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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

#391

Post by cthalupa »

andrewstuart wrote: post #279

Ilya’s job won’t survive this power play……. Satya has been humiliated and will be furious.

What mechanism does Satya have to do anything here?

Microsoft has a minority stake in the for-profit subsidiary that is wholly controlled by the 501(c)(3). All investors (and employees) in the for-profit have to agree to the operating agreement that specifies the for-profit is not actually obligated to actually make a profit and that it is all secondary the charter the non-profit operates under.

https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/charter

There is not a higher power than the board of the non-profit.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#393

Post by fch42 »

vasco wrote: post #346
yodsanklai wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine this type of person to abide to their normal obligations during business hours, and code full time the rest of their wake-up time. In my company, 80% coding for a senior SWE is rare. But if they deliver, management will give them some slack on the other evaluation axis. I have colleagues who work almost by themselves on new high impact projects. This has many benefits. No need to argue about designs, co…

This is very true everywhere I've looked. What also happens is regular developers (like me) want the same treatment as if they could end-to-end deliver "if they only let me", but many times can't, and actually need the structure and processes of a team. I've seen this freedom not working at all.

Indeed so ... the "structure" (call it bureaucracy of you like) is all of:

- an equalizer (entire team treated the same)

- a confidence booster (approval of others gives feeling of having done well)

- a way of distributing information (everyone is aware of all other team work)

You can run a team as a form of "competitive sport", and race everyone against each other; who churns out most "wins", and helpfulness, non-code-work, cross-team work are "distractors" to that objective hence undesirable and definitely not rewarded.

If the personalities in your team are "right" then this can work and by striving to best each other, all achieve highly. Have a single non-competitive person in there though... and it'll grate. Forcing a collaborative element into the work (whether by approval/review procedures, or by things like mentoring/coaching, or even just to force briefings to the team on project completion) creates a balance between the "lone crusaders" and the "power of the masses". Make the loners aware of, and contribute to, the concept of "team success", and give the "masses" insight into contributing factors of high individual performance.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#394

Post by 3np »

ksynwa wrote: post #386

Forgive my ignorance but I am asking this because a lot of people have been mentioning AGI. Does OpenAI say anywhere that they want to achieve AGI at somw point in the future? While GPT and other generative AIs are extremely innovative and cool they are really really far away from being AGI. Setting sights on something like AGI seems delusional or a marketing stunt at this point.

> OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

First sentence on https://openai.com/about

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#395

Post by mi3law »

calf wrote: post #216
mi3law wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Those zillions of lines are given to ChatGPT in the form of weights and biases through backprop during pre-training. The data does not map to any experience of ChatGPT itself, so it's performance involves associations between data, not associations between data and its own experience of that data.

Compare ChatGPT to a dog-- a dog's experience of an audible "sit" command maps to that particular dog's history of experience, manipulated through pain or pleasure (i.e. if you associate treat + "sit", you'll have a dog with its own grounded definition of sit). A human also learns words like "sit," and we always have our own understanding of those words, even if we can agree on them together too certain degrees in lines of linguistic corpora. In fact, the linguistic corpora is borne out of our experiences, our individual understandings, and that's a one way arrow, so something trained purely on that resultant data is always an abstraction level away from experience, and therefore from true grounded understanding or truth. Hence GPT (and all deep learning) unsolvable hallucination or grounding problems.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#396

Post by tempestn »

kashyapc wrote: post #384
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…

Hi, can we talk about the elephant in the room? I see breathless talk about "AGI" here, as if it's just sitting in Altman's basement and waiting to be unleashed. We barely understand how consciousness works, we should stop talking about "AGI". It is just empty, ridiculous techno-babble. Sorry for the harsh language, there's no nice way to drive home this point.

There is no need to understand how consciousness works to develop AGI.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#397

Post by thawab »

computerex wrote: post #331
ramraj07 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly will he make loads of money if he didn’t have any equity in OpenAI? Or should we assume that was a lie?

You know it's not just about the monetary compensation, that's rather short-sighted. sama is not hurting for cash. Being the CEO of OpenAI, in the climate that we are in, brings with it a lot of exposure and influence.

to add to your point: He was sitting with heads of state because of openai.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#398

Post by autonomousErwin »

bozhark wrote: post #296
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...

No one wants to be another woz

I think Woz got the absolute best deal but that's coming from a tinkerer's POV. People underestimate how much it sucks to be under scrutiny 100% of the time as a face of the company (i.e. Steve #2)

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#399

Post by jebarker »

amelius wrote: post #355
tsurba wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Brockman tweets is from technical standpoint the most mundane, boring, and obvious stuff I’ve read from a programmer. My reads of this guy have been he’s not working on any problems that are technically difficult (or interesting). It’s much easier to work long hours on easy problems. He also has a managerial vibe in all communications which supports my feeling. Most programming work in any project and company is…

They said "senior researchers ", and I would say a programmer is not a researcher if they spend all their time on programming.

This type of research happens in teams

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#400

Post by boltzmann_brain »

schleck8 wrote: post #97
convexstrictly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Greg Brockman works 60 to 100 hours per week, and spends around 80% of the time coding. Former colleagues have described him as the hardest-working person at OpenAI." https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...

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

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