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Reflections on OpenAI

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Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#341

Post by criddell »

tedsanders wrote: post #228
criddell wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. That feels like kind of a weak definition. That makes me wonder what kinds of work aren’t economically valuable? Would that be services generally provided by government?

Maybe I'm biased, but I actually think it's a pretty good definition, as definitions go. All of our narrow measures of human intelligence that we might be tempted to use - win at games, solve math problems, ace academic tests, dominate at programming competitions - are revealed as woefully insufficient as soon as an AI beats them but fails to generalize far beyond. But if you have an AI that can generate lots of reve…

I also find it interesting that the definition always includes the "outperforms humans" qualifier. Maybe our first AGIs will underperform humans.

Imagine I built a robot dog that behaved just like a biological dog. It bonds with people, can be trained, shows emotion, communicates, likes to play, likes to work, solves problems, understands social cues, and is loyal. IMHO, that would qualify as an AGI even though it isn't writing essays or producing business plans.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#342

Post by baggachipz »

teiferer wrote: post #299
hinterlands wrote: post #52

It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. I don't think this makes OpenAI special. It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization. Look at it this way: the flip side of "incredibly bottoms-up" from this article is that…

There is lots of rationalizing going on in his article. > I returned early from my paternity leave to help participate in the Codex launch. 10 years from now, the significance of having participated in that launch will be ridiculously small (unless you tell yourself that it was a pivotal moment of your life, even if it objectively wasn't) versus those first weeks with your newborn will never come back. Kudos to your…

The very fact that he did this exemplifies everything that is wrong about the tech industry and our current society. He's praising himself for this instead of showing remorse for his failure as a parent.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#344

Post by baggachipz »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #59
bhl wrote: post #3

> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends. There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months. Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, gi…

How did they have any time left to be a parent?

How did they have any time to create the child in the first place?

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#345

Post by adamgordonbell »

maest wrote: post #225
lz400 wrote: post #185

Engineers thinking they're building god is such a good marketing strategy. I can't overstate it. It's even difficult to be rational about it. I don't actually believe it's true, I think it's pure hype and LLMs won't even approximate AGI. But this idea is sort of half-immune to criticism or skepticism: you can always respond with "but what if it's true?". The stakes are so high that the potentially infinite payoff sno…

Similar to Pascal's wager, which pretty much amounts to "yeah, God is probably not real, _but what if it is_? The utility of getting into heaven is infinite (and hell is infinitely negative), so any non-zero probability that God is real should make you be religious, just in case." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager#Analysis_with...

See also Pascal's mugging, from Eliezer Yudkowsky. Some would say AI Safety research is a form of Pascal's mugging.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#346

Post by rvz »

lqstuart wrote: post #275
TheDong wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if we redefine "AGI" to mean "literally cloning a human biologically", then AGI suddenly is a very different problem (mainly one of ethics, since creating human clones, educating, brainwashing, and forcing them to respond to chat messages ala chatGPT has a couple ethical issues along the way). I don't see how claiming that intelligence is multi-faceted makes AGI (the A is 'artificial' remember) impossible. Even…

“AGI” isn’t a thing and never will be. It fails even really basic scrutiny. The objective function of a human being is to keep its biological body alive and reproduce. There is no such similar objective on which a ML algorithm can be trained. It’s frankly a stupid idea propagated by people with no meaningful connection to the field and no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.

We will look back on this and the early OpenAI employees (who sold) will speak out in documentaries and movies in a decades time and they will admit that "AGI" was a period of easy dumb money.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#347

Post by yawnr »

ml-anon wrote: post #200
bhl wrote: post #3

> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends. There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months. Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, gi…

This guy who is already independently wealthy chose working 16-17h 7 days a week instead of raising his newborn child and thanks his partner for “childcare duties”. Pretty much tells you everything you need to know.

Yeah as someone who has a young child this entire post made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. Working this much with a newborn is toxic behavior and if a company demands it then it is toxic culture. And writing about it as anything but that feels like some combination of Stockholm syndrome, being a workaholic, and marketing spin.

Being passionate about something and giving yourself to a project can be amazing, but you need to have the bandwidth to do it without the people you care about suffering because of that choice.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#348

Post by usaar333 »

teiferer wrote: post #299
hinterlands wrote: post #52

It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. I don't think this makes OpenAI special. It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization. Look at it this way: the flip side of "incredibly bottoms-up" from this article is that…

There is lots of rationalizing going on in his article. > I returned early from my paternity leave to help participate in the Codex launch. 10 years from now, the significance of having participated in that launch will be ridiculously small (unless you tell yourself that it was a pivotal moment of your life, even if it objectively wasn't) versus those first weeks with your newborn will never come back. Kudos to your…

Odd take. Openai gives 5 months of paternity leave and author is independently wealthy. What difference does it make between spending more time with a 4 month old vs a 4 year old? Or is your prescription that people should just be retiring once they have children?

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#349

Post by xdavidliu »

ashdksnndck wrote: post #254
harmonic18374 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not trying to advance wild hypotheticals, but something about his behavior does not quite feel right to me. Someone who has enough money for multiple lifetimes, working like he's possessed, to launch a product minimally different than those at dozens of other companies, and leaving his wife with all the childcare, then leaving after 14 months and insisting he was not burnt out but without a clear next step, not…

Why did Michael Jordan retire 3 times? Sure, you could probably write a book about it, but you would want to get to know the guy first.

first time in 93 because of burnout from three peat, and allegedly a gambling problem. second because of the lockout and krause pushing phil out. third because too old

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#350

Post by imiric »

criddell wrote: post #341
tedsanders wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm biased, but I actually think it's a pretty good definition, as definitions go. All of our narrow measures of human intelligence that we might be tempted to use - win at games, solve math problems, ace academic tests, dominate at programming competitions - are revealed as woefully insufficient as soon as an AI beats them but fails to generalize far beyond. But if you have an AI that can generate lots of reve…

I also find it interesting that the definition always includes the "outperforms humans" qualifier. Maybe our first AGIs will underperform humans. Imagine I built a robot dog that behaved just like a biological dog. It bonds with people, can be trained, shows emotion, communicates, likes to play, likes to work, solves problems, understands social cues, and is loyal. IMHO, that would qualify as an AGI even though it is…

> IMHO, that would qualify as an AGI even though it isn't writing essays or producing business plans.

I'm not sure it would, though. The "G" in AGI stands for "General", which a dog obviously can't showcase. The comparison must be done against humans, since the goal is to ultimately have the system perform human tasks.

The definition mentioned by tedsanders seems adequate to me. Most of the terms are fuzzy ("most", "outperform"), but limiting the criteria to economic value narrows it down to a measurable metric. Of course, this could be exploited by building a system that optimizes for financial gain over everything else, but this wouldn't be acceptable.

The actual definition is not that important, IMO. AGI, if it happens, won't appear suddenly from a singular event, but as a gradual process until it becomes widely accepted that we have reached it. The impact on society and our lives would be impossible to ignore at that point. The problem with this is that along the way there will be charlatans and grifters shouting from the rooftops that they've already cracked it, but this is nothing new.

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