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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

#451

Post by capableweb »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #423
jstummbillig wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI is an absolute unicorn, and not in the bullshit-1-mrd-vc-money-dollar sense but in being truly outstanding. Since all they do is software, that is solely because of the people involved, being able to do things and doing things that other people won't and achieving things that other people don't. When it comes to sports it's fairly obvious what outliers look like and well accepted that they exist. I don't see a…

> Since all they do is software... For a certain definition of "software": when only doing one training run costs an 8 digits sum (requiring hardware one order of magnitude more expensive than that to run) I kinda dispute the "all they do is software". It's definitely not "all software": a big part of their advantage compared to actually free and open models is the insane hardware they have access to. The free and op…

> I'd like to see the actually open and free models trained on the hardware used to train OpenAI: then we'd see how much of a "software edge" OpenAI has.

It would seem like you're talking about what "software edge" OpenAI has in the future, when others have caught up, while parent is talking about the existing "software edge" OpenAI has today, which you seem to implicitly agree with, as you're talking about OpenAI maybe not having any edge in the future.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#452

Post by jdthedisciple »

Rastonbury wrote: post #340
mirzap wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They resign under public pressure, I guess?

Why would they if they are advancing the goals of the non-profit and Altman was endangering that goal?

Hahaha "advancing the goals of non profit" right after making billions.

All of a sudden their amnesia stopped huh?

Hypocrites and virtue signallers, the whole board.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#453

Post by wslh »

Could we say that OpenAI is not only the company with the fastest product traction and impact in the world but the fastest to implode? When there are a lot of things at stake, not only money, people collide. This is a rant but we are seeing several examples now in 2023. There are "rules" for normal startups and different ones in another scale.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#454

Post by adammarples »

fennecbutt wrote: post #419
kashyapc wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not? It's on topic. Should people discussing nuclear energy not talk about fusion?

We know that fusion is a very common process that inevitably happens to even the simplest elements if you just make them hot enough, we just don't know how to do that in a controlled manner. We don't really know what intelligence is, how it came about, or how we would ever recreate it artificially or if that's possible. LLMs are some pretty convincing tricks though but that's on the level of making some loud noises behind a curtain and calling it fusion.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#455

Post by blurbleblurble »

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've seen the bugs of multiple 10x engineers multiply together for 10^n x bugs

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#456

Post by nobodyandproud »

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

What’s wrong with being another Woz? The money?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#457

Post by nerbert »

jstummbillig wrote: post #305
Fluorescence wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think "blaming" Sam is entirely correct. Of course, not for the petty reasons that you list. Sama has comprehensively explained why the original OS model did not work, and so far the argument – it's very expensive – seems to align with a reality where every single semi-competitive available LLM (since they all pale in comparison to GPT-4 anyway) has been trained with a whole lot of corporate money. Meta side-chaini…

This is on point. This whole mess is indeed an alignment issue. The fact that this came as a surprise to him could be an indicator of insufficient engagement with the board.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#458

Post by keepamovin »

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…

I think the surprising truth is that all of these people are essentially replaceable.

They may be geniuses, but AGI is an idea whose time has come: geniuses are no longer required to get us there.

The Singularity train has already left the station.

Inevitability.

Now humanity is just waiting for it to arrive at our stop

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#459

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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 would rather have one of you than ten people who dig the ditch in front of them.

You will see the distance to be travelled and say let's build a airplane.

but incentives in most companies demand "progess" hence most projects start by piling the car high and driving off. it's when they are attaching floats to the car and paddling across the atlantic shouting progess reports back to shore that the value of automation comes to mind

don't worry about the ADHD - embrace it. (my hint - of the boring has to be done, make it the only thing, have nothing else).

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#460

Post by Rastonbury »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #452
Rastonbury wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they if they are advancing the goals of the non-profit and Altman was endangering that goal?

Hahaha "advancing the goals of non profit" right after making billions. All of a sudden their amnesia stopped huh? Hypocrites and virtue signallers, the whole board.

I mean, the board doesn't have equity and the for-profit subsidiary is profit capped
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