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Reflections on OpenAI

calv.info

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Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#251

Post by fhub »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #70
bhl wrote: post #3

> 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.

He references childcare and paternity leave in the post and he was a co-founder in a $3B acquisition. To me it seems it is a time-of-life/priorities decision not a straight up burnout decision.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#253

Post by mirekrusin »

imiric wrote: post #157
tedsanders wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you! 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 wor…

Instead of looking at absolute capabilities, look at their first and second derivatives.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#254

Post by ashdksnndck »

harmonic18374 wrote: post #172
m00x wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What incentives? It's not a very intellectual opinion to give wild hypotheticals with nothing to go on other than "it's possible".

I am not trying to advance wild hypotheticals, but something about his behavior does not quite feel right to me. Someone who has enough money for multiple lifetimes, working like he's possessed, to launch a product minimally different than those at dozens of other companies, and leaving his wife with all the childcare, then leaving after 14 months and insisting he was not burnt out but without a clear next step, not…

Why did Michael Jordan retire 3 times? Sure, you could probably write a book about it, but you would want to get to know the guy first.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#255

Post by mirekrusin »

ml-anon wrote: post #202
m00x wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calvin works incredibly hard and has very little ego. I was surprised he joined OpenAI since he's loaded from the Segment acquisition, but if anyone it makes sense he would do this. He's always looking to find the hardest problem and work on it. That's what he did at Segment even in the later stages.

Someone putting their work project over their newborn in this circumstance (returning early from pay leave no less) is 100% ego driven.

Newborns need constantly mom, not dad. Moms need husbands or their moms to help. The way it works is you agree what to do as a family (to do it or not to do it) and everybody is happy with their lives. You can be a great dad and husband and still do all of it when it makes sense and your wife supports it etc. Not having kids in the first place could be considered ego driven, not this.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#257

Post by paradite »

This is an incredibly fascinating read into how OpenAI works.

Some of the details seem rather sensitive to me.

I'm not sure if the essay is going to stay up for long, given how "secretive" OpenAI is claimed to be.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#258

Post by nilirl »

Are any of these causal to OpenAI's success? Or are they incidental? You can throw all of this "culture" into an org but I doubt it'd do anything without the literal world-changing technology the company owns.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#259

Post by windowshopping »

viccis wrote: post #146

>It's hard to imagine building anything as impactful as AGI >... >OpenAI is also a more serious place than you might expect, in part because the stakes feel really high. On the one hand, there's the goal of building AGI–which means there is a lot to get right. I'm kind of surprised people are still drinking this AGI Koolaid

for real. same. the level of delusion. i think what'll happen is they'll get some really advanced agents that can effectively handle most general tasks and they'll call it AGI and say they've done it. it won't really be AGI, but a lot of people will have bought into the lie thanks to the incredibly convincing facsimile they'll have created.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#260

Post by d--b »

> As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing

Of course they are. People in orgs like that are passionate, they want to work on the tech cause LLMs are once-in-a-lifetime tech breakthrough. But they don’t realize enough that they’re working for bad people. Ultimately all of that tech is in the hands of Altman, and that guy hasn’t proven to be the saint he hopes to become.

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