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Evolving OpenAI's Structure

openai.com

431–440 of 746 posts

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#431
post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, we don't wait for somebody to give us a task and go do it as if that is our sole existence. We live with our thoughts, blank out, watch TV, read books etc. What we currently have and possibly in the next century as well will be nothing close to an actual AGI. I don't know if it is optimism or delusions of grandeur that d…

I think there's a useful distinction that's often missed between AGI and artificial consciousness. We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently with peak human capabilities, given sufficient tools or hardware to complete whatever that task may be, but lacks subjective experience or independent agency; I would call that AGI. The two concepts have historicall…

Regarding "We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently" - it is very clear to anyone who just looks at the recent work by Anthropic analyzing how their LLM "reasons" that such a thing will never come from LLMs without massive unknown changes - and definitely not from scale - so I guess the grandparent is absolute right that openai is nor really working on this.

It isn't close at all.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI can't really be a winner take all market. The 'reward' for general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly and it accelerates productivity. Not only is there infinite incentive to compete, but theres decreasing costs to. The only world in which AGI is winner take all is a world in which it is extremely controlled to the point at which the public cant query it.

Remember however that their charter specifies: "If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project" It does have some weasel words around value-aligned and safety-conscious which they can always argue but this could get interesting because they've basically agreed not to compete. A fairly insane thing to do in retros…

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Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors were using Google to diagnose patients before. The thing is, it's still the doctor delivering the diagnosis, the doctor writing the prescription, and the doctor billing insurance. Unless and until patients or hospitals are willing and legally able to use ChatGPT as a replacement for a doctor (unwise), ChatGPT is not about to eat any doctor's lunch.

Not OP, but I think this makes the point, not argues against it. Something has come along that can supplant Google for a wide range of things. And it comes without ads (for now). It’s an opportunity to try a different business model, and if they succeed at that then it’s off to the races indeed.

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Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#434
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. AGI is meaningless as a term if it doesn't mean completely autonomous agentic intelligence capable of operating on long-term planning horizons. Edit: because if "AGI" doesn't mean that... then what means that and only that!?

> Edit: because if "AGI" doesn't mean that... then what means that and only that!? "Agentic AI" means that. Well, to some people, anyway. And even then, people are already arguing about what counts as agency. That's the trouble with new tech, we have to invent words for new stuff that was previously fiction. I wonder, did people argue if "horseless carriages" were really carriages? And "aeroplane" how many argued tha…

Agents can operate in narrow domains too though, so to fit the G part of AGI the agent needs to be non-domain specific.

It's kind of a simple enough concept... it's really just something that functions on par with how we do. If you've built that, you've built AGI. If you haven't built that, you've built a very capable system, but not AGI.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#436

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OpenAI (or, more specifically, Chat GPT) is CocaCola, not Facebook. They have the brand recognition and consumer goodwill no other brand in AI has, incredibly so with school students, who will soon go into the professional world and bring that goodwill with them. I think better models are enough to dethrone OpenAI in API, B2C and internal enterprise use cases, but OpenAI has consumer mindshare, and they're going to b…

Does Google not have brand recognition and Consumer good will? We might read all sorts of deep opinions of Google on HN, but I think Search and Chrome market share speak themselves. For the average consumer, I'm skeptical that OpenAI carries much weight.

> For the average consumer, I'm skeptical that OpenAI carries much weight.

My friend teaches at a Catholic girls’ high school and based on what he tells me, everyone knows about ChatGPT, both staff and students. He just had to fail an entire class on an assignment because they all used it to write a book summary (which many of them royally screwed up because there’s another book with a nearly identical title).

It’s all anecdotal and whatnot but I don’t think many of them even know about Claude or Gemini, while ChatGPT has broad adoption within education. (I’m far less clear on how much mindshare it has within the general population though)

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#437
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just to get things right. The big AI LLM hype started end of 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, .... GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. I'd say 2020 is significant because that's when people seriously considered the Turing test passed reliably for the first time. But for the sake of this argument, it hardly matters what date years back we choose. There's been enough time since then to see the platea…

ChatGPT was not released to the general public until November 2022, and the mobile apps were not released until May 2023. For most of the world LLM's did not exist before those dates.

LLM AI hype started well before ChatGPT.

This site and many others were littered with OpenAI stories calling it the next Bell Labs or Xerox PARC and other such nonsense going back to 2016.

And GPT stories kicked into high gear all over the web and TV in 2019 in the lead-up to GPT-2 when OpenAI was telling the world it was too dangerous to release.

Certainly by 2021 and early 2022, LLM AI was being reported on all over the place.

>For most of the world LLM's did not exist before those dates.

Just because people don't use something doesn't mean they don't know about it. Plenty of people were hearing about the existential threat of (LLM) AI long before ChatGPT. Fox News and CNN had stories on GPT-2 years before ChatGPT was even a thing. Exposure doesn't get much more mainstream than that.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#438

I see OpenAI's original form as the last gasp of a kind of liberal tech; in a world where "doing good" was seen as very important, the non-profit approach made sense and got a lot of people on board. These days the Altmans and the pmarcas of the world are much more comfortable expressing their authoritarian, self-centered world views; the "evolving" structure of Open AI is fully in line with that. They want to be the…

They deeply believe in the Ayn Rand mindset that the system that brings them the most individual wealth is also the best system for humanity as a whole.

When people that wealthy are that delusional... With few checks or balances from politics, media, or even social media... I don't think humanity as a whole is in for a great time.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors were using Google to diagnose patients before. The thing is, it's still the doctor delivering the diagnosis, the doctor writing the prescription, and the doctor billing insurance. Unless and until patients or hospitals are willing and legally able to use ChatGPT as a replacement for a doctor (unwise), ChatGPT is not about to eat any doctor's lunch.

Not OP, but I think this makes the point, not argues against it. Something has come along that can supplant Google for a wide range of things. And it comes without ads (for now). It’s an opportunity to try a different business model, and if they succeed at that then it’s off to the races indeed.

Doctors weren't paying for Google either. If ChatGPT or other LLM AIs play that same role, the OP remains correct.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, alternatively, it’s much harder to fight with one hand behind your back. They need to be able to compete for resources and talent given the market structure, or they fail on the mission. This is already impossibly hard. Approximately zero people commenting would be able to win this battle in Sam’s shoes. What would they need to do to begin to have a chance? Rather than make all the obvious comments “bad evil man…

It seems like they lost most of their top talent - probably because of Altman.

Ok cool so what should he do today? Close up shop? Resign? Or try?
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