Assuming that's the end of the story, what hardcore ML people do Altman and Brockman have now for their new AI startup? Or are they just going to focus on the hardware thing?
Jakub Pachocki - Director of Research,
Aleksander Madry,
Szymon Sidor.
Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
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Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
#432I wonder if the recent departure of Kyle Vogt from Cruise is related. Emmett Shear and Kyle Vogt founded Twitch together.
It would make a lot of sense. Kyle knows the space, is already wealthy and has always been pretty altruistic. And the fact that Emmett is only interim should give you a hint something is up.
> And the fact that Emmett is only interim should give you a hint something is up.
That they didn't complete the process of a permanent CEO over the weekend after firing and then negotiating with Altman?
Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, serious investors won't touch OpenAI with a ten foot pole after these events. There's an idealistic bunch of people that think this was the best thing to happen to OpenAI, time will tell but I personally think this is the end of the company (and Ilya). Satya must be quite pissed off and rightly so, he gave them big money, believed in them and got backstabbed as well; disregarding @sama, MS is their single large…
200k MS employees can't do what 500 from OAI can, the more you pile on the problem, the worse the outcome. The problem with Microsoft is that, like Google, Amazon and IBM, they are not a good medium for radical innovation, are old, ossified companies. Apple used to be nimble when Steve was alive, but went to coasting mode since then. Having large revenue from old business is an obstacle in the new world, maybe Apple…
> Apple used to be nimble when Steve was alive, but went to coasting mode since then
Give me a break. Apple Watch and Air pods are far and away leaders in their category, Apple's silicon is a huge leap forward, there is innovation in displays, CarPlay is the standard auto interface for millions of people, while I may question the utility the Vision Pro is a technological marvel, iPhone is still a juggernaut (and the only one of these examples that predate Jobs' passing), etc. etc.
Other companies dream about "coasting" as successfully.
Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
#434"I specifically say I’m in favor of slowing down, which is sort of like pausing except it’s slowing down. If we’re at a speed of 10 right now, a pause is reducing to 0. I think we should aim for a 1-2 instead." - Emmett Shear, Sep 16, 2023
https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1703178063306203397?t=8nHS...
Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, despite what Musk did, X (Twitter?) has still been limping along for quite a while now. While more abrupt and surprising, this doesn't seem nearly as bad as that.
This is far worse. OpenAI simply cannot survive without Microsoft and skeleton staff. It's not like a static codebase where you can keep the service up and running indefinitely barring bugs. Why would anyone building with the OpenAI APIs, their customers, have any faith in the company if they openly don't care about business? Working on AI is highly capital intensive, on the scale of many tens of billions of dollars.…
Musk fired most of the engineers. I'd be pretty surprised if we see the level of attrition at OpenAI getting within an order of magnitude of that. We are just making predictions, though. I could be way off the mark and many more people are willing to jump ship than I imagine.
As for Microsoft, if they let OpenAI go, then what? Does Google pick them up? Elon? They are still looking to invent AGI, so I'd be surprised if no one wants to take advantage of that opportunity. I'd expect Microsoft to be aware of this and weigh into their calculus.
Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
#436Real question: I've never heard/seen of this website before, is it reputable?
The information? Yes, they are highly focused on the tech industry and very diligent. They make most (all?) of their revenue on subscriptions, so that limits their incentives to make clickbait content.
Well, they make different kinds of bad content, like in-depth investigations of how cool the parties their subscribers hold are.
Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another of Musk’s lies that keeps being propagated “ In 1995, he was accepted to a PhD program in materials science at Stanford University.[64][65] However, Musk decided to join the Internet boom, dropping out two days after being accepted and applied for a job at Netscape” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
Maybe read my comment again? There is no lie. I said accepted, not attended. And if you've ever tried to get into a PhD program at Stanford you'd know that isn't easy unless you have, you know, at least a little bit of knowledge of the field. So the parent claiming that Elon Musk doesn't even know basic Physics is blatantly wrong.
Sorry I misread that as “got a Material Science phd”
Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
#438For a change, maybe it'd be a good idea to get a CEO who at least has faint idea about how ML works on a technical level? Would you like a company that builds rockets to be led by some salesman who doesn't understand basic Physics? Probably not. You don't need to be Hinton or Schmidhuber, but come on, who thinks it's a good idea to have these typical "Silicon Valley VC CEOs" lead an AI company?
The trick is that execs do have unusually good insight into how their tech works, because they can ask their reports to explain it. Btw, I think it's funny how much credit Hinton gets for AI. His contribution is pretty much just keeping some grad students on the problem.
I think there's an important difference between not understanding and not doing the work yourself because you are in a managerial/advisor position. If you give Hinton a recent paper on LLM RLHF he will understand the nuances in it, he just delegates the actual work. If you give Emmett Shear or whoever such a thing, they almost certainly don't. For a deep tech company focused on research (not some consumer SaaS thing) I don't think you can be a good CEO if you don't even have an understanding of what you are building.
Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
#439Not a word from Ilya. I can’t wrap my mind around his motivation. Did he really fire Sam over “AI safety” concerns? How is that remotely rational.
No he didn't fire Sam over AI safety concerns. That's completely made up by people in the twittersphere. The only thing we know is that the board said the reason was that he lied to the board. The guardian[1] reported that he was working on a new startup[1] and that staff had been told it was due to a breakdown in communication and not to do with anything regarding safety, security, malfeasance or a bunch of other th…
Spoken to a bunch of folk at OpenAI, it really does seem to be regarding safety. Ilya was extremely worried, did not like the idea of GPT’s as users can train AI’s to do arbitrarily harmful stuff.
Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down
#440I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend. If it’s true that Altman won’t return to OpenAI (or alternatively: that the current board won’t step down) then where does that leave OpenAI? Microsoft can’t be happy, as evidenced by reporting that Nadella was acting as mediator to bring him back. Does OpenAI survive this? Will be super inter…
The big question in my mind is the reported threat from MSFT to withhold cloud credits (i.e. the actual currency of their $10B investment). Is this true? And are they going to follow through? I don't buy for a second that enough employees will walk to sink the company (though it could be very be disruptive). But for OpenAI, losing a big chunk of their compute could mean they are unable to support their userbase and t…
was it even reported? i heard a bunch of stuff that seemed to be hypothetical guessing like "satya must be furious" that seemed to morph into "it was reported satya is furious"
i've seen similar with the cloud credits thing, people just pontificating whether it's even a viable strategy.