Live data from Hacker News

Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

twitter.com

661–670 of 855 posts

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#661
post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they earned a return on it yet? Seriously asking; I've purchased a GitHub CoPilot license subscription but I don't know what their sales numbers are doing on AI in general. It's to be seen if it can be made more cost-efficient to deliver to consumers.

Checking MSFT price, seems like the market thinks they made the right move and the shareholders are for sure seeing a return.

What % of stock movements do you attribute to OAI, vs the cash-generation behemoth that is Windows/Office/Azure?

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious: what do you expect an "AGI" system to be able to do that we can't do with today's technology?

The simplest answer, without adding any extraordinary capabilities to the AGI that veer into magical intelligence, is to have AI assistants that can seemlessly interact with technology the way a human assistant would. So, if you want to meet with someone, instead of opening you calendar app and looking for an opening, you'd ask your AGI assistant to talk to their AGI assistant and set up a 1h meeting soon. Or, instea…

This is definitely an interesting way to look at it. My initial reaction is to consider that I can enhance the capabilities of a system without increasing its inteligence. For example, if I give a monkey a hammer, it can do more than it could do when it didn't have the hammer, but it is not more intelligent (though it could probably learn things by interacting with the world with the hammer). That leads me to think: can we enhance the capabilities of what we call "AI systems" to do these things, without increasing their intelligence? It seems like you can glue GPT-4o to some calendar APIs to do exactly this. This seems more like an issue of tooling rather than an issue of intelligence to me.

I guess the issue here is: can a system be "generally intelligent" if it doesn't have access to general tools to act on that intelligence? I think so, but I also can see how the line is very fuzzy between an AI system and the tools it can leverage, as really they both do information processing of some sort.

Thanks for the insight.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#663
post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they earned a return on it yet? Seriously asking; I've purchased a GitHub CoPilot license subscription but I don't know what their sales numbers are doing on AI in general. It's to be seen if it can be made more cost-efficient to deliver to consumers.

Checking MSFT price, seems like the market thinks they made the right move and the shareholders are for sure seeing a return.

Increased price of a company is indeed the expectation of future profits, but until those profits hit the balance sheet they are unrealized

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#664
post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI in the past (adjusted for 1980s) was pretty well funded. It's just that fundamental scientific discovery bears little relationship to the pallets of cash.

> AI in the past (adjusted for 1980s) was pretty well funded. A tiny fraction of the current funding. 2-4 orders of magnitude less. > It's just that fundamental scientific discovery bears little relationship to the pallets of cash Heavy funding may not automatically lead to breakthroughs such as Special Relativity or Quantum Mechanics (though it helps there too). But once the most basic ideas are in place, massive is…

> A tiny fraction of the current funding. 2-4 orders of magnitude less.

Operational costs were correspondingly lower, as they didn't need to pay electricity and compute bills for tens of millions concurrent users.

> But once the most basic ideas are in place, massive is what causes the breakthroughs like in the Manhatten Project and Apollo Program.

There is no reason to think that the ideas are in place. It could be that the local optimum is reached as it happened in many other technology advances before. The current model is mass scale data driven, the Internet has been sucked dry for data and there's not much more coming. This may well require a substantial change in approach and so far there are no indications of that.

From this pov monetization is irrelevant, as except for a few dozen researchers the rest of the crowd are expensive career tech grunts.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#665
post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checking MSFT price, seems like the market thinks they made the right move and the shareholders are for sure seeing a return.

The market thinks Tesla is worth more than all other automakers combined, that GameStop is a reasonable investment, and laying off engineers is great!

Because Tesla is. Unlike the traditional automakers that have no room of growth and in a perpetual stagnation, Tesla has potential being a partially automative and partially tech industry. They can even have their own mobile phones if they want to. Or robots and stuff.

What Mercedes, Porsche, Audi can do aside continue to produce the cars over and over again until they are overtaken by somebody else? Hell, both EU and USA need tariffs to compete with chinese automakers.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto currencies has the potential to grow the world economy by about 1-3%, as banking fees go down. Add other uses of crypto may double or triple that, but that's really speculative. AI, on the other hand, has a near infinite potential. It's conceivable that it will grow the global economy by 2% OR MORE per MONTH for decades or more. AI is going to be much more impactful than the internet. Probably more than intern…

I agree with you on the AI point, but with crypto not all is what it seems. Yes you may have short term growth, this is solely due to there being less regulation. Despite what many people think regulation is a good thing, put in place to avoid the excesses that lead to lost livelihoods. It stops whales from exploiting the poor, provides tools for central banks to try avoid depressions. Costs wise, banks acting as tru…

Well, I agree with all that. The 1-3% was meant to come off as a tiny, one-time gain, and an optimistic estimate of that. Not at all worth the hype.

Basically, crypto is more like gold rush than a tech breakthrough. And gold rushes rarely lead to much more than increased inflation.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious: what do you expect an "AGI" system to be able to do that we can't do with today's technology?

An AGI could replace human experts at tasks that doesn't require physical embodiment, like diagnosing patients, drafting contracts, doing your taxes etc. If you still do those manually and not just offload all of it to ChatGPT then you would greatly benefit from a real AGI that could do those tasks on their own. And no, using ChatGPT like you use a search engine isn't ChatGPT solving your problem, that is you solving…

Let's take a step back from LLMs. Could you accept the network of all interconnected computers as a generally intelligent system? The key part here that drives me to ask this is:

> ChatGPT solving your problem would mean it drives you, not you driving it like it works today.

I had a very bad Reddit addiction in the past. It took me years of consciously trying to quit in order to break the habit. I think I could make a reasonable argument that Reddit was using me to solve its problems, rather than myself using it to solve mine. I think this is also true of a lot of systems - Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

It's hard to pin down all computers as an "agent" in the way we like to think about that word and assign some degree of intelligence to, but I think it is at least an interesting exercise to try.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#668
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country, not to train other countries work forces. If you read anything about Canada ever you will also know they have a bunch of policies to try and stop the brain drain and to recruit tech workers from abroad.

> That makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country The idea is precisely that not having SV types around _improves_ the country, i.e. makes it closer to the preferences of Canadians. And yes, having a foreign tech worker doing 9-to-5 in a large legacy company for thoroughly average salaries is very different from having a SV-style startup culture. There is very little process in Can…

> Compare: if a large minority of Icelanders wanted to work for the Baby (which Iceland doesn't have), theb stopping the brain drain (convincing them to work in the Merchant Fleet) is the best outcome, but funneling them out (training them in merchant navigation and watching them join the Danish Navy) would still be preferable to them engaging in their desired behavior anyway (form their own pirate gang preying on the very Merchant Fleet you're trying to advantage).

I read this as if you'd be concerned of Canadians using their tech skills run malware groups, if Canada wouldn't let them leave and join SV companies.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AGI could replace human experts at tasks that doesn't require physical embodiment, like diagnosing patients, drafting contracts, doing your taxes etc. If you still do those manually and not just offload all of it to ChatGPT then you would greatly benefit from a real AGI that could do those tasks on their own. And no, using ChatGPT like you use a search engine isn't ChatGPT solving your problem, that is you solving…

Let's take a step back from LLMs. Could you accept the network of all interconnected computers as a generally intelligent system? The key part here that drives me to ask this is: > ChatGPT solving your problem would mean it drives you, not you driving it like it works today. I had a very bad Reddit addiction in the past. It took me years of consciously trying to quit in order to break the habit. I think I could make…

Companies are general intelligences and they use people, yes. But that depends on humans interpreting that data reddit users generates and updating their models, code and algorithms to adapt to that data, the computer systems alone aren't general intelligences if you remove the humans.

An AGI could run such a company without humans anywhere in the loop, just like humans can run such a company without an AGI helping them.

I'd say a strong signal that AGI has happened are large fully automated companies without a single human decisionmaker in the company, no CEO etc. Until that has happened I'd say AGI isn't here, if that happens it could be AGI but I can also imagine a good enough script to do it for some simple thing.

Re: Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

#670
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I’m with you on this. Next token prediction does lead to impressive emergent phenomena. But what makes people people is an internal drive to attend to our needs, and an LLM exists without that. A real AGI should be something you can drop in to a humanoid robot and it would basically live as an individual, learning from every moment and every day, growing and changing with time. LLMs can’t even count the number of…

>LLMs can’t even count the number of letters in a sentence. It's a consequence of tokenization. They "see" the world through tokens, and tokenization rules depend on the specific middleware you're using. It's like making someone blind and then claiming they are not intelligent because they can't tell red from green. That's just how they perceive the world and tells nothing about intelligence.

But it limits them, they cannot be AGI then, because a child that can count could do it :)
Post reply on HN