Meta's next for him? There's lots of money being poured into their AI division and there's lots of compute & being able to do any kind of research he might want.
Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
411–420 of 855 posts
Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Canadian Dream is to get a great education and then move of the US. You might want to blame the government or this or that but I think as a Canadian I've finally come to reckon with the fact that it's just not in the Canadian ethos to do risky things like make startups. Of course there are exceptions to the rule but they are very very rare. Canadian investors don't want to take big risks and the Americans are jus…
For folks without responsibilities like kids, aging parents, etc. I really don’t think startups are very “risky”. What’s the worst that happens? It doesn’t work out and after five years you go get a job in boring corp corp with an incredible skillset and vast life experience. You’ve sacrificed some income perhaps, but so what? People make choices like that all the time. Your working career could easily be 40 or 45 ye…
This depends on what you see as risk. If I can safely earn for 5 years way above national average and build a strong savings egg that can provide income forever.
Or I can fail at a startup and be close to zero five years later, the fact that you aren't homeless and starving and can get another job doesn't mean it wasn't risky, you still wasted a bunch of years compared to slow and steady accumulation.
I've read the majority of millionaires in the US get created like this, working and saving through decades.
You're basically repeating investor kool-aid, because for their model to work, 100 people will fail and 1 succeed, and so they tell you to not worry if you're in the 99.
Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Canadian Dream is to get a great education and then move of the US. You might want to blame the government or this or that but I think as a Canadian I've finally come to reckon with the fact that it's just not in the Canadian ethos to do risky things like make startups. Of course there are exceptions to the rule but they are very very rare. Canadian investors don't want to take big risks and the Americans are jus…
For folks without responsibilities like kids, aging parents, etc. I really don’t think startups are very “risky”. What’s the worst that happens? It doesn’t work out and after five years you go get a job in boring corp corp with an incredible skillset and vast life experience. You’ve sacrificed some income perhaps, but so what? People make choices like that all the time. Your working career could easily be 40 or 45 ye…
Turns out there’s only enough people with this mindset to fill a couple hubs around the world. The rest prefers less volatility and happily takes on less downside risk for capped reward and/or less upside risk.
Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
#414Jan Leike has said he's leaving too https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1790603862132596961
There goes the so called superalignment:
Ilya
Jan Leike
William Saunders
Leopold Aschenbrenner
All gone
Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
#415Probably not related, but it's worth pointing out that Daniel Kokotajlo ( https://www.lesswrong.com/users/daniel-kokotajlo ) left last month. But if it were related, then that would presumably be because people within the company (or at least two rather noteworthy people) no longer believe that OpenAI is acting in the best interests of humanity. Which isn't too shocking really given that a decent chunk of us feel the…
Well it might be in the best (long-term) interests of humanity to have autonomous flying killer robots powered by OpenAI secret military contracting work cut the human population in half, in the name of the long-term ecological health of the planet, and to cull those not smart or fast enough to run away, thus improving the breeding stock. That's why I don't trust people who run around claiming to be serving the best…
We already have tools to cut the human population in half even without AI. Acting in the best interests of humanity is really a cheesy way to frame it. I'm sure they also told Oppenheimer he was acting in the best interests of humanity.
Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
#416When walking around the U of Toronto, I often think that ~10 years ago Ilya was in a lab next to Alex trying to figure things out. I can't believe this new AI wave started there. Ilya, Karpathy, Jimmy Ba, and many more were at the right time when Hinton was there too.
And none of them build AI companies in Toronto. I’m Canadian and disappointed at how ineffective we are at building successful companies.
Why would anyone start the game on hard mode when easy mode is a border drive away?
Us is so outrageously better than the rest that people fly across oceans to start businesses there. Canada, being next door, doesn't have the distance moat to at least slow down the brain drain
Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I don’t trust much of anything sam says, so I’d take any framing with a large grain of salt
> a large grain of salt You mean a lump of salt? I've always wondered what the right word is to describe this amount of salt /!jk
A handful of salt
Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Canadian Dream is to get a great education and then move of the US. You might want to blame the government or this or that but I think as a Canadian I've finally come to reckon with the fact that it's just not in the Canadian ethos to do risky things like make startups. Of course there are exceptions to the rule but they are very very rare. Canadian investors don't want to take big risks and the Americans are jus…
For folks without responsibilities like kids, aging parents, etc. I really don’t think startups are very “risky”. What’s the worst that happens? It doesn’t work out and after five years you go get a job in boring corp corp with an incredible skillset and vast life experience. You’ve sacrificed some income perhaps, but so what? People make choices like that all the time. Your working career could easily be 40 or 45 ye…
The increased cost of living in the last few years has changed this somewhat. That 5 years of lower earnings now means less nice groceries, fewer holidays and being under the yoke of landlords for considerably longer.
Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
For folks without responsibilities like kids, aging parents, etc. I really don’t think startups are very “risky”. What’s the worst that happens? It doesn’t work out and after five years you go get a job in boring corp corp with an incredible skillset and vast life experience. You’ve sacrificed some income perhaps, but so what? People make choices like that all the time. Your working career could easily be 40 or 45 ye…
This depends on what you see as risk. If I can safely earn for 5 years way above national average and build a strong savings egg that can provide income forever. Or I can fail at a startup and be close to zero five years later, the fact that you aren't homeless and starving and can get another job doesn't mean it wasn't risky, you still wasted a bunch of years compared to slow and steady accumulation. I've read the m…
Of course you could probably say at least some of the same things about grad degrees that may not really translate into appreciable different/better career outcomes. Of course some say exactly that, especially about PhDs.
Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the majority of Canadians think that having great higher education institutions and thr people who work in them is a good fit for their way of life, but having Silicon Valley companies and people making SV salaries around epuld make their lives worse? If so, this is great: Canadians don't want to live with the tech crowd, so they provide them with the skills so they can move elsewhere, make their dreams come tu…
That makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country, not to train other countries work forces. If you read anything about Canada ever you will also know they have a bunch of policies to try and stop the brain drain and to recruit tech workers from abroad.
> That makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country
The idea is precisely that not having SV types around _improves_ the country, i.e. makes it closer to the preferences of Canadians.
And yes, having a foreign tech worker doing 9-to-5 in a large legacy company for thoroughly average salaries is very different from having a SV-style startup culture. There is very little process in Canada to make life difficult for the former style of company, and plenty of process to make operations difficult for the latter.
If not having SV folk improves Canada for Canadians, and hqving SV folks improves America for Americans, then this is just mutually beneficial trade. Efforts to try and stop brain drain still makes sense: it's even better if you can convince the citizens you trained to engage in the economic activity you actually want instead of economic activity that you find undesirable, but if you're unable to convince most of them, letting them go is still better than having them stay and engage in their undesirable behavior anyway.
Compare: if a large minority of Icelanders wanted to work for the Baby (which Iceland doesn't have), theb stopping the brain drain (convincing them to work in the Merchant Fleet) is the best outcome, but funneling them out (training them in merchant navigation and watching them join the Danish Navy) would still be preferable to them engaging in their desired behavior anyway (form their own pirate gang preying on the very Merchant Fleet you're trying to advantage).