21 ms·

OpenAI's plans according to Sam Altman removed at OpenAI's request

262 points by bluefishinit 3y ago

bluefishinit 3y ago
Here's the original: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop.com/blog/openai-plans https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop...
- manbash 3y ago
  This illustrates the irony: a company, whose product collects information from the internet, requests that an article "removed" from the internet. (And honestly this is probably a mistake as it actually draws more attention to the original article).
  - jeron 3y ago
    He definitely unleaded Streisand effect on the interview
    - bandyaboot 3y ago
      It’s amazing to me there are still people (in the tech space no less) who haven’t figured out how this works.
      - tasuki 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure Sam Altman knows about and understands Streisand effect. There are a myriad other explanations for "This content has been removed at the request of OpenAI."
    - swores 3y ago
      I don't agree. Go search for HN threads relating to anything Sam Altman has said publicly, interviews he's given etc and you'll see that they always get posted multiple times on HN and the biggest thread always has 100s if not 1000s of comments. This content was going to be wildly shared and discussed whether deleted or not, by deleting it they have at least a) made an official (yet soft, as it doesn't address any specific points) statement that it's not information they're trying to put out and b) probably reduced SEO / future views beyond these current discussions. I can't see any argument for it getting more attention because of deletion than it would have got anyway?
  - parineum 3y ago
    I don't think attention really matters. A statement remaining on their website is like continuously saying/affirming whatever that statement is. Removing it means they have changed their minds about something it contains. Removing it just stops that affirmation, it doesn't really matter if people know what you used to think as long as they know you no longer do. If you have a statement on your website that promises to never put cats on the moon but then you do, I imagine some shareholders/investors might feel misled. I don't know _if_ that opens someone up to legal action but I could see the argument.
    - akira2501 3y ago
      Is the statement on their website or on a third party website? Changing your mind about what you publish is one thing, changing your mind about an interview you just gave is another.
      - swyx 3y ago
        but theres an open question now about whether or not that was MEANT to be an interview, or rather a closed door session to a small group of folks. if Humanloop had not gotten clearance to post what they posted, this would have been a grave overstep of journalistic ethics. (i am not throwing stones, i've fallen foul of this as a blogger before, excusing myself from commonsense precaution in my eagerness to discuss industry relevant insights. private https://www.swyx.io/private https://www.swyx.io/private)
        3np 3y ago
        > if Humanloop had not gotten clearance to post what they posted, this would have been a grave overstep of journalistic ethics. Where did you get this idea? You don't "go on record" with a journalist. Everything you do and say around them is on the record by default. There are ethical codes and frameworks on what, when, and how to report but "private conversations are private" is certainly not considered normal. Re your mea culpa, it's a completely different situation and I don't see how journalistic ethics would be applicable there. If you want to have a more appropriate term, maybe "blogger ethics"?
  - bragr 3y ago
    This might not be about suppressing this particular bit of information so much about holding the group of journalists they invited to their agreements.
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    I don't think this is ironic. They retracted something they said, this is perfectly legit. I've deleted things I posted, including here on HN. You probably did too. And I've scraped data from the internet countless times. You probably did too. I don't think I'm an irony because of that. You probably aren't either.
  - yumraj 3y ago
    Perhaps intentionally so, to increase the hype and as you said draw more attention
- it_citizen 3y ago
  > The fact that scaling continues to work has significant implications for the timelines of AGI development. The scaling hypothesis is the idea that we may have most of the pieces in place needed to build AGI and that most of the remaining work will be taking existing methods and scaling them up. Is this a pretty consensual viewpoint? Or is it hype from OpenAI?
  - meroes 3y ago
    Within comp sci? Not sure. Within academia writ large? No way. But hey I look to biologists who put biological immortality > 100-200 years out (I've never believed Aubrey de Grey and similars during the 20 years he's been in headlines) and see AGI as in the domain of biology/psychology. We've implicated the brain, that's about it.
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      It seems absurd to me that someone would try to make a prediction about the state of technology in 100 years. If you asked people in 1920 to make a list of predictions about what we would/wouldn't be able to do today would they have done better than chance? I guess our understanding of the laws of physics haven't changed that much. So someone predicting that free energy will be impossible is likely correct.
      - warkdarrior 3y ago
        Solar power is mostly free energy, at least for the next 5B years.
        twelve40 3y ago
        uh... also "free" is hydro and wind which people have been using for millenniums
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    Taking existing methods and scaling them up leads to better LLMs. That's a major part of what OpenAI is doing. Now the scaling hypothesis is basically just that sophisticated behavior emerges by itself as neural networks get bigger and get trained on more data with more complex problems. LLMs certainly show that so far, but to jump to an AGI I think we need to fix various shortcomings. It's certainly possible that a future version of an LLM will be an AGI, but imho that will also be thanks to current and future improvements like adding an internal dialogue or medium-term memory. Or maybe LLMs just can't scale that far, because experiencing the world through text is insufficient.
- Animats 3y ago
  There's nothing surprising there. - Not enough GPUs. — we knew that. Look at NVidia's stock price. Roadmap for 2023: - Cheaper and faster GPT-4 — well, of course. - Longer context windows — expected. Everybody's trying to do that. - Finetuning API to be extended to latest models — well, of course. - A stateful API — convenience feature Roadmap for 2024: - Multimodality stalled because not enough GPUs. — said that that already. No exciting statements, such as "We have GPT-5 in test and it can do most desk jobs", or "We've acquired a wafer fab to make our own AI chips". What's the big deal?
  - belter 3y ago
    You missed what probably triggered it: "...said that OpenAI was considering open-sourcing GPT-3. Part of the reason they hadn’t open-sourced yet was that he was skeptical of how many individuals and companies would have the capability to host and serve large LLMs..."
    - Animats 3y ago
      Ah. OK.
    - swyx 3y ago
      that is also something that Sama has repeatedly mentioned on twitter and on his world tour. non issue
  - paulgb 3y ago
    > OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT Even though I interpret this as the author’s summarizing of a statement to the effect of “we want to stay at the platform layer and not the application layer”, it stands out to me as a phrasing that might irk lawyers sensitive to anything that could hurt them in an antitrust lawsuit a decade from now.
mupuff1234 3y ago
We need new SV seasons - dont even need to hire writers, it's just writing itself.
- dingledork69 3y ago
  We don't even need ChatGPT to do the writing, "Open"AI is already doing that for us.
sebzim4500 3y ago
That sums up OpenAI better than the original summary ever could.
- edfletcher_t137 3y ago
  "Open"AI
  - r053bud 3y ago
    Yup. The first lie they told us. Definitely won’t be the last.
    - behnamoh 3y ago
      I suspect they’re using gpt3.5 instead of 4 for certain prompts. But they tell you it’s gpt4.
    - 93po 3y ago
      To be fair, changing your direction or changing your mind isn't lying. We all have a right to do that.
- dathinab 3y ago
  They should rename themself. I mean that seriously not just as a joke. I mean their name makes a joke out of themself.
  - fathyb 3y ago
    What about Azure Cortana?
  - haolez 3y ago
    I worked for OpenTV a few years. It was a proprietary firmware for set top boxes.
  - sroussey 3y ago
    OpenAI. Full Self Driving. There are so many of these. My next company will be called Unicorn. ;)
dontreact 3y ago
My guess is that "making cheaper and faster GPT4" was leading to the rumors that GPT4 was nerfed
- victorvosk 3y ago
  I don't care what the official line is, something changed with it. It might be the same model but the way it answers questions and the content of those answers is much more dubious now. I think how it manages its conversation context was gimped in the web chat version. I find it routinely completely forgetting things in longer conversations.
  - jonplackett 3y ago
    I was thinking how I could optimise for longer conversations and the most obvious thing seemed to be to somehow summarise the conversation ever X messages and ask it to save what it things is important isn’t them. If they’re doing something like this that would probably explain it.
  - Stagnant 3y ago
    It is the text generation speed that got me suspicious. It seems like ChatGPT's GPT4 suddenly got 2-3 times faster at generating text, while the API GPT4 still generates the text at the same pace as it always has.
  - hickelpickle 3y ago
    I was using it to experiment lazily with machine learning and midi generation via CNN-LSTMs and noticed it happening in the middle of a chat with it. The context wasn't that long and it was providing excellent insights, then randomly started telling me how to make a music game in python and lost all previous context. I tried starting a new chat and adding the back context,had a good bit of code I was providing for context, and it could hardly keep track of the provide code context over the course of a few simple questions/changes, when before it had no problem and would actually surprise with drawing from long past context relevantly. After what ever happened it would randomly assume karras was being used if having not been provided any pytorch specific code for a few messages. API doesn't have these issue, or didn't a week ago when I was using it often, but something happened with the web model, which I guess is understandable, as the main reason I was using it vs the API was cost savings.
getmeinrn 3y ago
Surely they have the self-awareness to see how poorly this reflects on their brand?
- sho_hn 3y ago
  No one using ChatGPT to write their homework cares.
  - philipov 3y ago
    No one using ChatGPT to write their homework cared about the original article either, so that's irrelevant.
    - sho_hn 3y ago
      Agreed. My point is this is very much an in-bubble concern.
- catchnear4321 3y ago
  you’re talking about a couple of oligarchs. self-awareness is self-limiting to these types. they love hearing their own voices and seeing their own thoughts in print, which translates to a severe inability to just be quiet and let the machines grind the meat. in a way, we are fortunate for this.
- fdasfsdalkj 3y ago
  When you have the best AI in town I don't think it matters. For instance, you have people using Bing and MSIE now.
doctoboggan 3y ago
I honestly don’t understand the situation here. Why would Sam sit down for an interview and then request it be removed? Did he accidentally let slip something he didn’t mean to? Isn’t controlling the message supposed to be one of his best skills? I find it hard to believe anything said was really not intended for release. Also, does anyone at OpenAI really think removing the blog post will remove it from the internet? The top comment here is already a link to an archive of the content. I am interested in hearing the rationale for this action as I really don’t see why they requested the removal.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  It could be for some legal reason. In that case it doesn't matter that the content it's still on the internet, it only matters that you took action and fixed the "error".
- hartator 3y ago
  OpenAI is Microsoft now.
  - campbel 3y ago
    Good thing to remember.
  - anticensor 3y ago
    FTFY: OpenAI is AI.com now.
- nico 3y ago
  Maybe they are actually aiming for the Streisand effect on purpose Create an interesting and speculative situation out of nothing Heck this article is top 3 on HNs front page right now
  - taneq 3y ago
    Oooh maybe they tried to avoid this situation but GPT4 saw an opportunity. ;)
mrstone 3y ago
A surprise to no one, Sam is a knob.
- c7DJTLrn 3y ago
  My opinion of him changed when he started fear mongering in an attempt to exaggerate the current abilities of machine learning and present OpenAI as more impactful than it actually is.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ynniv 3y ago
Maybe those comments are no longer true? "OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT Quite a few developers said they were nervous about building with the OpenAI APIs when OpenAI might end up releasing products that are competitive to them. Sam said that OpenAI would not release more products beyond ChatGPT.
- foolfoolz 3y ago
  every platform starts this way. no one wants to use a platform that will actively cannibalize its customer base
- az226 3y ago
  Almost guaranteed this is it. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft swallows OpenAI whole. And at that point there will be several competing products like Dynamics Copilot, etc. The lines are blurring, but I probably think the comment was fair and probably needs the right context: the research team within OpenAI will unlikely compete head to head with developers building apps on top of it, but why would it ever restrict itself to such a limitation? It doesn’t make any sense. That said, it means they will focus on their platform and have probably no line of sight to any apps they would build.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    Is that even possible? I was under the impression that there are contracts preventing MSFT from aquiring more than 49% of OpenAI.
    - daveguy 3y ago
      49% control with one entity is effectively 100% control. You only need about 2% of the remaining votes to get your way in any decision.
      - 93po 3y ago
        Any percent control can be 100% control if OpenAI relies on Microsoft for something critical like compute, and is contractually bound to not go to anyone else for compute. If MS can threaten to take their toys and go home, they can get anything they want.
softwaredoug 3y ago
> OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT This is a nearly impossible promise. The most popular apps are broad platform shortcomings, and hard for the platform to guarantee they won’t encroach and solve a problem better solved natively.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  Exactly, he can't commit to it. He could have said "currently, it's not in OpenAI's plans to create any other app on top of GPT other than Chat". But commiting to a non-compete? Nah, this is too much...
dontupvoteme 3y ago
Poor Sam doesn't seem to know he's an employee of Microsoft now.
- 93po 3y ago
  The only reason MS is doing this is because they know they'd soon be employees of OpenAI if they didn't.
billiam 3y ago
For those of you gathering Altman pronouncements to train your AltmanGPT model that spits out 100% disingenuous and self-serving quotage, here is what he said that is sooooo sensitive: OpenAI’s plans according to Sam Altman Last week I had the privilege to sit down with Sam Altman and 20 other developers to discuss OpenAI’s APIs and their product plans. Sam was remarkably open. The discussion touched on practical developer issues as well as bigger-picture questions related to OpenAI’s mission and the societal impact of AI. Here are the key takeaways: 1. OpenAI is heavily GPU limited at present A common theme that came up throughout the discussion was that currently OpenAI is extremely GPU-limited and this is delaying a lot of their short-term plans. The biggest customer complaint was about the reliability and speed of the API. Sam acknowledged their concern and explained that most of the issue was a result of GPU shortages. The longer 32k context can’t yet be rolled out to more people. OpenAI haven’t overcome the O(n^2) scaling of attention and so whilst it seemed plausible they would have 100k - 1M token context windows soon (this year) anything bigger would require a research breakthrough. The finetuning API is also currently bottlenecked by GPU availability. They don’t yet use efficient finetuning methods like Adapters or LoRa and so finetuning is very compute-intensive to run and manage. Better support for finetuning will come in the future. They may even host a marketplace of community contributed models. Dedicated capacity offering is limited by GPU availability. OpenAI also offers dedicated capacity, which provides customers with a private copy of the model. To access this service, customers must be willing to commit to a $100k spend upfront. 2. OpenAI’s near-term roadmap Sam shared what he saw as OpenAI’s provisional near-term roadmap for the API. 2023: Cheaper and faster GPT-4 — This is their top priority. In general, OpenAI’s aim is to drive “the cost of intelligence” down as far as possible and so they will work hard to continue to reduce the cost of the APIs over time. Longer context windows — Context windows as high as 1 million tokens are plausible in the near future. Finetuning API — The finetuning API will be extended to the latest models but the exact form for this will be shaped by what developers indicate they really want. A stateful API — When you call the chat API today, you have to repeatedly pass through the same conversation history and pay for the same tokens again and again. In the future there will be a version of the API that remembers the conversation history. 2024: Multimodality — This was demoed as part of the GPT-4 release but can’t be extended to everyone until after more GPUs come online. 3. Plugins “don’t have PMF” and are probably not coming to the API anytime soon A lot of developers are interested in getting access to ChatGPT plugins via the API but Sam said he didn’t think they’d be released any time soon. The usage of plugins, other than browsing, suggests that they don’t have PMF yet. He suggested that a lot of people thought they wanted their apps to be inside ChatGPT but what they really wanted was ChatGPT in their apps. 4. OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT Quite a few developers said they were nervous about building with the OpenAI APIs when OpenAI might end up releasing products that are competitive to them. Sam said that OpenAI would not release more products beyond ChatGPT. He said there was a history of great platform companies having a killer app and that ChatGPT would allow them to make the APIs better by being customers of their own product. The vision for ChatGPT is to be a super smart assistant for work but there will be a lot of other GPT use-cases that OpenAI won’t touch. 5. Regulation is needed but so is open source While Sam is calling for regulation of future models, he didn’t think existing models were dangerous and thought it would be a big mistake to regulate or ban them. He reiterated his belief in the importance of open source and said that OpenAI was considering open-sourcing GPT-3. Part of the reason they hadn’t open-sourced yet was that he was skeptical of how many individuals and companies would have the capability to host and serve large LLMs. 6. The scaling laws still hold Recently many articles have claimed that “the age of giant AI Models is already over”. This wasn’t an accurate representation of what was meant. OpenAI’s internal data suggests the scaling laws for model performance continue to hold and making models larger will continue to yield performance. The rate of scaling can’t be maintained because OpenAI had made models millions of times bigger in just a few years and doing that going forward won’t be sustainable. That doesn’t mean that OpenAI won't continue to try to make the models bigger, it just means they will likely double or triple in size each year rather than increasing by many orders of magnitude. The fact that scaling continues to work has significant implications for the timelines of AGI development. The scaling hypothesis is the idea that we may have most of the pieces in place needed to build AGI and that most of the remaining work will be taking existing methods and scaling them up to larger models and bigger datasets. If the era of scaling was over then we should probably expect AGI to be much further away. The fact the scaling laws continue to hold is strongly suggestive of shorter timelines.
ilaksh 3y ago
I wish he would make a blog post about his plans then. Biggest question for me is, when is the next version after gpt-4-0314 coming out? Also it would be good for people to know the real situation with GPUs or AI accelerators that can handle their LLMs. Such as, did they order them and are now literally waiting for them to be manufactured, or are they installing them in a datacenter? Any kind of peek into those operations might help people understand the challenges so they complain less. Also this is tangential but is there a factory and design center in North America that can create and manufacture the necessary level of AI hardware? Or does OpenAI's ability to take on new customers down the line depend on Taiwan and holding off WWIII? I guess a lot of things kind of depend on that. But I don't see any good plans on how to avoid it.
- az226 3y ago
  It’s already out. It’s worse but faster at generating tokens.
  - ilaksh 3y ago
    I don't see any announcement. You mean they just silently replaced gpt-4-0314 somehow? I think that if they changed something its actually not the model, but maybe something that affects the performance of the model.
    - az226 3y ago
      Correct. If you go to the playground, choose Chat, you see two options, GPT4 and GPT4 (3/14). The former appears to be powering CharGPT4 right now and the latter is what used to be powering it.
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  Pretty sure he said a few months ago that scaling further than GPT 4 isn't going to help enough, and that other breakthroughs are needed or something about building on top of GPT 4. Since then the only foundational breakthrough was much bigger context windows. Obviously to even run and train GPT 4 now is too compute intensive, though yeah.
anankaie 3y ago
It is really weird to me that OpenAI, of all companies, does not understand that the internet is forever: https://archive.is/rcbem https://archive.is/rcbem
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  It doesn't matter, they probably retracted for legal reasons. If you store a copy, it's one thing, but they stated publicly now that they don't stand behind those words anymore.
- albert_e 3y ago
  For all they know their next version of chatGPT already scraped the said article form its website before removal and internalized the content :)
seydor 3y ago
the publicity stunts continue
23B1 3y ago
This is slightly off-topic, but I'd love to know what AI companies – or emerging tech companies in general – have founders that say what they mean, and aren't talking out of both sides of their mouth.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  He's kind of a nonlinear guy, but George Hotz comes to mind.
tikkun 3y ago
Speaking as a dev building products on the OpenAI APIs, I thought it was a super helpful article when I first read it, so I was sad to see that it was removed.
belter 3y ago
Maybe removed because of this "...said that OpenAI was considering open-sourcing GPT-3. Part of the reason they hadn’t open-sourced yet was that he was skeptical of how many individuals and companies would have the capability to host and serve large LLMs..." Probably got a phone call with Area Code 206 after that...
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  I don't think this would trigger a request to remove it. It may be the non-compete commitment in Altman's words that triggered. This is a big restriction for the future that he really can't commit.
asim 3y ago
The skeletons will slowly coming out of the closet now. People's motivations should never be taken at face value and neither should any response to why it was redacted. Everyone should be given the benefit of the doubt but you also don't hand over 50% or more of a company to a large corporate after decades in startups and literally running an incubator unless you have alterior motives to the altruistic one put forth. Elon Musk is a tyrranical actor in the system but he was also flagging something pretty clearly with the profit model shift. Everyone has a number and it always comes down to power, control and influence. Having "impact" is about being the one influencing the decisions and direction of not just technology but politics and policy too. So much more could be said on the topic and again we have to give everyone the benefit of the doubt but people who have alterior motives are always very obvious because they say and do exactly what you think they should to be the most positive influence aka SBF.
ihatetofu 3y ago
[dead]
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
chpmrc 3y ago
Archived version in case it hasn’t been posted yet: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop.com/blog/openai-plans https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop...
r_singh 3y ago
I suspect they have to release more products to climb up the value chains where their technology is currently being used to generate value for customers.
filmgirlcw 3y ago
Is it possible this was supposed to be on-background and not published for public consumption and there was a miscommunication? When I read the article last week, I was a little surprised it was published because it did read very much like the sort of meeting you have with people behind closed doors that aren’t secret the same way it would be under and NDA, but that are truly designed to offer background context and not to be published as a transcript. That scenario feels more likely to me than that there was something said that is no longer true, but I don’t know. From an optics perspective, it would probably have been better to just let the article stand rather than requesting that it get removed (unless there were fundamental misrepresentations of misunderstandings of what was said), but it could also be a situation where no one expected the article's removal to be noticed.
- daveguy 3y ago
  > but it could also be a situation where no one expected the article's removal to be noticed. This seems least likely. Hard to tell if it's misrepresentation or revealing secrets. Given how blunt, straightforward, and detailed the article was, I'd say it either revealed operational secrets that Microsoft or OpenAI didn't want to reveal. Especially those first few paragraphs that told specifica about shortcomings and what advancements are needed. Or it said they wouldn't compete in a broad category that they definitely will be competing.
  - filmgirlcw 3y ago
    Having been on both sides of these types of meetings, I don’t think the saying they won’t compete thing and that being false is realistic. If you meet with people/partners/influencers/press, you typically don’t lie like this, especially when you’re of the size/attention of OpenAI (there are always exceptions but I just don’t see it here). There are situations where you don’t want what are your legitimate and current plans put out in the world in writing by people other than you, especially if they are things that could change. I think there is a scenario where OpenAI today doesn’t intend to compete with its API users, but doesn’t want to make that a definitive statement when it might not know the future could hold or to account for parallel lines of development (if OpenAI was already working on an area and API users decide to get into that space too, how does that work. That happens at companies that offer both platforms and their own products all the time and it is rarely nefarious (obviously, sometimes it is), but I can see how that wouldn’t want to be a public message OpenAI would want out there, particularly if it isn’t directly from them. That said, I really do have to think this was a meeting that was designed to be on background and not represented as “OpenAI reveals their roadmap” and that this was a miscommunication from the jump. Just for reference, having been in these sorts of meetings as both a reporter/analyst and as the person providing information, it isn’t uncommon to have a set of guidelines known as “Chatham House Rules” [1] or something similar, where you can use the information, but not state it verbatim from notes or directly quote. But people that aren’t primarily reporters or analysts or lobbyists whatever, that isn’t always understood. Which is why you need to be explicit in the terms of the publicness of the meeting. Again, this is only a guess (but it is backed up by 15 years of professional work as both a reporter/analyst as well as someone who is often sent to talk to the press/influencers/customers/users in situations that have varying degrees of on/off-recordness, I have to think this was just a misunderstanding of how publicly the contents of a conversation were designed to be. Again, I don’t think that asking people to take something like this down is the right move most of the time, especially if the article already got attention and write ups. Just chalk it up to a loss and commit to explaining expectations better in the future (if someone was clear on the rules of disclosure and violates them, that’s entirely different. I have zero reason to believe that happened here). If someone posts something and it doesn’t hit the front page of hacker news and you catch it in the first five or ten minutes, yeah, asking to take it down might be OK — but in general, I say let it go. That said, I can’t help but wonder if it was a strategic mistake, not realizing that the takedown of the article would be noticed. The truth is, we won’t know unless Raza or Sam comments, and neither has a real incentive to comment IMHO. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: OpenAI's plans according to sama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141544 - May 2023 (254 comments)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hellbanTHIS 3y ago
Altman's dealing with being the face of a civilization-changing (or ending, who knows) technology and probably a horribly uncomfortable amount of sudden fame, I think people forget this when they're trying to pick apart everything he does and says. I'm not going to guess why he (or Microsoft, or whoever) wanted that taken down but the site agreed to do it.
jiangplus 3y ago
I think people are too nervous about everything of ChatGPT, OpenAI and Sam Altman. Does the plan matter so much?
braindead_in 3y ago
What about the plans itself though? I was looking forward to faster GPT-4, 1M context length and fine tuning APIs. These won't be coming anymore? Feel sorry for the Humanloop guys though. Somebody forgot to tell them to keep it private or what?
pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
https://archive.ph/ZQXKZ https://archive.ph/ZQXKZ
0xGod 3y ago
I like what Sam Altman suggested. OpenAI should open source all aspects of ChatGPT immediately and be reimbursed via tax revenue in the form of totalCostsThusFar * 7 so that each employee gets 7 years of their compensation paid for, so they can take a sabbatical and then contribute to building plugins. Run the model itself and the plugin store as distributed simple software that runs on the common internet backbone. Make it as simple as Google search used to be, but with the resources of the government behind it. Privacy and security guaranteed by the Constitution and the American military. Free chalice of knowledge for all. Then roll out the same compensation structure for all who build plugins people want. We know what plugin and api iPhone moments look like. Make training additional models 1% of American GDP each year moving forward and reinvest that into plugin development and general self development grants for technology companies that make a difference in making things better.
- user_named 3y ago
  What makes you think total costs and total salaries are even close to the same? What makes you think the company getting that amount of money means the employees getting the same amount? I mean the blind spots you have are just way too numerous, large and fundamental to even bother with your comment.
  - 0xGod 3y ago
    Those questions aren't blind spots at all. Those types of problems are very easy to solve, just think about it like a child would. "Keep paying people for 7 years" Every employee at Open AI gets their current comp for the next seven years. The idea is to turn this into an open library or model in its entirety so that anyone can run it on their own harwdware and so that training costs go down more.
ladino 3y ago
here you can find the original archived version: https://archive.li/uwaCp https://archive.li/uwaCp
tagyro 3y ago
Reading between the lines of the original article: 1. there are plenty of - consumer - GPUs, but it wouldn't be advantageous for OpenAI to fine tune the models to run on them, hence the artificial limitation to only use GPUs with 80+ GB. We already see plenty of projects working on adapting these models for 16-24 GB GPUs or even running on CPUs - that is obviously a problem for OpenAI 2. GPT-4 has been nerfed recently - there are plenty of discussions on this and I've also noticed it in my extended usage of both ChatGPT Plus and the OpenAI API. Also, as a developer (disclaimer) of a project on top of the OpenAI API, I've received multiple messages from users mentioning the issue. Even in the OpenAI discord there are multiple threads of developers complaining about the change to GPT-4. 3. Plugins do have PMF - in the OpenAI discord there are multiple threads about accessing plugins via the API. There are also many projects working specifically on this (AgentGPT, repository loader etc). My personal experience: as a developer, you can develop plugins but you can't charge for usage. At the same time, plugins are available only to paying users of ChatGPT Plus ... 4. OpenAI will wait and see what 3rd party projects get traction and once they see public interest in a project, will build that project. I'm willing to bet the ChatGPT iOS app was built in a couple of weeks (at most) and was a direct answer to the multitude of apps on the App Store. 5. OpenAI needs the cover of regulation. They developed their models without it but now regulation could help to prevent others from reaching their levels. At the same time, any open source projects that gain enough public interest will be copied/absorbed. This reads like a KGB press release.
- justdep 3y ago
  Can you elaborate on the changes to GPT-4 you've noticed specifically?
  - tagyro 3y ago
    In general, the quality of the replies seems to have been affected. More specifically: - the context window seems to have been reduced: I only have access to the 4k model, but even when the prompts and replies are well under this limit, the model seems to loose context, as in, the replies have no connection to the prompt; - hallucinations: while this has been a general issue with LLM's and even taking into account a reduction in the context window, GPT-4 seems to hallucinate a lot more now; - not answering: prompts for which I have received answers before get a "my cut-off date ..." answer now. I used GPT-4 mostly via the API and I saved the threads (history) of all prompts I've been sending, so it's fairly easy for me to "test" the before/after changes. Some tests that are easy to run: - the "apple" test: write 10 sentences that end with the word "apple" - I used to get 8/10 most of the time, sometimes even 10/10. Now it's more like 6-7/10. - a friend suggested the "jwst" prompt: when was the jwst launched? Depending on the answer (sometimes it says it is scheduled to launch, sometimes it answers correctly), subsequently ask "what hour and minute" - use a 1-2k prompt and analyse the answer - this shouldn't be an issue with a 4k limit, but sometimes it will hallucinate or respond with something totally unrelated temperature: 0.2, top_p: 1, max_tokens: 4000, streaming: true edit: I've noticed that speed has been improved, but that doesn't really help when the quality suffers; also, data point of 1, but when using it from Germany (Europe?), the quality suffers, when prompting via vpn from US, it seems to be slower but the quality is better (but again, take that with a big grain of salt)

262 points by bluefishinit 3y ago

Here's the original: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop.com/blog/openai-plans https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop...

manbash 3y ago
This illustrates the irony: a company, whose product collects information from the internet, requests that an article "removed" from the internet. (And honestly this is probably a mistake as it actually draws more attention to the original article).
- jeron 3y ago
  He definitely unleaded Streisand effect on the interview
  - bandyaboot 3y ago
    It’s amazing to me there are still people (in the tech space no less) who haven’t figured out how this works.
    - tasuki 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure Sam Altman knows about and understands Streisand effect. There are a myriad other explanations for "This content has been removed at the request of OpenAI."
  - swores 3y ago
    I don't agree. Go search for HN threads relating to anything Sam Altman has said publicly, interviews he's given etc and you'll see that they always get posted multiple times on HN and the biggest thread always has 100s if not 1000s of comments. This content was going to be wildly shared and discussed whether deleted or not, by deleting it they have at least a) made an official (yet soft, as it doesn't address any specific points) statement that it's not information they're trying to put out and b) probably reduced SEO / future views beyond these current discussions. I can't see any argument for it getting more attention because of deletion than it would have got anyway?
- parineum 3y ago
  I don't think attention really matters. A statement remaining on their website is like continuously saying/affirming whatever that statement is. Removing it means they have changed their minds about something it contains. Removing it just stops that affirmation, it doesn't really matter if people know what you used to think as long as they know you no longer do. If you have a statement on your website that promises to never put cats on the moon but then you do, I imagine some shareholders/investors might feel misled. I don't know _if_ that opens someone up to legal action but I could see the argument.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    Is the statement on their website or on a third party website? Changing your mind about what you publish is one thing, changing your mind about an interview you just gave is another.
    - swyx 3y ago
      but theres an open question now about whether or not that was MEANT to be an interview, or rather a closed door session to a small group of folks. if Humanloop had not gotten clearance to post what they posted, this would have been a grave overstep of journalistic ethics. (i am not throwing stones, i've fallen foul of this as a blogger before, excusing myself from commonsense precaution in my eagerness to discuss industry relevant insights. private https://www.swyx.io/private https://www.swyx.io/private)
      - 3np 3y ago
        > if Humanloop had not gotten clearance to post what they posted, this would have been a grave overstep of journalistic ethics. Where did you get this idea? You don't "go on record" with a journalist. Everything you do and say around them is on the record by default. There are ethical codes and frameworks on what, when, and how to report but "private conversations are private" is certainly not considered normal. Re your mea culpa, it's a completely different situation and I don't see how journalistic ethics would be applicable there. If you want to have a more appropriate term, maybe "blogger ethics"?
- bragr 3y ago
  This might not be about suppressing this particular bit of information so much about holding the group of journalists they invited to their agreements.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  I don't think this is ironic. They retracted something they said, this is perfectly legit. I've deleted things I posted, including here on HN. You probably did too. And I've scraped data from the internet countless times. You probably did too. I don't think I'm an irony because of that. You probably aren't either.
- yumraj 3y ago
  Perhaps intentionally so, to increase the hype and as you said draw more attention
it_citizen 3y ago
> The fact that scaling continues to work has significant implications for the timelines of AGI development. The scaling hypothesis is the idea that we may have most of the pieces in place needed to build AGI and that most of the remaining work will be taking existing methods and scaling them up. Is this a pretty consensual viewpoint? Or is it hype from OpenAI?
- meroes 3y ago
  Within comp sci? Not sure. Within academia writ large? No way. But hey I look to biologists who put biological immortality > 100-200 years out (I've never believed Aubrey de Grey and similars during the 20 years he's been in headlines) and see AGI as in the domain of biology/psychology. We've implicated the brain, that's about it.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    It seems absurd to me that someone would try to make a prediction about the state of technology in 100 years. If you asked people in 1920 to make a list of predictions about what we would/wouldn't be able to do today would they have done better than chance? I guess our understanding of the laws of physics haven't changed that much. So someone predicting that free energy will be impossible is likely correct.
    - warkdarrior 3y ago
      Solar power is mostly free energy, at least for the next 5B years.
      - twelve40 3y ago
        uh... also "free" is hydro and wind which people have been using for millenniums
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Taking existing methods and scaling them up leads to better LLMs. That's a major part of what OpenAI is doing. Now the scaling hypothesis is basically just that sophisticated behavior emerges by itself as neural networks get bigger and get trained on more data with more complex problems. LLMs certainly show that so far, but to jump to an AGI I think we need to fix various shortcomings. It's certainly possible that a future version of an LLM will be an AGI, but imho that will also be thanks to current and future improvements like adding an internal dialogue or medium-term memory. Or maybe LLMs just can't scale that far, because experiencing the world through text is insufficient.
Animats 3y ago
There's nothing surprising there. - Not enough GPUs. — we knew that. Look at NVidia's stock price. Roadmap for 2023: - Cheaper and faster GPT-4 — well, of course. - Longer context windows — expected. Everybody's trying to do that. - Finetuning API to be extended to latest models — well, of course. - A stateful API — convenience feature Roadmap for 2024: - Multimodality stalled because not enough GPUs. — said that that already. No exciting statements, such as "We have GPT-5 in test and it can do most desk jobs", or "We've acquired a wafer fab to make our own AI chips". What's the big deal?
- belter 3y ago
  You missed what probably triggered it: "...said that OpenAI was considering open-sourcing GPT-3. Part of the reason they hadn’t open-sourced yet was that he was skeptical of how many individuals and companies would have the capability to host and serve large LLMs..."
  - Animats 3y ago
    Ah. OK.
  - swyx 3y ago
    that is also something that Sama has repeatedly mentioned on twitter and on his world tour. non issue
- paulgb 3y ago
  > OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT Even though I interpret this as the author’s summarizing of a statement to the effect of “we want to stay at the platform layer and not the application layer”, it stands out to me as a phrasing that might irk lawyers sensitive to anything that could hurt them in an antitrust lawsuit a decade from now.

mupuff1234 3y ago

We need new SV seasons - dont even need to hire writers, it's just writing itself.

dingledork69 3y ago
We don't even need ChatGPT to do the writing, "Open"AI is already doing that for us.

sebzim4500 3y ago

That sums up OpenAI better than the original summary ever could.

edfletcher_t137 3y ago
"Open"AI
- r053bud 3y ago
  Yup. The first lie they told us. Definitely won’t be the last.
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    I suspect they’re using gpt3.5 instead of 4 for certain prompts. But they tell you it’s gpt4.
  - 93po 3y ago
    To be fair, changing your direction or changing your mind isn't lying. We all have a right to do that.
dathinab 3y ago
They should rename themself. I mean that seriously not just as a joke. I mean their name makes a joke out of themself.
- fathyb 3y ago
  What about Azure Cortana?
- haolez 3y ago
  I worked for OpenTV a few years. It was a proprietary firmware for set top boxes.
- sroussey 3y ago
  OpenAI. Full Self Driving. There are so many of these. My next company will be called Unicorn. ;)

dontreact 3y ago

My guess is that "making cheaper and faster GPT4" was leading to the rumors that GPT4 was nerfed

victorvosk 3y ago
I don't care what the official line is, something changed with it. It might be the same model but the way it answers questions and the content of those answers is much more dubious now. I think how it manages its conversation context was gimped in the web chat version. I find it routinely completely forgetting things in longer conversations.
- jonplackett 3y ago
  I was thinking how I could optimise for longer conversations and the most obvious thing seemed to be to somehow summarise the conversation ever X messages and ask it to save what it things is important isn’t them. If they’re doing something like this that would probably explain it.
- Stagnant 3y ago
  It is the text generation speed that got me suspicious. It seems like ChatGPT's GPT4 suddenly got 2-3 times faster at generating text, while the API GPT4 still generates the text at the same pace as it always has.
- hickelpickle 3y ago
  I was using it to experiment lazily with machine learning and midi generation via CNN-LSTMs and noticed it happening in the middle of a chat with it. The context wasn't that long and it was providing excellent insights, then randomly started telling me how to make a music game in python and lost all previous context. I tried starting a new chat and adding the back context,had a good bit of code I was providing for context, and it could hardly keep track of the provide code context over the course of a few simple questions/changes, when before it had no problem and would actually surprise with drawing from long past context relevantly. After what ever happened it would randomly assume karras was being used if having not been provided any pytorch specific code for a few messages. API doesn't have these issue, or didn't a week ago when I was using it often, but something happened with the web model, which I guess is understandable, as the main reason I was using it vs the API was cost savings.

getmeinrn 3y ago

Surely they have the self-awareness to see how poorly this reflects on their brand?

sho_hn 3y ago
No one using ChatGPT to write their homework cares.
- philipov 3y ago
  No one using ChatGPT to write their homework cared about the original article either, so that's irrelevant.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    Agreed. My point is this is very much an in-bubble concern.
catchnear4321 3y ago
you’re talking about a couple of oligarchs. self-awareness is self-limiting to these types. they love hearing their own voices and seeing their own thoughts in print, which translates to a severe inability to just be quiet and let the machines grind the meat. in a way, we are fortunate for this.
fdasfsdalkj 3y ago
When you have the best AI in town I don't think it matters. For instance, you have people using Bing and MSIE now.

doctoboggan 3y ago

I honestly don’t understand the situation here. Why would Sam sit down for an interview and then request it be removed? Did he accidentally let slip something he didn’t mean to? Isn’t controlling the message supposed to be one of his best skills? I find it hard to believe anything said was really not intended for release. Also, does anyone at OpenAI really think removing the blog post will remove it from the internet? The top comment here is already a link to an archive of the content. I am interested in hearing the rationale for this action as I really don’t see why they requested the removal.

dist-epoch 3y ago
It could be for some legal reason. In that case it doesn't matter that the content it's still on the internet, it only matters that you took action and fixed the "error".
hartator 3y ago
OpenAI is Microsoft now.
- campbel 3y ago
  Good thing to remember.
- anticensor 3y ago
  FTFY: OpenAI is AI.com now.
nico 3y ago
Maybe they are actually aiming for the Streisand effect on purpose Create an interesting and speculative situation out of nothing Heck this article is top 3 on HNs front page right now
- taneq 3y ago
  Oooh maybe they tried to avoid this situation but GPT4 saw an opportunity. ;)

mrstone 3y ago

A surprise to no one, Sam is a knob.

c7DJTLrn 3y ago
My opinion of him changed when he started fear mongering in an attempt to exaggerate the current abilities of machine learning and present OpenAI as more impactful than it actually is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ynniv 3y ago

Maybe those comments are no longer true? "OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT Quite a few developers said they were nervous about building with the OpenAI APIs when OpenAI might end up releasing products that are competitive to them. Sam said that OpenAI would not release more products beyond ChatGPT.

foolfoolz 3y ago
every platform starts this way. no one wants to use a platform that will actively cannibalize its customer base
az226 3y ago
Almost guaranteed this is it. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft swallows OpenAI whole. And at that point there will be several competing products like Dynamics Copilot, etc. The lines are blurring, but I probably think the comment was fair and probably needs the right context: the research team within OpenAI will unlikely compete head to head with developers building apps on top of it, but why would it ever restrict itself to such a limitation? It doesn’t make any sense. That said, it means they will focus on their platform and have probably no line of sight to any apps they would build.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Is that even possible? I was under the impression that there are contracts preventing MSFT from aquiring more than 49% of OpenAI.
  - daveguy 3y ago
    49% control with one entity is effectively 100% control. You only need about 2% of the remaining votes to get your way in any decision.
    - 93po 3y ago
      Any percent control can be 100% control if OpenAI relies on Microsoft for something critical like compute, and is contractually bound to not go to anyone else for compute. If MS can threaten to take their toys and go home, they can get anything they want.

softwaredoug 3y ago

> OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT This is a nearly impossible promise. The most popular apps are broad platform shortcomings, and hard for the platform to guarantee they won’t encroach and solve a problem better solved natively.

rmbyrro 3y ago
Exactly, he can't commit to it. He could have said "currently, it's not in OpenAI's plans to create any other app on top of GPT other than Chat". But commiting to a non-compete? Nah, this is too much...

dontupvoteme 3y ago

Poor Sam doesn't seem to know he's an employee of Microsoft now.

93po 3y ago
The only reason MS is doing this is because they know they'd soon be employees of OpenAI if they didn't.

billiam 3y ago

For those of you gathering Altman pronouncements to train your AltmanGPT model that spits out 100% disingenuous and self-serving quotage, here is what he said that is sooooo sensitive: OpenAI’s plans according to Sam Altman Last week I had the privilege to sit down with Sam Altman and 20 other developers to discuss OpenAI’s APIs and their product plans. Sam was remarkably open. The discussion touched on practical developer issues as well as bigger-picture questions related to OpenAI’s mission and the societal impact of AI. Here are the key takeaways: 1. OpenAI is heavily GPU limited at present A common theme that came up throughout the discussion was that currently OpenAI is extremely GPU-limited and this is delaying a lot of their short-term plans. The biggest customer complaint was about the reliability and speed of the API. Sam acknowledged their concern and explained that most of the issue was a result of GPU shortages. The longer 32k context can’t yet be rolled out to more people. OpenAI haven’t overcome the O(n^2) scaling of attention and so whilst it seemed plausible they would have 100k - 1M token context windows soon (this year) anything bigger would require a research breakthrough. The finetuning API is also currently bottlenecked by GPU availability. They don’t yet use efficient finetuning methods like Adapters or LoRa and so finetuning is very compute-intensive to run and manage. Better support for finetuning will come in the future. They may even host a marketplace of community contributed models. Dedicated capacity offering is limited by GPU availability. OpenAI also offers dedicated capacity, which provides customers with a private copy of the model. To access this service, customers must be willing to commit to a $100k spend upfront. 2. OpenAI’s near-term roadmap Sam shared what he saw as OpenAI’s provisional near-term roadmap for the API. 2023: Cheaper and faster GPT-4 — This is their top priority. In general, OpenAI’s aim is to drive “the cost of intelligence” down as far as possible and so they will work hard to continue to reduce the cost of the APIs over time. Longer context windows — Context windows as high as 1 million tokens are plausible in the near future. Finetuning API — The finetuning API will be extended to the latest models but the exact form for this will be shaped by what developers indicate they really want. A stateful API — When you call the chat API today, you have to repeatedly pass through the same conversation history and pay for the same tokens again and again. In the future there will be a version of the API that remembers the conversation history. 2024: Multimodality — This was demoed as part of the GPT-4 release but can’t be extended to everyone until after more GPUs come online. 3. Plugins “don’t have PMF” and are probably not coming to the API anytime soon A lot of developers are interested in getting access to ChatGPT plugins via the API but Sam said he didn’t think they’d be released any time soon. The usage of plugins, other than browsing, suggests that they don’t have PMF yet. He suggested that a lot of people thought they wanted their apps to be inside ChatGPT but what they really wanted was ChatGPT in their apps. 4. OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT Quite a few developers said they were nervous about building with the OpenAI APIs when OpenAI might end up releasing products that are competitive to them. Sam said that OpenAI would not release more products beyond ChatGPT. He said there was a history of great platform companies having a killer app and that ChatGPT would allow them to make the APIs better by being customers of their own product. The vision for ChatGPT is to be a super smart assistant for work but there will be a lot of other GPT use-cases that OpenAI won’t touch. 5. Regulation is needed but so is open source While Sam is calling for regulation of future models, he didn’t think existing models were dangerous and thought it would be a big mistake to regulate or ban them. He reiterated his belief in the importance of open source and said that OpenAI was considering open-sourcing GPT-3. Part of the reason they hadn’t open-sourced yet was that he was skeptical of how many individuals and companies would have the capability to host and serve large LLMs. 6. The scaling laws still hold Recently many articles have claimed that “the age of giant AI Models is already over”. This wasn’t an accurate representation of what was meant. OpenAI’s internal data suggests the scaling laws for model performance continue to hold and making models larger will continue to yield performance. The rate of scaling can’t be maintained because OpenAI had made models millions of times bigger in just a few years and doing that going forward won’t be sustainable. That doesn’t mean that OpenAI won't continue to try to make the models bigger, it just means they will likely double or triple in size each year rather than increasing by many orders of magnitude. The fact that scaling continues to work has significant implications for the timelines of AGI development. The scaling hypothesis is the idea that we may have most of the pieces in place needed to build AGI and that most of the remaining work will be taking existing methods and scaling them up to larger models and bigger datasets. If the era of scaling was over then we should probably expect AGI to be much further away. The fact the scaling laws continue to hold is strongly suggestive of shorter timelines.

ilaksh 3y ago

I wish he would make a blog post about his plans then. Biggest question for me is, when is the next version after gpt-4-0314 coming out? Also it would be good for people to know the real situation with GPUs or AI accelerators that can handle their LLMs. Such as, did they order them and are now literally waiting for them to be manufactured, or are they installing them in a datacenter? Any kind of peek into those operations might help people understand the challenges so they complain less. Also this is tangential but is there a factory and design center in North America that can create and manufacture the necessary level of AI hardware? Or does OpenAI's ability to take on new customers down the line depend on Taiwan and holding off WWIII? I guess a lot of things kind of depend on that. But I don't see any good plans on how to avoid it.

az226 3y ago
It’s already out. It’s worse but faster at generating tokens.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  I don't see any announcement. You mean they just silently replaced gpt-4-0314 somehow? I think that if they changed something its actually not the model, but maybe something that affects the performance of the model.
  - az226 3y ago
    Correct. If you go to the playground, choose Chat, you see two options, GPT4 and GPT4 (3/14). The former appears to be powering CharGPT4 right now and the latter is what used to be powering it.
whatyesaid 3y ago
Pretty sure he said a few months ago that scaling further than GPT 4 isn't going to help enough, and that other breakthroughs are needed or something about building on top of GPT 4. Since then the only foundational breakthrough was much bigger context windows. Obviously to even run and train GPT 4 now is too compute intensive, though yeah.

anankaie 3y ago

It is really weird to me that OpenAI, of all companies, does not understand that the internet is forever: https://archive.is/rcbem https://archive.is/rcbem

rmbyrro 3y ago
It doesn't matter, they probably retracted for legal reasons. If you store a copy, it's one thing, but they stated publicly now that they don't stand behind those words anymore.
albert_e 3y ago
For all they know their next version of chatGPT already scraped the said article form its website before removal and internalized the content :)

seydor 3y ago

the publicity stunts continue

23B1 3y ago

This is slightly off-topic, but I'd love to know what AI companies – or emerging tech companies in general – have founders that say what they mean, and aren't talking out of both sides of their mouth.

CamperBob2 3y ago
He's kind of a nonlinear guy, but George Hotz comes to mind.

tikkun 3y ago

Speaking as a dev building products on the OpenAI APIs, I thought it was a super helpful article when I first read it, so I was sad to see that it was removed.

belter 3y ago

Maybe removed because of this "...said that OpenAI was considering open-sourcing GPT-3. Part of the reason they hadn’t open-sourced yet was that he was skeptical of how many individuals and companies would have the capability to host and serve large LLMs..." Probably got a phone call with Area Code 206 after that...

rmbyrro 3y ago
I don't think this would trigger a request to remove it. It may be the non-compete commitment in Altman's words that triggered. This is a big restriction for the future that he really can't commit.

asim 3y ago

The skeletons will slowly coming out of the closet now. People's motivations should never be taken at face value and neither should any response to why it was redacted. Everyone should be given the benefit of the doubt but you also don't hand over 50% or more of a company to a large corporate after decades in startups and literally running an incubator unless you have alterior motives to the altruistic one put forth. Elon Musk is a tyrranical actor in the system but he was also flagging something pretty clearly with the profit model shift. Everyone has a number and it always comes down to power, control and influence. Having "impact" is about being the one influencing the decisions and direction of not just technology but politics and policy too. So much more could be said on the topic and again we have to give everyone the benefit of the doubt but people who have alterior motives are always very obvious because they say and do exactly what you think they should to be the most positive influence aka SBF.

ihatetofu 3y ago

[dead]

varelse 3y ago

[dead]

chpmrc 3y ago

Archived version in case it hasn’t been posted yet: https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop.com/blog/openai-plans https://web.archive.org/web/20230531203946/https://humanloop...

r_singh 3y ago

I suspect they have to release more products to climb up the value chains where their technology is currently being used to generate value for customers.

filmgirlcw 3y ago

Is it possible this was supposed to be on-background and not published for public consumption and there was a miscommunication? When I read the article last week, I was a little surprised it was published because it did read very much like the sort of meeting you have with people behind closed doors that aren’t secret the same way it would be under and NDA, but that are truly designed to offer background context and not to be published as a transcript. That scenario feels more likely to me than that there was something said that is no longer true, but I don’t know. From an optics perspective, it would probably have been better to just let the article stand rather than requesting that it get removed (unless there were fundamental misrepresentations of misunderstandings of what was said), but it could also be a situation where no one expected the article's removal to be noticed.

daveguy 3y ago
> but it could also be a situation where no one expected the article's removal to be noticed. This seems least likely. Hard to tell if it's misrepresentation or revealing secrets. Given how blunt, straightforward, and detailed the article was, I'd say it either revealed operational secrets that Microsoft or OpenAI didn't want to reveal. Especially those first few paragraphs that told specifica about shortcomings and what advancements are needed. Or it said they wouldn't compete in a broad category that they definitely will be competing.
- filmgirlcw 3y ago
  Having been on both sides of these types of meetings, I don’t think the saying they won’t compete thing and that being false is realistic. If you meet with people/partners/influencers/press, you typically don’t lie like this, especially when you’re of the size/attention of OpenAI (there are always exceptions but I just don’t see it here). There are situations where you don’t want what are your legitimate and current plans put out in the world in writing by people other than you, especially if they are things that could change. I think there is a scenario where OpenAI today doesn’t intend to compete with its API users, but doesn’t want to make that a definitive statement when it might not know the future could hold or to account for parallel lines of development (if OpenAI was already working on an area and API users decide to get into that space too, how does that work. That happens at companies that offer both platforms and their own products all the time and it is rarely nefarious (obviously, sometimes it is), but I can see how that wouldn’t want to be a public message OpenAI would want out there, particularly if it isn’t directly from them. That said, I really do have to think this was a meeting that was designed to be on background and not represented as “OpenAI reveals their roadmap” and that this was a miscommunication from the jump. Just for reference, having been in these sorts of meetings as both a reporter/analyst and as the person providing information, it isn’t uncommon to have a set of guidelines known as “Chatham House Rules” [1] or something similar, where you can use the information, but not state it verbatim from notes or directly quote. But people that aren’t primarily reporters or analysts or lobbyists whatever, that isn’t always understood. Which is why you need to be explicit in the terms of the publicness of the meeting. Again, this is only a guess (but it is backed up by 15 years of professional work as both a reporter/analyst as well as someone who is often sent to talk to the press/influencers/customers/users in situations that have varying degrees of on/off-recordness, I have to think this was just a misunderstanding of how publicly the contents of a conversation were designed to be. Again, I don’t think that asking people to take something like this down is the right move most of the time, especially if the article already got attention and write ups. Just chalk it up to a loss and commit to explaining expectations better in the future (if someone was clear on the rules of disclosure and violates them, that’s entirely different. I have zero reason to believe that happened here). If someone posts something and it doesn’t hit the front page of hacker news and you catch it in the first five or ten minutes, yeah, asking to take it down might be OK — but in general, I say let it go. That said, I can’t help but wonder if it was a strategic mistake, not realizing that the takedown of the article would be noticed. The truth is, we won’t know unless Raza or Sam comments, and neither has a real incentive to comment IMHO. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: OpenAI's plans according to sama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141544 - May 2023 (254 comments)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hellbanTHIS 3y ago

Altman's dealing with being the face of a civilization-changing (or ending, who knows) technology and probably a horribly uncomfortable amount of sudden fame, I think people forget this when they're trying to pick apart everything he does and says. I'm not going to guess why he (or Microsoft, or whoever) wanted that taken down but the site agreed to do it.

jiangplus 3y ago

I think people are too nervous about everything of ChatGPT, OpenAI and Sam Altman. Does the plan matter so much?

braindead_in 3y ago

What about the plans itself though? I was looking forward to faster GPT-4, 1M context length and fine tuning APIs. These won't be coming anymore? Feel sorry for the Humanloop guys though. Somebody forgot to tell them to keep it private or what?

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago

https://archive.ph/ZQXKZ https://archive.ph/ZQXKZ

0xGod 3y ago

I like what Sam Altman suggested. OpenAI should open source all aspects of ChatGPT immediately and be reimbursed via tax revenue in the form of totalCostsThusFar * 7 so that each employee gets 7 years of their compensation paid for, so they can take a sabbatical and then contribute to building plugins. Run the model itself and the plugin store as distributed simple software that runs on the common internet backbone. Make it as simple as Google search used to be, but with the resources of the government behind it. Privacy and security guaranteed by the Constitution and the American military. Free chalice of knowledge for all. Then roll out the same compensation structure for all who build plugins people want. We know what plugin and api iPhone moments look like. Make training additional models 1% of American GDP each year moving forward and reinvest that into plugin development and general self development grants for technology companies that make a difference in making things better.

user_named 3y ago
What makes you think total costs and total salaries are even close to the same? What makes you think the company getting that amount of money means the employees getting the same amount? I mean the blind spots you have are just way too numerous, large and fundamental to even bother with your comment.
- 0xGod 3y ago
  Those questions aren't blind spots at all. Those types of problems are very easy to solve, just think about it like a child would. "Keep paying people for 7 years" Every employee at Open AI gets their current comp for the next seven years. The idea is to turn this into an open library or model in its entirety so that anyone can run it on their own harwdware and so that training costs go down more.

ladino 3y ago

here you can find the original archived version: https://archive.li/uwaCp https://archive.li/uwaCp

tagyro 3y ago

Reading between the lines of the original article: 1. there are plenty of - consumer - GPUs, but it wouldn't be advantageous for OpenAI to fine tune the models to run on them, hence the artificial limitation to only use GPUs with 80+ GB. We already see plenty of projects working on adapting these models for 16-24 GB GPUs or even running on CPUs - that is obviously a problem for OpenAI 2. GPT-4 has been nerfed recently - there are plenty of discussions on this and I've also noticed it in my extended usage of both ChatGPT Plus and the OpenAI API. Also, as a developer (disclaimer) of a project on top of the OpenAI API, I've received multiple messages from users mentioning the issue. Even in the OpenAI discord there are multiple threads of developers complaining about the change to GPT-4. 3. Plugins do have PMF - in the OpenAI discord there are multiple threads about accessing plugins via the API. There are also many projects working specifically on this (AgentGPT, repository loader etc). My personal experience: as a developer, you can develop plugins but you can't charge for usage. At the same time, plugins are available only to paying users of ChatGPT Plus ... 4. OpenAI will wait and see what 3rd party projects get traction and once they see public interest in a project, will build that project. I'm willing to bet the ChatGPT iOS app was built in a couple of weeks (at most) and was a direct answer to the multitude of apps on the App Store. 5. OpenAI needs the cover of regulation. They developed their models without it but now regulation could help to prevent others from reaching their levels. At the same time, any open source projects that gain enough public interest will be copied/absorbed. This reads like a KGB press release.

justdep 3y ago
Can you elaborate on the changes to GPT-4 you've noticed specifically?
- tagyro 3y ago
  In general, the quality of the replies seems to have been affected. More specifically: - the context window seems to have been reduced: I only have access to the 4k model, but even when the prompts and replies are well under this limit, the model seems to loose context, as in, the replies have no connection to the prompt; - hallucinations: while this has been a general issue with LLM's and even taking into account a reduction in the context window, GPT-4 seems to hallucinate a lot more now; - not answering: prompts for which I have received answers before get a "my cut-off date ..." answer now. I used GPT-4 mostly via the API and I saved the threads (history) of all prompts I've been sending, so it's fairly easy for me to "test" the before/after changes. Some tests that are easy to run: - the "apple" test: write 10 sentences that end with the word "apple" - I used to get 8/10 most of the time, sometimes even 10/10. Now it's more like 6-7/10. - a friend suggested the "jwst" prompt: when was the jwst launched? Depending on the answer (sometimes it says it is scheduled to launch, sometimes it answers correctly), subsequently ask "what hour and minute" - use a 1-2k prompt and analyse the answer - this shouldn't be an issue with a 4k limit, but sometimes it will hallucinate or respond with something totally unrelated temperature: 0.2, top_p: 1, max_tokens: 4000, streaming: true edit: I've noticed that speed has been improved, but that doesn't really help when the quality suffers; also, data point of 1, but when using it from Germany (Europe?), the quality suffers, when prompting via vpn from US, it seems to be slower but the quality is better (but again, take that with a big grain of salt)