201–210 of 754 posts
Here's what I don't understand. There clearly were tensions between the for and not-for growth factions, but the Dev Day is being cited as a 'last straw'. It was a product launch. Ilya, and the board, should have been well aware of what was being released on that day for months. They should have at the very least been privy to the plan, if not outright sanctioned it. Seems like before launch would have been the time…
Let's look closer at the Ilya Sutskever vs Sam Altman tensions, and think of the product/profit as a cover. Ilya Sutskever is a True Believer in LLMs being AGI, in that respect aligned with Geoff Hinton, his academic advisor at University of Toronto. Hinton has said "So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’…
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Yeah this cult of CEOs is weird. It's such a small cohort that when someone doesn't completely blow it, they're immediately deemed as geniuses. Give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of brilliant engineers, researchers and many will make it work. But only a few ever get the chance, so this happens. They don't do any of the work. They just take the credit.
My last gig was with one of those wannabe Elon Musks (what wouldnI give to get wannabe Steve Jobs back). Horrible, ultimately he was ousted as CEO, only to be allowed to stay on as some head of innovation, because he and his founder buddies retained enough voting power to first get him a life time position as head of the board fir his "acievements" and then prevent his firing. They also vetoed, from ehat people told,…
Getting a company to that size is a lot.
I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience,…
A deal-making CEO who can carry rapport with the right people, make clever deals, and earn public trust can genuinely make a huge difference to a profit-seeking product company's trajectory. But when your profit-seeking company is owned by a non-profit with a public mission, that trajectory might end up pointed the wrong way. The Dev Day announcements, and especially the marketplace, can be seen as suggesting that's…
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What if the board gave Altman clear direction, Altman told them he accepted it, and then went off and did something else? This hypothesis doesn’t require the board’s direction to be objectively good.
IDK none of us are privy to any details of festering tensions or if there was a "last straw" scenario that if it was explained it would make sense. Something during that dev day really pissed some people off that's for sure. Given what the picture looks like today though that's my guess, firing Altman is an extreme scenario! Lots of CEOs have tensions with their boards over various issues otherwise the board is point…
Jeremy Howard (of fast.ai): https://x.com/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899 He is not exactly an insider, but seems broadly aligned/sympathetic/well-connected with the Ilya/researchers faction, his tweet/perspective was a useful proxy into what that split may have felt like internally.
Such a bad take. Developers (me included) loved Dev Day.
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OpenAI’s biggest issue is that it has no moat. The product is a simple interface to a powerful model, and it seems likely that any lead they have in the power of the model can be quickly overcome should they decrease R&D. The model is extremely simple to integrate and access - unlike something like Uber, where tons of complexity and logistics is hidden behind a simple interface, an easy interface to OpenAI’s model ca…
> OpenAI’s biggest issue is that it has no moat. This just isn't true. They have the users, the customers, Microsoft, the backing, the years ahead of most, and the good press. It's like saying Uber isn't worth anything because they don't own their cars and are just a middleman. Maybe that now changes since they fired the face of the company, and the press and sentiment turns on them.
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I think what's silly about "shepherding responsible AGI" is this is basically math, it's not some genie that can be kept hidden or behind some Manhattan Project level of effort. Pandora's box is open, and the best we can do is make sure it's not locked up behind some corporation or gov't.
I mean, that's clearly not really true, there's a huge "means of production" aspect to this which comes down to being able to afford the datastructure infrastructure. The cost of the computing machinery and the energy costs to run it are actually massive .
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I’m still wondering what unsafe AI even looks like in practical terms The only things I can think of is generated pornographic images of minors and revenge images (ex-partners, people you know). That kind of thing. More out there might be an AI based religion/cult.
How about you give it access to your email and it signs you up for the extra premium service from its provider and doesn't show you those emails unless you 'view all'. How about one that willingly and easily impersonates friends and family of people to help phishing scam companies.
Jeremy Howard (of fast.ai): https://x.com/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899 He is not exactly an insider, but seems broadly aligned/sympathetic/well-connected with the Ilya/researchers faction, his tweet/perspective was a useful proxy into what that split may have felt like internally.
Such a bad take. Developers (me included) loved Dev Day.