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Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

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Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#581

Post by upwardbound »

next_xibalba wrote: post #317

Here is Helen Toner's resumé: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-toner-4162439a/details/edu... I am genuinely flabbergasted as to how she ended up on the board. How does this happen? I can't even find anything about fellow board member Tasha McCauley...

Helen Toner is famous among the AI safety community for being one of the most important people working to halt and reverse any sort of "AI arms race" between the US & China. The recent successes in this regard at the UK AI Safety Summit and the Biden/Xi talks are due in large part to her advocacy.

She is well-connected with Pentagon leaders, who trust her input. She also is one of the hardest-working people among the West's analysts in her efforts to understand and connect with the Chinese side, as she uprooted her life to literally live in Beijing at one point in order to meet with people in the budding Chinese AI Safety community.

Here's an example of her work: AI safeguards: Views inside and outside China (Book chapter) https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97810032...

She's also co-authored several of the most famous "survey" papers which give an overview of AI safety methods: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22h...

She's at roughly the same level of eminence as Dr. Eric Horvitz (Microsoft's Chief Scientific Officer), who has similar goals as her, and who is an advisor to Biden. Comparing the two, Horvitz is more well-connected but Toner is more prolific, and overall they have roughly equal impact.

(Copy-pasting this comment from another thread where I posted it in response to a similar question.)

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#583

Post by tsimionescu »

lijok wrote: post #512
Jerrrry wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Perhaps the wording here is a bit confusing, but I think it's unambiguous that responding to a comment using the commenter's name ("John, you misunderstand") comes off as patronizing.

The commenter above doesn't mean that any reference to someone else by name ("Sam Altman was fired") is patronizing.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#584

Post by satvikpendem »

zbentley wrote: post #520
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #476

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?

It is much ado about nothing, to quote our laudet poet in the English canon. Who gives a shit about AI, really?

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#585

Post by Paul-Craft »

vikramkr wrote: post #491
matwood wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> last minute timing Only feels last minute to those outside. I've seen some of these go down in smaller companies and it's a lot like bankruptcy - slowly, then all at once.

Announcing something huge like this before market close is not something that can be interpreted as anything other than either a huge timing mistake or a massive feeling of urgency

I find it hard to believe that the board of OpenAI isn't smart, savvy and self-interested enough to know that not delaying the announcement by an hour or so is the wrong move. That leads me to believe that yes, this was something big and worthy enough of being announced with that timing, and that it was probably not a mistake.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#586

Post by m463 »

mirekrusin wrote: post #531
concurrentsquar wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More new information from Swisher: > "More scoopage: sources tell me chief scientist Ilya Sutskever was at the center of this. Increasing tensions with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman over role and influence and he got the board on his side." > "The developer day and how the store was introduced was in inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast. My bet: He’ll have a new company up by Monday." [source: https:/…

ClosedAI? > My bet: He’ll have a new company up by Monday.

Apart from some piddly tech, silicon valley startups primarily sell stock. And a monday company will be free to capitalize on the hype and sell stock that won't have its shoelaces tied like a non profit.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#587

Post by satvikpendem »

bangalore wrote: post #192
JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > How do I profit from this news Ignore and focus on your life, the grapevine in your neighborhood about who is selling their car or their house is not as exciting but will net you way more money than this happening thousands of miles away from you. And most importantly without having to fuck with leverage.

Thanks. I'm doing reasonably well in life.

Who isn't? That does not mean you cannot do well on financial news. The best way forward is to buy VTI/VTSAX (they are eqiivalent, just based on whether you want to buy a mutual fund or ETF) and wait 20 to 50 years.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#588

Post by Filligree »

jrockway wrote: post #519
lijok wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> referring to someone online by their name is considered patronizing This has to be a joke, right?

I don't think it's a joke. I would find it patronizing unless I'm already on a first name basis with the commenter through some prior relationship.

Really? Referring to someone by first name is perfectly ordinary where I’m from, regardless of relationship. If someone doesn’t want me to do that, I’d expect them to introduce themselves as “Mr. so-and-so”, instead.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#589

Post by kolja005 »

calf wrote: post #548
jumploops wrote: post #244

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…

Did Ilya give a reason why transformers are theoretically sufficient? I've watched him talk in a CS seminar and he's certainly interesting to listen to.

From the interviews with him that I have seen, Sutskever thinks that language model is a sufficient pretraining task because there is a great deal of reasoning involved in next token prediction. The example he used was that suppose you fed a murder mystery novel to a language model and then prompted it with the phrase "The person who committed the model was: ". The model would unquestionably need to reason in order to come to the right conclusion, but at the same time it is just predicting the next token.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#590

Post by vikramkr »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #585
vikramkr wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Announcing something huge like this before market close is not something that can be interpreted as anything other than either a huge timing mistake or a massive feeling of urgency

I find it hard to believe that the board of OpenAI isn't smart, savvy and self-interested enough to know that not delaying the announcement by an hour or so is the wrong move. That leads me to believe that yes, this was something big and worthy enough of being announced with that timing, and that it was probably not a mistake.

They also said Greg was going to stay at the company and then he immediately quit. I find it very hard to believe that smart, savvy, and self interested are adjectives that apply to a board who doesn't know what their own chairman thinks.
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