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Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

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Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#531

Post by aramattamara »

wg0 wrote: post #523
benterix wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI has a thousand employees and almost unlimited money You could say the same about Google - and yet they missed the consequences of their own discovery and got behind instead of being leaders. So you need specific talent to pull this off even if in theory you can hire anybody.

I am just curious how it happened to Google? Like who were the product managers or others who didn't see an opportunity here exactly where the whole thing was invented and they had huge amounts of data already, whole web basically and the amount of video that no one else can ever hope to have?

It's hard to invest millions in employees who are likely to leave to a competitor later. That's very risky, aka venture.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#532

Post by hugg »

astrange wrote: post #516
Jensson wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is more money in AGI than LLMs. That doesn't matter, they know how to do LLMs, they don't know how to do AGI. To modern capitalists that means you invest in one and the other someone else can do. OpenAI was exploratory until they found something that could make them rich, then they went closed and for profit, now you should see them as just another for profit.

They are a nonprofit.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesbroughel/2023/12/09/openai...

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#533

Post by jack_riminton »

wg0 wrote: post #523
benterix wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI has a thousand employees and almost unlimited money You could say the same about Google - and yet they missed the consequences of their own discovery and got behind instead of being leaders. So you need specific talent to pull this off even if in theory you can hire anybody.

I am just curious how it happened to Google? Like who were the product managers or others who didn't see an opportunity here exactly where the whole thing was invented and they had huge amounts of data already, whole web basically and the amount of video that no one else can ever hope to have?

I think the discovery of the power of the LLM was almost stumbled upon at OpenAI, they certainly didn't set out initially with the goal of creating them. Afaik they had one guy who was doing a project of creating an LLM with amazon review text data and only off the back of playing around with that did they realise its potential

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#534

Post by thebytefairy »

wg0 wrote: post #523
benterix wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI has a thousand employees and almost unlimited money You could say the same about Google - and yet they missed the consequences of their own discovery and got behind instead of being leaders. So you need specific talent to pull this off even if in theory you can hire anybody.

I am just curious how it happened to Google? Like who were the product managers or others who didn't see an opportunity here exactly where the whole thing was invented and they had huge amounts of data already, whole web basically and the amount of video that no one else can ever hope to have?

A lot of it was the unwillingness to take risk. LLMs were, and still are, hard to control, in terms of making sure they give correct and reliable answers, making sure they don't say inappropriate things that hurt your brand. When you're the stable leader you don't want to tank your reputation, which makes LLMs difficult to put out there. It's almost good for Google that OpenAI broke this ground for them and made people accepting of this imperfect technology.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#535

Post by RandomLensman »

ralfd wrote: post #480
nabla9 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top 6 science guys are long gone. Open AI is run by marketing, business, software and productization people. When the next wave of new deep learning innovations sweeps the world, Microsoft eats whats left of them. They make lots of money, but don't have future unless they replace what they lost.

How important are top science guys though? OpenAI has a thousand employees and almost unlimited money, and llm are better understood, I would guess continous development will beat singular genius heroes?

Most of every large business isn't science but getting organized, costs controlled, products made, risk managed, and so forth.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#536

Post by kgeist »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #446
OtomotO wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry, there must be some hidden tech, some completely different attempt to speak about AGI. I really, really doubt that transformers will become AGI. Maybe I am wrong, I am no expert in this field, but I would love to understand the reasoning behind this "could arrive this year", because it reminds me about coldfusion :X edit: maybe the term has changed again. AGI to me means truly understanding, maybe even som…

No I’m with you on this. Next token prediction does lead to impressive emergent phenomena. But what makes people people is an internal drive to attend to our needs, and an LLM exists without that. A real AGI should be something you can drop in to a humanoid robot and it would basically live as an individual, learning from every moment and every day, growing and changing with time. LLMs can’t even count the number of…

>LLMs can’t even count the number of letters in a sentence.

It's a consequence of tokenization. They "see" the world through tokens, and tokenization rules depend on the specific middleware you're using. It's like making someone blind and then claiming they are not intelligent because they can't tell red from green. That's just how they perceive the world and tells nothing about intelligence.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#537

Post by huygens6363 »

cm2187 wrote: post #481
fnordpiglet wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t feel that OpenAI has a huge moat against say Anthropic. And I don’t know OpenAI needs Microsoft nearly as much as Microsoft needs OpenAI

But is it even clear what is the next big leap after LLM? I have the feeling many tend to extrapolate the progress of AI from the last 2 years to the next 30 years but research doesn't always work like that (though improvements in computing power did).

Not saying it’s going to be the same, but I’m sure computing progress looked pretty unimpressive from, say, 1975 to 1990 for the uninitiated.

By the 90s they were still mainly used as fancy typewriters by “normal” people (my parents, school, etc) although the ridiculous potential was clear from day one.

It just took a looong time to go from pong to ping and then to living online. I’m still convinced even this stage is temporary and only a milestone on the way to bigger and better things. Computing and computational thought still has to percolate into all corners of society.

Again not saying “LLM’s” are the same, but AI in general will probably walk a similar path. It just takes a long time, think decades, not years.

Edit: wanted to mention The Mother of All Demos by Engelbart (1968), which to me looks like it captures all essential aspects of what distributed online computing can do. In a “low resolution”, of course.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#538

Post by darkwater »

reducesuffering wrote: post #502
Shrezzing wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While he'll be giving up a lot of wealth, it's unlikely that any meaningful NDA will be applied here. Maybe for products, but definitely not for their research. There's very few people who can lead in frontier AI research domains - maybe a few dozen worldwide - and there are many active research niches. Applying an NDA to a very senior researcher would be such a massive net-negative for the industry, that it'd be a n…

Kokotajlo: “To clarify: I did sign something when I joined the company, so I'm still not completely free to speak (still under confidentiality obligations). But I didn't take on any additional obligations when I left. Unclear how to value the equity I gave up, but it probably would have been about 85% of my family's net worth at least. Basically I wanted to retain my ability to criticize the company in the future.“ >…

> Unclear how to value the equity I gave up, but it probably would have been about 85% of my family's net worth at least.

Percentages are nice, but with money and wealth absolute numbers are already important enough. You can leave a very, very good life even if you are losing 85% if the remaining 15% is USD $1M. And if not signing that NDA will help you landing another richly paying job + freedom to say whatever you feel it's important saying.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#539

Post by e_i_pi_2 »

DalasNoin wrote: post #414
ascorbic wrote: post #410

Jan Leike has said he's leaving too https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1790603862132596961

There goes the so called superalignment: Ilya Jan Leike William Saunders Leopold Aschenbrenner All gone

Relying on specific people was never a good strategy, people will change but this will be a good test of their crazy governance structure. I think of it similar to political systems - if it can't withstand someone fully malicious getting in power then it's not a good system

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#540

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

nabla9 wrote: post #447
zoogeny wrote: post #362

Interesting, both Karpathy and Sutskever are gone from OpenAI now. Looks like it is now the Sam Altman and Greg Brockman show. I have to admit, of the four, Karpathy and Sutskever were the two I was most impressed with. I hope he goes on to do something great.

Top 6 science guys are long gone. Open AI is run by marketing, business, software and productization people. When the next wave of new deep learning innovations sweeps the world, Microsoft eats whats left of them. They make lots of money, but don't have future unless they replace what they lost.

> Open AI is run by marketing, business, software and productization people.

AKA 'the four horsemen of enshitification'.

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