convincing chatbots (though no one should pass the Turing test)." "We will completely s…
This month, a computer solved the first Advent of Code challenge in eight seconds.
Everyone on Hacker News was saying "well of course, you can't just feed it to a chatbot, that's cheating! the leaderboard is a human competition!" because we've normalized that. It's not surprising, it's just obvious, oh yeah you can't have an Advent of Code competition if the computers get to play as well.
Granted it took seven years. Not three.
Re: Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit
#420Sounds like Elon's "fourth attempt [..] to reframe his claims" might actually be close to the target. Otherwise, why would they engage in a publicity battle to sway public sentiment precisely now, if their legal case wasn't weak?
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