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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

#561

Post by nvarsj »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #544
nvarsj wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible, but harder than almost any other role. There are people at Google/Meta like this. Usually E7/E8 levels, "coding machines". It's much easier to go into a pseudo PM/TL/Director role though to hit those levels and income, so it's uncommon. You really have to have a passion for coding to put in the hours and be very good at it. Incredibly rare, believe it or not. Lots of people think they are good coders b…

This is a well debunked myth. You can commit a lot of code and commit better quality code, but there is an upper bound on productivity. If you don't get enough rest the quality diminishes. Management and leadership of a team has a way bigger impact than any single individual contributor could ever have. Humans are generally limited not by intelligence but by motivation and vision. Directing people to achieve what you…

I'm not discounting management or leadership. These are also very critical roles that can make or break organisations. But I'd challenge your assertion that management has a "way bigger impact" than a single IC can have. Both are critical at companies doing internet scale products.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#562

Post by n2d4 »

LightMachine wrote: post #516
n2d4 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No he wouldn't, if the CEO is substantially compensated for a $400B acquisition despite not owning equity that would be fraud. It's the CEO's fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of shareholders, if they take a $10bil cut for themselves that is $10bil that could've gone to the shareholders and hence not in their best interest. It is the reason why CEOs (not Sam, apparently) are usually compensated in stock opti…

You completely miss OP's point. He is basically saying that the market value of Sam is appreciated regardless of his equity. And one example on how that is true is that whatever company Sam starts next will have an insanely high valuation from the go.

Of course that's true, but what's the point of building a decacorn company just so you have higher chances of building another decacorn company afterwards?

If money was his motivation, why wouldn't he spend his time building a company like that in the first place? As the head of YC, I don't think he would've had any trouble raising for anything, even prior to OpenAI.

Also, it's not really parent's "point" as you claim; they quite explicitly talk about compensation in case of acquisition.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#563

Post by amelius »

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.

The God's spark of genius are the transformers which came from Google and are now in the open.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#564

Post by 22c »

kashyapc wrote: post #420
tempestn wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to understand how consciousness works to develop AGI.

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").

OpenAI (re?)defines AGI as a general AI that is able to perform most tasks as good as or better than a human. It's possible that under this definition and by skewing certain metrics, they are quite close to "AGI" in the same way that Google has already achieved "quantum supremacy".

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#565

Post by sbrother »

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...

Google invented the core technology, and they had an internal version long before ChatGPT was released. I joined when it was already at the "accessible to all employees" stage and it absolutely blew my mind.

They just hadn't -- and still haven't -- figured out how to commercialize it yet. I don't think they'll be the ones to crack that nut either. IMO they are too obsessed with "safety" to release something useful, and also can't reasonably deploy a service like ChatGPT at their scale because the costs are too high.

With OpenAI imploding this whole race just got a lot more interesting though...

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#566

Post by n2d4 »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #527
n2d4 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No he wouldn't, if the CEO is substantially compensated for a $400B acquisition despite not owning equity that would be fraud. It's the CEO's fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of shareholders, if they take a $10bil cut for themselves that is $10bil that could've gone to the shareholders and hence not in their best interest. It is the reason why CEOs (not Sam, apparently) are usually compensated in stock opti…

Can they not be paid a (very substantial) retention bonus? I’ve know people at startups that had no equity that were paid retention bonuses during acquisitions. Is a CEO different here?

Yes, but not too substantial, or the shareholders have grounds to sue based on what I said above.

A similar (but even more complicated) case is currently going on over at Sculptor Capital Management, where former management is suing current management because they have chosen to go with a "worse" acquisition deal that would let current management stay on-board. This is despite shareholder approval to the "worse" deal. https://www.pionline.com/hedge-funds/ex-sculptor-executives-...

In fact, to prevent this situation is exactly why golden parachutes exist.

It's also totally unproportional compared to what Sam would've gotten if he owned equity.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#567

Post by wavewrangler »

ahepp wrote: post #138
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft owns it. I honestly can not imagine trying to build a business on an API owned by Microsoft of all companies.

Isn't Microsoft famous for their insane API stability and backwards compatibility?

Microsoft is famous for a lack of adoption DESPITE backwards compatibility.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#568

Post by Jensson »

lttlrck wrote: post #560
RockCoach wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All of them being from the same area is relevant. Them being polish is not relevant except to show that they were from the same area.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#569

Post by augustiner »

Tade0 wrote: post #171

I'm embarrassed to say, being Polish myself, I had no idea that key people in OpenAI were Polish - I assume it was a coordinated resignation then. Madry is actually spelled Mądry, which translates to "Wise".

Btw, another Pole Wojciech Zaremba (not mentioned in the article though) is a co-founder of OpenAI (and an AI researcher too)

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#570

Post by Sai_ »

sbrother wrote: post #558
Sai_ wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-tune…

Sorry, no idea if what you’re looking for exists. For now, I was looking at integrating with OpenAI and productising some th ing but this situation is making me nervous.
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