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OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will leave and join rival Anthropic

403 points by tzury 2y ago

surfingdino 2y ago
Is it because OpenAI is slowly turning into Bing and you have to go elsewhere if you want to work on AI?
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862
stingraycharles 2y ago
Good for him, seems like OpenAI is moving towards a business model of profitability, and Anthropic seems to be more aligned with the original goals of OpenAI. Will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. It strikes me that OpenAI is better funded, though, and that AI (at their scale) is super expensive. How does Anthropic deal with this? How are they funding their operations? Edit: just looked it up, looks like they have a $4B investment from Amazon and a $2B investment from Google, which should be sufficient (I’m going to assume these are cloud credits). https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/amazon-doubles-down-on-anthropic-completing-its-planned-4b-investment/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/amazon-doubles-down-on-ant... https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-agrees-invest-up-2-bln-openai-rival-anthropic-wsj-2023-10-27/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-agrees-invest-up-2...
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Good for him, seems like OpenAI is moving towards a business model of profitability, and Anthropic seems to be more aligned with the original goals of OpenAI. What is open about Anthropic ?
  - imadj 2y ago
    >> Anthropic seems to be more aligned with the original goals of OpenAI. > What is open about Anthropic ? OpenAI's radical mission drift to the opposite extreme, made other companies look relatively closer to its own original goal than itself. From OpenAI's original announcement[1]: > Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return > Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. But ever since the ChatGPT craze, OpenAI ironically got completely consumed by capitalizing on financial return. They now appear quite unprincipled as if they see nothing but dollar signs and market dominance, which made Meta, Anthropic, even Google, look more rational and healthy by comparison. These companies are publishing research papers, open models, contributing more to the ecosystem and overall appear to be more mindful and conservative when it comes to the ethical and societal impact. [1] - https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/
    - Hrun0 2y ago
      You didn't answer the question.
  - resource_waste 2y ago
    I'm with you. Closed, Puritan models.
    - bamboozled 2y ago
      It was actually a serious and open question, but I can see, given the hypocrisy found in a lot of these self-proclaimed "open AI" companies, how it would come across like I was refuting something ;)
- daghamm 2y ago
  Anthropic has more limits on their free services, and even paid services have a cap that changes depending on current load. They are not burning VC money at the rate other AI companies at this size do. I think they are more profitable than openai.
tzury 2y ago
Claude 3.5 Sonnet by Anthropic is the best model out there, if you are trying to have an extremely talented programmer paired to you. Somehow, OpenAI is playing catch with them rather than vice versa.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  I just can't get past the "You must have a valid phone number to use Anthropic’s services." Umm... why? Nobody else in the AI space wants to track my number. I'm sure Anthropic has their "reasons". I just doubt it is one that I would like.
  - 4gotunameagain 2y ago
    I definitely had to give up a number when registering for chatGPT.
    - raverbashing 2y ago
      Same here. I can understand, they don't want their usage to go over the roof with fake accts
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    For API access I didn’t need to provide a phone number. I use it with a selfhosted lobechat instance without problems.
  - maccard 2y ago
    I'm not affiliated with Claude, but assuming you're serious: > Umm... why? https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8287232-why-do-i-need-to-verify-my-phone-number https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8287232-why-do-i-n... My guess is, these models are incredibly expensive to run, Claude has a fairly generous free tier, and phone numbers are one of the easiest ways to significantly reduce the number of duplicate accounts. > Nobody else in the AI space wants to track my number. Given they're likely hoovering up all of the data you're sending to them, and they have your email address to identify you, this seems like an odd hill to die on.
ochronus 2y ago
Go, Anthropic!
bookaway 2y ago
More inclusive title including Greg Brockman and Peter Deng departures: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Is it just me or is Brockman leaving absolutely huge ? I can’t believe this isn’t front page. Basically everyone who is anyone has left or is leaving. It’s ridiculous.
  - bookaway 2y ago
    Yeah, I was flabbergasted myself at the lack of commotion here when I got to the end of this article and learned of gdb's departure only then.
    - nwoli 2y ago
      Brockman isn’t leaving just going on a sabbatical/vacation
      - bookaway 2y ago
        For someone who cares deeply about the future of the company, lining up several significant departures temporary or otherwise on the same dates--including your own--seems the opposite of damage control. I could imagine a parody of the discussion between Altman and the board go something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sacn_bCj8tQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sacn_bCj8tQ
      - nunez 2y ago
        Karpathy went on sabbatical before he left Tesla...
      - bamboozled 2y ago
        It does say that, seems kind of strange though, rapidly growing company, apparently an absolutely key member of facilitating that growth and, poof, gone for 6 months at least.
Kjahd 2y ago
"Deepen my focus on AI alignment" is the new "spend more time with friends and family". What does that even mean? Is OpenAI secretly working on military applications? Or does it mean neutering the model until it evades all political discussions?
- yeevs 2y ago
  AI alignment has a well defined meaning. You can look at the wikipedia article if you wish. If you dismiss it as an important problem, that's fine but it's pretty clear what AI alignment means in this context.
  - weberer 2y ago
    I think you misunderstood the point. There's a specific thing regarding alignment that Schulman and OpenAI disagree on, and that thing is not revealed to us. There are countless possibilities, but we are left in the dark. For example, his focus on alignment could be more about preventing the end of human civilization, while Microsoft/OpenAI's focus could be more about not expressing naughty opinions that advertisers dislike.
- Version467 2y ago
  It means that OpenAIs public commitments to allocate resources for safety research do not track with what they actually do and people who were hired to work on safety (or in schulmans case choose to focus on safety) don't like it, so they leave.
- jebarker 2y ago
  It may mean what it says. Alignment may not be seen as as important as building larger and more capable models so may not be receiving the resources or attention he wants. Doesn't have to be as dramatic as military applications or neutering models.
Version467 2y ago
Must've been a difficult decision with him being a cofounder and all, but afaik he's been the highest ranked safety minded person at openai. He says it's not because openai leadership isn't committed to safety, but I'm not sure I buy that. We've seen numerous safety people leave exactly because of that reason. What makes this way more interesting to me though is how this announcement coincides with Brockmans sabbatical. Maybe there's nothing to it, but I find it more likely that things really aren't going well with sama. Will be interesting to see how this plays out and if he actually returns next year or if this is just a soft quitting announcement.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  Th reality is that every other person in tech now is hoping for Sama to fail. The world doesn't need AI to have a silicon valley face. Anthropic is doing a much, much better PR work by not having a narcissist as CEO.
  - thfjdtsrsg 2y ago
    Contrarily, I think the reality is that most of us couldn't care less about this AI soap opera.
    - danielbln 2y ago
      I want the best model at the lowest rate (and preferably lowest energy expenditure) and with the easiest access. Anything else is just background noise.
      - bookaway 2y ago
        Some people are wary of enabling ceos of disruptive technologies become the richest people in the world, take control of key internet assets and -- in random bursts of thin-skinned megalomania -- tilt the scales towards politicians or political groups who take action that negatively affect their own quality of life. It sounds absurd, but some are watching such a procession take place live as we speak.
ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
All of this back-and-forth in the AI scene is the preparation before the storm. Like the opening scene of a chess game, before any pieces are exchanged. Like the Braveheart "Hold!" scene. The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers. Google search is the best business model ever. Everybody wants to become the Google of the AI era. The "AI answer" industry might become 10 times bigger than the search industry. Google ran for 2 years without any monetization. Let's see how long the incumbents will "Hold" this time.
- jsheard 2y ago
  > The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers. The magic of genAI is they don't need to put ads next to the answers where they can easily be ignored or adblocked, they can put the ads inside the answers instead. The future, like it or not, is advertisers bidding to bias AI models towards mentioning their products.
  - Geezus_42 2y ago
    Sounds like a good way to guarantee no one ever uses it.
  - kranke155 2y ago
    I wish I didnt read this because this sounds crazily prescient.
  - ant6n 2y ago
    That’s how Google works. And also why Google doesn’t work anymore.
    - pydry 2y ago
      It's not just google, it's all media. The more embedded and authentic advertising looks the better it works. Magazine/newspaper ads exist as much as a pretext for the magazine to write nice things about their advertisers in reviews and such. The real product reddit sells, I think, is turning a blind eye when advertisers sockpuppet the hell out of the site. Movies try to milk product placement for as much as they can because it's more effective than regular advertising.
j4hdufd8 2y ago
Curious why this is allowed? NDA do not apply?
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  He is not a slave.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Even if NDAs are legal If you joined a company late enough that they have HR and legal forcing everyone to sign NDAs then you're not a co-founder.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Do you mean non compete? If so, then yes, non compete are illegal in California.
- ramon156 2y ago
  NDA's aren't really bound by law. Good luck explaining why this change is stealing customers, and which customers have left because of this change
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gizmo 2y ago
This is probably bad news for ChatGPT 5. I don't think it's that likely this co-founder would leave for a Anthropic if OpenAI were clearly in the lead. Also from a safety perspective you would want to be at the AI company most likely to create truly disruptive AI tech. This looks to me like a bet against OpenAI more than anything else. OpenAI has a burn rate of about 5 billion a year and they need to raise ASAP. If the fundraising isn't going well or if OpenAI is forced to accept money from questionable investors that would also be a good reason to jump ship. In situations like these it's good to remember that people are much more likely to take the ethical and principled road when they also stand to gain from that choice. People who put their ideals above pragmatic self-interest self-select out of positions of power and influence. That is likely to be the case here as well.
- reaperman 2y ago
  While I agree with your logic I also focused on: > People who put their ideals above pragmatic self-interest self-select out of positions of power and influence. That is likely to be the case here as well. It’s also possible that this co-founder realizes he has more than enough eggs saved up in the “OpenAI” basket, and that it’s rational to de-risk by getting a lot of eggs in another basket to better guarantee his ability to provide a huge amount of wealth to his family. Even if OpenAI is clearly in the lead to him, he’s still looking at a lot of risk with most of his wealth being tied up in non-public shares of a single company.
  - andruby 2y ago
    While true, him leaving OpenAI to (one of) their biggest competitors does seriously risk his eggs in the OpenAI basket.
    - JCharante 2y ago
      it only risks his eggs if the anthropic basket does well, if anthropic doesn't go well then he still has his OpenAI eggs
    - muzani 2y ago
ChicagoDave 2y ago
OpenAI seems to be going the wrong direction. GenAI has clear limitations and I’m wondering if OpenAI just refuses to acknowledge those limits.
botanical 2y ago
I still can't believe the sham of current "AI" is just brute forcing LLMs to seem intelligent. I use ChatGPT almost every day which is supposedly best-in-class and it is dumb. Valuation of these companies are in the billions and all we get is unethical / not-safe-for-humanity AI companies popping up everywhere. I'm scared to see what the future holds with these companies scraping all sorts of our data.
sschueller 2y ago
This industry is changing very quickly even in the open source side. For example people are jumping Stability AI's ship since the disaster that is SD3 over to Flux which seems to be the new favorite in open source models.
FL33TW00D 2y ago
We are in the good timeline. I have a ton of faith in the Anthropic team to do this right.
- camillomiller 2y ago
  I have a lot of respect for the Amodei siblings, and it’s good to see how, despite everything, Sam Altman is paying the price of his own toxicity
xyst 2y ago
OpenAI is circling the drain.
bionhoward 2y ago
From one Closed Output company to another, what a huge difference (not)
bcx 2y ago
Useful context: Open ai had 11 cofounders. Schulman was one of them. Schuman was not the original head of ai alignment / safety he was promoted into it when former leader left for Anthropic. Not everyone who’s a founder of an nonprofit ai research institute wants to be a leader/manager of a much more complicated organization in a much more complicated environment. Open Ai was founded a while ago. The degree of their long time success is entirely based on their ability to hire and retain the right talent in the right roles.
- edouard-harris 2y ago
  All of that is true. Some more useful context: 9 out of those 11 cofounders are now gone. Three have either founded or are working for direct competitors (Elon, Ilya, John), five have quit (Trevor, Vicki, Andrej, Durk, Pam), and one has gone on extended leave but may return (Greg). Right now, Sam and Wojciech are the only ones left.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nerdjon 2y ago
So here is my question, Anthropic seems to be trying to say they are a "safer" and more responsible AI company. And based on the features they have released that seems true so far, but I am legitimately curious if they really are or if its basically marketing disguising not having some features ready yet?
qwertox 2y ago
I'm confused with GPT4o. While it's faster than GPT4, the quality is noticeably worse. It often enters into a state where it just repeats what it already said, when all I want is a clarification or another opinion on what we were chatting about. A clarification could be a short sentence, a snipped of code, but no, I get the entire answer again, slightly modified. I cancelled Plus for one month, but got back this week, and for some reason I feel that it really isn't worth it anymore. And the teasing with the free tier, which is downgraded really fast, is more of an annoyance than a solution. There are these promises of "memory" and "talking with it", but they are just ads of something that isn't on the market, at least I don't have access to both of these features. Gemini used to be pretty bad, but for some reason it feels like it has improved a lot, focusing more on the task than on trying to be humanly friendly. Claude and Mistral are not able to execute code, which is a dealbreaker for me.
- cyberpunk 2y ago
  Yeah, I’ve almost entirely stopped reaching for it anymore. At some point it’s so frustrating getting it to output something halfway towards what I need that I’m just better doing it myself. I’ll probably cancel soon.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  > It often enters into a state where it just repeats what it already said, when all I want is a clarification or another opinion on what we were chatting about. A clarification could be a short sentence, a snipped of code, but no, I get the entire answer again, slightly modified. It is almost impossible to talk it out of being so repetitive. Super annoying especially since it eats into its own context window.
- Marsymars 2y ago
  > A clarification could be a short sentence, a snipped of code, but no, I get the entire answer again, slightly modified. This tracks, in the sense that this is what you'll get from many real people when you actually want a clarification.
- ravagedbanana 2y ago
  I anecdotally agree that GPT-4o often feels really bad, but I can't tell how much of this is due to becoming more accustomed to the quality and hallucinations of using ChatGPT. I tend to see Huggingface's LLM (anonymized, elo-based) Leaderboard as the SoT regarding LLM quality, and according to it GPT-4o is markedly better than GPT-4, and contrary to popular sentiment, is on-par with or better than Claude in most ways (except being slightly worse at coding). Not sure what to believe, or if there is some other dimension that Hugginface is not capturing here.

403 points by tzury 2y ago

surfingdino 2y ago

Is it because OpenAI is slowly turning into Bing and you have to go elsewhere if you want to work on AI?

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862

stingraycharles 2y ago

Good for him, seems like OpenAI is moving towards a business model of profitability, and Anthropic seems to be more aligned with the original goals of OpenAI. Will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. It strikes me that OpenAI is better funded, though, and that AI (at their scale) is super expensive. How does Anthropic deal with this? How are they funding their operations? Edit: just looked it up, looks like they have a $4B investment from Amazon and a $2B investment from Google, which should be sufficient (I’m going to assume these are cloud credits). https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/amazon-doubles-down-on-anthropic-completing-its-planned-4b-investment/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/amazon-doubles-down-on-ant... https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-agrees-invest-up-2-bln-openai-rival-anthropic-wsj-2023-10-27/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-agrees-invest-up-2...

bamboozled 2y ago
Good for him, seems like OpenAI is moving towards a business model of profitability, and Anthropic seems to be more aligned with the original goals of OpenAI. What is open about Anthropic ?
- imadj 2y ago
  >> Anthropic seems to be more aligned with the original goals of OpenAI. > What is open about Anthropic ? OpenAI's radical mission drift to the opposite extreme, made other companies look relatively closer to its own original goal than itself. From OpenAI's original announcement[1]: > Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return > Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. But ever since the ChatGPT craze, OpenAI ironically got completely consumed by capitalizing on financial return. They now appear quite unprincipled as if they see nothing but dollar signs and market dominance, which made Meta, Anthropic, even Google, look more rational and healthy by comparison. These companies are publishing research papers, open models, contributing more to the ecosystem and overall appear to be more mindful and conservative when it comes to the ethical and societal impact. [1] - https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/
  - Hrun0 2y ago
    You didn't answer the question.
- resource_waste 2y ago
  I'm with you. Closed, Puritan models.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    It was actually a serious and open question, but I can see, given the hypocrisy found in a lot of these self-proclaimed "open AI" companies, how it would come across like I was refuting something ;)
daghamm 2y ago
Anthropic has more limits on their free services, and even paid services have a cap that changes depending on current load. They are not burning VC money at the rate other AI companies at this size do. I think they are more profitable than openai.

tzury 2y ago

Claude 3.5 Sonnet by Anthropic is the best model out there, if you are trying to have an extremely talented programmer paired to you. Somehow, OpenAI is playing catch with them rather than vice versa.

jiggawatts 2y ago
I just can't get past the "You must have a valid phone number to use Anthropic’s services." Umm... why? Nobody else in the AI space wants to track my number. I'm sure Anthropic has their "reasons". I just doubt it is one that I would like.
- 4gotunameagain 2y ago
  I definitely had to give up a number when registering for chatGPT.
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    Same here. I can understand, they don't want their usage to go over the roof with fake accts
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  For API access I didn’t need to provide a phone number. I use it with a selfhosted lobechat instance without problems.
- maccard 2y ago
  I'm not affiliated with Claude, but assuming you're serious: > Umm... why? https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8287232-why-do-i-need-to-verify-my-phone-number https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8287232-why-do-i-n... My guess is, these models are incredibly expensive to run, Claude has a fairly generous free tier, and phone numbers are one of the easiest ways to significantly reduce the number of duplicate accounts. > Nobody else in the AI space wants to track my number. Given they're likely hoovering up all of the data you're sending to them, and they have your email address to identify you, this seems like an odd hill to die on.

ochronus 2y ago

Go, Anthropic!

bookaway 2y ago

More inclusive title including Greg Brockman and Peter Deng departures: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862

bamboozled 2y ago
Is it just me or is Brockman leaving absolutely huge ? I can’t believe this isn’t front page. Basically everyone who is anyone has left or is leaving. It’s ridiculous.
- bookaway 2y ago
  Yeah, I was flabbergasted myself at the lack of commotion here when I got to the end of this article and learned of gdb's departure only then.
  - nwoli 2y ago
    Brockman isn’t leaving just going on a sabbatical/vacation
    - bookaway 2y ago
      For someone who cares deeply about the future of the company, lining up several significant departures temporary or otherwise on the same dates--including your own--seems the opposite of damage control. I could imagine a parody of the discussion between Altman and the board go something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sacn_bCj8tQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sacn_bCj8tQ
    - nunez 2y ago
      Karpathy went on sabbatical before he left Tesla...
    - bamboozled 2y ago
      It does say that, seems kind of strange though, rapidly growing company, apparently an absolutely key member of facilitating that growth and, poof, gone for 6 months at least.

Kjahd 2y ago

"Deepen my focus on AI alignment" is the new "spend more time with friends and family". What does that even mean? Is OpenAI secretly working on military applications? Or does it mean neutering the model until it evades all political discussions?

yeevs 2y ago
AI alignment has a well defined meaning. You can look at the wikipedia article if you wish. If you dismiss it as an important problem, that's fine but it's pretty clear what AI alignment means in this context.
- weberer 2y ago
  I think you misunderstood the point. There's a specific thing regarding alignment that Schulman and OpenAI disagree on, and that thing is not revealed to us. There are countless possibilities, but we are left in the dark. For example, his focus on alignment could be more about preventing the end of human civilization, while Microsoft/OpenAI's focus could be more about not expressing naughty opinions that advertisers dislike.
Version467 2y ago
It means that OpenAIs public commitments to allocate resources for safety research do not track with what they actually do and people who were hired to work on safety (or in schulmans case choose to focus on safety) don't like it, so they leave.
jebarker 2y ago
It may mean what it says. Alignment may not be seen as as important as building larger and more capable models so may not be receiving the resources or attention he wants. Doesn't have to be as dramatic as military applications or neutering models.

Version467 2y ago

Must've been a difficult decision with him being a cofounder and all, but afaik he's been the highest ranked safety minded person at openai. He says it's not because openai leadership isn't committed to safety, but I'm not sure I buy that. We've seen numerous safety people leave exactly because of that reason. What makes this way more interesting to me though is how this announcement coincides with Brockmans sabbatical. Maybe there's nothing to it, but I find it more likely that things really aren't going well with sama. Will be interesting to see how this plays out and if he actually returns next year or if this is just a soft quitting announcement.

meiraleal 2y ago
Th reality is that every other person in tech now is hoping for Sama to fail. The world doesn't need AI to have a silicon valley face. Anthropic is doing a much, much better PR work by not having a narcissist as CEO.
- thfjdtsrsg 2y ago
  Contrarily, I think the reality is that most of us couldn't care less about this AI soap opera.
  - danielbln 2y ago
    I want the best model at the lowest rate (and preferably lowest energy expenditure) and with the easiest access. Anything else is just background noise.
    - bookaway 2y ago
      Some people are wary of enabling ceos of disruptive technologies become the richest people in the world, take control of key internet assets and -- in random bursts of thin-skinned megalomania -- tilt the scales towards politicians or political groups who take action that negatively affect their own quality of life. It sounds absurd, but some are watching such a procession take place live as we speak.

ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago

All of this back-and-forth in the AI scene is the preparation before the storm. Like the opening scene of a chess game, before any pieces are exchanged. Like the Braveheart "Hold!" scene. The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers. Google search is the best business model ever. Everybody wants to become the Google of the AI era. The "AI answer" industry might become 10 times bigger than the search industry. Google ran for 2 years without any monetization. Let's see how long the incumbents will "Hold" this time.

jsheard 2y ago
> The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers. The magic of genAI is they don't need to put ads next to the answers where they can easily be ignored or adblocked, they can put the ads inside the answers instead. The future, like it or not, is advertisers bidding to bias AI models towards mentioning their products.
- Geezus_42 2y ago
  Sounds like a good way to guarantee no one ever uses it.
- kranke155 2y ago
  I wish I didnt read this because this sounds crazily prescient.
- ant6n 2y ago
  That’s how Google works. And also why Google doesn’t work anymore.
  - pydry 2y ago
    It's not just google, it's all media. The more embedded and authentic advertising looks the better it works. Magazine/newspaper ads exist as much as a pretext for the magazine to write nice things about their advertisers in reviews and such. The real product reddit sells, I think, is turning a blind eye when advertisers sockpuppet the hell out of the site. Movies try to milk product placement for as much as they can because it's more effective than regular advertising.

j4hdufd8 2y ago

Curious why this is allowed? NDA do not apply?

TiredOfLife 2y ago
He is not a slave.
michaelt 2y ago
Even if NDAs are legal If you joined a company late enough that they have HR and legal forcing everyone to sign NDAs then you're not a co-founder.
lotsofpulp 2y ago
Do you mean non compete? If so, then yes, non compete are illegal in California.
ramon156 2y ago
NDA's aren't really bound by law. Good luck explaining why this change is stealing customers, and which customers have left because of this change

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

gizmo 2y ago

This is probably bad news for ChatGPT 5. I don't think it's that likely this co-founder would leave for a Anthropic if OpenAI were clearly in the lead. Also from a safety perspective you would want to be at the AI company most likely to create truly disruptive AI tech. This looks to me like a bet against OpenAI more than anything else. OpenAI has a burn rate of about 5 billion a year and they need to raise ASAP. If the fundraising isn't going well or if OpenAI is forced to accept money from questionable investors that would also be a good reason to jump ship. In situations like these it's good to remember that people are much more likely to take the ethical and principled road when they also stand to gain from that choice. People who put their ideals above pragmatic self-interest self-select out of positions of power and influence. That is likely to be the case here as well.

reaperman 2y ago
While I agree with your logic I also focused on: > People who put their ideals above pragmatic self-interest self-select out of positions of power and influence. That is likely to be the case here as well. It’s also possible that this co-founder realizes he has more than enough eggs saved up in the “OpenAI” basket, and that it’s rational to de-risk by getting a lot of eggs in another basket to better guarantee his ability to provide a huge amount of wealth to his family. Even if OpenAI is clearly in the lead to him, he’s still looking at a lot of risk with most of his wealth being tied up in non-public shares of a single company.
- andruby 2y ago
  While true, him leaving OpenAI to (one of) their biggest competitors does seriously risk his eggs in the OpenAI basket.
  - JCharante 2y ago
    it only risks his eggs if the anthropic basket does well, if anthropic doesn't go well then he still has his OpenAI eggs
  - muzani 2y ago

ChicagoDave 2y ago

OpenAI seems to be going the wrong direction. GenAI has clear limitations and I’m wondering if OpenAI just refuses to acknowledge those limits.

botanical 2y ago

I still can't believe the sham of current "AI" is just brute forcing LLMs to seem intelligent. I use ChatGPT almost every day which is supposedly best-in-class and it is dumb. Valuation of these companies are in the billions and all we get is unethical / not-safe-for-humanity AI companies popping up everywhere. I'm scared to see what the future holds with these companies scraping all sorts of our data.

sschueller 2y ago

This industry is changing very quickly even in the open source side. For example people are jumping Stability AI's ship since the disaster that is SD3 over to Flux which seems to be the new favorite in open source models.

FL33TW00D 2y ago

We are in the good timeline. I have a ton of faith in the Anthropic team to do this right.

camillomiller 2y ago
I have a lot of respect for the Amodei siblings, and it’s good to see how, despite everything, Sam Altman is paying the price of his own toxicity

xyst 2y ago

OpenAI is circling the drain.

bionhoward 2y ago

From one Closed Output company to another, what a huge difference (not)

bcx 2y ago

Useful context: Open ai had 11 cofounders. Schulman was one of them. Schuman was not the original head of ai alignment / safety he was promoted into it when former leader left for Anthropic. Not everyone who’s a founder of an nonprofit ai research institute wants to be a leader/manager of a much more complicated organization in a much more complicated environment. Open Ai was founded a while ago. The degree of their long time success is entirely based on their ability to hire and retain the right talent in the right roles.

edouard-harris 2y ago
All of that is true. Some more useful context: 9 out of those 11 cofounders are now gone. Three have either founded or are working for direct competitors (Elon, Ilya, John), five have quit (Trevor, Vicki, Andrej, Durk, Pam), and one has gone on extended leave but may return (Greg). Right now, Sam and Wojciech are the only ones left.

deleted 2y ago

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nerdjon 2y ago

So here is my question, Anthropic seems to be trying to say they are a "safer" and more responsible AI company. And based on the features they have released that seems true so far, but I am legitimately curious if they really are or if its basically marketing disguising not having some features ready yet?

qwertox 2y ago

I'm confused with GPT4o. While it's faster than GPT4, the quality is noticeably worse. It often enters into a state where it just repeats what it already said, when all I want is a clarification or another opinion on what we were chatting about. A clarification could be a short sentence, a snipped of code, but no, I get the entire answer again, slightly modified. I cancelled Plus for one month, but got back this week, and for some reason I feel that it really isn't worth it anymore. And the teasing with the free tier, which is downgraded really fast, is more of an annoyance than a solution. There are these promises of "memory" and "talking with it", but they are just ads of something that isn't on the market, at least I don't have access to both of these features. Gemini used to be pretty bad, but for some reason it feels like it has improved a lot, focusing more on the task than on trying to be humanly friendly. Claude and Mistral are not able to execute code, which is a dealbreaker for me.

cyberpunk 2y ago
Yeah, I’ve almost entirely stopped reaching for it anymore. At some point it’s so frustrating getting it to output something halfway towards what I need that I’m just better doing it myself. I’ll probably cancel soon.
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
> It often enters into a state where it just repeats what it already said, when all I want is a clarification or another opinion on what we were chatting about. A clarification could be a short sentence, a snipped of code, but no, I get the entire answer again, slightly modified. It is almost impossible to talk it out of being so repetitive. Super annoying especially since it eats into its own context window.
Marsymars 2y ago
> A clarification could be a short sentence, a snipped of code, but no, I get the entire answer again, slightly modified. This tracks, in the sense that this is what you'll get from many real people when you actually want a clarification.
ravagedbanana 2y ago
I anecdotally agree that GPT-4o often feels really bad, but I can't tell how much of this is due to becoming more accustomed to the quality and hallucinations of using ChatGPT. I tend to see Huggingface's LLM (anonymized, elo-based) Leaderboard as the SoT regarding LLM quality, and according to it GPT-4o is markedly better than GPT-4, and contrary to popular sentiment, is on-par with or better than Claude in most ways (except being slightly worse at coding). Not sure what to believe, or if there is some other dimension that Hugginface is not capturing here.