151–160 of 446 posts
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Can you please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack and/or name-calling? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry, I removed the personal attack.
Maybe I’m paranoid but this sounds too good to be true. Almost like something planted to help with recruiting after meta poached their best guys.
It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. I don't think this makes OpenAI special. It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization. Look at it this way: the flip side of "incredibly bottoms-up" from this article is that…
I liked my jobs and bosses!
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Not the author, but I work at OpenAI. There are wide variety of viewpoints and it's fine for employees to disagree on timelines and impact. I myself published a 100-page paper on why I think transformative AGI by 2043 is quite unlikely ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02519 ). From informal discussion, I think the vast majority of employees don't think that we're mere years from a post-scarcity utopia where we can drink…
> depends on your definition of AGI What definition of AGI is used at OpenAI? My definition: AGI will be here when you can put it in a robot body in the real word and interact with it like you would a person. Ask it to drive your car or fold your laundry or make a mai tai and if it doesn’t know how to do that, you show it, and then it can.
Thanks for sharing. One thing I was interested to read but didn't find in your post is: does everyone believe in the vision that the leadership has shared publicly, e.g. [1]? Is there some skepticism that the current path leads to AGI, or has everyone drunk the Kool-Aid? If there is some dissent, how is it handled internally? [1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
Not the author, but I work at OpenAI. There are wide variety of viewpoints and it's fine for employees to disagree on timelines and impact. I myself published a 100-page paper on why I think transformative AGI by 2043 is quite unlikely ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02519 ). From informal discussion, I think the vast majority of employees don't think that we're mere years from a post-scarcity utopia where we can drink…
The hype around this tech strongly promotes the narrative that we're close to exponential growth, and that AGI is right around the corner. That pretty soon AI will be curing diseases, eradicating poverty, and powering humanoid robots. These scenarios are featured in the AI 2027 predictions.
I'm very skeptical of this based on my own experience with these tools, and rudimentary understanding of how they work. I'm frankly even opposed to labeling them as intelligent in the same sense that we think about human intelligence. There are certainly many potentially useful applications of this technology that are worth exploring, but the current ones are awfully underwhelming, and the hype to make them seem more than they are is exhausting. Not to mention that their biggest potential to further degrade public discourse and overwhelm all our communication channels with even more spam and disinformation is largely being ignored. AI companies love to talk about alignment and safety, yet these more immediate threats are never addressed.
Anyway, it's good to know that there are disagreements about the impact and timelines even inside OpenAI. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if nothing else.
Why go through all that? Instead what would have been a much better scenario is openai carefully assessing different approaches to agentic coding and releasing a more fully baked product with solid differentiation. Even Amazon just did that with Kiro
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Absolutely correct. There is a reason why there was a cult-like behaviour on X amongst the employees in supporting to bringing back Sam as CEO when he was kicked out by the OpenAI board of directors at the time. "OpenAI is nothing without it's people" All of "AGI" (which actually was the lamborghinis, penthouses, villas and mansions for the employees) was all on the line and on hold if that equity went to 0 or would…
Yes, and the reason for that is that employees at OpenAI believed (reasonably) that they were cruising for Google-scale windfall payouts from their equity over a relatively short time horizon, and that Altman and Brockman leaving OpenAI and landing at a well-funded competitor, coupled with OpenAI corporate management that publicly opposed commercialization of their technology, would torpedo those payouts. I'd have so…
Why not? I don't think we're anywhere close, but there are no physical limitations I can see that prevent AGI.
It's not impossible in the same way our current understanding indicates FTL travel or time travel is.
> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends. There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months. Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, gi…