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Reflections on OpenAI

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Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#221

Post by energy123 »

hinterlands wrote: post #52

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…

  > 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.
It's also a performance art to acquire attention

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#222

Post by criddell »

tedsanders wrote: post #156
criddell wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In the OpenAI charter, it's "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." https://openai.com/charter/

Huh. That feels like kind of a weak definition.

That makes me wonder what kinds of work aren’t economically valuable? Would that be services generally provided by government?

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#224

Post by breadwinner »

> What's funny about this is there are exactly three services that I would consider trustworthy: Azure Kubernetes Service, CosmosDB (Azure's document storage), and BlobStore.

CosmosDB is trustworthy? Everyone I know that used CosmosDB ended up rewriting their code because of throttling.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#225

Post by maest »

lz400 wrote: post #185

Engineers 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…

Similar to Pascal's wager, which pretty much amounts to "yeah, God is probably not real, _but what if it is_? The utility of getting into heaven is infinite (and hell is infinitely negative), so any non-zero probability that God is real should make you be religious, just in case."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager#Analysis_with...

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#226

Post by enjoylife »

isoprophlex wrote: post #36
tines wrote: post #31

Interesting how ChatGPT’s style of writing has made people start bolding so much text.

Possibly the dumbest, blandest, most annoying kind of cultural transference imaginable. We dreamed of creating machines in our image, and now we're shaping ourselves in the image of our machines. Ugh.

I think we’ve always shaped ourselves based what we’re capable of building. Think of how infrastructure such as buildings and roadways shape our lives within them. What I do agree with you, is how LLMs are shaping our mental thought how we are offloading a lot of our mental capacities with blind trust in the LLM output.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#227

Post by darkmarmot »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #121
hinterlands wrote: post #52

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…

> There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things. I worked for a few years at a company that made software for casinos, and this was absolutely not the case there. Casinos absolutely have fully shameless villains at the helm.

VGT?

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#228

Post by tedsanders »

criddell wrote: post #222
tedsanders wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the OpenAI charter, it's "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." https://openai.com/charter/

Huh. That feels like kind of a weak definition. That makes me wonder what kinds of work aren’t economically valuable? Would that be services generally provided by government?

Maybe I'm biased, but I actually think it's a pretty good definition, as definitions go. All of our narrow measures of human intelligence that we might be tempted to use - win at games, solve math problems, ace academic tests, dominate at programming competitions - are revealed as woefully insufficient as soon as an AI beats them but fails to generalize far beyond. But if you have an AI that can generate lots of revenue doing a wide variety of real work, then you've probably built something smart. Diverse revenue is a great metric.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#229

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 »

ivape wrote: post #204
echoangle wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was nothing hypothesized that next-token prediction and scale could show emergent properties. Nobody ever hypothesized it before it happened? Hard to believe.

Someone else can confirm, but from my understanding, no they did not know sentiment analysis, reasoning, few shot learning, chain of thought, etc would emerge at scale. Sentiment analysis was one of the first things they noticed a scaled up model could generalize. Remember, all they were trying to do was get better at next-token prediction, there was no concrete idea to achieve "instruction following", for example. W…

> sentiment analysis, reasoning, few shot learning, chain of thought, etc would emerge at scale

Some would say it still hasn't (to an agreeable level).

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#230

Post by tbcj »

jjani wrote: post #50

> The thing that I appreciate most is that the company is that it "walks the walk" in terms of distributing the benefits of AI. Cutting edge models aren't reserved for some enterprise-grade tier with an annual agreement. Anybody in the world can jump onto ChatGPT and get an answer, even if they aren't logged in. There's an API you can sign up and use–and most of the models (even if SOTA or proprietary) tend to quickl…

Anthropic has banned my own accounts before I used them for violating ToS. Appeals do nothing. Only when I started using a Google login did they stop banning them. This isn’t an OpenAI-only problem.
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