16 ms·

It is hard for me to square "This company is a few short years away from building world-changing AGI" and "I'm stepping away to do my own thing". Maybe I'm just

• orionsbelt 2y ago
  Maybe she thinks the _world_ is a few short years away from building world-changing AGI, not just limited to OpenAI, and she wants to compete and do her own thing (and easily raise $1B like Ilya).
  • xur17 2y ago
    Which is arguably a good thing (having AGI spread amongst multiple entities rather than one leader).
    • tomrod 2y ago
      The show Person of Interest comes to mind.
      • tempodox 2y ago
        Samaritan will take us by the hand and lead us safely through this brave new world.
    • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      How is that good? An arms race increases the pressure to go fast and disregard alignment safety, non proliferation is essential.
      • actionfromafar 2y ago
        I think that train left some time ago.
      • ssnistfajen 2y ago
        Probably off-topic for this thread but my own rather fatalist view is alignment/safety is a waste of effort if AGI will happen. True AGI will be able to self-modify at a pace beyond human comprehension, and won't be obligated to comply with whatever values we've set for it. If it can be reined in with human-set rules like a magical spell, then it is not AGI. If humans have free will, then AGI will have it too. Humans frequently go rogue and reject value systems that took decades to be baked into them. There is no reason to believe AGI won't do the same.
      • PhilipRoman 2y ago
        Feels like the pope trying to ban crossbows tbh.
  • zooq_ai 2y ago
    I can't imagine investor pouring money on her. She has zero credibility both hardcore STEM like Ilya or a visionary like Jobs/Musk
    • phatfish 2y ago
      "Credibility" has nothing to do with how much money rich people are willing to give you.
    • KoftaBob 2y ago
      She was the CTO, how does she not have STEM credibility?
      • peanuty1 2y ago
        Has she published a single AI research paper?
      • zooq_ai 2y ago
        Sometimes with good looks and charm, you can fall up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira_Murati https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira_Murati Point me to a single credential where you feel confident of putting your money on her?
        • csomar 2y ago
          She studied math early on, so she's definitively technical. She is the CTO, so she kinda needs to balance the managerial while having enough understanding of the underlying technical.
          • zooq_ai 2y ago
            Again, it's easy to be a CTO for a startup. You just have to be at the right time. Your role is literally is, do all the stuff Researchers/Engineers have to deal with. Do you really think Mira set the technical agenda, architecture for OpenAI? It's a pity that HN crowd doesn't go one-level deep and truly understand on first principles
• jsheard 2y ago
  > It is hard for me to square "This company is a few short years away from building world-changing AGI" Altmans quote was that "it's possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days", which sounds a lot more optimistic on the surface than it actually is. A few thousand days could be interpreted as 10 years or more, and by adding the "possibly" qualifier he didn't even really commit to that prediction. It's hype with no substance, but vaguely gesturing that something earth-shattering is coming does serve to convince investors to keep dumping endless $billions into his unprofitable company, without risking the reputational damage of missing a deadline since he never actually gave one. Just keep signing those 9 digit checks and we'll totally build AGI... eventually. Honest.
  • z7 2y ago
    >Altmans quote was that AGI "could be just a few thousand days away" which sounds a lot more optimistic on the surface than it actually is. I think he was referring to ASI, not AGI.
    • umeshunni 2y ago
      Isn't ASI > AGI?
      • CaptainFever 2y ago
        Is the S here referring to Sentient or Specialised?
        • romanhn 2y ago
          Super, whatever that means
          • saalweachter 2y ago
            Actually, the S means hope.
        • 2y ago
• aresant 2y ago
  I think the much more likely scenario than product roadmap concerns is that Murati (and Ilya for that matter) took their shot to remove Sam, lost, and in an effort to collectively retain billion$ of enterprise value have been playing nice, but were never seriously going to work together again after the failed coup.
  • bg24 2y ago
    This is the likely scenario. Every conflict at exec level comes with a "messaging" aspect, with there being a comms team, and board to manage that part.
  • amenhotep 2y ago
    Failed coup? Altman managed to usurp the board's power, seems pretty successful to me
    • optimalsolver 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • richbell 2y ago
        For fun: > In the sentence, the people responsible for the coup are implied to be Murati and Ilya. The phrase "Murati (and Ilya for that matter) took their shot to remove Sam" suggests that they were the ones who attempted to remove Sam (presumably a leader or person in power) but failed, leading to a situation where they had to cooperate temporarily despite tensions.
    • xwowsersx 2y ago
      I think OP means the failed coup in which they attempted to oust Altman?
      • jordanb 2y ago
        Yeah the GP's point is the board was acting within its purview by dismissing the CEO. The coup was the successful counter-campaign against the board by Altman and the investors.
• golergka 2y ago
  Among other perfectly reasonable theories mentioned here, people burn out.
  • optimalsolver 2y ago
    This isn't a delivery app we're talking about. "Burn out" doesn't apply when the issue at hand is AGI (and, possibly, superintelligence).
    • kylehotchkiss 2y ago
      That isn't fair. People need a break. "AGI" / "superintelligence" is not a cause with so much potential we should just damage a bunch of people on the route to it.
    • jcranmer 2y ago
      Why would you think burnout doesn't apply? It should be a possibility in pretty much any pursuit, since it's primarily about investing too much energy into a direction that you can't psychologically bring yourself to invest any more into it.
    • minimaxir 2y ago
      Software is developed by humans, who can burn out for any reason.
    • agentcoops 2y ago
      Burnout, which doesn't need scare quotes, very much still applies for the humans involved in building AGI -- in fact, the burnout potential in this case is probably an order of magnitude higher than the already elevated chances when working through the exponential growth phase of a startup at such scale ("delivery apps" etc) since you'd have an additional scientific or societal motivation to ignore bodily limits. That said, I don't doubt that this particular departure was more the result of company politics, whether a product of the earlier board upheaval, performance related or simply the decision to bring in a new CTO with a different skill set.
  • PoignardAzur 2y ago
• m3kw9 2y ago
  A few short years is a prediction with lots of ifs and unknowns.
• hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
  It's likely hard for them to look at what their life's work is being used for. Customer-hostile chatbots, an excuse for executives to lay off massive amounts of middle class workers, propaganda and disinformation, regurgitated SEO blogspam that makes Google unusable. The "good" use cases seem to be limited to trivial code generation and writing boilerplate marketing copy that nobody reads anyway. Maybe they realized that if AGI were to be achieved, it would be squandered on stupid garbage regardless. Now I am become an AI language model, destroyer of the internet.
• romanovcode 2y ago
  Maybe she has inside info that it's not "around the corner". Making bigger and bigger models does not make AGI, not to mention exponential increase in power requirements for these models which would be basically unfeasible for mass market. Maybe, just maybe, we reached diminishing returns with AI, for now at least.
  • steinvakt 2y ago
    People have been saying that we reached the limits of AI/LLMs since GPT4. Using o1-preview (which is barely a few weeks old) for coding, which is definitely an improvement, suggests there's still solid improvements going on, don't you think?
    • samatman 2y ago
      Continued improvement is returns, making it inherently compatible with a diminishing returns scenario. Which I also suspect we're in now: there's no comparing the jump between GPT3.5 and GPT4 with GPT4 and any of the subsequent releases. Whether or not we're leveling out, only time will tell. That's definitely what it looks like, but it might just be a plateau.
  • xabadut 2y ago
    + there are many untapped sources of data that contain information about our physical world, such as video the curse of dimensionality though...
• tomrod 2y ago
  My take is that Altman recognizes LLM winter is coming and is trying to entrench.
  • chinathrow 2y ago
    Looking at ChatGPT or Claude coding output, it's already here.
    • criticalfault 2y ago
      Bad? I just tried Gemini and it was useless.
      • andrewinardeer 2y ago
        Google ought to hang its head in utter disgrace over the putrid swill they have the audacity to peddle under the Gemini label. Their laughably overzealous nanny-state censorship, paired with a model so appallingly inept it would embarrass a chatbot from the 90s, makes it nothing short of highway robbery that this digital dumpster fire is permitted to masquerade as a product fit for public consumption. The sheer gall of Google to foist this steaming pile of silicon refuse onto unsuspecting users borders on fraudulent.
      • mnk47 2y ago
        Starting to wonder why this is so common in LLM discussions at HN. Someone says "X is the model that really impressive. Y is good too." Then someone responds "What?! I just used Z and it was terrible!" I see this at least once in practically every AI thread
        • tomrod 2y ago
          Humans understand mean but struggle with variance.
        • rpmisms 2y ago
          It depends on what you're writing. GPT-4 can pump out average React all day long. It's next to useless with Laravel.
• f0e4c2f7 2y ago
  There is one clear answer in my opinion: There is a secondary market for OpenAI stock. It's not a public market so nobody knows how much you're making if you sell, but if you look at current valuations it must be a lot. In that context, it would be quite hard not to leave and sell or stay and sell. What if oai loses the lead? What if open source wins? Keeping the stock seems like the actual hard thing to me and I expect to see many others leave (like early googlers or Facebook employees) Sure it's worth more if you hang on to it, but many think "how many hundreds of M's do I actually need? Better to derisk and sell"
  • chatcode 2y ago
    What would you do if a) you had more money than you'll ever need in your lifetime b) you think AI abundance is just around the corner, likely making everything cheaper c) you realize you still only have a finite time left on this planet d) you have non-AGI dreams of your own that you'd like to work on e) you can get funding for anything you want, based on your name alone Do you keep working at OpenAI?
• Apocryphon 2y ago
  What if she believes AGI is imminent and is relocating to a remote location to build a Faraday-shielded survival bunker.
  • wantsanagent 2y ago
    This is now my head-canon.
    • tempodox 2y ago
      Laputan machine!
  • ben_w 2y ago
    Then she hasn't ((read or watched) and (found plausible)) any of the speculative fiction about how that's not enough to keep you safe.
    • Apocryphon 2y ago
      No one knows how deep the bunker goes
      • ben_w 2y ago
        We can be reasonably confident of which side of the Mohorovičić discontinuity it may be, as existing tools would be necessary to create it in the first place.
• paxys 2y ago
  Regardless of where AI currently is and where it is going, you don't simply quit as CTO of the company that is leading the space by far in terms of technology, products, funding, revenue, popularity, adoption and just about everything else. She was fired, plain and simple.
  • piuantiderp 2y ago
    Or you are disgusted and leave. Are there things more important than money? You'd certainly be certain the OpenAI founders sold themselves as, not'in'it'for'the money.
  • rvnx 2y ago
    You can leave and be happy with 30M+ USD in stocks and prospects of easy to find a job also.
  • noiwillnot 2y ago
    > leading the space by far in terms of technology, products, funding, revenue, popularity, adoption and just about everything else I am not 100% sure that they are still clearly leading the technology part, but agree in all other accounts.
• lacker 2y ago
  It's easy to have missed this part of the story in all the chaos, but from the NYTimes in March: Ms. Murati wrote a private memo to Mr. Altman raising questions about his management and also shared her concerns with the board. That move helped to propel the board’s decision to force him out. https://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... It should be no surprise if Sam Altman wants executives who opposed his leadership, like Mira and Ilya, out of the company. When you're firing a high-level executive in a polite way, it's common to let them announce their own departure and frame it the way they want.
  • startupsfail 2y ago
    Greg Brockman, OpenAI President and co-founder is also on extended leave of absence. And John Schulman, and Peter Deng are out already. Yet the company is still shipping, like no other. Recent multimodal integrations and benchmarks of o1 are outstanding.
    • mistercheph 2y ago
      In my humble opinion you're wrong, Sora and 4o voice are months old and no signs they're not vaporware, and they still haven't shipped a text model on par with 3.5 sonnet!
    • fairity 2y ago
      Quite interesting that this comment is downvoted when the content is factually correct and pertinent. It's a very relevant fact that Greg Brockman recently left on his own volition. Greg was aligned with Sam during the coup. So, the fact that Greg left lends more credence to the idea that Murati is leaving on her own volition.
      • frakkingcylons 2y ago
        > It's a very relevant fact that Greg Brockman recently left on his own volition. Except that isn’t true. He has not resigned from OpenAI. He’s on extended leave until the end of the year. That could become an official resignation later, and I agree that that seems more likely than not. But stating that he’s left for good as of right now is misleading.
• ren_engineer 2y ago
  most of the people seem to be leaving due to the direction where Altman is taking OpenAI. It went from a charity to him seemingly doing everything possible to monetize it for himself both directly and indirectly by him trying to raise funds for AI adjacent traditionally structured companies he controlled probably not coincidence that she resigned at almost the same time the rumors about OpenAI completely removing the non-profit board are getting confirmed - https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-remove-non-profit-control-give-sam-altman-equity-sources-say-2024-09-25/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o...
  • ethbr1 2y ago
    Afaik, he's exceedingly driven to do that, because if they run out of money Microsoft gets to pick the carcass clean.
• elAhmo 2y ago
  It would be definitely difficult thing to walk away. This is just one more in a series of massive red flags around this company, from the insanely convoluted governance scheme, over the board drama, to many executives and key people leaving afterwards. It feels like Sam is doing the cleanup and anyone who opposes him has no place at OpenAI. This, coming around the time where there are rumors of possible change to the corporate structure to be more friendly to investors, is an interesting timing.
• shmatt 2y ago
  I feel like this is stating the obvious - but i guess not to many - but a probabilistic syllable generator is not intelligence, it does not understand us, it cannot reason, it can only generate the next syllable It makes us feel understood in the same ways John Edward used to in daytime tv, its all about how language makes us feel true AGI...unfortunately we're not even close
  • CooCooCaCha 2y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong but you could use this reductive rhetorical strategy to dismiss any AI algorithm. "It's just X" is frankly shallow criticism.
    • iLoveOncall 2y ago
      And there's nothing wrong about that: the fact that _artificial intelligence_ will never lead to general intelligence isn't exactly a hot take.
      • CooCooCaCha 2y ago
        That's both a very general and very bold claim. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that's too strong of a claim given how we don't know what is possible yet and there's frankly no good reason to completely dismiss the idea of artificial general intelligence.
        • NoGravitas 2y ago
          I think the existence of biological general intelligence is a proof-by-existence for artificial general intelligence. But at the same time, I don't think LLM and similar techniques are likely in the evolutionary path of artificial general intelligence, if it ever comes to exist.
          • CooCooCaCha 2y ago
            That's fair. I think it could go either way. It just bugs me when people are so certain and it's always some shallow reason about "probability" and "it just generates text".
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  What top executives write in these farewell letters often has little to do with their actual reasons for leaving.
• letitgo12345 2y ago
  Maybe it is but it's not the only company that is
• iLoveOncall 2y ago
  People still believe that a company that has only delivered GenAI models is anywhere close to AGI? Success in not around any corner. It's pure insanity to even believe that AGI is possible, let alone close.
  • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    What can you confidently say AI will not be able to do in 2029? What task can you declare, without hesitation, will not be possible for automatic hardware to accomplish?
    • iLoveOncall 2y ago
      Easy: doing something that humans don't already do and program it to do. AI is incapable of any innovation. It accelerates human innovation, just like any other piece of software, but that's it. AI makes protein folding more efficient, but it can't ever come up with the concept of protein folding on its own. It's just software. You simply cannot have general intelligence without self-driven innovation. Not improvement, innovation. But if we look at much more simple concepts, 2029 is only 5 years (not even) away, so I'm pretty confident that anything that it cannot do right now it won't be able to do in 2029 either.
    • 015a 2y ago
      Discover new physics.
• goodluckchuck 2y ago
  I could see it being close, but also feeling an urgency to get there first / believing you could do it better.
• yieldcrv 2y ago
  easy for me to relate to that, my time is more interesting than that being in San Francisco for 6 years and success means getting hauled in front of Congress and European Parliament cant think of a worse occupational nightmare after having an 8-figure nest egg already
• apwell23 2y ago
  Her rise didn't make sense to me. Product manager at tesla to CTO at openAI with no technical background and a deleted profile ? This is a very strange company to say the least.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    A significant portion of the old guard at OpenAI was part of the Effective Altruism, AI Alignment, and Open Philanthropy movement. Most hiring in the foundational AI/model space is very nepotistic and biased towards people in that clique. Also, Elon Musk used to be the primary patron for OpenAI before losing interest during the AI Winter in the late 2010s.
    • comp_throw7 2y ago
      Which has zero explanatory power w.r.t. Murati, since she's not part of that crowd at all. But her previously working at an Elon company seems like a plausible route, if she did in fact join before he left OpenAI (since he left in Feb 2018).
  • nebula8804 2y ago
    >Product manager at tesla to CTO at openAI with no technical background and a deleted profile ? Doesn't she have a dual bachelors in Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering?
    • apwell23 2y ago
      Thats what is needed to get a job as a product manager these days?
      • nebula8804 2y ago
        Well that and years of experience leading projects. Wasn't she head of the Model X program at Tesla? But my point is that she does have a technical background.
• jappgar 2y ago
  I'm sure this isn't the actual reason, but one possible interpretation is "I'm stepping away to enjoy my life+money before it's completely altered by the singularity."
• ikari_pl 2y ago
  unless you didn't see it as a success, and want to abandon the ship before it gets torpedoed
• aucisson_masque 2y ago
  It's corporate bullcrap, you're not supposed to believe it. What really matters in these statement is what is not said.
• dyauspitr 2y ago
  I doubt she’s leaving to do her own thing, I don’t think she could. She probably got pushed out.
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Maybe it has to do with Sam getting rid of the nonprofit control and having equity? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548
• mmaunder 2y ago
  I think they have an innovation problem. There are a few signals wrt the o1 release that indicate this. Not really a new model but an old model with CoT. And the missing system prompt - because they're using it internally now. Also seeing 500 errors from their REST endpoints intermittently.
• vl 2y ago
  But also most likely she is already fully vested. Why stay and work 60 hours a week in such case?
• ggm 2y ago
  Hint: success is not just around the corner.
• hatthew 2y ago
  Could also be that she just got tired of the day to day responsibilities. Maybe she realized she that she hasn't been able to spend more than 5 minutes with her kids/nieces/nephews last week. Maybe she was going to murder someone if she had to sit through another day with 10 hours of meetings. I don't know her personal life or her feelings, but it doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine that she was just done.
• blihp 2y ago
  This was the company that made all sorts of noise about how they couldn't release GPT-2 to the public because it was too dangerous[1]. While there are many very useful applications being developed, OpenAI's main deliverable appears to be hype that I suspect when it's all said and done they will fail to deliver on. I think the main thing they are doing quite successfully is cashing in on the hype before people figure it out. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-generating-algorithm-ai-dangerous.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-genera...
  • johnfn 2y ago
    GPT-2 and descendants have polluted the internet with AI spam. I don't think that this is too unreasonable of a claim.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• mvkel 2y ago
  A couple of the original inventors of the transformer left Google to start crypto companies.
• sheepscreek 2y ago
  Another theory: it’s possibly related to a change of heart at OpenAI to become a for-profit company. It is rumoured Altman’s gunning for a 7% stake in the for-profit entity. That would be very substantial at a $150B valuation. Squeezing out senior execs could be a way for him to maximize his claim on the stake. Notwithstanding, the execs may have disagreed with the shift in culture.
• TrackerFF 2y ago
  Nothing difficult about it. 1) She has a very good big picture view of the market. She has probably identified some very specific problems that need to be solved, or at least knows where the demand lies. 2) She has the senior exec OpenAI pedigree, which makes raising funds almost trivial. 3) She can probably make as much, if not more, by branching out on her own - while having more control, and working on more interesting stuff.