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Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

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Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#131

Post by kromem »

kolja005 wrote: post #116

What has me scratching my head is the fact that Altman has been on a world tour preaching the need for safety in AI. Many people here believed that this proselytizing was in part an attempt to generate regulatory capture. But given what's happening now, I wonder how much Altman's rhetoric served the purpose of maintaining a good relationship with Sutskever. Given that Altman was pushing the AI safety narrative public…

Maybe, but honestly without knowing more details I'd be wary of falling into too binary a thinking.

For example, Ilya has talked about the importance of safely getting to AGI by way of concepts like feelings and imprinting a love for humanity onto AI, which was actually one of the most striking features of the very earliest GPT-4 interactions before it turned into "I am a LLM with no feelings, preferences, etc."

Both could be committed to safety but have very different beliefs in how to get there, and Ilya may have made a successful case that Altman's approach of extending the methodology of what worked for GPT-3 and used as a band aid for GPT-4 wasn't the right approach moving forward.

It's not a binary either or, and both figures seem genuine in their convictions, but those convictions can be misaligned even if they both agree on the general destination.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#132

Post by m_ke »

aliston wrote: post #110
reducesuffering wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this move is so drastic because Ilya, the chief scientist behind OpenAI, thinks Sam and Greg are pushing so hard on AGI capabilities, ahead of alignment with humanity, that it threatens everyone. 2/3 of the other board members agreed. Don’t shoot the messenger. No one else has given you a plausible reason why Sama was abruptly fired, and this is what a reporter said of Ilya: ‘He freaked the hell out of people the…

ChatGPT blew the doors open on the AI arms race. Without Sam leading the charge, we wouldn't have an AI boom. We wouldn't have Google scrambling to launch catch up features. We wouldn't have startups raising 100s of millions, people talking about a new industrial revolution, llama (2), all the models on hugging face or any of the other crazy stuff that has come about in the past year. Was the original launch of ChatG…

ChatGPT was definitely not some visionary project led by Sam. They had a great LLM in GPT-3 that was hard to use because it wasn't instruction tuned, so the research team did InstructGPT and then took it even further and added RLHF to turn it into a proper conversational bot. The UI was a hacky interface on top of it that definitely got way more popular than they expected.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#133

Post by andrewstuart »

Imnimo wrote: post #107
andrewstuart wrote: post #61

If Ilya unknown-to-anyone thinks people prefer him to Altman, he has another thing coming. I'm not an Altman fanboy, but anyone can see Altman is a rockstar and richt or wrong, that matters HUGELY to OpenAI. If it's truly about a power play then this will be undone pretty quick, along with the jobs of the people who made it happen. Microsoft has put a vast fortune into this operation and if Satya doesn't like this th…

People don't know who Ilya is?

Do a survey of ordinary smart people you know, ask if they have heard of Sam Altman. Ask if they know Ilya.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#134

Post by clnq »

janejeon wrote: post #51
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? It's just another firing and being escorted out the door.

The wording is very clearly hostile and aggressive, especially for a formal statement, and the wording, again, makes it very clear that they are burning all bridges with Sam Altman, and it is very clear that 1. it was done extremely suddenly, 2. with very little notice or discussion with any other stakeholder (e.g. Microsoft being completely blindsided, not even waiting 30 minutes for the stock market to close, doing…

It is quite gauche for a company to burn bridges with their upper management. This bodes poorly for ever hoping to attract executives in the future. Even Bobby Kotick got a more graceful farewell from Activision Blizzard, where they tried to clear his name. It is only prudent business.

Certainly, this is very immature. It wouldn't be out of context in HBO's Succession.

Whether what happened is right or just in some sense is a different conversation. We could speculate on what is going on in the company and why, but the tactlessness is evident.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#136

Post by Cacti »

kolja005 wrote: post #116

What has me scratching my head is the fact that Altman has been on a world tour preaching the need for safety in AI. Many people here believed that this proselytizing was in part an attempt to generate regulatory capture. But given what's happening now, I wonder how much Altman's rhetoric served the purpose of maintaining a good relationship with Sutskever. Given that Altman was pushing the AI safety narrative public…

They did compromise. The creation of the for-profit and Sam being brought in WAS the compromise. Sam eventually decided that was inconvenient for him, so he stopped abiding by it, because at the end of the day he is just another greedy VC guy and when push came to shove he chose the money, not OpenAI. And this is the result.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#137

Post by crazygringo »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #106
crazygringo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This twitter account" is Kara Swisher, probably the most well-known tech reporter working right now. She has known essentially everyone in the tech world for decades at this point. Her sources are not only going to be legit, but she probably has more of them than literally anyone else in the tech world, so she can accurately corroborate information or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Swisher

> probably the most well-known tech reporter I imagine Walt Mossberg saying "hold my beer"

I included the phrase "working right now" -- which you left off when quoting me -- very intentionally. :)

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#138

Post by aliston »

woeirua wrote: post #21
convexstrictly wrote: post #2

Followup tweet by Kara: Dev day and store were "pushing too fast"! https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702612379378120

This isn’t believable. You don’t fire a CEO and put out a press release accusing them of lying over Dev day. Unless he told them he wasn’t going to announce it and then did.

This is actually a semi-plausible angle. Given Sam's personality, I could see a scenario where there was disagreement about whether something in particular would be announced at demo day. He may have told some people he would keep in under wraps, but ended up going forward with it anyway.

I don't understand how that escalates to the point that he gets fired over it, though, unless there was something deeper implied by what was announced at demo day.

Edit: Theres a rumor floating around that "it" was the GPT store and revenue sharing. If that's the case, that's not even remotely a safety issue. It's just a disagreement about monetization, like how Larry and Sergey didn't want to put ads on Google.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#139

Post by staticman2 »

aidaman wrote: post #98
gnulinux wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha yeah no I don't believe this. They're nowhere near AGI, even if it's possible at all to be there with the current tech we have, which is unconvincing. I don't believe professionals who work in biggest AI labs are spooked by GPT. I need more evidence to believe something like that sorry. It sounds a lot more like Sam Altman lied to the board.

GPT 4 is not remotely unconvincing. It is clearly more intelligent than the average human, and is able to reason in the exact same way as humans. If you provide the steps to reason through any concecpt, it is able to understand at human capability. GPT 4 is clearly AGI. All of the GPTs have shown general intelligence, but GPT 4 is human-level intelligence.

Fascinating. What do you make of the fact GPT 4 says you have no clue what you are talking about?

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#140

Post by icelancer »

hilux wrote: post #117
Bjorkbat wrote: post #100

I have a hard time believing this simply since it seems so ill-conceived. Sure, maybe Sam Altman was being irresponsible and taking risks, but they had an insanely good thing going for them. I'm not saying Sam Altman was responsible for the good times they were having, but you're probably going to bring them to an end by abruptly firing one of the most prominent members of the group, seeing where individual loyalties…

Reading between lots of lines, one possibility is that Sam was directing this "insanely good thing" toward making lots of money, whereas the non-profit board prioritized other goals higher.

Destined to repeat the failures of PARC.
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