551–560 of 754 posts
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Convincing people is the ultimate trade. It can achieve more than any other skill. The idea that success at it shouldn’t be grounds for the genius label is absurd.
> Convincing people is the ultimate trade So by your standard SBF is an absolute genius.
I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience,…
A deal-making CEO who can carry rapport with the right people, make clever deals, and earn public trust can genuinely make a huge difference to a profit-seeking product company's trajectory. But when your profit-seeking company is owned by a non-profit with a public mission, that trajectory might end up pointed the wrong way. The Dev Day announcements, and especially the marketplace, can be seen as suggesting that's…
If shepherding responsible AGI can be done without a $10B budget in H100, sure… but it seems that scale matters. Having some people in the company sell state-of-the-art solutions to pay for the rest doing cutting-edge, expensive, necessary research isn’t a bad model.
If those separations needed to be re-affirmed, the research formally separated, a board decision approved to share any model from the research arm before it’s commercialized, etc., all that could be implemented within the mission of the entity. Microsoft Research, before them Bell Labs, and many others, have worked like that.
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Making humanity’s current lives worse to fund some theoretical future good (enriching himself in the process) is some highly impressive rationalisation work.
Try to tell that to the Effective Altruism crowd.
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If I'm understanding it correctly, it's basically the non-profit, AI for humanity vs the commercialization of AI. From what I've read, Ilya has been pushing to slow down (less of the move fast and break things start-up attitude). It also seems that Sam had maybe seen the writing on the wall and was planning an exit already, perhaps those rumors of him working with Jony Ive weren't overblown? https://www.theverge.com/…
The non-profit path is dead in the water after everyone realized the true business potential of GPT models.
It's hard to believe a Board that can't control itself or its employees could responsibly manage AI. Or that anyone could manage AGI. There is a long history of governance problems in nonprofits (see the transaction-cost economics literature on point). Their ambiguous goals induce politics. One benefit of profit-driven boards is that the goals make only well-understood risk trade-off's between growth now or later, an…
I know everybody is going nuts about this, but just from my personal perspective I’ve worked at a variety of companies with “important” CEOs, and in every single one of those cases had the CEO left I would not have cared at all. The CEO always gets way too much credit externally for what the company is doing, it does not mean the CEO is that important. OpenAI might be different, I don’t have any personal experience,…
Yeah this cult of CEOs is weird. It's such a small cohort that when someone doesn't completely blow it, they're immediately deemed as geniuses. Give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of brilliant engineers, researchers and many will make it work. But only a few ever get the chance, so this happens. They don't do any of the work. They just take the credit.
Some founders don’t do much, and some are violently toxic (Lord knows I worked for many), but it’s rarely how they gather big financing rounds. At least, the terrible ones I know rarely did.
CEOs… I’ve seen people coast from Consulting or Audit into very mediocre careers, so I wouldn’t understand if Conway defended them as a class. The Cult for Founders has problems (for the reasons you point out, especially those who keep looking for ‘technical cofounders’ for years), but it’s not as blatantly unfounded.
Here’s another theory. > the ousting was likely orchestrated by Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever over concerns about the safety and speed of OpenAI's tech deployment. Who was first to launch a marketplace for GPTs/agents? It wasn’t OpenAI, but Poe by Quora. Guess who sits on the OpenAI non-profit board? Quora CEO. So at least we know where his interest lies with respect to the vote against Altman and Greg.
This is a really good point. If a non profit whose board you sit on releases a product that competes with a product from the corporation you manage, how do you manage that conflict of interest? Seems he should have stepped down.
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Three points: 1. I don't think Ilya is equivalent to Carmack in this case — he's been focused on safety and alignment research, not building GPT-[n]. By most accounts Greg Brockman, who quit in disgust over the move, was more impactful than Ilya in recent years, as well as the senior researchers who quit yesterday. 2. I think you are underselling what happened with id: while they didn't blow up as fantastically as Io…
Until I can trust that when I send an AI agent off to do something that I will be successful without me babysitting and watching over it constantly AI won't truly be transformative (since the human bottleneck will remain). This is one of the core promises of alignment. Without it how can there be trust? While there are probably short term slow downs with an alignment focus, ultimately it is necessary to avoid throwin…
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Making humanity’s current lives worse to fund some theoretical future good (enriching himself in the process) is some highly impressive rationalisation work.
Try to tell that to the Effective Altruism crowd.
I think the EA movement has been broadly skeptical towards Sam for a while -- my understanding is that Anthropic was founded by EAs who used to work at OpenAI and decided they didn't trust Sam.
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The non-profit path is dead in the water after everyone realized the true business potential of GPT models.
What is the business potential? It seems like no one can trust it for anything, what do people actually use it for.