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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

#691

Post by vasco »

adastra22 wrote: post #586
rain_iwakura wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he never got into stanford. he made that up. there is no record of his admittance. and court records show that stanford dean (under oath) had to admit that they couldn't locate them. do you have source on "drove a lot of engineering" claim? even if you worked at one of these, could you prove the other?

Eric Berger’s book Liftoff details the early years of SpaceX based on interviews with the people involved. They all speak highly of Elon’s engineering expertise and the critical design decisions he made.

I have no inside information, but a biographical book written with exclusive interviews to the person basically means it's a PR book. It maybe also has interesting and true things, but that's like justifying that he knows engineering because his mom said so.

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

#692

Post by vintermann »

tempusalaria wrote: post #637
icyfox wrote: 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.

And the new CEO was a consultant to Anthropic, apparently. I'm only grateful I don't have to make sense of this drama.

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

#693

Post by zabzonk »

zer00eyz wrote: post #632
intellectronica wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hint - the "M$" thing is not smart or funny, just old.

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

#694

Post by sudosysgen »

simseye wrote: post #676
quietthrow wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see many academics indulge in sensationalist doomsaying. That's the real difference here. SETI wouldn't and couldn't seek grants by proposing to contact murderous aliens. I think academics have a general faith in goodwill of intelligence.Benevolence may be a convergent phenomenon. Maybe the mechanisms of reason themselves require empathy and goodness

Huh? There's plenty of AI doomerism amongst academics, see Bengio, Hinton, etc...

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

#695

Post by zuppy »

alex_young wrote: post #631
bmitc wrote: 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.

yes, but although we can all be replaced in a company, some of the people can be replaced much harder. so, i wouldn’t say that the number is high but maybe (and i only speculate) some of them are key people.

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

#696

Post by exitb »

fevangelou wrote: post #674
bmitc wrote: 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…

100% spot on. The world is filled with Sam Altmans, but surely not enough Ilya Sutskevers.

Was Sutskever really that instrumental to OpenAI's success, if it was at all possible for him to be surprised at the direction the company is taking. It doesn't seem that he is that involved in the day-to-day operations.

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

#697

Post by ahartmetz »

tempusalaria wrote: post #528
zoogeny wrote: post #358

I’m genuinely surprised that they stuck to their guns. The PR push behind Altman’s return was convincing enough that I had my doubts. Altman will be more than fine, he’ll get a bucket of money and the chance to prove he is the golden boy he’s been sold to the world. He will get to recruit a team that believes in his vision of accelerating AI for commercial use. This will lead to a more diverse market. I hope for the…

The whole situation should make it clear that SV media is beholden to VCs and will print anything they tell them to. Bloomberg, the verge and the information all went to bat for Altman in a big way on this.

My favorite was that part from Financial Times:

"Investors were hoping that Altman would return to a company “which has been his life's work”"

As opposed to Sutskever, who they found on the street somehow, yeah?

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

#698

Post by FeepingCreature »

astrange wrote: post #672
avalys wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The Sequences”? Yes, this doesn’t sound like a quasi-religious cult at all…

The message is that if you do math in your head in a specific way involving Bayes' theorem, it will make you always right about everything. So it's not even quasi-religious, the good deity is probability theory and the bad one is evil computer gods. This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical", and then decide they need to spend their life fighting evil compute…

> This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical"

Yes, which is 100% because of "LessWrong" and 0% because groups of young nerds do that every time, so much so that there's actually an XKCD about it (https://xkcd.com/592/).

The actual message regarding Bayes' Theorem is that there is a correct way to respond to evidence in the first place. LessWrong does not mandate, nor would that be a good idea, that you manually calculate these updates: humans are very bad at it.

> Also they invent effective altruism, which works until the math tells them it's ethical to steal a bunch of investor money as long as you use it on charity.

Given that this didn't happen with anyone else, and most other EAs will tell you that it's morally correct to uphold the law, and in any case nearly all EAs will act like it's morally correct, I'm inclined to think this was an SBF thing, not an EA thing. Every belief system will have antisocial adherents.

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

#699

Post by jmerz »

bmitc wrote: 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…

I think he's not as known in the outside world but it's really difficult to understate the amount of social capital sama has in the inner circles of Silicon Valley. It sounds like he did a good job instilling loyalty as a CEO as well, but the SV thing means that the more connected someone at the company is to the SV ecosystem, the more likely they like him/want to be on his good side.

This is kind of like the leadership of the executive branch switching parties. You're not going to say "why would the staff immediately quit?" Especially since this is corporate America, and sama can have another "country" next week.

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

#700

Post by mdekkers »

bmitc wrote: 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…

It is likely that wherever Altman goes next, @gdb would follow, and _he_ is deeply loved by many at OAI (but so is Altman).

CEOs should be judged by their vision for the company, their ability to execute on that vision, bringing in funding, and building the best executive team for that job. That is what Altman brings to the table.

You make it seem that wanting to make money is a zero-sum game, which is a narrow view to take - you can be heavily emotionally and intellectually invested in what you do for a living and wanting to be financially independent at the same time. You also appear to find it “disturbing” that people support someone that is doing a good job - there has always been a difference between marketing and operations, and it is rather weird you find that disturbing - and appreciate stability, or love working for a team that gets shit done.

To address your initial strawman, why would workers quit when the boss leaves? Besides all the normal reasons listed above, they also might not like the remaining folks, or they may have lost faith in those folks, given the epic clusterfuck they turned this whole thing into. All other issues aside, if I would see my leadership team fuck up this badly, on so many levels, i’d be getting right out of dodge.

These are all common sense, adult considerations for anyone that has an IQ and age above room temperature and that has held down a job that has to pay the bills, and combining that with your general tone of voice, I’m going to take a wild leap here and posit that you may not be asking these questions in good faith.

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