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Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

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Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#61
post #8

Any one noticed how Sam sometimes intentionally tries to attack his own work? For example, he has said GPT-2 was very bad, GPT-3 was bad, and GPT-4 is okay. He also fed the AI doomers by talking about AGI dangers and how the world needs to watch out for a future AI catastrophe. He just gives off the vibe of someone trying to act humble but I don't know how much of it is just an act and how much is real. I've never se…

it's an attempt to keep the hype train going by implying they have internal models that make GPT-4 look bad. The question is if that's actually true, we'll find out soon because plenty of other companies are now approaching GPT-4 level performance and OpenAI will have to show their hand

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#62
In any sufficiently large tech company, the "risk mitigation" leadership (legal, procurement, IT, etc) have to operate in a kind of Overton window that balance the risks they are hired to protect the corp from vs. the need or desire of the senior leadership to play fast and loose when they want or feel they need to.

Either the risk-mitigator 'falls in line' after repeatedly seeing their increasingly strident exhortations are falling on deaf ears (or even outright contradicted)... or they leave because it violates their sense of ethics.

Perhaps "AGI" and potential extinction event level fears is giving this more drama than it should have. Replace AGI with "no BYOD policy" and I bet there's a startup somewhere where it turned out that safety guy was super intent on the policy, senior leadership wasn't, and eventually safety guy quits.

Or it could all be as serious and dire as it seems. Hard to tell from the outside.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at compute scaling and model improvement on that compute, we’re going to get there pretty fast. Both compute, architecture and cost matter, and those have been improving like crazy. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect GPT-4o to come out at half the price one year later, with real-time voice, image and text. There is zero sign of slowing, Nvidia keeps building beefier GPUs specialized in LLMs, the…

AGI seems like a stretch when none of the LLM’s right now can solve the prompt: “ Write a sentence that has an odd number of words, with the third word being "keyboard", the last word being "anyway", the next-to-last word being a number, and the first word being a palindrome “ Do we have to add these examples to the dataset now, so that they can solve this? Then maybe we find another prompt and add that too, as a hum…

Interesting, gpt-4o took seven tries to do this, and I had to give it very specific feedback about what it was doing wrong. Here was the answer:

Level says keyboard broke down today, needing repair within five anyway.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#65

Interesting that OpenAI has completely destroyed their reputation over the last year. For me, they've gone from an admirable company to cringe-worthy. I really think that the best outcome here is for OpenAI to collapse and get absorbed by Microsoft, where adults can continue some of the good work that is being overshadowed by ego and cult-like vibes.

Don't hate the player, etc.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#66

Why is cult of personality so prevalent in the engineering / hacker community?

It's more than just engineer community. Have seen it in art, music, clothing design, medTech, finTech and angel-money groups.

I think it's just human condition to lean towards charismatic "leaders". Like, they're like you wanna be so...you love them.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#69

Why do we give this people credit by giving for granted that AGI is somehow magically around the corner? It is not, and everyone’s delusional.

If you look at compute scaling and model improvement on that compute, we’re going to get there pretty fast. Both compute, architecture and cost matter, and those have been improving like crazy. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect GPT-4o to come out at half the price one year later, with real-time voice, image and text. There is zero sign of slowing, Nvidia keeps building beefier GPUs specialized in LLMs, the…

> You can plot this exponential growth out over time and calculate when these models will have the complexity of the brain. Then you can assume some penalty for shitty architecture (that gets better over time), and you’ll have a ballpark estimate.

The same thing could’ve been said for self driving cars, or the space program, or a lot of things that seemed to be progressing quickly at the time.

Re: Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

#70

Interesting that OpenAI has completely destroyed their reputation over the last year. For me, they've gone from an admirable company to cringe-worthy. I really think that the best outcome here is for OpenAI to collapse and get absorbed by Microsoft, where adults can continue some of the good work that is being overshadowed by ego and cult-like vibes.

It is not like Microsoft’s CEO was behaving very admirably or free of ego.

For some reason people give Satya a pass. I guess because he comes off as a nice guy. Somehow no one associates all the anti competitive stuff MS does with him - like bundling Teams into Office, or forcing a Copilot button onto OEMs, or dark pattern nagging about default apps, or inserting ads into the start menu, or whatever. But that mode of operation is classic MS, and it makes sense they are still this way, since Satya was a long time MS veteran before he was CEO. All that said, he is probably actually nicer than previous MS executives. He has had a lot of difficulty in his personal life around his son, and that probably changed him for the better.
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