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OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

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Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading that thread it’s really interesting to me. I see how far we’ve come in a short couple of years. But I still can’t grasp how we’ll achieve AGI within any reasonable amount of time. It just seems like we’re missing some really critical… something… Idk. Folks much smarter than I seem worried so maybe I should be too but it just seems like such a long shot.

When it comes to AI, as a rule, you should assume that whatever has been made public by a company like OpenAI is AT LEAST 6 months behind what they’ve accomplished internally. At least. So yes, the insiders very likely know a thing or two that the rest of us don’t.

Sure, they know what they are about to release next, and what they plan to work on after that, but they are not clairvoyants and don't know how their plans are going to pan out.

What we're going to see over next year seems mostly pretty obvious - a lot of productization (tool use, history, etc), and a lot of efforts with multimodality, synthetic data, and post-training to add knowledge, reduce brittleness, and increase benchmark scores. None of which will do much to advance core intelligence.

The major short-term unknown seems to be how these companies will be attempting to improve planning/reasoning, and how successful that will be. OpenAI's Schulman just talked about post-training RL over longer (multi-reasoning steps) time horizons, and another approach is external tree-of-thoughts type scaffolding. These both seem more about maximizing what you can get out of the base model rather than fundamentally extending it's capabilities.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#732

This is an interesting update to the article... > After publication, an OpenAI spokesperson sent me this statement: “We have never canceled any current or former employee’s vested equity nor will we if people do not sign a release or nondisparagement agreement when they exit.” - Updated May 17, 2024, 11:20pm EDT

Neither of those statements negate the key point of the article. I've noticed that both Sam Altman personally, and official statements from OpenAI sound like they've been written by Aes Sedai: Not a single untrue word while simultaneously thoroughly deceptive.[1] Let's try translating some statements, as if we were listening to an evil person that can only make true statements: "We have never canceled any current or…

Could also be that they have a unique definition of vesting when they say specifically “vested equity”

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#733
post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may sound harsh but I think some of these researchers have a sort of god complex. Something like "I am so brilliant and what I have created is so powerful that we MUST think about all the horrible things that my brilliant creation can do". Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive next token predictor.

"Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive speeder-up of a lump of lead." "Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive hot water bottle that turns a crank." "Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive rock where neutrons hit other neutrons." The point isn't how it works, the point is what it does.

which is what?

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stare at you until you sign it because you are physically dependent on eating food every day Even lowest level fast food workers can choose a different employer. An engineer working at OpenAI certainly has a lot of opportunities to choose from. Even when I only had three years in the industry, mid at best, I asked to change the contract I was presented with because non-compete was too restrictive — and they did it.…

I am typically not willing to bet I can get back under health insurance for my family within the next 0-4 weeks. And paying for COBRA on a family plan is basically like going from earning $X/mo to drawing $-X/mo.

The perversely capitalistic healthcare system in the US is perhaps the number one reason why US employers have so much more power over their employees than their European counterparts.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's meaningfully affecting people today near the equator. Look at the April 2024 heatwave in South Asia. These will continue to get worse and more frequent. Millions of these people can't afford air conditioning.

> It's meaningfully affecting people today near the equator. Look at the April 2024 heatwave in South Asia. Weather is not climate, as everyone is so careful to point out during cold waves.

"Probability of experiencing a heatwave at least X degrees, during at least Y days in a given place any given day" is increasing rapidly in many places (as far as I understand) and is climate, not weather. Sure, any specific instance "is weather" but that's missing the forest for the trees.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#736

A lot of the brouhaha about OpenAI is silly, I think. But this is gross. Forcing employees to sign a perpetual non-disparagement agreement under threat of clawing back the large majority of their already earned compensation should not be legal. Honestly it probably isn't, but it'll take someone brave enough to sue to find out.

Lawsuits are tedious, expensive and drawn-out affairs that many people would rather just move on than initiate.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Options aren't vested equity though.

... They definitely can be. When I worked for a small biotech company all of my options had a tiered vesting schedule.

Re-read the post you’re replying to. They said options are not vested equity, which they aren’t. You still need to exercise an option that has vested to purchase the equity shares.

They did not say “options cannot get granted on a tiered vesting schedule”, probably because that isn’t true, as options can be granted with a tiered vesting schedule.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think catastrophic global warming and climate change will happen before we get AGI, possibly in part due to the pursuit of AGI. But as the saying goes, yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

> catastrophic global warming and climate change will happen before we get AGI, What are your timelines here? "Catastrophic" is vague but I'd put the climate change meaningfully affecting the quality of life of average westerner at end of century, while AGI could be before the middle of the century.

See this great video from Sabine Hossenfelder here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4

We have surpassed the 1.5°C goal and are on track towards 3.5°C to 5°C. This accelerates the climate change timeline so that we'll see effects postulated for the end of the century in about ~20 years.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#739

I wonder if employees rallying for Altman when the board was trying to fire him were obligated to do it by some secret agreement .

Even without explicit clauses, it's likely they feared the loss of a (perceived) great man would impact their equity -- regardless of his character. Sadly there is too much faith in these Jobs-esque 'great' men to drive innovation. It's a social illness IMO.

It's a taught ideology/theory, the great man theory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to AI, as a rule, you should assume that whatever has been made public by a company like OpenAI is AT LEAST 6 months behind what they’ve accomplished internally. At least. So yes, the insiders very likely know a thing or two that the rest of us don’t.

I understand this argument, but I can't help but feel we're all kidding ourselves assuming that their engineers are really living in the future. The most obvious reason is costs - if it costs many millions to train foundation models, they don't have a ton of experiments sitting around on a shelf waiting to be used. They may only get 1 shot at the base-model training. Sure productization isn't instant, but no one is t…

> I think that OpenAI (and Google, etc) are entirely living day-to-day with this tech like those of us on the outside.

I agree, and they are also living in a group-think bubble of AI/AGI hype. I don't think you'd be too welcome at OpenAI as a developer if you didn't believe they are on the path to AGI.

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