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Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

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Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#661

Post by 22c »

Applejinx wrote: post #656
Paul-Craft wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. None of this adds up. The only thing that makes any sense, given OpenAI has any sense and self interest at all, is that the reason they let Altman go may have even been bigger than even what they were saying, and that there was some lack of candor in his communications with the board. Otherwise, you don't make an announcement like that 30 minutes before markets close on a Friday.

[flagged]

Don't take this as combative, but that sounds like nothing more than a science fiction plot.

Putting arguments for how close we are or aren't to AGI aside; there's no way you could spend the amount of money it would take to train such a basilisk on company resources without anyone noticing. We are not talking about a rogue engineer running a few cryptominers in the server room, here.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#662

Post by fredgrott »

Remember folks, the trigger point that makes MS's investment worthless is reaching AGI point as that then triggers the charter rules to take the IP back out of commercial products....that is the crux of the firing...one board faction felt they had reached AGI and the people that were forced our or left felt they had not yet reached AGI.

From my brief dealings with SA at Loopt in 2005, SA just does not have a dishonest bone in his body.(I got a brief look at the Loopt pitch deck due to interviewing for a mobile dev position at Loopt just after Sprint invested).

If you want an angel invest play, find out the new VCfund firm Sam is setting up for hard research.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#663

Post by notahacker »

username332211 wrote: post #610
nostrademons wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is more abrupt and more direct than any CEO firing I've ever seen. For comparison, when Travis Kalanick was ousted from Uber in 2017, he "resigned" and then was able to stay on the board until 2019. When Equifax had their data breach, it took 4 days for the CEO to resign and then the board retroactively changed it to "fired for cause". With the Volkswagon emissions scandal, it took 20 days for the CEO to r…

You are comparing a corporate scandals, but the alternative theory in this forum seems to be a power struggle and power struggles have completely different mechanics. Think of it as the difference between a vote of no confidence and a coup. In the first case you let things simmer for a bit to allow you to wheel and deal and to arrange for the future. In the second case, even in the case of a parliamentary coup like t…

A boardroom coup isn't remotely like one where one looks for the gap where the guards and guns aren't and worries about the deposed leader being reinstated by an angry mob.

If they had the small majority needed to get rid of him over mere differences of future vision they could have done so on whatever timescale they felt like, with no need to rush the departure and certainly no need for the goodbye to be inflammatory and potentially legally actionable

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#664

Post by ilaksh »

kolja005 wrote: post #362
anvuong wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just disagreement in technological aspects, which any well-functioning company should always have a healthy amount of within its leadership. The press release literally said he was fired because he was lying. I haven't seen anything like that from a board of a big company for a very long time.

Additionally, OpenAI can just put resources towards both approaches in order to settle this dispute. The whole point of research is that you don't know the conclusions ahead of time.

That might be part of it. They announced that they were dedicating compute to researching superintelligence alignment. When they launched the new stuff on Dev Day, there was not enough compute and the service was disrupted. It may have also interfered with Ilya's team's allocation and stopped their research.

If that happened (speculation) then those resources weren't really dedicated to the research team.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#665

Post by j45 »

jprete wrote: post #379
j45 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could that not change as the board changes?

I think the board is required to be a majority non-equity-holders precisely because an equity-holding board will not keep to their non-profit mission.

Since it's a private non-profit corp it might be whatever they want the rules to be.

Arms-length neutrality on a board in silicon valley might still work like the rest as other comments have stated. Maybe someone can shed some light on it

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#666

Post by fidotron »

fsloth wrote: post #655
smoldesu wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Steve Jobs couldn't claim Wozniak's work as his own, he wouldn't have landed "his" Atari contract. Who knows where things would have gone after that, but I have a hard time tracing Apple's history of success without, say, the Apple II.

The milieu in which Apple came to fruitition was full of young small microcomputer shops. So it's not like Woz invented the microcomputer for the masses - his contribution was critical for early Apple for sure, but the market had tons of alternatives as well. Without Apple II it's hard to say were Jobs and Wozniak would have turned out. Jobs is such a unique, driven figure that I'm fairly sure he would have created a…

I don’t believe the evidence backs this up. Woz is as much a one off as Jobs.

Woz did two magic things just in the Apple II which no one else was close to: the hack for the ntsc color, and the disk drive not needing a completely separate CPU. In the late 70s that ability is what enabled the Apple II to succeed.

The point is Woz is a hacker. Once you build a system more properly, with pieces used how their designers explicitly intended, you end up with the Mac (and things like Sun SPARCstafions) which does not have space for Woz to use his lateral thinking talents.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#667

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

yellow_postit wrote: post #493
johnwheeler wrote: post #84

Edit: I called it https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725682088639119857 nothing to do with dishonesty. That’s just the official reason. ———- I haven’t heard anyone commenting about this, but the two main figures here-consider: This MUST come down to a disagreement between Altman and Sutskever. Also interesting that Sutskever tweeted a month and a half ago https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1707752576077176907 Th…

[flagged]

…”Woke”? What does that have to do with anything?

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#668

Post by mrangle »

If the primary issue is was safety vs performance, then in the near-future-end performance is going to win. As is the nature of AI that has been written about for decades.

But right now, the board undoubtedly feels the most pressure in the realm of safety. This is where the political and big-money financial (Microsoft) support will be.

If all true, Altman's departure was likely inevitable as well as fortunate for his future.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#669

Post by denton-scratch »

tinco wrote: post #550
cedws wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ilya claims the transformer architecture, with some modification for efficiency, is actually sufficient for AGI. I thought this guy was supposed to know what he's talking about? There was a paper that shows LLMs cannot generalise[0]. Anybody who's used ChatGPT can see there's imperfections. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12288

Humans don't work this way either. You don't need the LLM to do the logic, you just need the LLM to prepare the information so it can be fed into a logic engine. Just like humans do when they shut down their system 1 brain and go into system 2 slow mode. I'm in the definitely ready for AGI camp. But it's not going to be a single model that's going to do the AGI magic trick, it's going to be an engineered system consi…

> You don't need the LLM to do the logic, you just need the LLM to prepare the information so it can be fed into a logic engine.

This is my view!

Expert Systems went nowhere, because you have to sit a domain expert down with a knowledge engineer for months, encoding the expertise. And then you get a system that is expert in a specific domain. So if you can get an LLM to distil a corpus (library, or whatever) into a collection of "facts" attributed to specific authors, you could stream those facts into an expert system, that could make deductions, and explain its reasoning.

So I don't think these LLMs lead directly to AGI (or any kind of AI). They are text-retrieval systems, a bit like search engines but cleverer. But used as an input-filter for a reasoning engine such as an expert system, you could end up with a system that starts to approach what I'd call "intelligence".

If someone is trying to develop such a system, I'd like to know.

Re: Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

#670

Post by cowl »

mcmcmc wrote: post #429
mark_l_watson wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point. It was rude to drop a bombshell during trading hours. That said, the chunk of value Microsoft dropped today may be made back tomorrow, but maybe not: if OpenAI is going to slow down and concentrate on safe/aligned AI then that is not quite as good for Microsoft.

Why is OpenAI responsible for protecting Microsoft’s stock price?

it's not that OpenAI is reponsible, but those board members have burned a lot of bridges with investors with this behaviour. the investor world is not big so self-serving interest would dictate that you at least take their interest in consideration before acting especially with something like waiting 1 hour before press release. No Board would want them now because they are posined apple for the investors.
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