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Evolving OpenAI's Structure

openai.com

381–390 of 746 posts

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#381
post #21

It's somewhat odd to me that many companies operating in the public eye are basically stating "We are creating a digital god, an instrument more powerful than any nuclear weapon" and raising billions to do it, and nobody bats an eye...

How is an LLM more powerful than any nuclear weapon? Seriously curious.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#382

I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market: > Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale,…

Even if they think it will be a winner-take-all market, they won't say it out loud. It would be begging for antitrust lawsuits.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#383
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you believe AGI won't come for a long time, because you don't want that to happen. The turing test was succesfull. Pre chatGPT, I would not have believed, that will happen so soon. LLMs ain't AGI, sure. But they might be an essential part and the missing parts maybe already found, just not put together. And work there will be always plenty. Distributing ressources might require new ways, though.

> The turing test was succesfull. The very people whose theories about language are now being experimentally verified by LLMs, like Chomsky, have also been discrediting the Turing test as pseudoscientific nonsense since early 1990s. It's one of those things like the Kardashev scale, or Level 5 autonomous driving, that's extremely easy to define and sounds very cool and scientific, but actually turns out to have no pr…

"but actually turns out to have no practical impact on anything whatsoever"

Bots, that are now allmost indistinguishable from humans, won't have a practical impact? I am sceptical. And not just because of scammers.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#384
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like misinformation, are you talking about how Sam left YC after OpenAI took off? What PG said was "we didn't want him to leave, just to choose one or the other"[1]. [1]: https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940

"You could parachute [Sam] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king." http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

That says PG thinks Sam is clever. I don't think there's any moral judgement there. The statement I posted suggests PG likes Sam and would love to keep working with him.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing OpenAI is doing, or ever has done, has been close to AGI.

https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-... Here is a mainstream opinion about why AGI is already here. Written by one of the authors the most widely read AI textbook: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...

"AGI is already here, just wait 30 more years". Not very convincing.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That world never existed. Yes, pockets did - IT professionals with broadband lines and spare kit hosting IRC servers and phpBB forums from their homes free of charge, a few VC-funded companies offering idealistic visions of the net until funding ran dry (RIP CoHost) - but once the web became privatized, it was all in service of the bottom line by companies. Web 2.0 onwards was all about centralization, surveillance,…

> That world never existed It absolutely did. Steve Wozniak was real. Silicon Valley wasn't always a hive of liars and sycophants.

I have to agree. That's one of the dangers of today's world; the risk of believing that we never had a better one. Yes, the altruism of yesteryear was partially born of convenience, but it still existed. And I remember people actually believing it was important and acting as such. Today's cynicism and selfishness seem a lot more arbitrary to me. There's absolutely no reason things have to be this way. Collectively, we have access to more wealth and power now than we ever did previously. By all accounts, things ought to be great. It seems we just need the current generation of leaders to re-learn a few lessons from history.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#388
post #23
post #21

It's somewhat odd to me that many companies operating in the public eye are basically stating "We are creating a digital god, an instrument more powerful than any nuclear weapon" and raising billions to do it, and nobody bats an eye...

Lots of people in academia and industry are calling for more oversight. It's the US government that's behind. Europe's AI Act bans applications with unacceptable risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act

> Lots of people in academia and industry

Mostly OpenAI and DeepMind and it stunk of 'pulling up the drawbridge behind them' and pivoting from actual harm to theoretical harm.

For a crowd supposedly entrenched in startups, it's amazing everyone here is so slow to recognise it's all funding pitches and contract bidding.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#389
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying LLMs have only incrementally improved is like saying my 13 year old has only incrementally approved over the last 5 years. Sure, it's been a set of continuous improvements, but that has taken it from a toy to genuinely insanely useful. Personally, deep research and o3 have been transformative, taking LLMs from something I have never used to something that I am using daily. Even if the progress ends up plateaui…

> any company sitting this out risks being unable to capture users back from Open AI at a later date. Why? I paid for Claude for a while, but with Deepseek, Gemini and the free hits on Mistral, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity I'm not sure why I would now. This is anecdotal of course, but I'm very rarely unique in my behaviour. I think the best the subscription companies can hope for is that their subscribers don't rea…

>I'm very rarely unique in my behaviour

I cannot stress this enough: if you know what Deepseek, Claude, Mistral, and Perplexity are, you are not a typical consumer.

Arguably, if you have used a single one of those brands you are not a typical consumer.

The vast majority of people have used ChatGPT and nothing else, except maybe clicking on Gemini or Meta AI by accident.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-... Here is a mainstream opinion about why AGI is already here. Written by one of the authors the most widely read AI textbook: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...

Why does the Author choose to ignore the "General" in AGI? Can ChatGPT drive a car? No, we have specialized models for driving vs generating text vs image vs video etc etc. Maybe ChatGPT could pass a high school chemistry test but it certainly couldn't complete the lab exercises. What we've built is a really cool "Algorithm for indexing generalized data", so you can train that Driving model very similarly to how you…

Generality is a continuous value, not a boolean; turned out that "AGI" was poorly defined, and because of that most people were putting the cut-off threshold in different places.

Likewise for "intelligent", and even "artificial".

So no, ChatGPT can't drive a car*. But it knows more about car repairs, defensive driving, global road features (geoguesser), road signs in every language, and how to design safe roads, than I'm ever likely to.

* It can also run python scripts with machine vision stuff, but sadly that's still not sufficient to drive a car… well, to drive one safety, anyway.

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