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Reflections on OpenAI
181–190 of 446 posts
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I also don't believe AGI is a thing 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.
If we were to believe the embodiment theory of intelligence (it’s by far not the only one out there, but very influential and convincing), this means that building an AGI is an equivalent problem to building an artificial human. Not a puppet, not a mock, not “sorta human”, but real, fully embodied human, down to gut bacterial biome, because according to the embodiment theory, this affects intelligence too.
In this formulation, it’s pretty much as impossible as time travel, really.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#183If you'd like some "objective" insights into how bottoms-up innovation at OpenAI works..
a research manager there coauthored this under-hyped book: https://engineeringideas.substack.com/p/review-of-why-greatn...
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#184What a great post. Some points that stood out to me: - Progress is iterative and driven by a seemingly bottom up, meritocratic approach. Not a top down master plan. Essentially, good ideas can come from anywhere and leaders are promoted based on execution and quality of ideas, not political skill. - People seem empowered to build things without asking permission there, which seems like it leads to multiple parallel p…
> I liked the take of the path to AGI being framed as a three horse race between OpenAI (consumer product DNA), Anthropic (business/enterprise DNA), and Google (infrastructure/data DNA) Wouldn't want to forget Meta which also has consumer product DNA. They literally championed the act of making the consumer the product.
"Hey, Twitter vibes are a metric, so make sure to mention the company on Twitter if you want to be heard."
Twitter is a one-way communication tool. I doubt they're using it to create a feedback loop with users, maybe just to analyse their sentiment after a release?
The entire article reads more like a puff piece than an honest reflection. Those of us who live outside the US are more sceptical, especially after everything revealed about OpenAI in the book Empire of AI.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#185Engineers thinking they're building god is such a good marketing strategy. I can't overstate it. It's even difficult to be rational about it. I don't actually believe it's true, I think it's pure hype and LLMs won't even approximate AGI. But this idea is sort of half-immune to criticism or skepticism: you can always respond with "but what if it's true?". The stakes are so high that the potentially infinite payoff snowballs over any probabilities. 0.00001% multiplied by infinite is an infinite EV so you have to treat it like that. Best marketing, it writes itself.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#186Engineers thinking they're building god is such a good marketing strategy. I can't overstate it. It's even difficult to be rational about it. I don't actually believe it's true, I think it's pure hype and LLMs won't even approximate AGI. But this idea is sort of half-immune to criticism or skepticism: you can always respond with "but what if it's true?". The stakes are so high that the potentially infinite payoff sno…
"but what if it's true?"
There was nothing hypothesized about next-token prediction and emergent properties (they didn't know scale would allow it to generalize for sure). What if it's true is part of LLMs story, there is a mystical element here.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#187Engineers thinking they're building god is such a good marketing strategy. I can't overstate it. It's even difficult to be rational about it. I don't actually believe it's true, I think it's pure hype and LLMs won't even approximate AGI. But this idea is sort of half-immune to criticism or skepticism: you can always respond with "but what if it's true?". The stakes are so high that the potentially infinite payoff sno…
"but what if it's true?" There was nothing hypothesized about next-token prediction and emergent properties (they didn't know scale would allow it to generalize for sure). What if it's true is part of LLMs story, there is a mystical element here.
> There was nothing hypothesized that next-token prediction and scale could show emergent properties.
Nobody ever hypothesized it before it happened? Hard to believe.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#188> 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…
The author left after 14 months at OpenAI, so that seems like a burnout duration.
It's worst than that. Lots of power struggles and god-like egos. Altman called one of the employees "Einstein" on Twitter, some think they were chosen to transcend humanity, others believe they're at war with China, some want to save the world, others see it burn, and some just want their names up there with Gates and Jobs.
This is what ex-employees said in Empire of AI, and it's the reason Amodei and Kaplan left OpenAI to start Anthropic.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's nothing cynical about leaving a job after cliffing My criticism is that that's a detail that is being obscured and instead other explanations for leaving are being presented (cynically IMO).
I don't see anything interesting about that detail; you keep trying to make something out of it, but there's nothing there to talk about. There might be some marginal drama to scrape up here if the post was negative about OpenAI (I'd still be complaining about trying to whip up drama where there isn't any), but it's kind of glowing about them.
Well now the goalpost has shifted from "it's not cynical" to "even if it is cynical it doesn't matter" and dang has already warned me so I'm hesitant to continue this thread. I'll just say that once you recognize that a lot of the fluff in this article is cynically motivated, it reduces your risk of giving the information presented more meaning than is really there.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's no longer hanging over anyone's head, The tender offer limitations still are, last I heard. Sure, maybe OA can no longer cancel your vested equity for $0... but how valuable is (non-dividend-paying) equity you can't sell? (How do you even borrow against it, say?)
Nope, happy to report that was also fixed. (It would be a pretty fake solution if equity cancellation was halted, but equity could still be frozen. Cancelled and frozen are de facto identical until the first dividend payment, which could take decades.)
So OA PPUs can now be sold and transferred without restriction to arbitrary buyers, outside the tender offer windows?