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You're making it seem like OpenAI is a dumpster fire and not literally the only company that is MILES ahead of its competition. Not too mention they're supposed

You're making it seem like OpenAI is a dumpster fire and not literally the only company that is MILES ahead of its competition. Not too mention they're supposedly a billion in yearly revenue. Not even Google can compete. It could also be a signal that the company recognizes that they would not be where they currently are without their workers. Maybe they're giving a reason for their workers to stay (become multi-millionaires overnight) and not go to their competitors.

chaxor 3y ago
To be fair, they are not miles ahead of everyone completely - they're good at shipping products. Other companies (such as deepmind/Google) have capabilities approximately on par, or sometimes better than OpenAI - they just aren't very good at making products out of their research.
- rvz 3y ago
  Or OpenAI is just better at marketing / hyping their products and creating the illusion that they are ahead.
- tomp 3y ago
  Noone has released a GPT-4 competitor after a year. I'd say that's quite a lead. Maybe this has changed now with new Gemini model, but still that means one year ahead of everyone.
  - chaxor 3y ago
    Again, that's a webapp product for the public - not state of the art research. These are very different things.
    - blackoil 3y ago
      Research without ability to create better models and products don't mean much. If the research is so good we should see somethings coming out of it.
pk-protect-ai 3y ago
They are not leading their competition in terms of technology; they are ahead in a public theater and as the first to market. The claims of "regulate us," "it's almost AGI and it's dangerous," and "let's put a moratorium on larger models" are all just hype, deceiving the public. They utilize the work of scientists and other companies worldwide without acknowledging their contributions. Certainly, they have done an impressive job, and the scientists and engineers working there deserve respect and recognition. However, they are not significantly ahead of current research. They are not even weeks ahead of research. The current landscape is a game of budgets, winning public opinion, and securing investments.
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  No company in the history of companies has ever advertised themselves with the concept "we're going to destroy the world", primarily because it doesn't actually work. OpenAI are true believers, they say that sort of thing because that is what they genuinely think.
  - pk-protect-ai 3y ago
    No single neural network currently has the capability to destroy the world, and it will not occur until the architecture for NNs is altered to become self-driving rather than reactive. Even then, it will not be sentient. The deception occurs when the attention shifts from the people operating new powerful technology (tools) to this technology itself.
    - FeepingCreature 3y ago
      Meanwhile, every AI company ever: "We are very excited about agents. We are working hard on agents. We want to roll out agents as soon as possible. Also, persistent memory and online learning would be nice to get." Like, are you following the things that OpenAI and Deepmind are saying at all? The things that make current LLMs not a threat, they aim to tear down as soon as they can arrange. OpenAI just released a video network, and one of their core touted benefits was that you could use it as an action controller! And, um. Do you really think, when the AIs can take a simple prompt and turn it into a ten thousand step plan that requires dynamic skill acquisition, resourcing and persistence, that generating the prompt will be the one single task that stumps them? When we are at that point - and to be clear, every leading AI organisation is sprinting to reach that point earliest - then the difference between doom and safety will be one sentence: "When you are done with that, generate a new prompt." This is not how a world with a long expected lifespan looks. edit: To be clear, I'm still not accusing OpenAI of making up the doom stuff. Even though when I phrase it like that it sounds like they're directly working on things that obviously end the world, which seems contradictory, I don't think they see it like that. To be honest, I can't explain why any doomer works at OpenAI, except in the way that people sometimes move towards explosions and gunfire. I think it's just a bug in the human brain. We want to have the danger in sight.
_heimdall 3y ago
> literally the only company that is MILES ahead of its competition Its worth noting that, at least when working in a truly novel and untested industry, whoever is leading the pack would likely be the first to know when they tech hits a dead end. By no means am I saying that's actually the case, but there is still a real possibility that LLMs and the underlying architecture don't pan out with regards to the company's goal of developing anything resembling an AGI. If there is a core challenge with the architecture that doesn't scale, OpenAI would just run into the wall when everyone else was still MILES back.
- kouru225 3y ago
  It doesn’t need to pan out as a way to create AGI though. It just needs to be useful and profitable.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    At least from what I've seen and how I've seen others use LLMs, the general consensus seems to be that they're useful for the basics today but are more of a promising tech than something that's already landed. If OpenAI features were to freeze at what we have today I would be surprised if the company stayed around without a major pivot. Again I'm in no on way saying this is actually the case, only a hypothetical since the tech is still very new and we don't know what we don't know.
    - nl 3y ago
      > If OpenAI features were to freeze at what we have today I would be surprised if the company stayed around without a major pivot. This isn't really true. GPT4 is incredibly useful right now and being used by lots of business processes without any improvements being needed. Every incremental improvement (eg Gemini 1.5 huge context window) opens up even more possibilities. AGI isn't required at all.
      - lmeyerov 3y ago
        Very much this. It's incredible what we can do with it - our limiter building louie.ai has been more ourselves than OpenAI. Though of course a better LLM (smarter, faster, cheaper) does enable more. The main problem with freezing is the moat disappears. Others are steadily catching up, and on specific benchmarks, even surpassing. Groq.com is insane wrt perf.

chaxor 3y ago

To be fair, they are not miles ahead of everyone completely - they're good at shipping products. Other companies (such as deepmind/Google) have capabilities approximately on par, or sometimes better than OpenAI - they just aren't very good at making products out of their research.

rvz 3y ago
Or OpenAI is just better at marketing / hyping their products and creating the illusion that they are ahead.
tomp 3y ago
Noone has released a GPT-4 competitor after a year. I'd say that's quite a lead. Maybe this has changed now with new Gemini model, but still that means one year ahead of everyone.
- chaxor 3y ago
  Again, that's a webapp product for the public - not state of the art research. These are very different things.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    Research without ability to create better models and products don't mean much. If the research is so good we should see somethings coming out of it.

pk-protect-ai 3y ago

They are not leading their competition in terms of technology; they are ahead in a public theater and as the first to market. The claims of "regulate us," "it's almost AGI and it's dangerous," and "let's put a moratorium on larger models" are all just hype, deceiving the public. They utilize the work of scientists and other companies worldwide without acknowledging their contributions. Certainly, they have done an impressive job, and the scientists and engineers working there deserve respect and recognition. However, they are not significantly ahead of current research. They are not even weeks ahead of research. The current landscape is a game of budgets, winning public opinion, and securing investments.

FeepingCreature 3y ago
No company in the history of companies has ever advertised themselves with the concept "we're going to destroy the world", primarily because it doesn't actually work. OpenAI are true believers, they say that sort of thing because that is what they genuinely think.
- pk-protect-ai 3y ago
  No single neural network currently has the capability to destroy the world, and it will not occur until the architecture for NNs is altered to become self-driving rather than reactive. Even then, it will not be sentient. The deception occurs when the attention shifts from the people operating new powerful technology (tools) to this technology itself.
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    Meanwhile, every AI company ever: "We are very excited about agents. We are working hard on agents. We want to roll out agents as soon as possible. Also, persistent memory and online learning would be nice to get." Like, are you following the things that OpenAI and Deepmind are saying at all? The things that make current LLMs not a threat, they aim to tear down as soon as they can arrange. OpenAI just released a video network, and one of their core touted benefits was that you could use it as an action controller! And, um. Do you really think, when the AIs can take a simple prompt and turn it into a ten thousand step plan that requires dynamic skill acquisition, resourcing and persistence, that generating the prompt will be the one single task that stumps them? When we are at that point - and to be clear, every leading AI organisation is sprinting to reach that point earliest - then the difference between doom and safety will be one sentence: "When you are done with that, generate a new prompt." This is not how a world with a long expected lifespan looks. edit: To be clear, I'm still not accusing OpenAI of making up the doom stuff. Even though when I phrase it like that it sounds like they're directly working on things that obviously end the world, which seems contradictory, I don't think they see it like that. To be honest, I can't explain why any doomer works at OpenAI, except in the way that people sometimes move towards explosions and gunfire. I think it's just a bug in the human brain. We want to have the danger in sight.

_heimdall 3y ago

> literally the only company that is MILES ahead of its competition Its worth noting that, at least when working in a truly novel and untested industry, whoever is leading the pack would likely be the first to know when they tech hits a dead end. By no means am I saying that's actually the case, but there is still a real possibility that LLMs and the underlying architecture don't pan out with regards to the company's goal of developing anything resembling an AGI. If there is a core challenge with the architecture that doesn't scale, OpenAI would just run into the wall when everyone else was still MILES back.

kouru225 3y ago
It doesn’t need to pan out as a way to create AGI though. It just needs to be useful and profitable.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  At least from what I've seen and how I've seen others use LLMs, the general consensus seems to be that they're useful for the basics today but are more of a promising tech than something that's already landed. If OpenAI features were to freeze at what we have today I would be surprised if the company stayed around without a major pivot. Again I'm in no on way saying this is actually the case, only a hypothetical since the tech is still very new and we don't know what we don't know.
  - nl 3y ago
    > If OpenAI features were to freeze at what we have today I would be surprised if the company stayed around without a major pivot. This isn't really true. GPT4 is incredibly useful right now and being used by lots of business processes without any improvements being needed. Every incremental improvement (eg Gemini 1.5 huge context window) opens up even more possibilities. AGI isn't required at all.
    - lmeyerov 3y ago
      Very much this. It's incredible what we can do with it - our limiter building louie.ai has been more ourselves than OpenAI. Though of course a better LLM (smarter, faster, cheaper) does enable more. The main problem with freezing is the moat disappears. Others are steadily catching up, and on specific benchmarks, even surpassing. Groq.com is insane wrt perf.