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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

#531

Post by cma »

schleck8 wrote: post #443
vineyardmike wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had internal efforts, and Anthropic already. They definitely don’t have the compute to spare to split with another organization. Apple surely doesn’t have a cluster that at all compares with the big cloud giants. Oracle and AWS are really the only cloud left, and oracle is already renting to Microsoft for GPU compute.

Apple is burning through more than a million USD per day for its research on Ajax and Co, they definitely have an interest in building big imo.

That's .1% of their annual expenditures

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#532

Post by JohnFen »

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

Why not?? Being another Woz would be amazing.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#533

Post by PoignardAzur »

benkarst wrote: post #414
PoignardAzur wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post and its replies are a contest for who can best perform enlightened cynicism. The truth is there isn't any strong evidence one way or another, only your existing worldviews. Partnering with Microsoft and closing access both have profit-driven and ideology driven explanations, and we don't have strong evidence it's one and not the other.

[flagged]

FWIW I picked it in high school after the diamond sword in Minecraft.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#534

Post by mark_l_watson »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #27

Makes me wonder whether to keep building upon OpenAI? Given that they have an API and it takes effort to build on that vs. something else. I am small fry but maybe other people are wondering the same? Can they give reassurances about their products going into the future?

Take my opinion with some skepticism because I am retired and the massive amount of time I put into LLMs (and deep learning in general) is only for my own understanding and enjoyment:

In all three languages I frequently use (Common Lisp, Python, and Racket) it is easy to switch between APIs. You can also use a library like LangChain to make switching easier.

For people building startups on OpenAI specific APIs, they can certainly protect themselves by using Azure as an intermediary. Microsoft is in the “stability business.”

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#535

Post by sfn42 »

sureglymop wrote: post #481
mkl wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no point building a hypothetical system. You have no idea if it works until you try it. And lol, documentation? For a system that doesn't exist?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#536

Post by wand3r »

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.

Yeah, an interesting point was brought up by David Sacks on the All In Podcast. While technically Altman has (reportedly) no shares in OpenAI he has significant shares/control in the weird entity the profits go. So technically he has kind of a Peter Theil 401k type loophole that allows him to amass control of a potentially massive amount of money while on paper it technically isnt his.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#537

Post by sfn42 »

GamerAlias wrote: post #273
romafirst3 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why even claim he did 80 hours a week coding, while also being the chairman of the board? Can we get a pllleeeeeeaaaase???? He’s clearly a terrible programmer and/or a terrible chairman and to be honest this news says he’s at least 1 of 2 on the above.

Realistically the odds of gdb being a terrible programmer are very very slim. He has been in the field for at least a decade, published papers, given talks, was the CTO of stripe ( a company generally respected for having sick technical infrastructure). If he works an inordinate amount, then it's probably cause he loves it. I would guess he is much more likely to be world class than terrible

Dumb people don't like other peoples success. It reminds them that they're dumb nobodies.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#538

Post by mr_mitm »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #317
andirk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might as well add LOC as a metric. Both can mean the person is extremely inefficient, over-engineering everything, and their eyes are begging for a break. However! The best engineers I've been around do work a lot and they like it.

I’m not sure why it’s seen as ok to work 100 hours per week, or even glorified. If instead of work it was something else it would be seen as a problem. 100 hours per week doesn’t leave room for anything else other than basic human needs. “They like it”, well all addicts like what they’re addicted to, it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

Agreed. "I like it" might also just mean "I can't bear being alone with my thoughts" or "I can't deal with life and need the distraction". Not that that's always the case, it's probably more often than not in these situations and should be seen as a hint that there might be more going on.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#539

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

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…

> There is "coding" and there is "God's spark genius of algorithms" kind of work.

I really don't buy that for a second. Most of OpenAI's value compared to any competitor comes from the money they spent hiring humans to trawl through training data.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#540

Post by reducesuffering »

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.

I’d like to see a mea culpa from the hordes of people who insist OpenAI was purely doing a regulatory capture grift, instead of the very real and very obvious existential AGI debate going on behind the scenes, as we witness now.
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