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Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#701

Post by fancyfredbot »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #390
justanotherjoe wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the Microsoft thing and the direction Sam Altman is taking OpenAI. I imagine that caused a significant shift in workload and nature of work for the people in OpenAI.

I don't see how it could be something like this. If Sam wanted to do this he wouldn't need to lie. I suspect Sam did something stupid and the board had no choice. I would be very surprised if they actually wanted to fire Sam.

Well that turned out to be 100% wrong. I am, as predicted, very surprised.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#703

Post by [deleted] »

LightMachine wrote: post #521
toomuchtodo wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could Microsoft not hire Sam (reporting directly to Satya) and those who departed and equip them with compute access and ancillary resources? It seems less of a lift than salvaging the OpenAI situation internally due to the emotions and politics involved, non competes not existing in California (broadly speaking), and the logistics of attempting to apply pressure to a 501c3 board with very little leverage. The value…

Even if they could, why would Sam accept it? The smartest move for Sam is to just start his own for-profit company, easily raise a fuckton of money, hire all the talents from OpenAI and carry on with whatever he was doing. I think this is OpenAI's loss more than anything else. Now if the reason is truly a push against Sam's for-profit direction, I wonder if OpenAI will back it up by releasing their models to the publ…

[deleted]

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#704

Post by JohnFen »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #690
JohnFen wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not?? Being another Woz would be amazing.

I just saw this. Glad to see I’m not the only one. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/21/why-apple-co-founder-steve-w... My take: He’s the Keanu Reeves of tech (or Keanu is the Woz of the film industry). The world can use more of this.

My attitude about money is pretty much the same as Woz's. There's a lot of us out there, but the worldview is so alien to the modern computer industry that it just doesn't register.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#705

Post by MacsHeadroom »

keepamovin wrote: post #671
MacsHeadroom wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My embodiment is my PC environment. I interact with the world through computer displays. There is no reason embodiment for AGI should need to be physical or mammalian-like in any way.

Strong disagree. But it may take me a while to elucidate and enumerate the reasons.

I'm disabled and have had a computer in front of me since I was 2. I'm rarely not in front of a screen except to shower and sleep.

Plenty of very intelligent people are completely paralyzed. Sensations of physical embodiment is highly overrated and is surely not necessary for intelligence.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#706

Post by worldsayshi »

mkl wrote: post #515
worldsayshi wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else would you call the ability for it to adapt a task for its own capabilities?

Language modelling, token prediction. It's not much different from generating code in a particular programming language; given examples, learn the patterns and repeat them. There's no self-awareness or consciousness or understanding or even the concept of capabilities, just predicting text.

Sure but that kind of sounds like it is building a theory of mind of itself.

If it does have considerable training data including prompt and response when people are interacting with itself then I suppose it isn't that surprising.

That does sound like self awareness, in the non magical sense. It is aware of its own behaviour because it has been trained on it.

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#707

Post by andirk »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #317
andirk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might as well add LOC as a metric. Both can mean the person is extremely inefficient, over-engineering everything, and their eyes are begging for a break. However! The best engineers I've been around do work a lot and they like it.

I’m not sure why it’s seen as ok to work 100 hours per week, or even glorified. If instead of work it was something else it would be seen as a problem. 100 hours per week doesn’t leave room for anything else other than basic human needs. “They like it”, well all addicts like what they’re addicted to, it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

I think a lot of addicts despise their addiction. Exceptions are the few highly acceptable addictions in society such as coffee. Nonetheless, doing anything in excess can be detrimental to one's health and livelihood and should be kept in checked, monitored.

OK now back to my 12 hour day. Not burnt out yet so I'm going to keep going. And yes, I LIKE IT!

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#708

Post by ajmurmann »

anon291 wrote: post #579
kashyapc wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, can we talk about the elephant in the room? I see breathless talk about "AGI" here, as if it's just sitting in Altman's basement and waiting to be unleashed. We barely understand how consciousness works, we should stop talking about "AGI". It is just empty, ridiculous techno-babble. Sorry for the harsh language, there's no nice way to drive home this point.

An AGI system is not human and shouldn't be treated as such. Consciousness is not a trait of intelligence. Consciousness usually requires quaila which puts animals ahead of computers.

How do you know intelligence isn't sufficient and that computers cannot have qualia. Any incoming information could result in qualia. Just because we cannot imagine them doesn't mean they cannot be someone's subjective experience

Re: Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

#710

Post by augustulus »

calf wrote: post #505
augustulus wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nothing I’ve seen from OpenAI is any indication that they’re close to AGI. gpt models are basically a special matrix transformation on top of a traditional neural network running on extremely powerful hardware trained on a massive dataset. this is possibly more like “thinking” than a lot of people give it credit for, but it’s not an AGI, and it’s not an AGI precursor either. it’s just the best applied neural networks…

As a layperson, what does the special matrix transformation do? Is that the embeddings thing, or something else entirely? Something about transformer architecture I guess?

https://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/2018/04/03/attention.html
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