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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

#521

Post by LightMachine »

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…

Even if they could, why would Sam accept it? The smartest move for Sam is to just start his own for-profit company, easily raise a fuckton of money, hire all the talents from OpenAI and carry on with whatever he was doing. I think this is OpenAI's loss more than anything else. Now if the reason is truly a push against Sam's for-profit direction, I wonder if OpenAI will back it up by releasing their models to the public again. That would be world-changing, specially if the successor to GPT-4 is already trained.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#522

Post by [deleted] »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #349
digitcatphd wrote: post #249

I really wonder if a dividing line started to emerge internally regarding the path to take the company. [1] On one hand they serve Microsoft and developers, building digital AI infrastructure. [2] On the other hand, they seem to try and want to build some monopoly and destroy as many startups (and companies) as possible. In the last developer day, they did a half-ass job of both. GPTs suck. The OpenAI Assistants don'…

Uh, sorry, what? You think serving Microsoft would be opposed to building a monopoly?

[deleted]

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#523

Post by dash2 »

Iv wrote: post #299
mirzap wrote: post #193

This is escalating rather quickly. It is an incredibly irresponsible move by the OpenAI board. Hypergrowing company, and now they managed to shake up their user's trust in leadership stability. This has Adam's (D'Angelo) fingerprints all over it (for context, he did overthrow his co-founder, and Quora has been struggling ever since). This guy shouldn't sit on any board ever again. I predict the board will be fired, a…

> and now they managed to shake up their user's trust in leadership stability Do users care about that? I care about features stability and avoidance of shitification. That's why I am usually preferring open models to depending on OpenAI's API. This drama has me curious about the outcome and if it leads to more openness from OpenAI, it may gain me back as a user.

They're trying to get to AGI. I don't think keeping the current chatGPT feature stable is their primary goal.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#524

Post by wavewrangler »

kpandit wrote: post #345
ramraj07 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not commenting about the ppl who are subject of this thread but talking in general. I have been lucky enough to have seen some of these 10x engineers but what is much more common is a 1x engineer feeling and treated like a 10x engineer because they are surrounded by 0.1x engineers.

That’s still 10x. If you think that’s worth mentioning, you should see the 10x engineers swoon over the 100x unicorn.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#525

Post by toomuchtodo »

LightMachine wrote: post #521
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…

Even if they could, why would Sam accept it? The smartest move for Sam is to just start his own for-profit company, easily raise a fuckton of money, hire all the talents from OpenAI and carry on with whatever he was doing. I think this is OpenAI's loss more than anything else. Now if the reason is truly a push against Sam's for-profit direction, I wonder if OpenAI will back it up by releasing their models to the publ…

It’s a fair point, and I suppose the question is the math around the equity potential of a new org built from scratch vs being issued a boatload of Microsoft equity, the future profit potential from that grant, while being able to walk right in to a fully operationalized env.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#526

Post by LightMachine »

mirzap wrote: post #376
andrewstuart wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be surprised if Sam does. He’s free now to compete and defeat with a huge equity stake.

We could be witnessing another Apple-Jobs moment. He could go and pursue other interests, but I have a feeling that he deeply cares about OpenAI. If that's the case, he will be back eventually, just as Jobs returned to Apple repeatedly.

Completely different situation. Jobs couldn't just fundraise for his new Oranges company, lure all the talent out of Apple and outcompete it at that point. Sam can do that to OpenAI in a blink if that's his plans.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#527

Post by LeafItAlone »

n2d4 wrote: post #479
twoodfin wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your forward-looking value to an organization is your value whether it’s realized in equity or not. In the world where Sam Altman leads OpenAI to market dominance and eventual acquisition by Microsoft for $400B or whatever, he obviously would represent an important part of what Microsoft would be buying and would be compensated accordingly.

No he wouldn't, if the CEO is substantially compensated for a $400B acquisition despite not owning equity that would be fraud. It's the CEO's fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of shareholders, if they take a $10bil cut for themselves that is $10bil that could've gone to the shareholders and hence not in their best interest. It is the reason why CEOs (not Sam, apparently) are usually compensated in stock opti…

Can they not be paid a (very substantial) retention bonus? I’ve know people at startups that had no equity that were paid retention bonuses during acquisitions. Is a CEO different here?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#528

Post by jstummbillig »

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…

They are using hardware, yes, but they are not creating (which is what I mean by "doing") the hardware. Anyone else with funding could have access to the same hardware for running their software, and other people did do that, and do do that (now, of course, in a drastically tighter supply/demand situation).

I do not wanna be flippant here: Obviously having easy access to money and a good standing with the right people is making things A LOT simpler, but other people could have reasonably convinced someone to give them money to built the same software. That's what VCs do, after all.

Regarding the rest: Feels very much like a different topic. I'll pass.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#529

Post by maxlamb »

kubb wrote: post #405
Tade0 wrote: post #171

I'm embarrassed to say, being Polish myself, I had no idea that key people in OpenAI were Polish - I assume it was a coordinated resignation then. Madry is actually spelled Mądry, which translates to "Wise".

A lot of top talent from Polish universities went to work in the Silicon Valley (with the US spending $0 on their education BTW). They're very well represented per capita of their home country, but just a drop in the ocean of international talent that the Bay Area is swarming with.

To be fair, the US also spends $0 on most students going to Stanford and Harvard as well :)

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#530

Post by Obscurity4340 »

lawn wrote: post #476
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.

You wouldn't have to bring up Microsoft as some kind of evidence, WorldCoin (eyeball scanning scam) is more than enough proof of what he's interested in.

What was the actual endgame there?
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