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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

#851

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…

> I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers.

What do you mean by "full stack"? I'm sure there's a spectrum of ability, but frankly where I'm from, "Data Scientist" refers to someone who can use pandas and scikit-learn. Probably from inside a Jupyter notebook.

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

#852

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…

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.

Do you have a link to one please?

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

#853

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…

Otoh Ilya wasn't a main contributor for GPT-4 as per the list of contributions. gdb was.

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

#854

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 w…

Why then has no one come close to replicating GPT-4 after 8 months of it being around?

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

#855
post #836

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…

And some luck is needed really.

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

#856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Why then has no one come close to replicating GPT-4 after 8 months of it being around?

Because of outstanding execution of OpenAI technical folks. An execution that has nothing to do with Altman. Similarly Mistral 7B model has much better performances than others. There is some smart engineering plus finding the magical parameters that produce great results. Moreover, they have a lot of training power. Unfortunately here the biggest competitor would be a company that lost its way a lot of time ago: Google. So OpenAI look magical (while it is using mostly research produced by Google).

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

#857
post #596

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

"Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, must be sacked."

Reminds me of the story of Chinggis Khan's burial:

"It's also said that after the Khan was laid to rest in his unmarked grave, a thousand horsemen trampled over the area to obscure the grave's exact location. Afterward, those horsemen were killed. And then the soldiers who had killed the horsemen were also killed, all to keep the grave's location secret."

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

#858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass resignations from whom, I wonder. Other researchers?

If you're an engineer at open ai, you just saw probably millions of dollars of personal wealth get potentially evaporated on friday. You're going to quit and go wherever Altman goes next.

Deca-unicorns don't come along every day. How would Sam Altman build another one? (I'll be impressed if he does.)

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

#859

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…

On the other hand having virtually the whole staff being willing to follow him shows they clearly think very highly of him. That kind of loyalty is pretty wild when you think about how significant being a part of OPENAI means at this point.

They probably just asked a couple of guys.

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

#860

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…

On the other hand having virtually the whole staff being willing to follow him shows they clearly think very highly of him. That kind of loyalty is pretty wild when you think about how significant being a part of OPENAI means at this point.

Loyalty is not earned, it is more like 'snared' or 'captured'.

Local guy had all the loyalty of his employees, almost a hero to them.

Got bought out. He took all the money for himself, left the employees with nothing. Many got laid off.

Result? Still loyal. Still talk of him as a hero. Even though he obviously screwed them, cared nothing for them, betrayed them.

Loyalty is strange. Born of charisma and empty talk that's all emotion and no substance. Gathering it is more the skill of a salesman than a leader.

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