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OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#931

Post by 93po »

konschubert wrote: post #922
nopromisessir wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those things sound very boring to me. I can offer no concrete solutions. However, I have a friend who graduated from high school #1 of a big class and 2 years early. His mom explained that if he made at least a 1400(of 1600) on his SAT, she would buy him a new gaming computer. He then proceeded to make exactly a 1400. No more. No less. I recommend if you haven't tried already, an iteration to this approach using…

Be careful with reward systems, as it can destroy internal motivation. Additionally, one very important thing to learn as a young adult is how to motivate yourself to do things that have only long term payoffs. Of course I also understand that you can take SAT only once, so as bad as that is, it’s maybe not the best time to learn a life lesson.

Is it a recent thing that you can only take it once? when I was a teenager you could take it as many times as you wanted

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#932

Post by jug »

yeck wrote: post #307
skepticATX wrote: post #228

> OpenAI spokesperson Lindsey Held Bolton refuted that notion in a statement shared with The Verge: “Mira told employees what the media reports were about but she did not comment on the accuracy of the information.” > Separately, a person familiar with the matter told The Verge that the board never received a letter about such a breakthrough and that the company’s research progress didn’t play a role in Altman’s sudd…

So we have sources claiming there is a letter, and another source claiming there is not. Feel like some people would need to start going on the record before anything might reasonably be determined from this.

And honestly normally I'd trust Reuters above The Verge.

But in either case, I think Reuters absolutely had someone on the inside to leak this. They have made mistakes in the past, sure, but they are also not a tabloid and they don't innovate.

To me, a sensible conclusion of this is simply that OpenAI is not ready or willing to discuss this. Stuff that are supposed to be kept internal but due to the emotional state over at OpenAI, things might have leaked, potentially even out of spite.

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#933

Post by 93po »

meheleventyone wrote: post #712
synaesthesisx wrote: post #151

Remember, about a month ago Sam posted a comment along the lines of "AI will be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to very strange outcomes". The board was likely spooked by the recent breakthroughs (which were most likely achieved by combining transformers with another approach), and hit the panic button. Anything capable of "superhuman persuasion",…

Looking at humanity, persuasion seems to be an extremely low bar! Also for a superhuman trait is it that it’s capable of persuading anyone anything or rather that it’s able to persuade everyone about something. Power vs. Reach.

I agree with this. Corporate news is complete and total obvious bullshit, but it overwhelmingly informs how people think about most anything.

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#934

Post by culi »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #877
naasking wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this sort of understanding is a result of some manner of understanding the underlying mechanisms and not a result of just having a huge dictionary of synonyms. He developed an understanding of the underlying mechanisms because he correlated concepts between algebraic and geometric domains, ie. multimodal training data. Multimodal models are already known to be meaningfully better than unimodal ones. We've barely sc…

First YouTube video that hit for "absolute value of complex" numbers says within 30 seconds that you have to take the 2 numbers, square them and add them and the result is square root of that. I doubt he had to come up with that on his own.

The child clearly demonstrated a geometric, rather than formulaic, understanding of the problem

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#935

Post by htk »

zeven7 wrote: post #488
htk wrote: post #6

Just when I thought the ride was over. The belief in what's in the letter could explain some things like how the board couldn't trust Sam to keep this "discovery" at bay, and how it could be better to implode the company than let it explore said technology.

Also could it explain why the board failed to provide a proper justification for the firing?

Absolutely, let's not even talk about the Pandora's box.

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#936

Post by 93po »

torginus wrote: post #674
somenameforme wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think any rhetoric could ever persuade you to you adopt the opposite general worldview of what you currently have? I'm positive that it could not for me. The reason for this is not because I'm obstinate, but because my worldview is not formed on persuasion, but on lived experience. And I think this is true for the overwhelming majority of people. It's why our views tend to change as we age, and experience more…

Yes. Do not forget that we literally live in the Matrix, getting all the information of import through tiny screens, the sources and validity of which we can only speculate on. All of the validity of the info we have is verified by heuristics we have, like groupthink, listening to 'experts' and trying to match up the info with our internal knowledge and worldview. I feel like our current system of information allows…

I think it’s extremely positive that most of our information comes from the Internet, because before that we only got information from our local peers who are often extremely wrong or problematic and their opinions. All I have to do is look at organized religion, and the negative impact that it’s had on the world, to appreciate that the Internet has, in general, a higher standard of evidence and poor opinions are more likely to be challenged

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#937

Post by 93po »

danbmil wrote: post #673
zx8080 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > sure 10x engineers are cool but damn those 10,000x engineer/researchers... What was he referring to?

I think he is referring to an AGI that is 10000x more productive than a median programmer

What I took from that comment was that people at open AI were successfully making tools that led to a 10,000 fold increase

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#938

Post by aswegs8 »

doug_durham wrote: post #688
cduzz wrote: post #316

I was talking to my (12 year old) son about parts of math he finds boring. He said that he thinks absolute value is absurdly easy and extremely boring. I asked him if there was anything that might make it more interesting, he said "maybe complex numbers". So I asked him "what would the absolute value of i+1 be?" he thinks for a little bit and says "square root of 2" and I ask him "what about the absolute value of 2i…

What makes you think that an LLM has a "huge dictionary of synonyms"? That's not how LLMs work. They capture underlying concepts and their relations. You had a good point going until you make a straw man argument about the capabilities of LLMs.

Any source on what they actually capture? Seems interesting to me.

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#939

Post by theonlybutlet »

wbhart wrote: post #491

I feel very comfortable saying, as a mathematician, that the ability to solve grade school maths problems would not be at all a predictor of ability to solve real mathematical problems at a research level. The reason LLMs fail at solving mathematical problems is because: 1) they are terrible at arithmetic, 2) they are terrible at algebra, but most importantly, 3) they are terrible at complex reasoning (more specifica…

You're underestimating the power of LLM's.

I'll address two of your points as the other two stem from this.

They can't backtrack that's purely just design and can be easily trained there's no need to simulate at random until it gets the answer, if allowed to review it's prior answers and consider this, if often can reason a better answer. Further more breaking down problems. This is easily demonstrated when looking at how accuracy improves when you ask it to explain it's reasoning as it calculates (break it down into smaller problems). The same for humans, large mathematical problems are solved using learned methods to breakdown and simplify calculations into those easier for us to calculate and build up.

If the model was able to self adjust weightings based on it's finding this would further improve it (another design limitation we'll eventually get to improve, reinforcement learning). Much like 2+2=4 is your instantaneous answer, the neural connection has been made so strong in our brains by constant emphasis we no longer need to think of an abacus each time we get to the answer 4.

You're also ignoring the emergent properties of these LLMs, theyre obviously not yet at human level but they do understand the underlying values and can reason using this value. Semantic search/embeddings is evidence of this.

Re: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster

#940

Post by 93po »

consumer451 wrote: post #836
righthand wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> plus whatever they get for letting Microsoft gobble them up The average salary there is $250k. More than that would be the vestment greater than their base, no?

As I understand it, there was supposed to be a liquidity event at a valuation of $86B, very soon. This event was no longer scheduled after Altman was removed.

Why have I not read this before it seems like the most obvious reason for all of this
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