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Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#131

Post by taberiand »

Mentlo wrote: post #66
hilux wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking for my own n of 1, ChatGPT Pro has almost entirely (>90%) replaced the Google search engine in my daily life. The results from ChatGPT are just so much better and faster. That's got to be worth something, since Alphabet is a $1.7T company mostly on the strength of ads associated with Google search.

Chat gpt is not a good source of truth so can’t be used for information retrieval at scale. You might have a specific usage pattern that is very different to the majority of Google Search users so it works for you

Personally, I don't have use case for comparing Google and ChatGPT that has truth as a requirement in the output.

For the majority of my use of ChatGPT and Google, I need to be able to get useful answers to vague questions - answers that I can confirm for myself through other means - and I need to iterate on those questions to hone in on the problem at hand. ChatGPT is undoubtedly superior to Google in that regard.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#132

Post by BoorishBears »

n_ary wrote: post #55

While I don’t know what is happening in OpenAI, from my experience(long enough to have an opinion), top people often leave when the employer is doing well or passing the last hurdle because, by that time the employer has gained adequate presence and brand identity that anyone leaving can immediately end up in top FAANG or equivalent Corps with much better benefits and of course pay/equity and other things. Only time…

> While I don’t know what is happening in OpenAI

Would it really have been so hard to find out Sam Altman just got fired without notice?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#133

Post by atleastoptimal »

schleck8 wrote: post #97
convexstrictly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Greg Brockman works 60 to 100 hours per week, and spends around 80% of the time coding. Former colleagues have described him as the hardest-working person at OpenAI." https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...

This is like a supervillain origin story, Greg and Sam are 100 % going to start something new now, even if it's just out of spite with how much both seem to have liked their work at OpenAI

Would they even be able to compete with OpenAI at this point? Even without Greg and Sam they have Ilya, the models they've trained so far, institutional knowledge, datasets and billions from Microsoft. Could OpenAI be at escape velocity anyway to AGI just continuing on the track it's been on?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#134

Post by disconnection »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #121
mebutnotme wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d recommend trying to build out your systems to work across LLMs where you can. Create an interface layer and for now maybe use OpenAI and Vertex as a couple of options. Vertex is handy as while not always as good you may find it works well for some tasks and it can be a lot cheaper for those. If you build out this way then when the next greatest LLM comes out you can plug that into your interface and switch the ta…

The problem is swapping LLMs can require rework of all your prompts, and you may be relying on specific features of OpenAI. If you don't then you are at a disadvantage or at least slowing down your work.

I have a hierarchy of templates, where I can automatically swap out parts of the prompt based on which LLM I am using. And also have a set of benchmarking tests to compare relative performance. I treat LLMs like a commodity and keep switching between them to compare performance.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#135

Post by mi3law »

svnt wrote: post #30
mi3law wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be useful in certain contexts, most certainly as a code co-pilot, but that and yours/others' usage doesn't change the fundamental mismatch between the limits of this tech and what Sam and others have hyped it up to do. We've already trained it on all the data there is, it's not going to get "smarter" and it'll always lack true subjective understanding, so the overhype has been real, indeed to bubble levels as…

I would appreciate another example where a major new communications technology peaks in its implementation within the first year after it is introduced to the market.

FTX / crypto, which just imploded last year.

Look, I'm an AGI/AI researcher myself. I believe and bleed this stuff. AI is here to stay and is forever a part of computing in many ways. Sam Altman and others bastardized it by overhyping it to current levels, derailing real work. All the traction OpenAI has accumulated, outside of github copoilot / codex, is itself so far away from product-market fit that people are playing off the novelty of AGI / the GPT/AI being on its way to "smarter" than human rather than any real usage.

Hype in tech is real. Overhype and bubbles are real. In AI in particular, there's been AI winters because of the overhype.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#136

Post by jeswin »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #81
karmasimida wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am at lost. Not fear, just lost. Don't know what to do. Is my investment into their API still worth it? It feels very unstable at this moment.

Microsoft owns it. I honestly can not imagine trying to build a business on an API owned by Microsoft of all companies.

People have been successfully building on MS APIs for four decades now. I've been for nearly three.

What exactly are you saying?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#137

Post by thekoma »

MattRix wrote: post #12
thr8976 wrote: post #4

Aleksander in particular is deeply invested in AI safety as a mission. It's a very confusing departure, since most of the reporting so far indicates that Ilya and the board fired Sam to prioritize safety and non-profit objectives. A huge loss for OpenAI nonetheless.

Perhaps you could argue that he wants to stick with Sam and the others because if they start a company that competes with OpenAI, there’s a real chance they catch up and surpass OpenAI. If you really want to be a voice for safety, it’ll be most effective if you’re on the winning team.

One funny detail is that the OpenAI charter states that, if this happens, they will stop their own work and help the organisation that is closest to achieving OpenAI's stated goal.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#138

Post by ahepp »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #81
karmasimida wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am at lost. Not fear, just lost. Don't know what to do. Is my investment into their API still worth it? It feels very unstable at this moment.

Microsoft owns it. I honestly can not imagine trying to build a business on an API owned by Microsoft of all companies.

Isn't Microsoft famous for their insane API stability and backwards compatibility?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#139

Post by ncruces »

clauderoux wrote: post #70
Tohhou wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must not use AI if you think this. AI is not the bubble. Everything AI will replace is the bubble.

AI today is in a weird position. What I can do today with AI was _inimaginable_ just 1 year ago. However, for a lot of people, the concept has worn out so fast, that they don't realize anymore what has happened... Some very intelligent people said some very silly things, such as that it was a bad search engine (it isn't a search engine) that it was a glorified word guesser (it doesn't exactly work as your telephone w…

It's a wonder. But if capex and opex are insane, and go up with every generation, the magic fades quickly.

Like, GitHub Copilot may be amazing, but if it looses money for every added user, if power users loose the company 4 or 8 times what they already pay, then maybe it's not an efficient use of compute resources.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#140

Post by sasaf5 »

convexstrictly wrote: post #84
aidaman wrote: post #61

GPT5 pre-training just ended I believe. Brock, Pachocki, Szymon Sidor, would have likely all been involved. These are huge losses. Pachocki led pre-training for GPT-4, and probably GPT-5. Brockman is the major engineer responsible for the efficiency improvements that enabled ChatGPT and GPT-4 to be even remotely cost-effective. That is a piece that is often overlooked, but OpenAI's advantage over the competition in c…

"Greg Brockman works 60 to 100 hours per week, and spends around 80% of the time coding. Former colleagues have described him as the hardest-working person at OpenAI." https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...

I am either skeptical or envious of such claims. Someone coding so much would quickly be launched into meetings to communicate one's results and to coordinate with others.

It would be my life's dream to spend 80 hours per week coding without having to communicate with others... but no one is an island...

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