5 ms·

Wait this is just a corporate turf war? That's boring I already have those at work

by rcpt 3y ago

reducesuffering 3y ago
No, this move is so drastic because Ilya, the chief scientist behind OpenAI, thinks Sam and Greg are pushing so hard on AGI capabilities, ahead of alignment with humanity, that it threatens everyone. 2/3 of the other board members agreed. Don’t shoot the messenger. No one else has given you a plausible reason why Sama was abruptly fired, and this is what a reporter said of Ilya: ‘He freaked the hell out of people there. And we’re talking about AI professionals who work in the biggest AI labs in the Bay area. They were leaving the room, saying, “Holy shit.” The point is that Ilya Sutskever took what you see in the media, the “AGI utopia vs. potential apocalypse” ideology, to the next level. It was traumatizing.’ https://www.aipanic.news/p/what-ilya-sutskever-really-wants https://www.aipanic.news/p/what-ilya-sutskever-really-wants
- moralestapia 3y ago
  Bull. Shit. OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value. This is the same company that went from "non-profit" to "jk, lol, we are actually for-profit now". I still think that move was not even legal but rules for thee not for me. They ousted sama because it was bad for business. Why? We may never know, or we may know next week, who knows? Literally.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    > OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value Clearly not, as Sama has no equity and a board of four people with little, if any, equity, just unilaterally decided to upend their status quo and assured $ printer, to the bewilderment of their $2.5T 49% owner, Microsoft.
    - moralestapia 3y ago
      >as Sama has no equity Yeah and he got sacked.
  - sainez 3y ago
    It seems you are conflating OpenAI the non-profit, with OpenAI the LLC: https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure
    - moralestapia 3y ago
      No, that's the whole point, "AI for the benefit of humanity" and whatnot turned out to be a marketing strategy (if you could call it that).
      - lucubratory 3y ago
        That is what Ilya Sutskever and the board of the non-profit have effectively accused Sam Altman of in firing him, yes.
        moralestapia 3y ago
        ??? Source?
        lucubratory 3y ago
        Kara's reporting on motive: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028?t=dQB8R_oAqmDzLqHXJ2gH1Q&s=19 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028?t... Kara's reporting on who is involved: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294?t=NoCOBSCOZnmlKFAVlH8EJA&s=19 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294?t... Confirmation of a lot of Kara's reporting by Ilya himself: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725717129318560075?t=6ANB-hHzQA9f6N0S7kPGeQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725717129318560075?t... Ilya felt that Sam was taking the company too far in the direction of profit seeking, more than was necessary just to get the resources to build AGI, and every bit of selling out gives more pressure on OpenAI to produce revenue and work for profit later, and risks AGI being controlled by a small powerful group instead of everyone. After OpenAI Dev Day, evidently the board agreed with him - I suspect Dev Day is the source of the board's accusation that Sam did not share with complete candour. Ilya may also care more about AGI safety specifically than Sam does - that's currently unclear, but it would not surprise me at all based on how they have both spoken in interviews. What is completely clear is that Ilya felt Sam was straying so far from the mission of the non-profit, safe AGI that benefits all of humanity, that the board was compelled to act to preserve the non-profit's mission. Them expelling him and re-affirming their commitment to the OpenAI charter is effectively accusing him of selling out. For context, you can read their charter here: https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter and mentally contrast that with the atmosphere of Sam Altman on Dev Day. Particularly this part of their charter: "Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit."
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  They aren’t anywhere close to AGI. It’s a joke at this point.
  - mcmcmc 3y ago
    An ego battle really
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gnulinux 3y ago
  Haha yeah no I don't believe this. They're nowhere near AGI, even if it's possible at all to be there with the current tech we have, which is unconvincing. I don't believe professionals who work in biggest AI labs are spooked by GPT. I need more evidence to believe something like that sorry. It sounds a lot more like Sam Altman lied to the board.
  - aidaman 3y ago
    GPT 4 is not remotely unconvincing. It is clearly more intelligent than the average human, and is able to reason in the exact same way as humans. If you provide the steps to reason through any concecpt, it is able to understand at human capability. GPT 4 is clearly AGI. All of the GPTs have shown general intelligence, but GPT 4 is human-level intelligence.
    - SkyPuncher 3y ago
      The only thing GPT 4 is missing is the ability to recognize it needs to ask more questions before it jumps into a problem. When you compare it to an entry level data entry role, it's absolutely AGI. You loosely tell it what it needs to do, step-by-step, and it does it.
      - dekhn 3y ago
        This sort of property ("loosely tell it what it needs to do, step-by-step, and it does it.") is definitely very exciting and remarkable, but I don't think it necessarily constitutes AGI. I would say instead it's more an emergent property of language models trained on extremely large corpora that contain many examples that, in embedding space, aren't that far from what you're asking it to do. I don't think LLMs have really demonstrated anything interesting around generalized intelligence, which although a fairly abstract concept, can be thought of as being able to solve truly novel problems outside their training corpora. I suspect there still needs to be a fair amount of work improving both the model design itself, the training data, and even the mental model of ML researchers, before we have systems that can truly reason in a way that demonstrates their generalized intelligence.
- drcode 3y ago
  Let's not put the cart before the horse Even if they say this was for safety reasons, let's not blindly believe them. I am on the pro safety side, but I'm gonna wait till the dust settles before I come to any conclusions on this matter.
  - Exoristos 3y ago
    Let's not confuse ChatGPT "safety" with the meaning of the word in most contexts. This is about safely keeping major media of all kinds aligned with the messaging of the neoliberal political party of your locale.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  From what's come out so far, it reads more like he thinks they're pushing too hard too fast on commercialization, not AGI. They're chasing profit opportunities at market instead of fulfilling the board's non-profit mission to build safe AGI.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  This is hand-wringing moral panic by nontechnical people who fear the unknown and don't understand AI/DL/ML/LLMs. It's shriekingly obvious no one sane will intentionally build "SkyNet", nor can they for decades.
- LZ_Khan 3y ago
  I trust the hell of a lot more in Ilya than Altman. Ilya is a scientist through and through, not a grifter.
- aliston 3y ago
  ChatGPT blew the doors open on the AI arms race. Without Sam leading the charge, we wouldn't have an AI boom. We wouldn't have Google scrambling to launch catch up features. We wouldn't have startups raising 100s of millions, people talking about a new industrial revolution, llama (2), all the models on hugging face or any of the other crazy stuff that has come about in the past year. Was the original launch of ChatGPT "safe?" Of course not, but it moved the industry forward immensely. Swisher's follow up is even more eyebrow raising: "The developer day and how the store was introduced was in inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast. My bet: He’ll have a new company up by Monday." What exactly from the demo day was "pushing too far?" We got a dall-e api, a larger context window and some cool stuff to fine tune GPT. I don't really see anything there that is too crazy... I also don't get the sense that Sam was cavalier about AI safety. That's why I am so surprised that the apparent reason for his ousting appears to be a boring, old, political turf war. My sense is that there is either more to the story, or Sam is absolutely about to have his Steve Jobs moment. He's also likely got a large percentage of the OpenAI researcher's on his side.
  - m_ke 3y ago
    ChatGPT was definitely not some visionary project led by Sam. They had a great LLM in GPT-3 that was hard to use because it wasn't instruction tuned, so the research team did InstructGPT and then took it even further and added RLHF to turn it into a proper conversational bot. The UI was a hacky interface on top of it that definitely got way more popular than they expected.
    - aliston 3y ago
      I don't know if it was led by Sam, and don't dispute that it may have been "hacky," but there is no denying it was a visionary project. Yes, other companies had similar models. I know Google, in particular, already had similar LLMs, but explicitly chose not to incorporate them into its products. Sam / OpenAI had the gumption to take the state of the art and package it in a way that it could be interacted with by the masses. In fact, thinking about it more, the parallels with Steve Jobs are uncanny. Google is Xerox. ChatGPT is the graphical OS. Sam is...

Wait this is just a corporate turf war? That's boring I already have those at work

by rcpt 3y ago

Wait this is just a corporate turf war? That's boring I already have those at work

No, this move is so drastic because Ilya, the chief scientist behind OpenAI, thinks Sam and Greg are pushing so hard on AGI capabilities, ahead of alignment with humanity, that it threatens everyone. 2/3 of the other board members agreed. Don’t shoot the messenger. No one else has given you a plausible reason why Sama was abruptly fired, and this is what a reporter said of Ilya: ‘He freaked the hell out of people there. And we’re talking about AI professionals who work in the biggest AI labs in the Bay area. They were leaving the room, saying, “Holy shit.” The point is that Ilya Sutskever took what you see in the media, the “AGI utopia vs. potential apocalypse” ideology, to the next level. It was traumatizing.’ https://www.aipanic.news/p/what-ilya-sutskever-really-wants https://www.aipanic.news/p/what-ilya-sutskever-really-wants

moralestapia 3y ago
Bull. Shit. OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value. This is the same company that went from "non-profit" to "jk, lol, we are actually for-profit now". I still think that move was not even legal but rules for thee not for me. They ousted sama because it was bad for business. Why? We may never know, or we may know next week, who knows? Literally.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  > OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value Clearly not, as Sama has no equity and a board of four people with little, if any, equity, just unilaterally decided to upend their status quo and assured $ printer, to the bewilderment of their $2.5T 49% owner, Microsoft.
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    >as Sama has no equity Yeah and he got sacked.
- sainez 3y ago
  It seems you are conflating OpenAI the non-profit, with OpenAI the LLC: https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    No, that's the whole point, "AI for the benefit of humanity" and whatnot turned out to be a marketing strategy (if you could call it that).
    - lucubratory 3y ago
      That is what Ilya Sutskever and the board of the non-profit have effectively accused Sam Altman of in firing him, yes.
      - moralestapia 3y ago
        ??? Source?
        lucubratory 3y ago
        Kara's reporting on motive: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028?t=dQB8R_oAqmDzLqHXJ2gH1Q&s=19 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028?t... Kara's reporting on who is involved: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294?t=NoCOBSCOZnmlKFAVlH8EJA&s=19 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294?t... Confirmation of a lot of Kara's reporting by Ilya himself: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725717129318560075?t=6ANB-hHzQA9f6N0S7kPGeQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725717129318560075?t... Ilya felt that Sam was taking the company too far in the direction of profit seeking, more than was necessary just to get the resources to build AGI, and every bit of selling out gives more pressure on OpenAI to produce revenue and work for profit later, and risks AGI being controlled by a small powerful group instead of everyone. After OpenAI Dev Day, evidently the board agreed with him - I suspect Dev Day is the source of the board's accusation that Sam did not share with complete candour. Ilya may also care more about AGI safety specifically than Sam does - that's currently unclear, but it would not surprise me at all based on how they have both spoken in interviews. What is completely clear is that Ilya felt Sam was straying so far from the mission of the non-profit, safe AGI that benefits all of humanity, that the board was compelled to act to preserve the non-profit's mission. Them expelling him and re-affirming their commitment to the OpenAI charter is effectively accusing him of selling out. For context, you can read their charter here: https://openai.com/charter https://openai.com/charter and mentally contrast that with the atmosphere of Sam Altman on Dev Day. Particularly this part of their charter: "Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit."
cactusplant7374 3y ago
They aren’t anywhere close to AGI. It’s a joke at this point.
- mcmcmc 3y ago
  An ego battle really
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gnulinux 3y ago
Haha yeah no I don't believe this. They're nowhere near AGI, even if it's possible at all to be there with the current tech we have, which is unconvincing. I don't believe professionals who work in biggest AI labs are spooked by GPT. I need more evidence to believe something like that sorry. It sounds a lot more like Sam Altman lied to the board.
- aidaman 3y ago
  GPT 4 is not remotely unconvincing. It is clearly more intelligent than the average human, and is able to reason in the exact same way as humans. If you provide the steps to reason through any concecpt, it is able to understand at human capability. GPT 4 is clearly AGI. All of the GPTs have shown general intelligence, but GPT 4 is human-level intelligence.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    The only thing GPT 4 is missing is the ability to recognize it needs to ask more questions before it jumps into a problem. When you compare it to an entry level data entry role, it's absolutely AGI. You loosely tell it what it needs to do, step-by-step, and it does it.
    - dekhn 3y ago
      This sort of property ("loosely tell it what it needs to do, step-by-step, and it does it.") is definitely very exciting and remarkable, but I don't think it necessarily constitutes AGI. I would say instead it's more an emergent property of language models trained on extremely large corpora that contain many examples that, in embedding space, aren't that far from what you're asking it to do. I don't think LLMs have really demonstrated anything interesting around generalized intelligence, which although a fairly abstract concept, can be thought of as being able to solve truly novel problems outside their training corpora. I suspect there still needs to be a fair amount of work improving both the model design itself, the training data, and even the mental model of ML researchers, before we have systems that can truly reason in a way that demonstrates their generalized intelligence.
drcode 3y ago
Let's not put the cart before the horse Even if they say this was for safety reasons, let's not blindly believe them. I am on the pro safety side, but I'm gonna wait till the dust settles before I come to any conclusions on this matter.
- Exoristos 3y ago
  Let's not confuse ChatGPT "safety" with the meaning of the word in most contexts. This is about safely keeping major media of all kinds aligned with the messaging of the neoliberal political party of your locale.
swatcoder 3y ago
From what's come out so far, it reads more like he thinks they're pushing too hard too fast on commercialization, not AGI. They're chasing profit opportunities at market instead of fulfilling the board's non-profit mission to build safe AGI.
1letterunixname 3y ago
This is hand-wringing moral panic by nontechnical people who fear the unknown and don't understand AI/DL/ML/LLMs. It's shriekingly obvious no one sane will intentionally build "SkyNet", nor can they for decades.
LZ_Khan 3y ago
I trust the hell of a lot more in Ilya than Altman. Ilya is a scientist through and through, not a grifter.
aliston 3y ago
ChatGPT blew the doors open on the AI arms race. Without Sam leading the charge, we wouldn't have an AI boom. We wouldn't have Google scrambling to launch catch up features. We wouldn't have startups raising 100s of millions, people talking about a new industrial revolution, llama (2), all the models on hugging face or any of the other crazy stuff that has come about in the past year. Was the original launch of ChatGPT "safe?" Of course not, but it moved the industry forward immensely. Swisher's follow up is even more eyebrow raising: "The developer day and how the store was introduced was in inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast. My bet: He’ll have a new company up by Monday." What exactly from the demo day was "pushing too far?" We got a dall-e api, a larger context window and some cool stuff to fine tune GPT. I don't really see anything there that is too crazy... I also don't get the sense that Sam was cavalier about AI safety. That's why I am so surprised that the apparent reason for his ousting appears to be a boring, old, political turf war. My sense is that there is either more to the story, or Sam is absolutely about to have his Steve Jobs moment. He's also likely got a large percentage of the OpenAI researcher's on his side.
- m_ke 3y ago
  ChatGPT was definitely not some visionary project led by Sam. They had a great LLM in GPT-3 that was hard to use because it wasn't instruction tuned, so the research team did InstructGPT and then took it even further and added RLHF to turn it into a proper conversational bot. The UI was a hacky interface on top of it that definitely got way more popular than they expected.
  - aliston 3y ago
    I don't know if it was led by Sam, and don't dispute that it may have been "hacky," but there is no denying it was a visionary project. Yes, other companies had similar models. I know Google, in particular, already had similar LLMs, but explicitly chose not to incorporate them into its products. Sam / OpenAI had the gumption to take the state of the art and package it in a way that it could be interacted with by the masses. In fact, thinking about it more, the parallels with Steve Jobs are uncanny. Google is Xerox. ChatGPT is the graphical OS. Sam is...