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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

#371

Post by wil421 »

concordDance wrote: post #304
Lacerda69 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If MS gets their hands on an AGI help us god, but no "organizational safeguards" will matter. Not that I think AGI is possible or desirable in the first place, but that's a different discussion.

Impossible with LLMs, with currently known techniques or impossible full stop?

Impossible with computers full stop. IMHO, we may be able to slice together DNA or modify it to create a new or smarter organism than AGI in a computer.

They already shifted goal posts and they’ll do it again. AI used to mean AGI but marketing got a hold of it. Once something resembling AGI comes out they’ll say well it’s not Level 5 AGI or something similar.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#372

Post by sigmoid10 »

thinkingemote wrote: post #218
Lacerda69 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I didn't even need to check the source. I immediately thought that this was obvious when it was announced (implicitly) that Ilya must have voted out Sam on the board. Whatever legalese is going on in the side channels to justify everything, I can totally see the conflict in visions between these two guys. And I'm sorta glad Ilya came out on top, even though I'm not a big fan of him either. Brockman is the real loss from this mess.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#373

Post by cthalupa »

andrewstuart wrote: post #284
chasd00 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who fires the board at a 501.3c?

I absolutely guarantee you when Microsoft owns 50% that they paid $50,000,000,000 for, that Microsoft is really in charge. The board and Ilya will all be gone within a month.

https://openai.com/our-structure

Microsoft doesn't even own a majority stake in the for-profit, much less anything at all in the non-profit that ultimately controls everything.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#374

Post by throwuwu »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #243
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...

For the most part you would run out of things to code surely? Unless you really are a one man-band with a full understanding of the commercials, user feedback, support etc.

They’re doing groundbreaking research, there’s always something new to try.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#375

Post by BoorishBears »

karmasimida wrote: post #146
BoorishBears wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advice seems off-point: overall it seems like Sam has operated opposite of the narrative he built (which aggrandized a vision of the future and downplayed the importance of making money) and got fired for it. If I was OpenAI I'd want to quit today not because I want to follow Sam, but because the same bullshit that people left Google Brain et al. for has managed to catch up with them at OpenAI. It's a shame hones…

You misunderstood my point. The narrative I am referring to is a simple one: take back what should be his. A.k.a, revenge. That is for sure a strong word. People live on stories (collective imagination, if fancier), and what they like most is a wronged prince/princess took back his/her crown. It is the same with Taylor Swift rerecording her albums. The story potential will feed itself, until it is fully realized. The…

> If I was OpenAI I'd want to quit today not because I want to follow Sam

Sounds like I did? I think this is kind of a bad take, no one is quitting OpenAI before Sam has even had 24 hours to process being fired to help him take on his revenge arc.

Instead it sounds like people are angered by the process and powers that lead to him being fired like that, which is extremely understandable given the history of OpenAI. People forget half of OpenAI's competitive advantage was just not letting themselves be mired in self-sabtoage, the exact kind their board just demonstrated today.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#376

Post by mirzap »

andrewstuart wrote: post #287
mirzap wrote: post #193

This is escalating rather quickly. It is an incredibly irresponsible move by the OpenAI board. Hypergrowing company, and now they managed to shake up their user's trust in leadership stability. This has Adam's (D'Angelo) fingerprints all over it (for context, he did overthrow his co-founder, and Quora has been struggling ever since). This guy shouldn't sit on any board ever again. I predict the board will be fired, a…

I’d be surprised if Sam does. He’s free now to compete and defeat with a huge equity stake.

We could be witnessing another Apple-Jobs moment. He could go and pursue other interests, but I have a feeling that he deeply cares about OpenAI. If that's the case, he will be back eventually, just as Jobs returned to Apple repeatedly.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#377

Post by aj7 »

nirav72 wrote: post #343
vineyardmike wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had internal efforts, and Anthropic already. They definitely don’t have the compute to spare to split with another organization. Apple surely doesn’t have a cluster that at all compares with the big cloud giants. Oracle and AWS are really the only cloud left, and oracle is already renting to Microsoft for GPU compute.

>Apple surely doesn’t have a cluster that at all compares with the big cloud giants. Apple has a lot of cash to throw at it. Question would be if Apple is even interested in it.

They should be. The slight improvements in messaging autocomplete in iOS 17 have made a noticeable difference in my texting. To have an iPhone that understands me, and a Siri that doesn’t say, “Here’s what I found on the web” is extremely valuable.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#378

Post by nwoli »

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…

…Unless you achieve regulatory capture which prevents competitors from easily popping up

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#379

Post by PoignardAzur »

benkarst wrote: post #230

It's incredible how many of you alleged tech people think that Sam just wanted a world of safe AI while his actions suggest he wanted to make dump trucks of money. He was the one who partnered with Microsoft and turned it from a non-profit to a for-profit company.

This post and its replies are a contest for who can best perform enlightened cynicism.

The truth is there isn't any strong evidence one way or another, only your existing worldviews.

Partnering with Microsoft and closing access both have profit-driven and ideology driven explanations, and we don't have strong evidence it's one and not the other.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#380

Post by justanotherjoe »

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…

Probably the Microsoft thing and the direction Sam Altman is taking OpenAI. I imagine that caused a significant shift in workload and nature of work for the people in OpenAI.
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