561–570 of 701 posts
The AI safety people may be one of the most destructive forces in tech history.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by that/why you think so?
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The legal risk comes if Altman decides he wants a similar job and can't find it over the next few months or years, and has reason to believe that OpenAI's statements tainted his reputation. OpenAI's board's press release could very easily be construed as "Sam Altman is not trustworthy as a CEO", which could lead to his reputation being sullied among other possible employers. He could argue that the board defamed his…
It’s not defamation if it’s true
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>John >I'm not patronizing you (A)ssuming (G)ood (F)aith, referring to someone online by their name, even in an edge case where their username is their name, is considered patronizing as it is difficult to convey a tone via text medium that isn't perceived as a mockery/veiled threat. This may be a US-internet thing; analogous to getting within striking distance with a raised voice can be a capital offense in the US,…
> referring to someone online by their name is considered patronizing This has to be a joke, right?
I recognize that the above para sort of sounds like I think I have some authority to mediate between them, which is not true and not what I think. I'm just replying to this side conversation about how to be polite in public, just giving my take.
The broad pattern here is that there are norms around how and when you use someone's name when addressing them, and when you deviate from those norms, it signals that something is weird, and then the reader has to guess what is the second most likely meaning of the rest of the sentence, because the weird name use means that the most likely meaning is not appropriate.
Sam and Ilya have recently made public statements about AGI that appear to highlight a fundamental disagreement between them. Sam claims LLMs aren't sufficient for AGI (rightfully so). Ilya claims the transformer architecture, with some modification for efficiency, is actually sufficient for AGI. Obviously transformers are the core component of LLMs today, and the devil is in the details (a future model may resemble…
>Ilya claims the transformer architecture, with some modification for efficiency, is actually sufficient for AGI. I thought this guy was supposed to know what he's talking about? There was a paper that shows LLMs cannot generalise[0]. Anybody who's used ChatGPT can see there's imperfections. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12288
This just proves that the LLMs available to them, with the training and augmentation methods they employed, aren't able to generalize. This doesn't prove that it is impossible for future LLMs or novel training and augmentation techniques will be unable to generalize.
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What is confusing here is Why would Greg have agreed to the language in the press release (that he would be staying in the company and report to the CEO) only to resign 1 hour later. Surely the press release would not have contained that information without the his agreement that he would be staying.
He didn't. Greg was informed after Sam (I'm assuming the various bits being flung about by Swisher are true; she gets a free pass on things like this), so I think the sequence was: a subset of the board meets, forms quorum, votes to terminate Sam and remove Greg as chair (without telling him). Then they write the PR, and around the same time, let Sam and then Greg know. If OpenAI were a government, this would be call…
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I can remember to do something tomorrow after doing many things in-between. I can reason about something and then combine it with something I reasoned about at a different time. I can learn new tasks. I can pick a goal of my own choosing and then still be working towards it intermittently weeks later. The examples we have now of GPT LLM cannot do these things. Doing those things may be a small change, or may not be t…
Former neuroscientist here. Our brain actually uses many different functions for all of these things. Intelligence is incredibly complex. But also, you don't need all of these to have real intelligence. People can problem solve without memory, since those are different things. People can intelligently problem-solve without a task. And working towards long-term goals is something we actually take decades to learn. And…
Yes-- this is pretty much what I believe. And there's considerable uncertainty in how close AGI is (and how cheap it will be once it arrives).
It could be tomorrow and cheap. I hope not, because I'm really uncertain if we can deal with it (even if the AI is relatively well aligned).
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Doesn't justify the hostile language and the urgent last minute timing. (partners were notified just minutes before press release). They didn't wait even 30 min for the market to close causing MSFT to drop billions in that time. A mere direction disagrement would have been handled with "Sam is retiring after 3 months to spend more time with his Family, We thank him for all his work". And surely would be taken months…
> . They didn't wait even 30 min for the market to close causing MSFT to drop billions in that time Ha! Tell me you don't know about markets without telling me! Stock can drop after hours too.
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Yeah, this is more abrupt and more direct than any CEO firing I've ever seen. For comparison, when Travis Kalanick was ousted from Uber in 2017, he "resigned" and then was able to stay on the board until 2019. When Equifax had their data breach, it took 4 days for the CEO to resign and then the board retroactively changed it to "fired for cause". With the Volkswagon emissions scandal, it took 20 days for the CEO to r…
what examples are you considering here, bioweapons?
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Why would Greg have said "after learning today's news" if he took part in the vote? If he decided to quit immediately after the vote then why would the board issue a statement saying he was going to stay on? I don't think he took part, the others probably convened a meeting and cast a unanimous vote, issued the statement and then contacted Greg and Sam. The whole thing seems rushed so that's probably how it would hav…
> If he decided to quit immediately after the vote then why would the board issue a statement saying he was going to stay on? Why would they issue a statement saying that he was going to stay on without some form of assurance from him? I mean, you're writing a release stating that you're firing your CEO and accusing him of lack of candor. Not exactly the best news to give. You're chasing that with "oh by the way, the…
Maybe to make it clear that if he leaves, it is him quitting not him being fired. This would avoid potential legal issues.
Maybe they thought there was a chance be would stay.
Edit: I called it https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725682088639119857 nothing to do with dishonesty. That’s just the official reason. ———- I haven’t heard anyone commenting about this, but the two main figures here-consider: This MUST come down to a disagreement between Altman and Sutskever. Also interesting that Sutskever tweeted a month and a half ago https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1707752576077176907 Th…
I think you're completely backward. A board doesn't do that unless they absolutely have to. Think back in history. For example, consider the absolutely massive issues at Uber that had to go public before the board did anything. There is no way this is over some disagreement, there has to be serious financial, ethical or social wrongdoing for the board to rush job it and put a company worth tens of billions of dollars…
All this to say that the board is probably unlike the boards of the vast majority of tech companies.