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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

#401

Post by ThinkBeat »

tsurba wrote: post #329
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...

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…

I disagree.

Personally, I find it much easier to get lost in time and focused when I am working on something challenging. Time just flies by.

If I have to work on something boring / routine / repetitive I find it much hard to focus and time goes by so slowly.

Then my brain decides to look for ways to automate what I am doing. Perhaps a DSL or .. or .. o .. No work, remember work, but I could hmm if I write a Perl script i, No work you need to work, but it woud be work if i cold only

(I am diagnosed with ADHD)

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#402

Post by frabcus »

silviot wrote: post #155
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...

I'm trying to read and reread this over and over again to make sense of this but to me it sounds like in the comments people speak as if Greg brockman resigned while in the article he is not amongst the three names who resigned. What am I missing here?

He was fired from being Chair of the Board, but the rest of the board left him in his position as an engineer (?) in the company. Then an hour or two later he resigned as an engineer.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312704

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#403

Post by NhanH »

ramraj07 wrote: post #282
NhanH wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about being rockstar or 10x. He was the chairman of the board (and President of the LLC). Practically speaking, he can work however he wishes within the company. Seeing that he went from CTO role to President role, it's fairly obvious that he got the opportunity to structure the role and the work to best fit him (and probably the company, too).

There’s always a hoarde of people second guessing the 10x engineer. Of course it looks impossible to regular folks. I have seen a few people like this. They’re real. Sometimes it’s even worth the dysfunction they cause to see this in action.

I am not second guessing the 10x engineer, that topic is not the one under discussion.

The topic at hand is “how did a high level engineer got to focus on programming”. And I am saying that the reason has to do more with his influence and role within the organization, rather than other reason.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#404

Post by worldsayshi »

Roark66 wrote: post #178
worldsayshi wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it really have that kind of self awareness to be able to do that successfully? I feel very sceptical.

I doubt self awareness has anything to do with it..

What else would you call the ability for it to adapt a task for its own capabilities?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#405

Post by kubb »

Tade0 wrote: post #171

I'm embarrassed to say, being Polish myself, I had no idea that key people in OpenAI were Polish - I assume it was a coordinated resignation then. Madry is actually spelled Mądry, which translates to "Wise".

A lot of top talent from Polish universities went to work in the Silicon Valley (with the US spending $0 on their education BTW). They're very well represented per capita of their home country, but just a drop in the ocean of international talent that the Bay Area is swarming with.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#406

Post by cthalupa »

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.

Yes. AGI is literally their charter.

https://openai.com/charter

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#407

Post by fennecbutt »

l5870uoo9y wrote: post #319
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.

I find the close partnership with Microsoft and their vision of "Creating safe AI that benefits all of humanity" difficult to reconcile. Open source vs commercialism could definitely be a reason for the split.

How so? Think about it, Microsoft is very risk averse. Hell, even to get the Xbox project going they had to fight so damn hard because "we're not a games company, we make Windows and Office"

It's completely illogical to say that just because an AI company isn't open source it can't strive to also be "safe".

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#408

Post by thawab »

jessriedel wrote: post #354
andrewstuart wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're not. They don't have board seats. The mission-driven founders of Open AI were very serious about ensuring this.

with the amount they paid, how did they not get a seat in the board?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#409

Post by frabcus »

bcherny wrote: post #293
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.

Honest question: How would he make money if he didn’t have equity in OpenAI?

Via his Y Combinator related holdings in companies which use the OpenAI APIs? Or just which are getting capital and exposure due to ChatGPT boosting visibility of AI.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#410

Post by twoodfin »

bcherny wrote: post #293
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.

Honest question: How would he make money if he didn’t have equity in OpenAI?

Your forward-looking value to an organization is your value whether it’s realized in equity or not.

In the world where Sam Altman leads OpenAI to market dominance and eventual acquisition by Microsoft for $400B or whatever, he obviously would represent an important part of what Microsoft would be buying and would be compensated accordingly.

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