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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

#581

Post by datameta »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #455
ramraj07 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s always a hoarde of people second guessing the 10x engineer. Of course it looks impossible to regular folks. I have seen a few people like this. They’re real. Sometimes it’s even worth the dysfunction they cause to see this in action.

I've seen the bugs of multiple 10x engineers multiply together for 10^n x bugs

In my experience I have encountered two 10x engineers:

1) Moves fast, flexes their authority to sweep small stuff under the rug until it is out of scope and can be "fixed real quick" later. Often leverages many subject matter experts through effective and persistent communication and learns quick enough to get PRs through the door (that sometimes need "quick" fixes later). Enjoys selecting items that benefit their career the most, at the expense of others on their team. Mentors only enough to onboard and increase his team's yield, not to aid their careers. Fueled by the recognition and validation of peers through PR/project completion.

2) Gets shit done, is the SMI themself. Solo code cannon, but PRs go in clean, beautiful to look at. May not get along well with some but not necessarily abrasive to work with especially being part of their direct team. Can be a great altruistic mentor if they spare 5% of their time. Enjoys what they do, and the technologies they work with. Fueled by personal satisfaction in their achievements, and in uplifting their team.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#583

Post by Kye »

angoragoats wrote: post #574
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…

> It seems less of a lift I’ve seen this expression a lot recently and it baffles me. The word you are looking for is “effort,” or if you prefer adjectives, maybe something like “difficult.”

This will blow your mind but English has endless dialects and minor variations. This is like complaining that someone calls soda pop or says y'all.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#584

Post by cthalupa »

DannyBee wrote: post #549
cthalupa wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What mechanism does Satya have to do anything here? Microsoft has a minority stake in the for-profit subsidiary that is wholly controlled by the 501(c)(3). All investors (and employees) in the for-profit have to agree to the operating agreement that specifies the for-profit is not actually obligated to actually make a profit and that it is all secondary the charter the non-profit operates under. https://openai.com/ou…

So, for starters, they own all the compute being used. I think people seriously underestimate how hard it is to get the GPU compute/etc that is necessary to be useful here. Lead time would be years, easily, even if you had the money. NVidia can't change this for you even if they liked you - they literally can't build chips fast enough. Depending on the exact agreement, Microsoft may have just given them credits/free…

This is a good point in a vacuum, but it's likely not that feasible legally, nor am I sure it would even be in Microsoft's best interests to do so to begin with.

Huge portions of the compute they are using is also directly doing inference for Microsoft products, so that's another dimension to all of this.

You also have to remember that ultimately Microsoft had to sign an operating agreement that states that the primary duty of the for-profit is the mission and charter of the non-profit and that all other things are secondary to that.

Not that any of that makes Satya happy, but it does severely limit his options outside of cutting off his nose to spite his face. I think the primary outcome is in significantly reducing the chances Microsoft continues to invest.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#585

Post by cthalupa »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #493
cthalupa wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what mechanism? 3/4ths the remaining board have no financial interests in OpenAI.

Personal/moral: "Championing" non-profit after reaping the fruits of massive commercial success Monetary: Promotions and payouts (now or future)? Equity is not the only way

Is it a massive commercial success? They have received significant funding, and likely have high revenue, but is it profitable? Is it in a position to be profitable? We're not in the world of companies getting decades of runway from VCs anymore, between concerns around a recession (justified or not), higher interest rates, etc.

There's rapidly becoming more and more competitors in this space, as well. OpenAI has a significant first-mover advantage, but I don't know that it is insurmountable, and I doubt investors are confident that it is either. That means they're even less likely to have infinite runway.

So I'm not sure there's personal/moral success at this point in the story for the board to begin with.

Monetary - 3/4ths the board is independent. They are not actually employed by OpenAI. There's nothing to promote them to, and nothing in the charter of the non-profit that would give them payouts.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#587

Post by boh »

Jensson wrote: post #571
sbrother wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

Yeah, the legal and financials parts of ChatGPT are very questionable. I don't think Google would launch a service that would open them up to so many lawsuits unless it was very profitable, and I doubt ChatGPT is very profitable currently. Bard was likely not trained on copyrightable data, that makes it safe from lawsuits but also removes most of the usecases people want ChatGPT for. And it isn't just about lawsuits,…

It was 100% trained on copyrightable data. You can tell by using it and Google has a history of "ask for forgiveness not permission" when it comes to data mining.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#588

Post by m_ke »

RockCoach wrote: post #500
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…

>My bet is that it could be all about some research directions that were "shielded" by Sam. As far as I can tell, all three of them are of Polish descent. For all we know they might have decided to resign together even if only one of them had a personal issue with OpenAI's vision. We will find out soon enough whether they will just found their own competing startup, based on OpenAI's "secret sauce" or not.

I wonder if Wojciech Zaremba will leave as well

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#589

Post by skepticATX »

aidaman wrote: post #156
lannisterstark wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doomerism when it comes to technology has always been such a weird mindset to me. "oh no, they're gonna take the horses/horse buggies/telegram/landlines away!" "Goddamn, how dare they invent the bigger cannons!?" - Romans, 1453, in Constantinople probably. (One incident where I can use my exempt powers).

Most of the time the technology is not building an artificial intelligent computer that is capable of superhuman reasoning. Have you used gpt4? it's reasoning capabilities match human ability. The more you think about it, the more scary the reality becomes. GPT 4 can reason through any mental exercise as well as a human. The rest of the work to make it autonomous is simple in comparison.

> it's reasoning capabilities match human ability

All research that I have seen disagrees with this take. Ask GPT-4 a few basic block world problems and see for yourself if it can match human ability.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#590

Post by TheBigSalad »

mirzap wrote: post #193

This is escalating rather quickly. It is an incredibly irresponsible move by the OpenAI board. Hypergrowing company, and now they managed to shake up their user's trust in leadership stability. This has Adam's (D'Angelo) fingerprints all over it (for context, he did overthrow his co-founder, and Quora has been struggling ever since). This guy shouldn't sit on any board ever again. I predict the board will be fired, a…

How do you know that? What did the ceo do?
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