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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

#481

Post by sureglymop »

mkl wrote: post #433
amelius wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the point was more than a lot of programming is not actually programming. Working in the industry, most somewhat complex systems require mostly work on paper, planning, research, reading documentation etc. and in the end some writing of code. Too often though, that is dismissed because it's "less agile" and a few years down the road the technical debt is huge.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#482

Post by School-Cotton »

kashyapc wrote: post #384
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…

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.

AGI does not require consciousness.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#483

Post by Loughla »

j_maffe wrote: post #311
konschubert wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the possibility that people who know a thing or two technology might still think AI brings a lot of good and that kneecapping AI isn't the right move at this time.

There are plenty of AI experts who believe that AI will do more harm than good if it keeps being developed at this rate.

This is not as strong of an argument as you think. There have been experts who believe pretty much every technological innovation, since we transitioned from rock tablets to paper, that it will do more harm than good.

Context: I believe the end of humanity will be real AI and not climate change.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#484

Post by Kye »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #389
mirzap wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I misspoke earlier. Although nobody has actual power on paper, public and investor pressure can be just as influential.

Could Microsoft not hire Sam (reporting directly to Satya) and those who departed and equip them with compute access and ancillary resources? It seems less of a lift than salvaging the OpenAI situation internally due to the emotions and politics involved, non competes not existing in California (broadly speaking), and the logistics of attempting to apply pressure to a 501c3 board with very little leverage. The value…

There's already a Microsoft Sam.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#485

Post by pydry »

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.

>There’s always a hoarde of people second guessing the 10x engineer.

Because most 10x engineers recognized by management as such are characterized chiefly by building out shoddy software extremely quickly that only they can understand.

In a similar dynamic, Doctors that are scored highly by patients often have pretty bad medical outcomes.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#486

Post by cthalupa »

benkarst wrote: post #467
nickisnoble wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure is a color, pretty common.

Oh, ok. Thanks for the education sir. I'm sure it's referring the color and not the second biggest cloud computing platform grossing over 50 billion per year.

The poster's name is [Type Of French Knife][French Word For Azure (the color)]

It is likely referring to the color, not the cloud platform.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#487

Post by abenga »

Anotheroneagain wrote: post #435
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?

Probably almost guaranteed to be false.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#488

Post by [deleted] »

Kye wrote: post #484
toomuchtodo wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could Microsoft not hire Sam (reporting directly to Satya) and those who departed and equip them with compute access and ancillary resources? It seems less of a lift than salvaging the OpenAI situation internally due to the emotions and politics involved, non competes not existing in California (broadly speaking), and the logistics of attempting to apply pressure to a 501c3 board with very little leverage. The value…

There's already a Microsoft Sam.

[deleted]

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#489

Post by cthalupa »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #461
Rastonbury wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They still stand to benefit personally, do they not?

By what mechanism? 3/4ths the remaining board have no financial interests in OpenAI.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#490

Post by calf »

clauderoux wrote: post #383
calf wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Talking to a computer to bring it to make some quite complicated task is INCREDIBLE... Are there any good examples of this? I struggle to use ChatGPT, maybe I'm using it not cleverly (or deeply) enough.

Recently I had to share a documentation written in Word, which I had to format in Markdown to put it on Github. I transformed my document into a text file for each chapter and then I asked chatGPT to transform each of these files into a Markdown page. And I also asked it to improve the English. Then I asked chatGPT to translate each of these files into different languages. The result is here: https://github.com/naver…

OK then that's tedious work, not complex work.

I know that lots of people have personal stories of using ChatGPT but I was hoping something publicly reported on or like a showcase of truly impressive usages somewhere.

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