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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 fro

by 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
    There's usually enough room for 2-3 winners. iOS and Android. Intel and AMD. Firefox and Chrome. Also, OpenAI has some of the most expensive people in the world, which is why they're burning so much money. Presumably they're so expensive because they're some of the smartest people in the world. Some are likely smarter than Schulman.
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > Presumably they're so expensive because they're some of the smartest people in the world. I don't want to dissuade you from this belief, but maybe you should pay less attention to the boastful marketing of these AI companies. :-) Seriously: from what I know about the life of insanely smart people, I'd guess that OpenAI (and most other companies that in their marketing claim to hire insanely smart people) doesn't have any idea how to actually make use of such people. Such companies rather hire for other specific personality traits.
Gettingolderev 2y ago
I don't think a co-founder would just jump ship just because. That would be very un-co-founderish. I would also assume that he earns enough money to be rich. You are not a co-founder of OpenAI if you are not playing with the big boys. So he definitly wants to be in this AI future but not with OpenAI. So i would argue it has to do with something which is important to him so important that the others disagree with him.
mark_l_watson 2y ago
I find the 5 billion a year burn rate amazing, and OpenAI’s competition is stiff. I happily pay ABACUS.AI ten dollars a month for easy access to all models, with a nice web interface. I just started paying OpenAI twenty a month again, but only because I am hoping to get access to their interactive talking mode. I was really surprised when OpenAI started providing most of their good features for free. I am not a business person, but it seems crazy to me to not try for profitability, of at least being close to profitability. I would like to know what the competitors’ burn rates are also. For API use, I think OpenAI’s big competition is Groq, serving open models like Llama 3.1.
- codazoda 2y ago
  I don’t use Groq, but I agree the free models are probably the biggest competitors. Especially since we can run them locally and privately. Because I’ve seen a lot of questions about how to use these models, I recorded a quick video showing how I use them on MacOS. https://makervoyage.com/ai https://makervoyage.com/ai
  - mark_l_watson 2y ago
    I use Ollama running local models about half the time (from Common Lisp or Python apps) myself.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Local private models are not a threat to openai. Local is not where the money is, it’s in cloud services and api usage fees.
    - elorant 2y ago
      They aren’t in terms of profitability, but they are in terms of future revenue. If most early adopters start self-hosting models then a lot of future products will be build outside of OpenAI’s ecosystem. Then corporations will also start searching how to self-host models because privacy is the primary concern for AI’s adoption. And we already have models like Llama3 400B that is close to ChatGPT.
jejeyyy77 2y ago
this AI safety stuff is just a rabbit hole of distraction, IMO. OpenAI will be better off without this crowd and just focus on building good products.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tivert 2y ago
  > this AI safety stuff is just a rabbit hole of distraction, IMO. > OpenAI will be better off without this crowd and just focus on building good products. Ah yes, "focus on building good products" without safety. Except a "good product" is safe. Otherwise you're getting stuff like an infinite range plane powered by nuclear jet engine that has fallout for exhaust [1]. [1] IIRC, nuclear-powered cruise missiles were contemplated: their attack would have consisted on dropping bombs on their targets, then flying around in circles spreading radioactive fallout over the land.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > Except a "good product" is safe. Depends on how you define "safe". The kind of "safe" we get from OpenAI today seems to be mostly censorship, I don't think we need more of that.
  - jejeyyy77 2y ago
    what i'm saying is the safety risks of AI are over exaggerated to the point of comedy. it is no more dangerous than any other kind of software. there is an effort by AI-doomer groups to try and regulate/monopolize the technology, but fortunately it looks like open source has put a wrench in this.
lolinder 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. Yep. The writing was already on the wall for GPT-5 when they teased a new model for months and let the media believe it was GPT-5, before finally released GPT-4o and admitting they hadn't even started on 5 yet (they quietly announced they were starting a new foundation model a few weeks after 4o). Don't get me wrong, the cost savings for 4o are great, but it was pretty obvious at that point that they didn't have a clue how they were going to move past 4 in terms of capabilities. If they had a path they wouldn't have intentionally burned the hype for 5 on 4o. This departure just further cements what I was already sure was the case—OpenAI has lost the lead and doesn't know how they're going to get it back.
- rvnx 2y ago
  Or it could be the start of the enshittification of Anthropic, like OpenAI ruined GPT-4 with GPT-4o by overly simplifying it. I hope not, because Claude is much better, especially at programming.
  - nar001 2y ago
    They ruined GPT-4? How? I thought they were basically the same models, just multimodal
    - rvnx 2y ago
      GPT-4o is different from GPT-4, you can "feel" it is smaller model that really struggles to do reasoning and programming and has a much weaker logic. If you compare to Claude Sonnet, just the context window considerably improves the answers as well. Of course there is no objective metrics, but from a user perspective I can see the coding skills are much better in Anthropic (and it's funny, because in theory, according to benchmarks it is Google Gemini the best, but in reality is absolutely terrible).
      - toxik 2y ago
        Have to say I agree with this, 4o is dumber in my subjective experience.
dirtybirdnj 2y ago
> 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. I don't know what world you live in, but my experience has been 100% the opposite. Most people will not do what is ethical or principled. When you try to discuss it with them, they will DARVO and congrats, you have now been targeted for public retribution by the sociopathic child in the drivers seat. The thing that upsets me most is the survivorship bias you express, and how everybody thinks that people are "nice and kind" they are not. The world is an awful terrible place full of liars, cheats and bad people that WE NEED TO STOP CELEBRATING. One more time WE NEED TO STOP CELEBRATING BAD PEOPLE WHO DO BAD THINGS TO OTHERS.
- gizmo 2y ago
  People are not one-dimensional. People can lie and cheat on one day and act honorably the day after. A person can be kind and generous and cruel and selfish. Most people are just of average morality. Not unusually good nor unusually bad. People in positions of power get there because they seek power, so there is a selection effect there for sure. But nonetheless you'll find that very successful people are in most ways regular people with regular flaws. (Also, I think you misread what I wrote.)
- diab0lic 2y ago
  I think you may have misread the quote you’re replying to. You and the GP post appear to be in agreement. I read it as: P(ethical_and_principled) < P(ethical_and_principled|stands_to_gain) Or in plain language people are more likely to do the right thing when they stand to gain, rather than just because it’s the right thing.
bookaway 2y ago
If being sued by the world's richest billionaire or the whole non-profit thing didn't complicate matters, and if the board had any teeth, one could wish the board would explore a merger with Anthropic with Altman leaving at the end of all of it and save everyone another years worth of drama.
- 1235125 2y ago
  [flagged]
lupire 2y ago
Could be as simple as switching from a limited profit/pa company to unlimited profit/pay.
sangnoir 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. I'll play devil's advocate. People leave bad bosses all the time, even when everything else is near-perfect. Additionally, cofounders sometimes get pushed out - even Steve Jobs went through this.
wseqyrku 2y ago
They won't release 5 before election.

by gizmo 2y ago

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
  There's usually enough room for 2-3 winners. iOS and Android. Intel and AMD. Firefox and Chrome. Also, OpenAI has some of the most expensive people in the world, which is why they're burning so much money. Presumably they're so expensive because they're some of the smartest people in the world. Some are likely smarter than Schulman.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > Presumably they're so expensive because they're some of the smartest people in the world. I don't want to dissuade you from this belief, but maybe you should pay less attention to the boastful marketing of these AI companies. :-) Seriously: from what I know about the life of insanely smart people, I'd guess that OpenAI (and most other companies that in their marketing claim to hire insanely smart people) doesn't have any idea how to actually make use of such people. Such companies rather hire for other specific personality traits.

Gettingolderev 2y ago

I don't think a co-founder would just jump ship just because. That would be very un-co-founderish. I would also assume that he earns enough money to be rich. You are not a co-founder of OpenAI if you are not playing with the big boys. So he definitly wants to be in this AI future but not with OpenAI. So i would argue it has to do with something which is important to him so important that the others disagree with him.

mark_l_watson 2y ago

I find the 5 billion a year burn rate amazing, and OpenAI’s competition is stiff. I happily pay ABACUS.AI ten dollars a month for easy access to all models, with a nice web interface. I just started paying OpenAI twenty a month again, but only because I am hoping to get access to their interactive talking mode. I was really surprised when OpenAI started providing most of their good features for free. I am not a business person, but it seems crazy to me to not try for profitability, of at least being close to profitability. I would like to know what the competitors’ burn rates are also. For API use, I think OpenAI’s big competition is Groq, serving open models like Llama 3.1.

codazoda 2y ago
I don’t use Groq, but I agree the free models are probably the biggest competitors. Especially since we can run them locally and privately. Because I’ve seen a lot of questions about how to use these models, I recorded a quick video showing how I use them on MacOS. https://makervoyage.com/ai https://makervoyage.com/ai
- mark_l_watson 2y ago
  I use Ollama running local models about half the time (from Common Lisp or Python apps) myself.
- dartos 2y ago
  Local private models are not a threat to openai. Local is not where the money is, it’s in cloud services and api usage fees.
  - elorant 2y ago
    They aren’t in terms of profitability, but they are in terms of future revenue. If most early adopters start self-hosting models then a lot of future products will be build outside of OpenAI’s ecosystem. Then corporations will also start searching how to self-host models because privacy is the primary concern for AI’s adoption. And we already have models like Llama3 400B that is close to ChatGPT.

jejeyyy77 2y ago

this AI safety stuff is just a rabbit hole of distraction, IMO. OpenAI will be better off without this crowd and just focus on building good products.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tivert 2y ago
> this AI safety stuff is just a rabbit hole of distraction, IMO. > OpenAI will be better off without this crowd and just focus on building good products. Ah yes, "focus on building good products" without safety. Except a "good product" is safe. Otherwise you're getting stuff like an infinite range plane powered by nuclear jet engine that has fallout for exhaust [1]. [1] IIRC, nuclear-powered cruise missiles were contemplated: their attack would have consisted on dropping bombs on their targets, then flying around in circles spreading radioactive fallout over the land.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > Except a "good product" is safe. Depends on how you define "safe". The kind of "safe" we get from OpenAI today seems to be mostly censorship, I don't think we need more of that.
- jejeyyy77 2y ago
  what i'm saying is the safety risks of AI are over exaggerated to the point of comedy. it is no more dangerous than any other kind of software. there is an effort by AI-doomer groups to try and regulate/monopolize the technology, but fortunately it looks like open source has put a wrench in this.

lolinder 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. Yep. The writing was already on the wall for GPT-5 when they teased a new model for months and let the media believe it was GPT-5, before finally released GPT-4o and admitting they hadn't even started on 5 yet (they quietly announced they were starting a new foundation model a few weeks after 4o). Don't get me wrong, the cost savings for 4o are great, but it was pretty obvious at that point that they didn't have a clue how they were going to move past 4 in terms of capabilities. If they had a path they wouldn't have intentionally burned the hype for 5 on 4o. This departure just further cements what I was already sure was the case—OpenAI has lost the lead and doesn't know how they're going to get it back.

rvnx 2y ago
Or it could be the start of the enshittification of Anthropic, like OpenAI ruined GPT-4 with GPT-4o by overly simplifying it. I hope not, because Claude is much better, especially at programming.
- nar001 2y ago
  They ruined GPT-4? How? I thought they were basically the same models, just multimodal
  - rvnx 2y ago
    GPT-4o is different from GPT-4, you can "feel" it is smaller model that really struggles to do reasoning and programming and has a much weaker logic. If you compare to Claude Sonnet, just the context window considerably improves the answers as well. Of course there is no objective metrics, but from a user perspective I can see the coding skills are much better in Anthropic (and it's funny, because in theory, according to benchmarks it is Google Gemini the best, but in reality is absolutely terrible).
    - toxik 2y ago
      Have to say I agree with this, 4o is dumber in my subjective experience.

dirtybirdnj 2y ago

> 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. I don't know what world you live in, but my experience has been 100% the opposite. Most people will not do what is ethical or principled. When you try to discuss it with them, they will DARVO and congrats, you have now been targeted for public retribution by the sociopathic child in the drivers seat. The thing that upsets me most is the survivorship bias you express, and how everybody thinks that people are "nice and kind" they are not. The world is an awful terrible place full of liars, cheats and bad people that WE NEED TO STOP CELEBRATING. One more time WE NEED TO STOP CELEBRATING BAD PEOPLE WHO DO BAD THINGS TO OTHERS.

gizmo 2y ago
People are not one-dimensional. People can lie and cheat on one day and act honorably the day after. A person can be kind and generous and cruel and selfish. Most people are just of average morality. Not unusually good nor unusually bad. People in positions of power get there because they seek power, so there is a selection effect there for sure. But nonetheless you'll find that very successful people are in most ways regular people with regular flaws. (Also, I think you misread what I wrote.)
diab0lic 2y ago
I think you may have misread the quote you’re replying to. You and the GP post appear to be in agreement. I read it as: P(ethical_and_principled) < P(ethical_and_principled|stands_to_gain) Or in plain language people are more likely to do the right thing when they stand to gain, rather than just because it’s the right thing.

bookaway 2y ago

If being sued by the world's richest billionaire or the whole non-profit thing didn't complicate matters, and if the board had any teeth, one could wish the board would explore a merger with Anthropic with Altman leaving at the end of all of it and save everyone another years worth of drama.

1235125 2y ago
[flagged]

lupire 2y ago

Could be as simple as switching from a limited profit/pa company to unlimited profit/pay.

sangnoir 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. I'll play devil's advocate. People leave bad bosses all the time, even when everything else is near-perfect. Additionally, cofounders sometimes get pushed out - even Steve Jobs went through this.

wseqyrku 2y ago

They won't release 5 before election.