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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

#501

Post by calf »

nerbert wrote: post #457
jstummbillig wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been watching For All Mankind and a small subplot was the director finally choosing to "play ball with the big boys" in order as to secure funding and stability for NASA's scientific projects. It made NASA underlings unhappy but was justified as a necessary evil.

It's like a real-life example, i.e. what would you do if you were in the CEO's position?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#502

Post by Paul-Craft »

mi3law wrote: post #157
tempestn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not going to get "smarter" and it'll always lack true subjective understanding What is your basis for those claims? Especially the first one; I would think it's obvious that it will get smarter; the only questions are how much and how quickly. As far as subjective understanding, we're getting into the nature of consciousness territory, but if it can perform the same tasks, it doesn't really impact the value.

My basis for these claims is from my research career, work described so far at aolabs.ai; still very much in progress, but form what I've learned I can respond to the 2 claims you're poking at-- 1) we should agree on what we mean by smart or intelligent. That's really hard to do so let's narrow it down to "does not hallucinate" the way GPT does, or more high level has a subjective understanding of its own that anothe…

I don't see why "does not hallucinate" is a viable definition for "intelligent." Humans hallucinate, both literally, and in the sense of confabulating the same way that LLMs do. Are humans not intelligent?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#503

Post by nindalf »

tsurba wrote: post #329
convexstrictly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Greg Brockman works 60 to 100 hours per week, and spends around 80% of the time coding. Former colleagues have described him as the hardest-working person at OpenAI." https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...

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…

Impressive analysis. Can’t wait for someone to tell you what kind of a programmer you are based on your HN comments.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#504

Post by fsloth »

belter wrote: post #473
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…

If all of that would be enough, there would be a ChatGPT from Google, a long time ago...

In general Google sucks in creating new consumer offerings. So it's not about resources for sure. I guess it's about synergy, culture, taste and talent.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#505

Post by calf »

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…

As a layperson, what does the special matrix transformation do? Is that the embeddings thing, or something else entirely? Something about transformer architecture I guess?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#506

Post by infecto »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #448
infecto wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are a founder and working in a company doing bleeding edge it’s easy to work lots of hours. Maybe it’s not the kind of environment for you but others thrive in it. Lots of high demand type roles out unrelated to engineering that also have large hour workloads and compensate exceptionally well.

What do those people want the compensation for? To sleep on a mansion and back to work? Assuming they leave the office. What I’m trying to say is that it is an addiction like any other and should be treated as such, not glorified.

Yes we understood your idea the first time around. And you still miss the point. It might not be for you but many individuals genuinely love their work. Either because they founded it, like the area of work, the people, or some combination.

It’s ok to not enjoy it yourself. Different strokes for different folks.

I don’t think it should be culturally championed but I don’t see it as an immediate red flag especially in the case of a bleeding edge company like OpenAI.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#507

Post by Waterluvian »

benkarst wrote: post #230

It's incredible how many of you alleged tech people think that Sam just wanted a world of safe AI while his actions suggest he wanted to make dump trucks of money. He was the one who partnered with Microsoft and turned it from a non-profit to a for-profit company.

He wants his money and a bunch of others will follow him to whatever company he forms because they want their money.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#508

Post by nottorp »

eurekin wrote: post #238
nottorp wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that those who worship productivity tend to appreciate "content creators" not artists :)

During my brief venture into 3d graphics I often found that 1 hour of truly creating is spaced between ten hours of fixing up UV's, redoing topology, finding cause for the seam, trying to make a watertight mesh for photon tracing, fighting the subdivision algorithm to retain details, diverting a edge loop, where it causes the less distress. I call the first hour true productivity. The last part is, from the perspecti…

It's interesting how some terms we use reveal our world view. What does referring to art as "product" imply?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#509

Post by slekker »

RockCoach wrote: post #500
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.

What does being Polish have to do with it?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#510

Post by varelse »

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…

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