Maybe, as closed as open ai is, it is still too open.
Maybe it needed to be removed from the landscape so that only purely privately-held, large-scale operations exist?
OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
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Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite hypothesis: Ilya et al suspected emergent AGI ( e.g. saw the software doing things unprompted or dangerous and unexpected) and realized the Worldcoin shill is probably not the one you want calling the shots on it. For the record, I don't think it's true. I think it was a power play, and a failed coup at that. But it's about as substantiated as the "serious" hypotheses being mooted in the media. And it's m…
Absolutely wild to me that people are drawing a straight line between a text completion algorithm and AGI. The term "AI" has truly lost all meaning.
I agree, it's an extremely non-obvious assumption and ignores centuries-old debates (empiricism vs. rationalism) about the nature of reason and intelligence. I am sympathetic to Chomsky's position.[1]
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is why, at least in the U.S., we have given non-profits exemptions from taxation. That's your belief . The NFL, Heritage Foundation and Scientology are all non-profits and none of them improve society; they all profit from it. (For what its' worth, I wish the law was more aligned with your worldview)
An argument could be made that sports - and a sports organization - helps society
Indeed, and one for ChatGPT.
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems extremely short sighted for the rest of the board to go along with that.
HN has been radiating a lot of "We did it Reddit!" energy these past 4 days. Lots of confident conjecture based on very little. I have been guilty of it myself, but as an exercise in humility, I will come back to these threads in 6 months to see how wrong I and many others were.
That might make an interesting blog post. If you write anything up, you should submit it!
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#605There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…
Alternative theory: ChatGPT was a runaway hit product that sucked up a lot of the organization's resources and energy. Sam and Greg wanted to roll with it and others on the board did not. They voted on it and one side won. There isn't a bigger, more interesting story here. This is in fact a very common story that plays out at many software companies. The board of openai ended up making a decision that destroyed billi…
Except that the new CEO has explicitly stated he and the board are very much still interested in commercialization. Plus, if the board had on this simple kind of disagreement, they had no reason to also accuse Sam of dishonesty and bring about this huge scandal.
Granted, it's also possible the reasons are as you state and they were simply that incompetent at managing PR.
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#606There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…
So they actually kicked him out because he transformed a non-profit into a money printing machine?
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#607There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…
>Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something? What type of politicking and decepti…
I like to read that, besides the problems others have listed, OpenAI seems like it was built on top of the work of others, who were researching AI, and suddenly took all this "free work" from the contributors and sold it for a profit where the original contributors didn't even see a single dime from their work.
To me it seems like it's the usual case of a company exploiting open source and profiting off others' contributions.
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not wild. "Predict the next word" does not imply a bar on intelligence; a more intelligent prediction that incorporates more detail from the descriptions of the world that were in the training data will be a better prediction. People are drawing a straight line because the main advance to get to GPT-4 was throwing more compute at "predict the next word", and they conclude that adding another order of magnitude o…
> Predict the next word Are there any papers testing how good humans are at predicting the next word? I presume us humans fail badly: 1. as the variance in input gets higher? 2. Poor at regurgitating common texts (e.g. I couldn't complete a known poem). 3. When context starts to get more specific (majority of people couldn't complete JSON)?
The following blogpost by an OpenAI employee can lead us to compare patterns and transistors.
https://nonint.com/2023/06/10/the-it-in-ai-models-is-the-dat... The ultimate model, in his (author's) sense, would suss out all patterns and then patterns among those patterns and so on, so that it delivers on compute and compression efficiency.
To achieve compute and compression efficiency, it means LLM models have to cluster all similar patterns together and deduplicate them. This also means successively levels of pattern recognition to be done i.e. patterns among patterns among patterns and so on , so as to do the deduplication across all hierarchy it is constructed. Full trees or hierarchies won't get deduplicated but relevant regions / portions of those trees will, which implies fusing together in ideas space. This means root levels will be the most abstract patterns. This representation also means appropriate cross-pollination among different fields of studies further increasing effectiveness.
This reminds me of a point which my electronics professor made on why making transistors smaller has all the benefits and only few disadvantages. Think of these patterns as transistors. The more deduplicated and closely packed they are, the more beneficial they will be. Of course, this "packing together" is happening in mathematical space.
Another thing which patterns among patterns among patterns reminds me of homotopies. This brilliant video by PBS Infinite Series is amazing. As I can see, compressing homotopies is what LLMs do, replace homotopies with patterns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7wNWQ4aTLQ
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#609There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…
People keep speculating sensational, justifiable reasons to fire Altman. But if these were actual factors in their decision, why doesn't the board just say so?
Until they say otherwise, I am going to take them at their word that it was because he a) hired two people to do the same project, and b) gave two board members different accounts of the same employee. It's not my job nor the internet's to try to think up better-sounding reasons on their behalf.
Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
#610There has to be a bigger story to this. Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen. Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI a…
> taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society. This is absolutely peak irony! US pouring trillions into its army and close to nothing into its society (infrastructure, healthcare, education...) : crickets Some cou…
The difference is that the US Army wasn't created with the intent to "keep guns from the hands of criminals" and we all know it's a bad actor.
OpenAI, on the other hand...