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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?

#331

Post by anon291 »

nradov wrote: post #229
convexstrictly wrote: post #13

Sutskever: "You can call it (a coup), and I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity." Scoop: theinformation.com https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255

The funny thing is that so far OpenAI has made zero demonstrable progress toward building a true AGI. ChatGPT is an extraordinary technical accomplishment and useful for many things, but there is no evidence that scaling up that approach will get to AGI. At least a few more major breakthroughs will probably be needed.

> The funny thing is that so far OpenAI has made zero demonstrable progress toward building a true AGI. ChatGPT is an extraordinary technical accomplishment and useful for many things, but there is no evidence that scaling up that approach will get to AGI.

How can you honestly say things like this? ChatGPT shows the ability to sometimes solve problems it's never explicitly been presented with. I know this. I have a very little known Haskell library. I have asked ChatGPT to do various things with my own library, that I have never written about online, and that I have never seen before. I regularly ask it to answer questions others send to me. It gets it basically right. This is completely novel.

It seems pretty obvious to me that scaling this approach will lead to the development of computer systems that can solve problems that it's never seen before. Especially since it was not at all obvious from smaller transformer models that these emergent properties would come about by scaling parameter sizes... at all.

What is AGI if not problem solving in novel domains?

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

#332

Post by anon291 »

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.

Then you say 'the board has decided to part ways with Sam due to strategic disagreement'. Not 'he wasn't candid'. not being candid can be a crime.

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

#333

Post by anon291 »

SilverSlash wrote: post #87

My biggest question is: If Sam Altman starts a new company by next month, and him and Greg Brockman know all details of how GPT4/5 works, then what what will this mean for OpenAI's dominance and lead?

We all know how GPT4/5 work essentially. You can easily run a GPT capable model with a few GPUs in the cloud. The secret sauce is the training data, that openAI owns.

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

#334

Post by bart_spoon »

malwarebytess wrote: post #196

Ilya Sutskever really seems to think AGI's birth is impending and likely to be delivered at OpenAI. From that perspective it makes sense to keep capital at arms length. Is there anything to his certainty? It doesn't feel like it's anywhere close.

It may not feel close, but the rate of acceleration may mean that by the time it “feels” close it’s already here. It was barely a year ago that ChatGPT was released. Compare GPT-4 with the state of the art 2 years prior to its release, and the rate of progress is quite remarkable. I also think he has a better idea of what is coming down the pipeline than the average person on the outside of OpenAI does.

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

#335

Post by anon291 »

015a wrote: post #293
mvkel wrote: post #158

Sam wanted to commercialize stuff to shoot for revenue. Ilya wants to keep pushing for gpt 4.5 and beyond, to hell with the revenue. Ilya won the argument, Sam out. Hell yeah. It's not safetyism vs accelerationism. It's commercialization vs innovation.

OpenAI's mission statement is "Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity". How does an LLM App Store advance OpenAI toward this goal? Like, even in floaty general terms? You can make an argument that ChatGPT does (build in public, prepare the world for what's coming, gather training data, etc). You can... maybe... make an argument that their API does... but I think that's a lot harder. The App Store product, th…

> OpenAI's mission statement is "Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity".

Well an app store let's people... use it.

Look at UNIX. UNIX systems are great. They have produced great benefit to the world. Linux, as the most common Unix-like OS, also does. However, most people do not run any of the academic 'innovative' distros. Most people run the most commercialized version you can possibly think of Android and iOS (Unix variant from Apple). It takes commercializing something to actually make it useful.

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

#336

Post by kcb »

thepasswordis wrote: post #83

This is genuinely frustrating. IF the stories are to be believed so far, the board of OpenAI, perhaps one of the most important tech companies in the world right now, was full of people who are openly hostile to the existence of the company. I don't want AI safety. The people talking about this stuff like it's a terminator movie are nuts. Strongly believe that this will be a lot like facebook/oculus ousting Palmer Lu…

Convincing yourself and others that you're developing this thing that could destroy humanity if you personally slip up and are just not careful enough makes you feel really powerful.

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

#337

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Some weeks ago, I listened to a Bloomberg interview with Altman where he was joined by someone from OpenAI who does the programming. There was obvious disagreement between the two, and the interviewer actually made a joke about it. Perhaps Altman was destined to become the next SBF. Too much misrepresentation to the public, telling people what they want to hear..

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

#338

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

>The wording is very clearly hostile and aggressive

At least we can be sure that ChatGPT didn't write the statement, then.

Otherwise the last paragraph would have equivocated that both sides have a point.

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

#339

Post by bart_spoon »

andrewstuart wrote: post #127
rirarobo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what do you mean by "unknown -to-anyone"? Ilya is a co-founder of OpenAI, the Chief Scientist, and one of the best known AI researchers in the field. He has also been touring with Sam Altman at public events, and getting highlights such as this one recently: https://youtu.be/9iqn1HhFJ6c

Altman is virtually a household name. Relative to that - Ilya is unknown.

That seems like an incredibly foolish measure of credibility. Donald Trump and Taylor Swift have far greater name recognition than Altman, and yet they aren’t going to be leading the AI revolution.

OpenAI is where it is because its models are much, much better than the alternatives and pretty much always have been since their inception, not because of anything on the business side. The second alternative or open source models reach parity, they will start shedding customers. Their advantage is entirely due to their R&D, not anything on the business side.

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