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Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

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Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#631
post #592

Through all of this, no one has cogently explained why Altman leaving is such a big deal. Why would workers immediately quit their job when he has no other company, and does he even know who these workers are? Are these people that desperate to make a buck (or the prospect of big bucks)? It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting ou…

Looks like they have about 700 employees. A handful quitting doesn’t seem like a mutiny.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#632

TheInformation: Dozens of Staffers Quit OpenAI After Sutskever Says Altman Won’t Return >Dozens of OpenAI staffers internally announced they were quitting the company Sunday night, said a person with knowledge of the situation, after board director and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever told employees that fired CEO Sam Altman would not return. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dozens-of-staffers-q...

Tip for builders: you can use the GPT APIs on Microsoft Azure. Managed reliably, nobody's quitting, no drama. Same APIs, just with better controls, global availability, and a very stable, reliable, and trustworthy provider. (disclosure: I work at Azure, but this is just my own observation).

You want me to trust M$ in all this? Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Fellow nerds, you really need to go into work on Monday and have a hard chat with your C levels and legal (Because IANAL). The question is: Who owns the output of LLM/AI/ML tooling?

I will give you a hint, it's not you.

Do you need to copyright what a CS agent says, no, you want them on script as much as possible. An LLM parroting your training data is a good thing (assuming a human wrote it). Do you want an LLM writing code, or copy for your product, or a song for your next corporate sing along (Where did you go old IBM)? No you dont, because it's likely going straight to the public domain. Depending on what your doing with the tool and how your using it, it might not matter that this is the case (its an internal thing) but M$, or openAI, or whoever your vendor is, having a copy that they are free to use might be very bad...

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#633

TheInformation: Dozens of Staffers Quit OpenAI After Sutskever Says Altman Won’t Return >Dozens of OpenAI staffers internally announced they were quitting the company Sunday night, said a person with knowledge of the situation, after board director and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever told employees that fired CEO Sam Altman would not return. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dozens-of-staffers-q...

Isn't this expected? Nearly everyone who joined post ChatGPT was primarily financially motivated. What is more interesting is how many of the core research team stays.

This is actually pretty surprising to me, since a financially motivated person would normally wait until a better deal, and just collect their paycheck in the meantime.

There's also no guarantee that Altman will really start a new company, or be able to collect funding to hire everyone quickly. I wonder if these people are just very loyal to Sam.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#634
post #488

This will be an interesting test to see how fast you can bootstrap GPT-4 level performance with unlimited funds and talent that already has deep knowledge of the internals. With the initial adoption of ChatGPT alongside Copilot, OpenAI's data moat of crawled data & RLHF is pretty vast. And that's not leaving the walled garden of OpenAI. You can simulate a lot of this using other off-the-shelf LLMs (see Alpaca) but no…

I would switch, but not because of Altman backing or not. I would switch if their strategy were to be to progress at pace. I’m not big on AI safety as it is parroted these days, I just want more AI, faster.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#635
post #519

I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend. If it’s true that Altman won’t return to OpenAI (or alternatively: that the current board won’t step down) then where does that leave OpenAI? Microsoft can’t be happy, as evidenced by reporting that Nadella was acting as mediator to bring him back. Does OpenAI survive this? Will be super inter…

Can microsoft buy IP from openAI? recruit their engineers? asking for a friend

Exclusive use up until pre-AGI tech.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#636

Honest question: Other than 1) Microsoft and 2) anyone building a product with the OpenAI api 3) OpenAI employees… …is OpenAI crashing a burning a big deal? This seems rather over hyped… everyone has an opinion, everyone cares because OpenAI has a high profile. …but really , alternatives to chatGPT exist now, and most people will be, really… not affected by this in any meaningful degree. Isn’t breaking the strangle h…

Totally agree. It seems like OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but even some free open source projects have become really good. I am no expert, so take this with a grain of salt. It seems OpenAI has a lead, but only of a few months or so and others are racing behind. I guess it really sucks if you built something that relies on the OpenAI api, but even then one could replace the api layer.

None of the open source stuff even comes close to GPT4, I’ve tried them repeatedly.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#637
post #488

This will be an interesting test to see how fast you can bootstrap GPT-4 level performance with unlimited funds and talent that already has deep knowledge of the internals. With the initial adoption of ChatGPT alongside Copilot, OpenAI's data moat of crawled data & RLHF is pretty vast. And that's not leaving the walled garden of OpenAI. You can simulate a lot of this using other off-the-shelf LLMs (see Alpaca) but no…

Many of OpenAIs most talented people left to start Anthropic. They have billions in funding and have not yet got particularly close to GPT-4.

I think that illustrates it will be a be a big uphill battle for any new entrant no matter how well funded or resourced.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this expected? Nearly everyone who joined post ChatGPT was primarily financially motivated. What is more interesting is how many of the core research team stays.

This. Very accurate. At the end of they day this is a battle between academics and capitalists and what they stand for. We generally know how this typically goes…

The capitalists run it into the ground while the academics stand around confused asking each other what happened?

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#639

Reality check for those who need it: Altman won't be starting a competing company. First, he may have contractual restrictions and second, OpenAI owns their IP. And even if Altman is somehow free to do what he wants because he was fired (doubtful), anyone who quits to go with him surely do have airtight non-competes. Besides, it's not like Sam and his few loyalists are just going to spin up a few servers and duplicat…

Perhaps. Anthropic was started by a bunch of people who left OpenAI b/c it wasn't focused enough on safety.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend. That's kinda what happened. The latest gist I read was that the non-profit, idealistic(?) board clashed with the for-profit, hypergrowth CEO over the direction to take the company. When you read the board's bios, they're weren't ready for this job (few are; these rocket ship stories are rare…

I am not sure why. As far as I can tell, the board doesn't need to answer to anyone.

I think the diagram I saw showed they don't actually answer to MS, VCs, or employee investors? And not even that they're out-voted, they don't answer to them at all.
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