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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

#551

Post by wavewrangler »

koonsolo wrote: post #387
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...

Coding for 50 to 80 hours a week? Well, I call bullshit on that. Never seen anyone do that consistently and with high quality and quantity output. Let's first define 'coding' before we jump into the details: 'coding' for me is sitting at your computer doing the work. It's not getting a coffee, chatting with a colleague, going to toilet or reading hacker news. So if you're reading this and claiming to do 100 hours per…

I dunno man. I feel like reading this was definitely work. It surely wasn’t leisure. Have you ever examined code output by gpt where it looks impressive at first glance? That’s what reading this was like. If you’re reading this, I’m just kidding. If you’re not reading this, I’m not kidding.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#552

Post by AIrtemis »

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…

By that definition Elizer should be working on really hardcore stuff, right? And yet his explanations about actual technical stuff come across as a guy that barely understands how matmul works.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#553

Post by sanp »

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…

Sam and the board have realized the existing structure of OpenAI does not make them (Sam, board, investors) as wealthy as a for-profit structure would. This is the start of winding down OpenAI. I will not be surprised at all if Sam does what you have said and some members of the existing board invest.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#554

Post by marcinzm »

sasaf5 wrote: post #140
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...

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...

There's probably people whose main job was to read the code and then communicate it more broadly. This is also cutting edge ML where a ton of code is basically thrown away due to not panning out so possibly the amount that needs to be communicated is fairly small.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#555

Post by wavewrangler »

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.

“…Alright, so it can DREAM!!! BUT CAN IT suffer?!?!”

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#556

Post by hhsectech »

mcpackieh wrote: post #466
kashyapc wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. I don't want to split hairs on specifics, but I had in mind the "weak AGI" (consciousness- and sentience-free) vs "strong AGI". Since Shank 's comment didn't specify what they meant, I should have made a more charitable interpretation (i.e. assume it was "weak AGI").

Consciousness has no technical meaning. Even for other humans, it is a (good and morally justified) leap of faith to assume that other humans have thought processes that roughly resemble your own. It's a matter philosophers debate and science cannot address. Science cannot disprove the p-zombie hypothesis because nobody can devise an empirical test for consciousness.

I dont understand why something has to be conscious to be intelligent. If they were the same thing we wouldn't have two separate words.

I suspect AGI is quite possible, it just won't be what everyone thinks it will be.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#557

Post by jjtheblunt »

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...

Wasn’t OpenAI populated in part by Google Brain people who left Google’s bs bureaucracy and internal politics?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#558

Post by sbrother »

Sai_ wrote: post #518
quickthrower2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. I'll keep going too. I am just putting a nice GUI wrapper around the new Assistant stuff which looks damn cool. Project is half "might make some bucks" and half "see if this is good to use in the day job".

Yeah, the assistants api is pretty great. Curious if you’ve faced issues with certain things not working out of the blue forcing you to re-run threads? For example, i have an assistant which is supposed to parse an uploaded file and extract useful info from it. To use this assistant, I create a thread and a run and attach it to the assistant with a different file-id. About half the time, the assistant simply throws u…

The assistants API is fantastic; I was just getting started with it. This news makes me reconsider -- but I also think it's inevitable that a compatible API will be released with open source underlying LLMs. I've deployed the OpenAI-compatible completions API over Llama2 in production with vLLM, and it works perfectly.

Do you know if there are any projects working on this? Even something like a high quality json-tuned base model would go a huge way toward replicating OpenAI's current product.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#559

Post by motoboi »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #539
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.

And their competition didn’t had the same resources?

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#560

Post by lttlrck »

RockCoach wrote: post #517
slekker wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does being Polish have to do with it?

You've been focussing on the most irrelevant part of my comment. Nothing to do with being Polish in particular. Only that there is a connecting element that might help explain why these 3 decided to resign together on the same day.

It's the first sentence which does make it seem important from your perspective, far from irrelevant.
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