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Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

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Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more of us would run for Congress. I'd much rather have a government of technocrats of various stripes than ex lawyers and rich business types. IMO governments, like websites, should be boring but effective, focused on small day to day improvements, not all flash and empty marketing chasing cultural trends...

I don't know, while lawyers and MBA's are not who I would choose to run the country, I am not sure the I would pick people with the motto "run fast and break things" in charge either.

It's already broken. We could at least have fast internet and net neutrality.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frankly, OpenAI seems to be losing its luster, and fast. Good. I have no idea what's really going on inside that company but the way the staff were acting on twitter when Altman got the push was genuinely scary, major red flags, bad vibes, you name it, it reeked of it.

What do you mean? How were they acting? I was surprised and touched by their loyalty, but maybe I missed something you noticed.

It's not clear to me how many of the undersigned did so under some degree of duress. Apparently there was a lot of pressure from the senior employees (those who had the most $$$ to lose) to sign.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#314
post #12

This is quite the loss for OpenAI. And no one seems to have heard what Ilya Sutskever's status is at OpenAI as well.

If I was Sam Altman, Ilya would be on a short leash. I’m actually amazed he wasn’t booted already. He might be talented, but if he can’t be trusted, he needs to go.

> He might be talented, but if he can’t be trusted, he needs to go.

Ironically that may be exactly what Sutskever thought about Altman.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#315
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, Israel is using AI to generate their bombing targets and pound Gaza strip with bombs non-stop [0]. And, according to UN, Turkey has used AI powered, autonomous littering drones to hit military convoys in Libya [1]. Regardless of us vs. them, AI shouldn't be a part of warfare, IMHO. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how... [1]: https://www.voanews.com/a/africa_possible-fi…

> AI shouldn't be a part of warfare, IMHO. Nor should nuclear weapons, guns, knives, or cudgels. But we don’t have a way to stop them being used.

This is literally the only thing that matters in this debate. Everything else is useless hand-wringing from people who don't want to be associated with the negative externalities of their work.

The second that this tech was developed it became literally impossible to stop this from happening. It was a totally foreseeable consequence, but the researchers involved didn't care because they wanted to be successful and figured they could just try to blame others for the consequences of their actions.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#316

Frankly, OpenAI seems to be losing its luster, and fast. Plugins were a failure. GPTs are a little better, but I still don't see the product market fit. GPT-4 is still king, but not by that much any more. It's not even clear that they're doing great research, because they don't publish. GPT-5 has to be incredibly good at this point, and I'm not sure that it will be.

To be honest, I hate takes like this. ChatGPT, which basically revolutionized the whole AI industry and the public's imagination about what AI can do, was released not even 15 months ago, and since then they have consistently released huge upgrades (GPT 4 just a couple months later) and numerous products since then. I still haven't used another model that comes close to GPT 4. But since it's been, say, all of 23 hours since OpenAI released a new product (memory) they're "losing their luster".

The same nonsense happened with Apple, where like a month after they first released Apple Watch people were yelling "What's next???!!!! Apple is dying without Steve Jobs!"

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2015 he wrote this blog post about "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks": https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ That blog post inspired Alec Radford at Open AI to do the research that produced the "Unsupervised sentiment neuron": https://openai.com/research/unsupervised-sentiment-neuron Open AI decided to see what happened if they scaled up that model by leveraging the ne…

Is it stated somewhere that Radford was inspired by that blog post?

I tried to find the where I heard that Radford was inspired by that blog post, but the closest thing I found is that in the "Sentiment Neuron" paper (Learning to Generate Reviews and Discovering Sentiment: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01444.pdf), in the "Discussion and Future Work" section they mention this Karpathy paper from 2015: Visualizing and Understanding Recurrent Networks https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02078

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know things keep moving faster and faster, especially in this space, but GPT-4 is less than a year old. Claiming they are losing their luster, because they aren’t shaking the earth with new models every quarter, seems a little ridiculous. As the popularity has exploded, and ethical questions have become increasingly relevant, it is probably worth taking some time to nail certain aspects down before releasing everyt…

I never bought into ethical questions. It's trained on publicly available data as far as I understand. What's the most unethical thing it can do? My experience is limited. I got it to berate me with a jailbreak. I asked it to do so, so the onus is on me to be able to handle the response. I'm trying to think of unethical things it can do that are not in the realm of "you asked it for that information, just as you woul…

One recent example in the news was the AI generated p*rn of Taylor Swift. From what I read, the people who made it used Bing, which is based on OpenAI’s tech.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never bought into ethical questions. It's trained on publicly available data as far as I understand. What's the most unethical thing it can do? My experience is limited. I got it to berate me with a jailbreak. I asked it to do so, so the onus is on me to be able to handle the response. I'm trying to think of unethical things it can do that are not in the realm of "you asked it for that information, just as you woul…

One recent example in the news was the AI generated p*rn of Taylor Swift. From what I read, the people who made it used Bing, which is based on OpenAI’s tech.

This is more sensationalism than ethical issue. Whatever they did they could do, and probably do better, using publicly available tools like Stable Diffusion.

Re: Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

#320
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI shouldn't be a part of warfare, IMHO. Nor should nuclear weapons, guns, knives, or cudgels. But we don’t have a way to stop them being used.

This is literally the only thing that matters in this debate. Everything else is useless hand-wringing from people who don't want to be associated with the negative externalities of their work. The second that this tech was developed it became literally impossible to stop this from happening. It was a totally foreseeable consequence, but the researchers involved didn't care because they wanted to be successful and fi…

> the researchers involved didn't care because they wanted to be successful and figured they could just try to blame others for the consequences of their actions

Such an absurdly reductive take. Or how about just like nuclear energy and knives, they are incredibly useful, society advancing tools that can also be used to cause harm. It's not as if AI can only be used for warfare. And like pretty much every technology, it ends up being used 99.9% for good, and 0.1% for evil.

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