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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

#491

Post by augustulus »

keepamovin wrote: post #458
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

nothing I’ve seen from OpenAI is any indication that they’re close to AGI. gpt models are basically a special matrix transformation on top of a traditional neural network running on extremely powerful hardware trained on a massive dataset. this is possibly more like “thinking” than a lot of people give it credit for, but it’s not an AGI, and it’s not an AGI precursor either. it’s just the best applied neural networks that we currently have

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#492

Post by AgentME »

riverdweller wrote: post #189

If the speculation that the board want to open up everything so that it is truly open/public domain "for the benefit of humanity" turns out to be accurate, I can't see Microsoft being terribly happy about this now that they own 49% of OpenAI and want not only to recoup their investments but make ongoing profit. An exodus of staff might provoke a very quick release of a lot of code, pipelines, and training data by the…

Neither Sam nor Ilya thinks that committing to open sourcing their models is good for the safety of humanity. This conflict is not about open source at all. (https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/15/23640180/openai-gpt-4-lau...)

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#493

Post by jdthedisciple »

cthalupa wrote: post #489
jdthedisciple wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still stand to benefit personally, do they not?

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

Personal/moral: "Championing" non-profit after reaping the fruits of massive commercial success

Monetary: Promotions and payouts (now or future)? Equity is not the only way

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#494

Post by keepamovin »

berniedurfee wrote: post #469
keepamovin wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I disagree. I don’t think LLMs are a pathway to AGI. I think LLMs will lead to incredibly powerful game-changing tools and will drive changes that affect the course of humanity, but this technology won’t lead to AGI directly. I think AGI is going to arrive via a different technology, many years in the future still. LLMs will get to the point where they appear to be AGI, but only in the same way the latest 3D renderin…

I'm not saying LLMs are. LLMs are not the only thing going on right now. But they do enable a powerful tool.

I think the path to AGI is: embodiment. Give it a body, let it explore a world, fight to survive, learn action and consequence. Then AGI you will have.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#495

Post by hackerlight »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #472
riverdweller wrote: post #189

If the speculation that the board want to open up everything so that it is truly open/public domain "for the benefit of humanity" turns out to be accurate, I can't see Microsoft being terribly happy about this now that they own 49% of OpenAI and want not only to recoup their investments but make ongoing profit. An exodus of staff might provoke a very quick release of a lot of code, pipelines, and training data by the…

It’s the opposite. They are irrationally fearful of what they have built. Therefore, they will handicap any progress or competitive advantage that they have.

A few days ago Sam said that a recent breakthrough was a game changer. They recently finished pretraining GPT-5 apparently. So it could be related to the rapid rate of progress.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#496

Post by augustulus »

wil421 wrote: post #371
concordDance wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impossible with LLMs, with currently known techniques or impossible full stop?

Impossible with computers full stop. IMHO, we may be able to slice together DNA or modify it to create a new or smarter organism than AGI in a computer. They already shifted goal posts and they’ll do it again. AI used to mean AGI but marketing got a hold of it. Once something resembling AGI comes out they’ll say well it’s not Level 5 AGI or something similar.

if you think it’s impossible with computers then surely you must have a reason why computers are operationally incapable of doing the same as flesh and blood

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#497

Post by keepamovin »

augustulus wrote: post #491
keepamovin wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

nothing I’ve seen from OpenAI is any indication that they’re close to AGI. gpt models are basically a special matrix transformation on top of a traditional neural network running on extremely powerful hardware trained on a massive dataset. this is possibly more like “thinking” than a lot of people give it credit for, but it’s not an AGI, and it’s not an AGI precursor either. it’s just the best applied neural networks…

I'm not saying OpenAI is close. Collectively we are tho. The train is rolling, unstoppable momentum. We just have to wait.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#498

Post by Sai_ »

fennecbutt wrote: post #415
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…

Microsoft will partner with them if they start a new company I reckon, 100%. And Microsoft are risk adverse enough that I think they do care about AI safety, even if only from a "what's best for the business" standpoint. Tbh idc if we get AGI. There'll be a point in the future where we have AGI and the technology is accessible enough that anybody can create one. We need to stop this pointless bickering over this sort…

Isn’t that the exact point - an AGI won’t need a human at the helm.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#499

Post by hackerlight »

gdiamos wrote: post #286
konschubert wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think sam is smart enough to not waste his time inside a corporate mill.

Jensen isn't a normal CEO

I don't think NVDA would want to work on LLMs/AGI, it doesn't cohere with their business. In the short term they're focused on upscaling and frame generation, and long term it'd be neural rendering.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#500

Post by RockCoach »

suziemanul wrote: post #464

This is Olek Madry and Jakub Pachocki we are talking about. Check out their respective dblps if you don't get it. It's a kind of loss that will be hard to recover from. In relation to other comments here. There is "coding" and there is "God's spark genius of algorithms" kind of work. This is what made the magic of OpenAI. Believe me, those guys were not "just coding". My bet is that it could be all about some researc…

>My bet is that it could be all about some research directions that were "shielded" by Sam.

As far as I can tell, all three of them are of Polish descent. For all we know they might have decided to resign together even if only one of them had a personal issue with OpenAI's vision. We will find out soon enough whether they will just found their own competing startup, based on OpenAI's "secret sauce" or not.

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