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The key question in my mind is not who is going to be on the new board, but whether Ilya Sutskever will stay if Altman comes back. I worry that OpenAI without I
by breadwinner 3y ago
The key question in my mind is not who is going to be on the new board, but whether Ilya Sutskever will stay if Altman comes back. I worry that OpenAI without Ilya is not going to produce groundbreaking innovations at the same pace. Hopefully Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever can patch things up. That's more important than who they add or remove to the board.
- sashank_1509 3y agoI don’t know if Ilya contributed anything technically to OpenAI in the recent 2-3 years. He is broadly thanked along with Sam in GPT4 List of contributors, he is not mentioned in ChatGPT list of contributors, he is again thanked for advice in the GPT-3 list of contributors. The folks who resigned upon Sams ouster, Jacub Pachocki is credited as lead of GPT-4 , Greg Brockmann is credited for multiple things in GPT-4 ( he was the lead for training infra setup). All of them would have left if Sam left, if anything letting Sam go would significantly hamstring OpenAI than letting Ilya go.
- mrtksn 3y agoCurrently, it’s very unclear who operates under what motives. How much is it about ego? How much is it about money and how much is it due to intellectual positions? Maybe there’re are no heroes and maybe there’re no antiheroes? With the recent news about other investments and deals, the facade doesn’t seem to even resemble the OpenAI’s reality. I can’t wait to read the autobiography of involved parties.
- jessenaser 3y agoSam Altman by Walter Isaacson Releasing 2037...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- spking 3y agoShouldn't it be written by ChatGPT?
- dboreham 3y agoChatGPT "with Walter Isaacson".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mickdarling 3y agoI had ChatGPT give me some proposals for screenplays. My favorite was Rainbow MosAIc, a Rashomon style film taking place mainly from Friday to Monday. It played with all the different potential motivations and theories. It did a half decent metaphor with representing the different points of view via the different video conferencing cameras.
- resource0x 3y agoAre you sure they will be "consistently candid" in their autobiographies? :-)
- thepasswordis 3y ago>Ego I can absolutely empathize with Ilya here, though. As far as I know the tech making openai function is largely his life’s work. It would be extremely frustrating to have Sam be the face of it, and be given the credit for it. Sam is clearly a very accomplished businessman and networker. Those people are super important, I wish I had a person like him on my team. I’ve had the experience of other people tacitly taking credit for my work. Giving talks about it, receiving praise for their vision. It’s incredibly demoralizing. I’m not necessarily saying Sam did this, since I don’t know any of these people. Just speculating on how it might feel to ge Ilya watching Sam go on a world tour meeting heads of state to talk about what is largely Ilya’s work.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago…and yet a very familiar story in the industry.
- kwant_kiddo 3y agoWhat makes you think it is 'his' work and not theirs? I remember when OpenAI was just a joke compared to Deepmind. The turning point (as I remember) was when they used [1] deep reinforcement learning on dota2. clearly iyla (also one of the authors) contributed, but so did many others on the team I assume? [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06680.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06680.pdf
- WanderPanda 3y agoThe robotic hand Rubiks cube manipulation using RL was no joke either!
- mi_lk 3y agoIt for sure doesn't have sama's name on it. The point stands
- slavetologic 3y agoI can personally understand this, and am currently struggling with it. It's hard that the world works this way.
- ioulaum 3y agoGiven that nothing criminal happened, canning Sam with no chance for discussion was just overkill. It's probably more of an intellectual / philosophical position, given that they just did not think through the real impact on the business (and thus the mission itself) I'm inclined to assume that something stupid was done. It happens. They should resolve it, fix the rules for how the board can behave, and move on. Despite the bungling, Ilya is probably still a good voice to have on the board. His key responsibility (super-alignment), is a key part of OpenAI's mission.
- cmdli 3y agoWhile we don’t know the whole story, I don’t think Sam is innocent in this matter. It seems likely that this was a recurring disagreement, and perhaps this was simply a step too far where the board had to act. When you fire somebody, typically you don’t give them a heads up.
- Aeolun 3y agoYou don’t typically do it this quickly either.
- tempestn 3y agoWhat do you mean? Typically (always?) the firing itself is instantaneous. We have no idea how long the issues that led to the firing went on. The communication was certainly very poor, and we don't know if the reasons were good, but I don't understand the speed complaint.
- Aeolun 3y agoIf it’s not a sudden thing, the person being fired generally writes a ‘no bad feelings’ instead of a ‘WTF’ message.
- rblatz 3y agoIf you do it properly, from the outside it seems sudden.
- zyang 3y agoMusk recruited Ilya from Google to start OpenAI. Musk was ousted by Altman. Now Altman is ousted by Ilya.
- YeBanKo 3y agoInitially I thought it iwas about money. Now it seems to be about intellectual position: Sama wants to move fast and break things, Ilya does not. I don’t want my bank to replace customer support with LLM agent, that has access to internal APIs or LLM driving a medical decision just yet. As an example, couple years ago Crisis Text Line decided to sell data to a for profit spin off. Their justification was that data was anonymized, which was bs for it’s unstructured text data, and that it’s not against terms of service, which users had agreed to. Mind you, these users were people in crisis maybe even on a brink of a suicide. This was highly unethical and caused a backlash. Then one of the bod members wrote a half assed “reflection” post [1]. If some core employees of CTL did a “coup” to stop this decision, because they believed it’s unethical and dangerous, wouldn’t it be justifies? [1] http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/01/31/crisis-text-line-from-my-perspective.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/01/31/crisis-...
- s3p 3y ago>I don’t want my bank to replace customer support with LLM agent, that has access to internal APIs If it weren't for the mentality you are rallying against we wouldn't have ChatGPT. Google, Meta, everyone had these LLMs sitting around. OpenAI was the only company with the balls to release it to the public.
- foobarqux 3y agoThe other question is what happens to the pretense of "safety". The CEO explicitly said multiple times that he does not have unilateral control, that he is subordinate to the board and that the board's job was to remove him if it he was pursuing an unsafe course. Assuming he gets re-instated that would all be shown to be false.
- lucubratory 3y agoYeah, a $2.8Tn tech company and a venture capitalist's network managing to overturn the non-profit Board's completely legal action (legally required of the Board, even) they took in furtherance of their Charter would be the ultimate practical demonstration that no legal structure, not even those specifically designed to do so, is above what capital wants. It's their world, we're just living in it, and they want to make sure they make the next world subservient to them too.
- Aeolun 3y agoJust because something is legal does not mean it is right. If they’d spent a week talking with him and ultimately couldn’t resolve their differences and then fired him that would be one thing.
- lucubratory 3y agoThis has been going on for months. Sam sidelined Ilya out of his job a month ago, after a long time of Ilya trying to convince him he was going down the wrong course.
- junofan 3y agoYou have evidence Sam lied, like their statement implies? How do you know the action was in furtherance of their charter instead of over petty grievances?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- siva7 3y agoIlya will do just fine after openai but there is zero chance that he will stay there as too many bridges are burned.
- ioulaum 3y agoI think Sam could "potentially" be the bigger man in this. Ilya may still be someone who should be on the board... Especially given his role as head of alignment research. He deserves a say on key issues related to OpenAI. People get excited. Stupid things happen. Especially in startups. ChatGPT having become so successful doesn't change the fact that the company as a whole, is fairly immature still. They should seriously just laugh about it and move on. Let's just say that Ilya had a bad couple of days, and probably needs a couple of weeks of vacation.
- gizmo 3y agoI agree. As long as Sam has total control over the board it's fine if Iiya doesn't approve of everything Sam does. Not worth losing a top AI researcher over this.
- BryantD 3y agoThat defeats the purpose of having a board. Which is sometimes the desired outcome, of course, but if I were Microsoft I am not sure I’d want Sam in there with zero checks and balances. I also wouldn’t want Ilya in there without checks and balances, to be clear. So the challenge is identifying the right adults. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that negotiation to complete successfully in the eyes of all parties by 5 PM today. It’s possible that Ilya will give up on having his requirements satisfied and leave.
- gizmo 3y agoIf Sam returns he doesn't want to risk getting ousted again? So presumably he'll appoint people 100% loyal to him. Plenty of precedent for tech founders to have total board control. It will take a little while for Sam to consolidate power, but he won't forget what happened this weekend and he'll play the long game accordingly.
- beachy 3y agoBig investors like Microsoft won't want a board that is utterly subservient to the CEO.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yumraj 3y agoIt seems somewhat clear that at the end of the day there are two camps, Ilya and Sam. Sam is backed by investors who are looking for returns, and are not sure if Ilya will get them the same juicy 100X. So, if Sam comes back, then I’m pretty sure Ilya will go on his own. Whether he will focus on GPT or AGI or ?, is anyone’s guess, as is how many from OpenAI will follow him as everyone loves money. EDIT: Ilya should have no trouble finding benefactors of his own, whether they are one of the FAANGs or VCs is TBD.
- felipellrocha 3y agoWho would invest in Ilya, though, when he very publicly tried to oust one of his oldest allies and failed? Trust can’t be built that way
- u3456ue 3y ago[flagged]
- code_biologist 3y agoWhy wouldn't I trust someone who took action to uphold their organizational charter, knowing there would be intense pressure to do otherwise? Investment is only partially about trust. I agree Sam's a pretty investable guy. I expect Sam to pursue growth through fundraising, product commercialization, corporate partnerships, etc in exactly the YC mode. He's also clearly ok with letting the momentum of that growth overwhelm the original stated aims of OpenAI, especially given what the original firing press release said about Sam not being entirely forthright. I suspect Microsoft made their investment knowing that something like this might happen. It's not trustworthy that he tried to overwhelm nonprofit aims under for-profit momentum, but if you're an investor do you care?
- chucke1992 3y agoI doubt about Ilya's involvement at this point.
- ptero 3y agoI doubt it is fixable. Firing aside (which will be hard, but not impossible to make peace on), they have fundamental differences in goals. Even if you force a shotgun marriage to save the company, I would bet this will be a short term reprieve. Both goals can be successfully pursued, just not at the same company. My 2c.
- az226 3y agoNo way Ilya gets to stay. The trust is broken far beyond repair.
- felipellrocha 3y agoThis is a terrible take. Ilya staying is the only thing that is basically guaranteed. Everything else isn’t. In addition, no one is irreplaceable.
- breadwinner 3y ago> Ilya staying is the only thing that is basically guaranteed. How is that guaranteed? If investors remove him from board of directors, he may get pissed off and quit, no? > In addition, no one is irreplaceable. In theory, maybe. In practice, it is not always easy. Nearly a year after ChatGPT came out Google hasn't been able to catch up. If it was easy to replace Ilya after he left Google, they would have caught up by now.
- trashtester 3y agoA rough guess is that Elon will pick up Ilya, with a promise to really aim for safe AGI.
- alecco 3y agoI'm starting to suspect this was all orchestrated by Google. Win-win. Google has the hardware, the data, and the models. Google only lacks OpenAI's secret refining sauce. Getting back Ilya would be the best outcome for them.
- mcmcmc 3y agoAh yes, Elon who famously keeps all his promises without needing a court order.
- whyenot 3y agoI apologize in advance for this snarky comment, but with Elon’s track record when it comes to safety at Twitter and Tesla, I would doubt his sincerity or follow-through on AI safety.
- trashtester 3y agoI suppose "safety" means different things to different people. Elon seems to be of the type that cares about existential risks. One reading of him, is that he sees both Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX as tools to mitigate what he sees as existential risks. In the case of Tesla, to accelerate the development of electric cars, in the case of Twitter, to reduce the probability of civil war and in the case of SpaceX to eventually have humanity (or our descendants) spread out enough that a single catastrophic event (like a meteor, gray goo or similar) doesn't wipe us out all at once. His detractors obviously will question both his motives and methods, but if we imagine he's acting out of good faith (whether or not he's wrong), his approach to AI fits the pattern, including his story about why he helped with the startup of OpenAI in the first place. From someone with an ex-risk approach to AI safety, the first concern is, to quote Ilya from the recent Alignment Workshop "As a bare minimum, let's make it so that if the tech does 'bad things', it's because of its operators, rather than due to some unexpected behavior". In other words, for someone concerned with existential risk, even intentional "bad use" such as using AI for killer robots at a large scale in war or for a dictator to use AI to suppress a population are secondary concerns. And it appears to me that Elon and Ilya both have this outlook, while Sam may be more concerned with shorter term social impacts.