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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

#871

Post by dmix »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #746
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…

Based on Andrej Karpathy's comment on Twitter today, the board never explained any of this to the staff. So siding with Altman seems like a far better option since his return would mean a much higher likelihood of continuing business as usual. If Ilya & co. want the staff to side with them, they have to give a reason first. It doesn't necessarily have to be convincing, but not giving a reason at all will never be con…

And the new CEO wants to slow down AI development and is a Yudkowsky fan which is another incentive to leave https://x.com/drtechlash/status/1726507930026139651?s=46&t=

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

#872

Post by altpaddle »

Palmik wrote: post #371
kromem wrote: post #28

Foundational AI companies fracturing is going to be good for the overall market. Just like Anthropic spinning off from OpenAI brought some very cool research (particularly liked the functional introspection vs node based stuff), Altman going into his own venture to compete will help diversify the overall space. And while many seem to be thinking this is going to bode poorly for OpenAI, I think perhaps long term it mi…

The default winners in this race, in the medium-term horizon (~18 months), are the existing incumbents: Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta. OpenAI was positioned to be able to compete. I am not sure a diluted OpenAI will be.

But I think this episode shows how dependent OpenAI was on Microsoft. They seem to be closer to an extension than a truly independent actor

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

#873

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

ChatGTP wrote: post #848
3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new CEO, (Emmett, not Mura, who was CEO for two days I guess) has publicly stated on multiple occasions "we need to slow down from a 10 to a 1-2". Ilya is also in favor of dramatically "slowing down". That's who's left in this company, running it. In the field of AI, right now, "slowing down" is like deciding to stop the car and walk the track by foot in the middle of a Formula 1 race. It's like going backwards.…

Well many of the top researches in the world seem keen for a slow down so I’m not sure you’re right. You can’t force people to work on things at a pace they’re uncomfortable with.

You'd find this hard to support with facts.

We have a bunch of people talking about how worried they are and how we should slow down, and among them Sam Altman, and you see he was shipping fast. And Elon Musk, who also was concurrently working on his own AI startup while telling everyone how we should stop.

There's no stopping this and any person of at least average intelligence is fully aware of this. If a "top researcher" is in favor of not researching, then they're not a researcher. If a researcher doesn't want to ship anything they research, they're also not a researcher.

OpenAI has shipped nothing so far that is in any way suggesting the end of humanity or other such apocalyptic scenario. In total, these AI models have great potency in making our media, culture, civilization a mess of autogenerated content, and they can be very disruptive in a negative way. But no SINGLE COMPANY is in control of this. If it's not OpenAI, it'll be one of the other AI companies shipping comparable models right now.

OpenAI simply had the chance to lead, and they just gave up on it. Now some other company will lead. That's all that happened. OpenAI slowing down won't slow down AI in general. It just makes OpenAI irrelevant in 1-2 years time max.

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

#874

Post by altpaddle »

djha-skin wrote: post #659

Alright, cool, they stuck to their guns about being not-for-profit, and they want to be more mission focused than profit/product focused. Why, then, did they bring in THE CO-FOUNDER OF TWITCH to help them out? Seems like an off-brand thing to do for a group of people focused on "the mission".

I mean it's not like there's going to be a huge pool of suitable candidates for something like this on short notice. They probably picked the most capable candidate they knew of who aligned with their values

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

#875

Post by 15457345234 »

xcv123 wrote: post #654
15457345234 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> massive shitposters Yes, agreed, but on _twitter_? The massive_disgruntled_engineer_rant does have a lot of precedent but I've never considered twitter to be their domain. Mailing lists, maybe.

Yes, on Twitter. Mailing lists are old boomer shit.

That's funny

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

#876

Post by fallingknife »

famouswaffles wrote: post #779
mianos wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why you would want people on the board who understand the technology. Unless they have some other technology that we don't know about, that maybe brought all this on, a GPT is not a clear path to AGI. That is a technical thing that to understand seems to be beyond most people without real experience in the field. It is certainly beyond the understanding of some dude that lucked into a great training s…

>Unless they have some other technology that we don't know about, that maybe brought all this on, a GPT is not a clear path to AGI. So Ilya Sutskever, one of the most distinguished ML researchers of his generation does not understand the technology ? The same guy who's been on record saying LLMs are enough for AGI ?

AGI doesn't exist. There is no standard for what makes an AGI or test to prove that an AI is or isn't an AGI once built. There is no engineering design for even a hypothetical AGI like there is for other hypothetical tech e.g. a fusion reactor, so we have no idea if it is even similar to existing machine learning designs. So how can you be an expert on it? Being an expert on existing machine learning tech, which Ilya absolutely is, doesn't grant this status.

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

#877

Post by dmix »

bayindirh wrote: post #628
wokwokwok wrote: post #458

Honest question: Other than 1) Microsoft and 2) anyone building a product with the OpenAI api 3) OpenAI employees… …is OpenAI crashing a burning a big deal? This seems rather over hyped… everyone has an opinion, everyone cares because OpenAI has a high profile. …but really , alternatives to chatGPT exist now, and most people will be, really… not affected by this in any meaningful degree. Isn’t breaking the strangle h…

I'll be probably downvoted to hell, but, I think what is happening is healthy to the ecosystem. Pine forests are known to grow by fires. Fires scatter the seeds around, the area which is unsustainable is reset, new forests are seeded, life goes on. This is what we're seeing, too. A very dense forest has burned, seeds are scattered, new, smaller forests will start growing. Things will slow down a bit, bit accelerate a…

That's a very good analogy.

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

#878

Post by sumitkumar »

Solvency wrote: post #817
belugacat wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a big deal because he’s extremely charismatic and well connected and that matters much, much more for a tech company’s success than some programmers like to think.

What am I missing here: Sam Altman has zero charisma or cool factor. Every talk I've seen him in, he comes off as lethargic and sluggish. I get zero sense of passion or rallying drive around the hype of AI from him. He's not an AI visionary. He's not a hype man. He simply "is", and just because he happens to have been the CEO he's been thrust into the spotlight, but there's literally nothing interesting about him.

Is is not generic charisma. It is specific to who he can attract to work with him. You and I cannot figure it out just by going through how we perceive him from a distance. The average AI researcher/investor isn't looking for traditional charisma. In the interview with Lex Friedman he comes across as just the right person to lead the current GPT based products. Anyone else would be too traditional for this nascent product suite.

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

#879

Post by nmfisher »

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.

Speak for yourself, I cancelled my GPT4 subscription because I prefer using Claude 2.

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

#880

Post by rightbyte »

steakscience wrote: post #845
jmerz wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leaders…

Every SV CEO has a "Sam Altman saved my butt during crucial incident X" story

Like what?
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