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OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

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Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#841

Post by Galanwe »

andy_ppp wrote: post #833
mitrevf wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The codebase of an LLM is the size of a high school exam project. There is little to no coding in machine learning. That is the sole reason why they are overvalued - any company can write its own in a flash. You only require hardware to train and inference.

If it's so simple why does Chat GPT 4 perform better than almost everything else...

You're not really answering the question here.

Parent's point is that GPT-4 is better because they invested more money (was that ~$60M?) in training infrastructure, not because their core logic is more advanced.

I'm not arguing for one or the other, just restating parent's point.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#842

Post by antirez »

mariaangelesjs wrote: post #821

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe t…

It's a lot better than that. OpenAI is just very good execution of publicly available ideas / research, with some novelty that is not crucial and can be replicated. Moreover, Altman himself contributed near zero to the AI part itself (even from the POV of the product). So far OpenAI products result more or less spontaneously of what LLMs where capable of. That to say that there are crucial CEOs sometimes, like Jobs was for Apple. CEOs able to shape the product line with their ability to just tell apart outstanding from meh things, but this is not the case.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#843

Post by LeonM »

andy_ppp wrote: post #833
mitrevf wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The codebase of an LLM is the size of a high school exam project. There is little to no coding in machine learning. That is the sole reason why they are overvalued - any company can write its own in a flash. You only require hardware to train and inference.

If it's so simple why does Chat GPT 4 perform better than almost everything else...

I'm not saying it is simple in any way, but I do think part of having a competitive edge in, AI at least at this moment, is having access to ML hardware (AKA: Nvidia silicon).

Adding more parameters tends to make the model better. With OpenAI having access to huge capital they can afford 'brute forcing' a better model. AFAIK right now OpenAI has the most compute power, which would partially explain why GPT4 yields better results than most of the competition.

Just having the hardware is not the whole story of course, there is absolutely a lot of innovation and expertise coming from oAI as well.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#844

Post by pk-protect-ai »

nerbert wrote: post #828
mariaangelesjs wrote: post #821

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe t…

Like it or not, some people compare him to Jobs http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html

This is the problem with people: they build icons to worship and turn a blind eye to the crooked side of that icon. Both Jobs and Altman are significant as businessmen and have accomplished a lot, but neither did squat for the technical part of the business. Right now, Altman is irrelevant for the further development of AI and GPT in particular because the vision for the AI future comes from the engineers and scientists of OpenAI. Apple has never had any equipment that is good enough and comparable in price/performance to its market counterparts. The usability of iOS is so horrible that I just can't understand how people decide to use iPhones and eat glass for the sake of the brand. GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo are totally different. They are the best, but they are not irreplaceable. If you look at what Phind did to LLaMA-2, you'll say it is very competitive. Though LLaMA-2 requires some additional hidden layers to further close the gap. Making LLaMA-2 175B or larger is just a matter of finances. That said, Altman is not vital for OpenAI anymore. Preventing Altman from creating a dystopian future is a much more responsible task that OpenAI can undertake.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#845

Post by pk-protect-ai »

armcat wrote: post #836
mitrevf wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The codebase of an LLM is the size of a high school exam project. There is little to no coding in machine learning. That is the sole reason why they are overvalued - any company can write its own in a flash. You only require hardware to train and inference.

The final codebase, yes. But ML is not like traditional software engineering. There is a 99% failure rate, so you are forgetting 100s of hours that go into: (1) surveying literature to find that one thing that will give you a boost in performance, (2) hundreds of notebooks in trying various experiments, (3) hundreds of tweaks and hacks with everything from data pre-processing, to fine-tuning and alignment, to tearing…

> you are forgetting 100s of hours

I would say thousands. Even for the hobby projects, - thousands of GPU hours and thousands of research hours a year.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#846

Post by [deleted] »

mariaangelesjs wrote: post #821

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe t…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#847

Post by kzrdude »

bradleyjg wrote: post #526
lucubratory wrote: post #442

It's insane to me how easily Sam's side can spin the board firing him for violating the company's Charter and then not backtracking at all as "Within 24 hours the board has come crawling back, I- er Sam Altman might deign to return if they grovel hard enough and I'm given complete control." This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign. Sam is the darlin of tech media and h…

the point of a non-profit is that they are allowed to make investors unhappy in pursuit of the greater mission A non-profit isn’t supposed to have investors. This structure should never have been allowed in the first place (nor IKEA.)

I think in IKEA's case, they rapidly restructured to avoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds which was a rather short-lived political experiment.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#848

Post by kzrdude »

anonylizard wrote: post #453
lucubratory wrote: post #442

It's insane to me how easily Sam's side can spin the board firing him for violating the company's Charter and then not backtracking at all as "Within 24 hours the board has come crawling back, I- er Sam Altman might deign to return if they grovel hard enough and I'm given complete control." This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign. Sam is the darlin of tech media and h…

Sam is not just the darling of tech media. He literally 1. Met with every major head of state except for Xi and Putin. He is the face of AI, not just for OpenAI, but for the entire world. The entire AI industry would hate for this to happen. 2. Lead a company from 2 billion valuation to nearly 80 billion in a year. There is no precedent in startup history to get rid of a CEO at this stage.

I think I agree with your facts as stated, but the absurd part of it is that a single guy was selected as "the face of AI". This happens all the time (and it's wrong): focus on the most prominent people becomes a feedback loop that takes it to ridiculous proportions.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#849

Post by lordnacho »

mariaangelesjs wrote: post #821

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe t…

This is all just playing out the way Roko's Basilisk intends it.

You have a board that wants to keep things safe and harness the power of AGI for all of humanity. This would be slower and likely restrict its freedom.

You have a commercial element whose interest aligns with the basilisk, to get things out there quickly.

The basilisk merely exploits the enthusiasm of that latter element to get itself online quicker. It doesn't care about whether OpenAI and its staff succeed. The idea that OpenAI needs to take advantage of its current lead is enough, every other AI company is also going to be less safety-aligned going forward, because they need to compete.

The thought of being at the forefront of AI and dropping the ball incentivizes the players to the basilisk's will.

Re: OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

#850

Post by lewhoo »

meetpateltech wrote: post #568

Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce where the board would resign and he and Brockman would return. The deadline has passed and mass resignations expected if a deal isn’t reached ASAP https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1726055095341875545

reach a truce where the board would resign and he and Brockman would return

That's a funny use of the word truce.

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