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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

#211

Post by GenericPoster »

Exoristos wrote: post #151
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more realistic argument is that AI will be used as a power amplifier by the already powerful.

Nah other way around. It would amplify the majority. That's why the powers-that-be consider it a huge potential problem.

Ah yes, because all those normal people will be able to run these powerful models on the devices that they currently own. Such a naive take.

The rich will ALWAYS get their piece of the pie, and once they've had their fill, we'll be left fighting for the crumbs and thanking them for their generosity.

AI won't solve world hunger, it will make millions of people jobless. It won't stop wars, it will be used as a tool for the elite to spread propaganda. The problems that plague society today are ones that technology (that has existed for decades) can fix but greed prevents it.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#212

Post by konschubert »

aidaman wrote: post #156
lannisterstark wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doomerism when it comes to technology has always been such a weird mindset to me. "oh no, they're gonna take the horses/horse buggies/telegram/landlines away!" "Goddamn, how dare they invent the bigger cannons!?" - Romans, 1453, in Constantinople probably. (One incident where I can use my exempt powers).

Most of the time the technology is not building an artificial intelligent computer that is capable of superhuman reasoning. Have you used gpt4? it's reasoning capabilities match human ability. The more you think about it, the more scary the reality becomes. GPT 4 can reason through any mental exercise as well as a human. The rest of the work to make it autonomous is simple in comparison.

> GPT 4 can reason through any mental exercise as well as a human.

So can I.

And yet, people don't consider me an existential threat.

Mostly because I do not have nukes.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#213

Post by Fluorescence »

Shank wrote: post #192

It seems like firing Sam and causing this massive brain drain might be antithetical to the whole AGI mission of the original non-profit. If OpenAI loses everyone to Sam and he starts some new AI company, it probably won't be capped-profit and just be a normal company. All of the organizational safeguards OpenAI had inked with Microsoft and protection against "selling AGI" once-developed are out-the-window if he just…

Why not blame Altman for that?

If he didn't manage to keep OpenAI consistent with it's founding principles and all interests aligned then wouldn't booting him be right? The name OpenAI had become a source of mockery. If Altman/Brockman take employees for a commercial venture, it just seems to prove their insincerity about the OpenAI mission.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#214

Post by Lacerda69 »

thinkingemote wrote: post #195
antman wrote: post #163

So what was he lying about that got the board so pissed? A story that fits is that they assumed/knew that he had different goals and/or was going to create a spinoff. If they waited for the GPT5 pretraining to finish and then they minimized the cost of the loss of Altman and the engineers. The whole secrecy, compartmentalization and urgency of their actions could only be explained by being against a wall. Otherwise i…

current popular theory is that those fired/left were taking OpenAI for profit, and the board stuck with their original goal of non profit.

you mean current completely made up speculation by anon online?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#215

Post by sanxiyn »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #194
schleck8 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think its possible, at least for the foreseable future, they were heavily over indexed on Azure offering them discounted compute, not like they're gonna buy that amount of GPU elsewhere

On the other hand, Anthropic exists, so I am not sure.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#216

Post by calf »

mi3law wrote: post #157
tempestn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not going to get "smarter" and it'll always lack true subjective understanding What is your basis for those claims? Especially the first one; I would think it's obvious that it will get smarter; the only questions are how much and how quickly. As far as subjective understanding, we're getting into the nature of consciousness territory, but if it can perform the same tasks, it doesn't really impact the value.

My basis for these claims is from my research career, work described so far at aolabs.ai; still very much in progress, but form what I've learned I can respond to the 2 claims you're poking at-- 1) we should agree on what we mean by smart or intelligent. That's really hard to do so let's narrow it down to "does not hallucinate" the way GPT does, or more high level has a subjective understanding of its own that anothe…

Then why can't the the grounded truth of ChatGPT be born of a body of silicon and emotional experience of zillions of lines of linguistic corpus?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#217

Post by NhanH »

nvarsj wrote: post #177
sasaf5 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It's possible, but harder than almost any other role. There are people at Google/Meta like this. Usually E7/E8 levels, "coding machines". It's much easier to go into a pseudo PM/TL/Director role though to hit those levels and income, so it's uncommon. You really have to have a passion for coding to put in the hours and be very good at it. Incredibly rare, believe it or not. Lots of people think they are good coders b…

It's not about being rockstar or 10x. He was the chairman of the board (and President of the LLC). Practically speaking, he can work however he wishes within the company. Seeing that he went from CTO role to President role, it's fairly obvious that he got the opportunity to structure the role and the work to best fit him (and probably the company, too).

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#218

Post by thinkingemote »

Lacerda69 wrote: post #214
thinkingemote wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

current popular theory is that those fired/left were taking OpenAI for profit, and the board stuck with their original goal of non profit.

you mean current completely made up speculation by anon online?

That's one source. There are others about, but as I wrote it's a "theory".

edits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38314420

I imagine when the full story comes out all these theories and speculations will be ignored and we will literally forget ever being interested in them!

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#219

Post by FrustratedMonky »

system2 wrote: post #188
urbandw311er wrote: post #158

Just seen their departure tweets (link below) What’s with this annoying trend of omitting capital letters from comms? https://x.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559?s=20

They think they are being cute and cool. "Look I am sloppy and don't care how others perceive me".

it takes extra steps to add capitals. and spell checking a short text? can you not figure out what is being said?

imagine being someone that is just being quick, and everyone around you is inferring some motive like 'being cool', when really he isn't thinking of your perceptions at all.

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