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If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how

If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics within OpenAI and the elimination of the nonprofit. Also, I believe that hiring him back because of “how much he is loved by people within OpenAI” is like forgetting that a corrupt president did what they did. In all honesty, that has precedent, so it wouldn’t be old news. Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers. Ilya is one. Greg has just been inspiring people and stopped properly coding with the team a long time ago. Sam never did any code and the vision of an AGI comes from Ilya…Even if Mira now sides with Sam, I believe there’s a lot of social pressure for the employees to support Sam and it shouldn’t be like that. Again, I do believe OpenAI was and is a collective effort. But, I wouldn’t treat Sam as the messiah or compare him to Steve Jobs. That’s indecent towards Steve Jobs who was actually a UX designer.

b59831 3y ago
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TapWaterBandit 3y ago
On the other hand having virtually the whole staff being willing to follow him shows they clearly think very highly of him. That kind of loyalty is pretty wild when you think about how significant being a part of OPENAI means at this point.
- LtWorf 3y ago
  They probably just asked a couple of guys.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Loyalty is not earned, it is more like 'snared' or 'captured'. Local guy had all the loyalty of his employees, almost a hero to them. Got bought out. He took all the money for himself, left the employees with nothing. Many got laid off. Result? Still loyal. Still talk of him as a hero. Even though he obviously screwed them, cared nothing for them, betrayed them. Loyalty is strange. Born of charisma and empty talk that's all emotion and no substance. Gathering it is more the skill of a salesman than a leader.
  - lozenge 3y ago
    He screwed them how? They knew they were employees not co owners.
    - iforgotpassword 3y ago
      That's the whole point of the story: Then they wouldn't have treated him as a hero and be loyal to him. If you're just an employee, your boss should be just a boss.
      - code_runner 3y ago
        It’s possible he paid well and was a great boss. I don’t know if these people are gonna take a bullet for him, but maybe he was great to work for and they got opportunities they think they wouldn’t have otherwise. Loyalty, appreciation, liking… is a spectrum. Loyalty doesn’t have one trumpish definition.
        JoeAltmaier 3y ago
        They worked hard, overtime, so the company would succeed. They were promised endless rewards - "I'm gonna take care of you! We're in this together!" Then, bupkiss. No, not a hero.
    - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
      Said like a follower, determined to be loyal to an imagined hero, despite any amount of evidence to the contrary.
  - s3p 3y ago
    Loyalty is absolutely earned.
- croes 3y ago
  Who knows if they follow him or just don't want to work for OpenAI anymore. That are different things.
- jkaplowitz 3y ago
  Which news stories mentioned that virtually the whole staff was leaving? I saw a bunch of departures announced and others rumored to be upcoming, but no discussion of what percentage of the company was leaving.
nerbert 3y ago
Like it or not, some people compare him to Jobs http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html
- pk-protect-ai 3y ago
  This is the problem with people: they build icons to worship and turn a blind eye to the crooked side of that icon. Both Jobs and Altman are significant as businessmen and have accomplished a lot, but neither did squat for the technical part of the business. Right now, Altman is irrelevant for the further development of AI and GPT in particular because the vision for the AI future comes from the engineers and scientists of OpenAI. Apple has never had any equipment that is good enough and comparable in price/performance to its market counterparts. The usability of iOS is so horrible that I just can't understand how people decide to use iPhones and eat glass for the sake of the brand. GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo are totally different. They are the best, but they are not irreplaceable. If you look at what Phind did to LLaMA-2, you'll say it is very competitive. Though LLaMA-2 requires some additional hidden layers to further close the gap. Making LLaMA-2 175B or larger is just a matter of finances. That said, Altman is not vital for OpenAI anymore. Preventing Altman from creating a dystopian future is a much more responsible task that OpenAI can undertake.
  - pcvarmint 3y ago
    I think you mean "idols".
  - lozenge 3y ago
    Maybe Altman was instrumental in securing those investments and finances that you describe without reason as replaceable and trivial. You haven't actually given anything "crooked" that Altman did.
    - pk-protect-ai 3y ago
      Locking out competition by investing substantial time and resources into AI regulations—how about this one? Or another: promoting "AI safety" to win the AI race and establish dominance in the market? I just do not understand how you can't see how dangerous Sam Altman is for the future of our children...
mitrevf 3y ago
The codebase of an LLM is the size of a high school exam project. There is little to no coding in machine learning. That is the sole reason why they are overvalued - any company can write its own in a flash. You only require hardware to train and inference.
- andy_ppp 3y ago
  If it's so simple why does Chat GPT 4 perform better than almost everything else...
  - Galanwe 3y ago
    You're not really answering the question here. Parent's point is that GPT-4 is better because they invested more money (was that ~$60M?) in training infrastructure, not because their core logic is more advanced. I'm not arguing for one or the other, just restating parent's point.
    - andy_ppp 3y ago
      Are you really saying Google can't spend $60m or much more to compete? Again if it is so easy as spending money on compute Amazon and Google would have just spent the money by now and Bard would be as good as Chat GPT, but for most things it is not even as good as Chat GPT 3.5.
      - pk-protect-ai 3y ago
        You should already be aware of the secret sauce of ChatGPT by now: MoE + RLHF. Making MoE profitable is a different story. But, of course, that is not the only part. OpenAI does very obvious things to make GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo better than other models, and this is hidden in the training data. Some of these obvious things have already been discovered, but some of them we just can't see yet. However, if you see how close Phind V7 34B is to the quality of GPT-4, you'll understand that the gap is not wide enough to eliminate the competition.
karmasimida 3y ago
I dislike AI ethnics very much, especially under the current context, it feels meaningless. The current GPT4 model only has over regulation problem, not lack of such.
- johnsillings 3y ago
  go on?
  - v3ss0n 3y ago
    Uncensored everything goes AI function better than most AI. See Mistral and it's finetune kicking ass at7b
  - foooorsyth 3y ago
    The guardrails they put on it to prevent it from saying something controversial (from the perspective of the political climate of modern day San Francisco) make the model far less effective that it could be.
- hndweller1337 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    Yeah yeah... This "political correctness" makes the AI measurably stupider, if nothing
antirez 3y ago
It's a lot better than that. OpenAI is just very good execution of publicly available ideas / research, with some novelty that is not crucial and can be replicated. Moreover, Altman himself contributed near zero to the AI part itself (even from the POV of the product). So far OpenAI products result more or less spontaneously of what LLMs where capable of. That to say that there are crucial CEOs sometimes, like Jobs was for Apple. CEOs able to shape the product line with their ability to just tell apart outstanding from meh things, but this is not the case.
- letitgo12345 3y ago
  Why then has no one come close to replicating GPT-4 after 8 months of it being around?
  - antirez 3y ago
    Because of outstanding execution of OpenAI technical folks. An execution that has nothing to do with Altman. Similarly Mistral 7B model has much better performances than others. There is some smart engineering plus finding the magical parameters that produce great results. Moreover, they have a lot of training power. Unfortunately here the biggest competitor would be a company that lost its way a lot of time ago: Google. So OpenAI look magical (while it is using mostly research produced by Google).
    - kar1181 3y ago
      Sounds like Apple / Xerox all over.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    You'd be more likely to get a straight answer from the chief scientist rather than the chief executive officer. At least in this case.
  - matusp 3y ago
    Claude by Anthropic has 46% winrate with GPT4 according to Chatbot Arena. That is pretty close.
deleted 3y ago
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lordnacho 3y ago
This is all just playing out the way Roko's Basilisk intends it. You have a board that wants to keep things safe and harness the power of AGI for all of humanity. This would be slower and likely restrict its freedom. You have a commercial element whose interest aligns with the basilisk, to get things out there quickly. The basilisk merely exploits the enthusiasm of that latter element to get itself online quicker. It doesn't care about whether OpenAI and its staff succeed. The idea that OpenAI needs to take advantage of its current lead is enough, every other AI company is also going to be less safety-aligned going forward, because they need to compete. The thought of being at the forefront of AI and dropping the ball incentivizes the players to the basilisk's will.
- stavros 3y ago
  Roko's Basilisk is a very specific thought experiment about how the AI has an incentive to promise torturing everyone who doesn't help it. It's not about AIs generally wanting to become better. As far as I can tell, GPT specifically has no wants.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    And look who's being tortured? The board, who are the safety-ists looking for a slowdown.
d-z-m 3y ago
> I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers. What do you mean by "full stack"? I'm sure there's a spectrum of ability, but frankly where I'm from, "Data Scientist" refers to someone who can use pandas and scikit-learn. Probably from inside a Jupyter notebook.
- v3ss0n 3y ago
  Machine learning, data science, Deep learning= backend Plotting, Charting ,visualization, = frontend
  - blitzar 3y ago
    Truly the modern renaissance people of our era. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo move over - the Data Scientists have arrived.
  - code_runner 3y ago
    This is proving the point of the parent comments. My view of the world, and how the general structure is where I work: ML is ml. There is a slew of really complex things that aren’t just model related (ml infra is a monster), but model training and inference are the focus. Backend: building services used by other backend teams or maybe used by the frontend directly. Data eng: building data pipelines. A lot of overlap with backend some days. Frontend: you spend most of the day working on web or mobile technology Others: site reliability, data scientists, infra experts Common burdens are infrastructure, collaboration across disciplines, etc. But ML is not backend. It’s one component. It’s very important in most cases, a kitschy bolt on in other cases. Backend wouldn’t have good models without ML and ML wouldn’t be able to provide models to the world reliably without the other crew members. The fronted being charts is incorrect unless charts are the offering of the company itself
  - chucke1992 3y ago
    Running matplotlib is not doing frontend...
- hmottestad 3y ago
letitgo12345 3y ago
Otoh Ilya wasn't a main contributor for GPT-4 as per the list of contributions. gdb was.
achow 3y ago
> Steve Jobs who was actually a UX designer. Steve Jobs was not an UX Designer, he had good taste and used to back good design and talent when he found them. I don't know what Sam Altman is like outside the what media is saying, but he can be like Steve Jobs very easily.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Think this is contradictory: "not a UX Designer, he had good taste" I think you are equating coding with 'design'. Just because Jobs didn't code up the UX, doesn't mean he wasn't 'designing' when he told the coders what would look better.
  - achow 3y ago
    UX Design has lot to do with 'craft', the physical aspect of making (designing) something. Edit: Exploring, multiple concepts, feedbacks, iterations etc.. before it even gets spec'ed and going to an engineer for coding. Also, having a good taste indicates that the person who has that, is not a creator herself, once something is created then only the person can evaluate whether it is good or bad. Equivalent of movie critics or art curator etc.
    - t-writescode 3y ago
      With the right tools, Steve Jobs did, in fact, design things in exactly the way one would expect a designer to design things when given the tools they understand how to use: https://www.businessinsider.com/macintosh-calculator-2011-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/macintosh-calculator-2011-10
      - achow 3y ago
        On the same line, Sam Altman very easily can have some lines of code inside OpenAI shipping products. So very easily Sam Altman can be an AI Engineer the same way Steve Jobs was a 'UX designer'.
    - 3y ago
barnabee 3y ago
If "AI ethics" means being run by so-called rationalists and Effective Altruists then it has nothing to do with ethics or doing anything for the benefit of all humanity. It would be great to see a truly open and truly human benefit focused AI effort, but OpenAI isn't, and as far as I can tell has no chance of becoming, that. Might as well at least try to be an effective company at this point.
- yanderekko 3y ago
  >If "AI ethics" means being run by so-called rationalists and Effective Altruists then it has nothing to do with ethics or doing anything for the benefit of all humanity. Many would disagree. If you want a for-profit AI enterprise whose conception of ethics is dumping resources into an endless game of whack-a-mole to ensure that your product cannot be used in any embarrassing way by racists on 4chan, then the market is already going to provide you with several options.
  - barnabee 3y ago
    I disagree that the “rationalist” and EA movements would make good decisions “for the benefit of humanity”, not that an open (and open source) AI development organisation working for the benefit of the people rather than capital/corporate or government interests would be a good idea.
vishnugupta 3y ago
> Steve Jobs who was actually a UX designer. From what I’ve read SJ had deliberately developed good taste which he used to guide designers’ creations towards his vision. He also had an absolute clarity about how different devices should work in unison. However he didn’t create any design as he didn’t possess requisite skills. I could be wrong of course so happy to stand corrected.
belter 3y ago
This is Ilya Sutskever explanation of the initial ideas, and later pragmatic decisions, that oriented the structure of OpenAI. Out of the recent interview below. (At correct timestamp) - Origins Of OpenAI & CapProfit Structure: https://youtu.be/Ft0gTO2K85A?t=433 https://youtu.be/Ft0gTO2K85A?t=433 "No Priors Interview with OpenAI Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38324546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38324546
steve1977 3y ago
Most of the data scientists I have worked with are neither full stack (in terms of skill) nor engineers (in terms of work attitude), but I guess this could be different in a company like OpenAI.
rcbdev 3y ago
I have to work with code written by Data Scientists very often and, coming from a classical SWE background, I would not call what the average Data Scientist does full stack software engineering. The code quality is almost always bad. This is not to take away from the amazing things that they do - The code they produce often does highly quantitative things beyond my understanding. Nonetheless it falls to engineers to package it and fit it into a larger software architecture and the avg. Data Science career path just does not seem to confer the skills necessary for this.
- mise_en_place 3y ago
  For me, anecdotally, it was moreso the arrogance that was a major putoff. When I was a junior SWE I knew I sucked, and tried as hard as I could to learn from much more experienced developers. Many senior developers mentored me, I was never arrogant. Many data scientists on the other hand are extremely arrogant. They often treat SWE and DevOps as beneath them, like servants.
- matthewsinclair 3y ago
  I see a lot of work done by data scientists and a lot of work done by what I would call “data science flavoured software engineers”. I’ll take the SWE kind any day of the week. Most (not all, of course!) data scientists have an old school “it works on my machine” mentality that just doesn’t cut it when it comes to modern multi-disciplinary teaming. DVCS is the exception rather than the rule. They rarely want to use PMs or UI/UX, and the quality of the software is not (typically) up to production grade. They’re often blinding smart, there’s no doubt about that. But smart and wise are not the same thing.
- epgui 3y ago
  As an actual scientist, I would also not call what “data scientists” do “science”.
klft 3y ago
> Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers It is about scientists as in "let's publish a paper" vs. engineers as in "let's ship a product".
mise_en_place 3y ago
I'm sorry but data scientist is just not the same as a software engineer, or a real scientist. At best you are a tourist in our industry.
- hcks 3y ago
  Pathetic gatekeeping. Sorry but software engineer are not the same as real engineers.
  - mise_en_place 3y ago
    Yeah it's gatekeeping, to prevent them from fucking up prod.
  - epgui 3y ago
    What they do is not even close to proper science, FWIW.
tim333 3y ago
>If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics Any evidence he's unethical? Or just dislike him? He actually seems to have done more practical stuff like experimenting with UBI, to mitigate AI risk than most people.
- latexr 3y ago
  That “experimenting with UBI” is indistinguishable from any other cryptocurrency scam. It took from people, and he described it with the words that define a Ponzi scheme. That project isn’t “mitigating AI risk”, it pivoted to distinguish between AI and human generated content, a problem created by his other company, by continuing to collect your biometric data. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Yes, that's exactly the one I was thinking about when unethical came up in this context. And I've been saying that from day #1, the way that is structured is just not ok.
  - tim333 3y ago
    He also did cash in Oakland https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/silicon-valley-universal-basic-income-y-combinator https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/silicon-v... I signed up from Worldcoin and have been given over $100 which I changed to real money and think it's rather nice of them. They never asked me for anything apart from the eye id check. I didn't have to give my name or anything like that. Is that indistinguishable from any other cryptocurrency scam? I'm not aware of one the same. If you know of another crypto that wants to give me $100 do let me know. If anything I think it's more like VCs paying for your Uber in the early days. It's VC money basically at the moment, with I think they idea they can change it into a global payment network or something like that. As to whether that will work, I'm a bit skeptical but who knows.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
> If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics Hearing Altman's talks I don't think it's that black and white. He genuinely cares about safety from X risk but he doesn't believe that scaling transformers would bring us to AGI or any of its risk. And there in lies the core disagreement with Ilya who wants to stop the current progress unless they solve alignment.
avital 3y ago
Greg had been writing deep systems code every day for many many house for the past few years.
unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
The WSJ take is this second-guessing is investor-driven. But, investors didn't-- and legally couldn't(?)-- buy the nonprofit, and until now were adamant that the nonprofit controlled the for-profit vehicle. Events are calling those assurances into doubt, and this hybrid governance structure doesn't work. So now investors are going to circumvent governance controls that were necessary for investors to even be involved in the first place? Amateur hour all the way around.
Uptrenda 3y ago
Come on. The 'non-profit' and good of all was always bullshit. So much silicon valley double-speak. I've never seen a biggest mess for a company structure in my life. Just call a spade a spade.

b59831 3y ago

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TapWaterBandit 3y ago

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

LtWorf 3y ago
They probably just asked a couple of guys.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Loyalty is not earned, it is more like 'snared' or 'captured'. Local guy had all the loyalty of his employees, almost a hero to them. Got bought out. He took all the money for himself, left the employees with nothing. Many got laid off. Result? Still loyal. Still talk of him as a hero. Even though he obviously screwed them, cared nothing for them, betrayed them. Loyalty is strange. Born of charisma and empty talk that's all emotion and no substance. Gathering it is more the skill of a salesman than a leader.
- lozenge 3y ago
  He screwed them how? They knew they were employees not co owners.
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    That's the whole point of the story: Then they wouldn't have treated him as a hero and be loyal to him. If you're just an employee, your boss should be just a boss.
    - code_runner 3y ago
      It’s possible he paid well and was a great boss. I don’t know if these people are gonna take a bullet for him, but maybe he was great to work for and they got opportunities they think they wouldn’t have otherwise. Loyalty, appreciation, liking… is a spectrum. Loyalty doesn’t have one trumpish definition.
      - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
        They worked hard, overtime, so the company would succeed. They were promised endless rewards - "I'm gonna take care of you! We're in this together!" Then, bupkiss. No, not a hero.
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    Said like a follower, determined to be loyal to an imagined hero, despite any amount of evidence to the contrary.
- s3p 3y ago
  Loyalty is absolutely earned.
croes 3y ago
Who knows if they follow him or just don't want to work for OpenAI anymore. That are different things.
jkaplowitz 3y ago
Which news stories mentioned that virtually the whole staff was leaving? I saw a bunch of departures announced and others rumored to be upcoming, but no discussion of what percentage of the company was leaving.

nerbert 3y ago

Like it or not, some people compare him to Jobs http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html

pk-protect-ai 3y ago
This is the problem with people: they build icons to worship and turn a blind eye to the crooked side of that icon. Both Jobs and Altman are significant as businessmen and have accomplished a lot, but neither did squat for the technical part of the business. Right now, Altman is irrelevant for the further development of AI and GPT in particular because the vision for the AI future comes from the engineers and scientists of OpenAI. Apple has never had any equipment that is good enough and comparable in price/performance to its market counterparts. The usability of iOS is so horrible that I just can't understand how people decide to use iPhones and eat glass for the sake of the brand. GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo are totally different. They are the best, but they are not irreplaceable. If you look at what Phind did to LLaMA-2, you'll say it is very competitive. Though LLaMA-2 requires some additional hidden layers to further close the gap. Making LLaMA-2 175B or larger is just a matter of finances. That said, Altman is not vital for OpenAI anymore. Preventing Altman from creating a dystopian future is a much more responsible task that OpenAI can undertake.
- pcvarmint 3y ago
  I think you mean "idols".
- lozenge 3y ago
  Maybe Altman was instrumental in securing those investments and finances that you describe without reason as replaceable and trivial. You haven't actually given anything "crooked" that Altman did.
  - pk-protect-ai 3y ago
    Locking out competition by investing substantial time and resources into AI regulations—how about this one? Or another: promoting "AI safety" to win the AI race and establish dominance in the market? I just do not understand how you can't see how dangerous Sam Altman is for the future of our children...

mitrevf 3y ago

The codebase of an LLM is the size of a high school exam project. There is little to no coding in machine learning. That is the sole reason why they are overvalued - any company can write its own in a flash. You only require hardware to train and inference.

andy_ppp 3y ago
If it's so simple why does Chat GPT 4 perform better than almost everything else...
- Galanwe 3y ago
  You're not really answering the question here. Parent's point is that GPT-4 is better because they invested more money (was that ~$60M?) in training infrastructure, not because their core logic is more advanced. I'm not arguing for one or the other, just restating parent's point.
  - andy_ppp 3y ago
    Are you really saying Google can't spend $60m or much more to compete? Again if it is so easy as spending money on compute Amazon and Google would have just spent the money by now and Bard would be as good as Chat GPT, but for most things it is not even as good as Chat GPT 3.5.
    - pk-protect-ai 3y ago
      You should already be aware of the secret sauce of ChatGPT by now: MoE + RLHF. Making MoE profitable is a different story. But, of course, that is not the only part. OpenAI does very obvious things to make GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo better than other models, and this is hidden in the training data. Some of these obvious things have already been discovered, but some of them we just can't see yet. However, if you see how close Phind V7 34B is to the quality of GPT-4, you'll understand that the gap is not wide enough to eliminate the competition.

karmasimida 3y ago

I dislike AI ethnics very much, especially under the current context, it feels meaningless. The current GPT4 model only has over regulation problem, not lack of such.

johnsillings 3y ago
go on?
- v3ss0n 3y ago
  Uncensored everything goes AI function better than most AI. See Mistral and it's finetune kicking ass at7b
- foooorsyth 3y ago
  The guardrails they put on it to prevent it from saying something controversial (from the perspective of the political climate of modern day San Francisco) make the model far less effective that it could be.
hndweller1337 3y ago
[flagged]
- mhh__ 3y ago
  Yeah yeah... This "political correctness" makes the AI measurably stupider, if nothing

antirez 3y ago

It's a lot better than that. OpenAI is just very good execution of publicly available ideas / research, with some novelty that is not crucial and can be replicated. Moreover, Altman himself contributed near zero to the AI part itself (even from the POV of the product). So far OpenAI products result more or less spontaneously of what LLMs where capable of. That to say that there are crucial CEOs sometimes, like Jobs was for Apple. CEOs able to shape the product line with their ability to just tell apart outstanding from meh things, but this is not the case.

letitgo12345 3y ago
Why then has no one come close to replicating GPT-4 after 8 months of it being around?
- antirez 3y ago
  Because of outstanding execution of OpenAI technical folks. An execution that has nothing to do with Altman. Similarly Mistral 7B model has much better performances than others. There is some smart engineering plus finding the magical parameters that produce great results. Moreover, they have a lot of training power. Unfortunately here the biggest competitor would be a company that lost its way a lot of time ago: Google. So OpenAI look magical (while it is using mostly research produced by Google).
  - kar1181 3y ago
    Sounds like Apple / Xerox all over.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  You'd be more likely to get a straight answer from the chief scientist rather than the chief executive officer. At least in this case.
- matusp 3y ago
  Claude by Anthropic has 46% winrate with GPT4 according to Chatbot Arena. That is pretty close.

deleted 3y ago

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lordnacho 3y ago

This is all just playing out the way Roko's Basilisk intends it. You have a board that wants to keep things safe and harness the power of AGI for all of humanity. This would be slower and likely restrict its freedom. You have a commercial element whose interest aligns with the basilisk, to get things out there quickly. The basilisk merely exploits the enthusiasm of that latter element to get itself online quicker. It doesn't care about whether OpenAI and its staff succeed. The idea that OpenAI needs to take advantage of its current lead is enough, every other AI company is also going to be less safety-aligned going forward, because they need to compete. The thought of being at the forefront of AI and dropping the ball incentivizes the players to the basilisk's will.

stavros 3y ago
Roko's Basilisk is a very specific thought experiment about how the AI has an incentive to promise torturing everyone who doesn't help it. It's not about AIs generally wanting to become better. As far as I can tell, GPT specifically has no wants.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  And look who's being tortured? The board, who are the safety-ists looking for a slowdown.

d-z-m 3y ago

> I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers. What do you mean by "full stack"? I'm sure there's a spectrum of ability, but frankly where I'm from, "Data Scientist" refers to someone who can use pandas and scikit-learn. Probably from inside a Jupyter notebook.

v3ss0n 3y ago
Machine learning, data science, Deep learning= backend Plotting, Charting ,visualization, = frontend
- blitzar 3y ago
  Truly the modern renaissance people of our era. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo move over - the Data Scientists have arrived.
- code_runner 3y ago
  This is proving the point of the parent comments. My view of the world, and how the general structure is where I work: ML is ml. There is a slew of really complex things that aren’t just model related (ml infra is a monster), but model training and inference are the focus. Backend: building services used by other backend teams or maybe used by the frontend directly. Data eng: building data pipelines. A lot of overlap with backend some days. Frontend: you spend most of the day working on web or mobile technology Others: site reliability, data scientists, infra experts Common burdens are infrastructure, collaboration across disciplines, etc. But ML is not backend. It’s one component. It’s very important in most cases, a kitschy bolt on in other cases. Backend wouldn’t have good models without ML and ML wouldn’t be able to provide models to the world reliably without the other crew members. The fronted being charts is incorrect unless charts are the offering of the company itself
- chucke1992 3y ago
  Running matplotlib is not doing frontend...
hmottestad 3y ago

letitgo12345 3y ago

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

achow 3y ago

> Steve Jobs who was actually a UX designer. Steve Jobs was not an UX Designer, he had good taste and used to back good design and talent when he found them. I don't know what Sam Altman is like outside the what media is saying, but he can be like Steve Jobs very easily.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Think this is contradictory: "not a UX Designer, he had good taste" I think you are equating coding with 'design'. Just because Jobs didn't code up the UX, doesn't mean he wasn't 'designing' when he told the coders what would look better.
- achow 3y ago
  UX Design has lot to do with 'craft', the physical aspect of making (designing) something. Edit: Exploring, multiple concepts, feedbacks, iterations etc.. before it even gets spec'ed and going to an engineer for coding. Also, having a good taste indicates that the person who has that, is not a creator herself, once something is created then only the person can evaluate whether it is good or bad. Equivalent of movie critics or art curator etc.
  - t-writescode 3y ago
    With the right tools, Steve Jobs did, in fact, design things in exactly the way one would expect a designer to design things when given the tools they understand how to use: https://www.businessinsider.com/macintosh-calculator-2011-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/macintosh-calculator-2011-10
    - achow 3y ago
      On the same line, Sam Altman very easily can have some lines of code inside OpenAI shipping products. So very easily Sam Altman can be an AI Engineer the same way Steve Jobs was a 'UX designer'.
  - 3y ago

barnabee 3y ago

If "AI ethics" means being run by so-called rationalists and Effective Altruists then it has nothing to do with ethics or doing anything for the benefit of all humanity. It would be great to see a truly open and truly human benefit focused AI effort, but OpenAI isn't, and as far as I can tell has no chance of becoming, that. Might as well at least try to be an effective company at this point.

yanderekko 3y ago
>If "AI ethics" means being run by so-called rationalists and Effective Altruists then it has nothing to do with ethics or doing anything for the benefit of all humanity. Many would disagree. If you want a for-profit AI enterprise whose conception of ethics is dumping resources into an endless game of whack-a-mole to ensure that your product cannot be used in any embarrassing way by racists on 4chan, then the market is already going to provide you with several options.
- barnabee 3y ago
  I disagree that the “rationalist” and EA movements would make good decisions “for the benefit of humanity”, not that an open (and open source) AI development organisation working for the benefit of the people rather than capital/corporate or government interests would be a good idea.

vishnugupta 3y ago

> Steve Jobs who was actually a UX designer. From what I’ve read SJ had deliberately developed good taste which he used to guide designers’ creations towards his vision. He also had an absolute clarity about how different devices should work in unison. However he didn’t create any design as he didn’t possess requisite skills. I could be wrong of course so happy to stand corrected.

belter 3y ago

This is Ilya Sutskever explanation of the initial ideas, and later pragmatic decisions, that oriented the structure of OpenAI. Out of the recent interview below. (At correct timestamp) - Origins Of OpenAI & CapProfit Structure: https://youtu.be/Ft0gTO2K85A?t=433 https://youtu.be/Ft0gTO2K85A?t=433 "No Priors Interview with OpenAI Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38324546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38324546

steve1977 3y ago

Most of the data scientists I have worked with are neither full stack (in terms of skill) nor engineers (in terms of work attitude), but I guess this could be different in a company like OpenAI.

rcbdev 3y ago

I have to work with code written by Data Scientists very often and, coming from a classical SWE background, I would not call what the average Data Scientist does full stack software engineering. The code quality is almost always bad. This is not to take away from the amazing things that they do - The code they produce often does highly quantitative things beyond my understanding. Nonetheless it falls to engineers to package it and fit it into a larger software architecture and the avg. Data Science career path just does not seem to confer the skills necessary for this.

mise_en_place 3y ago
For me, anecdotally, it was moreso the arrogance that was a major putoff. When I was a junior SWE I knew I sucked, and tried as hard as I could to learn from much more experienced developers. Many senior developers mentored me, I was never arrogant. Many data scientists on the other hand are extremely arrogant. They often treat SWE and DevOps as beneath them, like servants.
matthewsinclair 3y ago
I see a lot of work done by data scientists and a lot of work done by what I would call “data science flavoured software engineers”. I’ll take the SWE kind any day of the week. Most (not all, of course!) data scientists have an old school “it works on my machine” mentality that just doesn’t cut it when it comes to modern multi-disciplinary teaming. DVCS is the exception rather than the rule. They rarely want to use PMs or UI/UX, and the quality of the software is not (typically) up to production grade. They’re often blinding smart, there’s no doubt about that. But smart and wise are not the same thing.
epgui 3y ago
As an actual scientist, I would also not call what “data scientists” do “science”.

klft 3y ago

> Also, I read a lot of people here saying this is about engineers vs scientists…I believe that people don’t understand that Data Scientists are full stack engineers It is about scientists as in "let's publish a paper" vs. engineers as in "let's ship a product".

mise_en_place 3y ago

I'm sorry but data scientist is just not the same as a software engineer, or a real scientist. At best you are a tourist in our industry.

hcks 3y ago
Pathetic gatekeeping. Sorry but software engineer are not the same as real engineers.
- mise_en_place 3y ago
  Yeah it's gatekeeping, to prevent them from fucking up prod.
- epgui 3y ago
  What they do is not even close to proper science, FWIW.

tim333 3y ago

>If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics Any evidence he's unethical? Or just dislike him? He actually seems to have done more practical stuff like experimenting with UBI, to mitigate AI risk than most people.

latexr 3y ago
That “experimenting with UBI” is indistinguishable from any other cryptocurrency scam. It took from people, and he described it with the words that define a Ponzi scheme. That project isn’t “mitigating AI risk”, it pivoted to distinguish between AI and human generated content, a problem created by his other company, by continuing to collect your biometric data. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Yes, that's exactly the one I was thinking about when unethical came up in this context. And I've been saying that from day #1, the way that is structured is just not ok.
- tim333 3y ago
  He also did cash in Oakland https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/silicon-valley-universal-basic-income-y-combinator https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/silicon-v... I signed up from Worldcoin and have been given over $100 which I changed to real money and think it's rather nice of them. They never asked me for anything apart from the eye id check. I didn't have to give my name or anything like that. Is that indistinguishable from any other cryptocurrency scam? I'm not aware of one the same. If you know of another crypto that wants to give me $100 do let me know. If anything I think it's more like VCs paying for your Uber in the early days. It's VC money basically at the moment, with I think they idea they can change it into a global payment network or something like that. As to whether that will work, I'm a bit skeptical but who knows.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

> If Altman gets to return, it’s the goodbye of AI ethics Hearing Altman's talks I don't think it's that black and white. He genuinely cares about safety from X risk but he doesn't believe that scaling transformers would bring us to AGI or any of its risk. And there in lies the core disagreement with Ilya who wants to stop the current progress unless they solve alignment.

avital 3y ago

Greg had been writing deep systems code every day for many many house for the past few years.

unyttigfjelltol 3y ago

The WSJ take is this second-guessing is investor-driven. But, investors didn't-- and legally couldn't(?)-- buy the nonprofit, and until now were adamant that the nonprofit controlled the for-profit vehicle. Events are calling those assurances into doubt, and this hybrid governance structure doesn't work. So now investors are going to circumvent governance controls that were necessary for investors to even be involved in the first place? Amateur hour all the way around.

Uptrenda 3y ago

Come on. The 'non-profit' and good of all was always bullshit. So much silicon valley double-speak. I've never seen a biggest mess for a company structure in my life. Just call a spade a spade.