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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

#431

Post by tucnak »

thinkingemote wrote: post #195
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…

current popular theory is that those fired/left were taking OpenAI for profit, and the board stuck with their original goal of non profit.

how can people be so naïve... think about it. isn't it exactly the kind of spin that you would expect from "new" leadership? like, of course they're going to take the moral high-ground like any new regime would.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#432

Post by imetatroll »

fennecbutt wrote: post #407
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Microsoft is risk averse only in the sense that they don't want any competition.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#433

Post by mkl »

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.

Lots of research is mostly programming, e.g. my applied maths PhD. The way to try out software-based ideas is with programming.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#434

Post by koonsolo »

timthelion wrote: post #411
koonsolo wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding for 50 to 80 hours a week? Well, I call bullshit on that. Never seen anyone do that consistently and with high quality and quantity output. Let's first define 'coding' before we jump into the details: 'coding' for me is sitting at your computer doing the work. It's not getting a coffee, chatting with a colleague, going to toilet or reading hacker news. So if you're reading this and claiming to do 100 hours per…

While I'm sure 100 hours a week is impossible, my dad did 6x11 work days which were dominated by coding pre-internet. You wouldn't know him, he burned out. I have personally witnessed him do more than 60 hours in a week coding. That said, his coding work isn't necessarilly creative. He can do a 12 hour stint of step through debugging stopping only to microwave frozen food. Or 12 hours of data analytic work. Since it…

I also notice that the more complex a task is, the less hours of it I can do.

If I know what to write, and I just have to crunch out pretty straightforward code, I can do more hours (nowhere near 12 hours though, maybe 8 at best).

I can imagine the work your dad did, didn't include juggling a big complex system in his head, which seems to require a lot of mental energy.

That's basically also what Carmack states, that you can reach 12 hours if you plan your work to include some easier tasks for that day. But then again, I was never able to really apply that strategy.

Thanks for you take on it! :)

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#435

Post by Anotheroneagain »

aidaman wrote: post #61

GPT5 pre-training just ended I believe. Brock, Pachocki, Szymon Sidor, would have likely all been involved. These are huge losses. Pachocki led pre-training for GPT-4, and probably GPT-5. Brockman is the major engineer responsible for the efficiency improvements that enabled ChatGPT and GPT-4 to be even remotely cost-effective. That is a piece that is often overlooked, but OpenAI's advantage over the competition in c…

What is the truth about OpenAI achieving some sort of "true" AGI?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#436

Post by theGeatZhopa »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #401
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…

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 scr…

I'm not diagnosed as you are, but I'm the same in that terms. Boring needs to be automated, challenging tasks need to be automated too.

So basically, my brain is lazy and try to find a way to keep it in that state.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#437

Post by martindbp »

kozikow wrote: post #246

I know Jakub Pachocki and in my feeling, Jakub leaving is worse for gpt than Greg or Sam. Im not claiming to know more than everyone else, but Sam was IMO just a face. Greg is backend engineer - that's less important than actual research.

The whole team that trained GPT1-3 and came up with RLHF left to found Anthropic, perhaps proving that key people are maybe not so key and that other factors are more important. This is a further blow though on top of the previous one.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#438

Post by [deleted] »

Fluorescence wrote: post #213
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…

Why not blame Altman for that? If he didn't manage to keep OpenAI consistent with it's founding principles and all interests aligned then wouldn't booting him be right? The name OpenAI had become a source of mockery. If Altman/Brockman take employees for a commercial venture, it just seems to prove their insincerity about the OpenAI mission.

[deleted]

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#439

Post by schleck8 »

lwhi wrote: post #300
martijnvds wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ALDI Nord vs Aldi Süd; Adidas vs Puma?

Yes you're correct, thanks! Edit: apparently ALDI VS LIDL is an urban myth. It's ALDI that was split in two ..

Aldi and Lidl are each other's biggest competitors. Aldi Süd and Nord don't really clash because there is only two markets where both are present: Germany, where they aren't competing though (split in North and South) and the US (Aldi vs. Trader Joe's). Every other country only has one of the two Aldis. Lidl on the other hand is present in most large markets alongside one of the Aldis.
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