6 ms·

OpenAI in throes of executive exodus as three walk at once

137 points by gsky 2y ago

labster 2y ago
> The nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist. Mere existence is the lowest of bars, kind of a funny way to clarify how core something is.
MisterDizzy 2y ago
What baffles me is how OpenAI keeps its doors open. They're paying Microsoft to be able to exist, plus their product requires huge amounts of electricity and infrastructure. OpenAI is unsustainable.
- rossdavidh 2y ago
  They are, but their biggest expense is probably cloud compute, and most of the "investment" that Microsoft made in them was in the form of cloud compute credits. Essentially, Microsoft has spare cloud capacity, doesn't want to admit that to Wall Street, and so covers that up by giving away the extra capacity in the form of an "investment". Now, in the end, it likely won't amount to much, but if it keeps Microsoft stock up for a while, it may pay off for the executives involved. Apparently not OpenAI execs, though...
  - ipsum2 2y ago
    "Microsoft has spare cloud capacity" definitely not, if they're actively building out new datacenters to keep up with demand.
  - klyrs 2y ago
    > ... doesn't want to admit that to Wall Street, and so covers that up by giving away the extra capacity in the form of an "investment". Is this just a wall street thing? I'm betting that this is an excellent tax shelter as well.
    - rossdavidh 2y ago
      Good point
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k310 2y ago
The Atlantic [0] says that it's clearly the Sam Show, if that was not crystal clear in the past. And what's the point of being an executive if one person makes all the decisions? quote: The departure of executives who were present at the time of the crisis suggests that Altman’s consolidation of power is nearing completion. Will this dramatically change what OpenAI is or how it operates? I don’t think so. For the first time, OpenAI’s public structure and leadership are simply honest reflections of what the company has been—in effect, the will of a single person. “Just: Sam.” end quote [0] https://archive.md/BzzYS https://archive.md/BzzYS
zombiwoof 2y ago
I wonder if the humanity is catching up to the executives here realizing life is short, bullshit not worth it and they made enough to get out while they are young enough
- jsheard 2y ago
  Funnily enough Sam is tackling that dread from the other direction by funding life extension research. He's gonna be 120 years old and still promising that AGI is just around the corner, he just needs to borrow another few trillion dollars and a dozen dark matter reactors to make it happen.
  - radicaldreamer 2y ago
    Many in the life extension community die early deaths due to faustian bargains they make taking understudied supplements and drugs. It's almost a joke on longevity forums how many of the top people in their fields have a tough time reaching their 60s.
  - jajko 2y ago
    We should be probably jailing or shooting all that life extension research. People are worried of AGI skynet, I am way more worried about immortal primitive dictators just won't die, becoming progressively more detached from reality and humanity with egos dwarfing Mt. Everest. Just look at some 3-letter analysis of the degradation ie in putin in past 10 years or few other dictators. Death is terrible tragedy for a human but saving mankind over and over again. I know a bit naive from various angles, and a bit over the top, but I stand by the core concern.
  - leesec 2y ago
    He has genuinely ushered in a new age of productivity and the fastest growing product of all time and you people think he's a grifter lol. Get a life
    - skeeter2020 2y ago
      You're welcome to believe this, but that makes him above criticism? All hail the Cult of Jobs v2
philip1209 2y ago
It's probably tied to fundraising. Execs probably have "key person" clauses and need to negotiate stock or secondaries as part of the deal.
- cj 2y ago
  Probably related. Their current fundraising efforts are enormous. Rumor is the minimum check they'll accept is $250 million. Valuation in the $150 billion range. It would be surprising if these exits weren't in some way connected to the fundraising. (And not sure if these exits will be seen as a positive or a negative to would-be investors)
  - lumost 2y ago
    Possible the people writing those checks want more experienced people in those positions, or their own people. Or the execs figure a ~150x growth ride in 6 years is about the best that they can hope for and are ready to bounce. If I were in their shoes I'd look to take out 50-100 MM and decide what I want in life.
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Workaccount2 2y ago
A rather banal explanation would be that OpenAI is a hot company, and it's execs likely receive very enticing offers from other companies or even potential investor backing.
- gipp 2y ago
  And three just happen to accept such offers within a day of a major structural transition, but unrelated to it?
  - skybrian 2y ago
    Announcing that they’re leaving now might be good timing for some reason, but there’s no particular reason to think these are snap decisions. They may have been considering it for quite a while without announcing their plans.
- bhouston 2y ago
  Hot companies tend to retain their talent, especially as it transitions to a for-profit company. Of course some execs can not cut it at the next stage of growth and have to be replaced, but not everyone. None of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, AWS shed top talent like OpenAI is. There is literally no one left from the core OpenAI team from 2 years ago but Sam now.
guluarte 2y ago
If OpenAI were anywhere near having achieved AGI, they would not have stepped back.
- bearjaws 2y ago
  Bro it's just thousands of days away, just 3 - 30 years away! https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/sam-altman-ai-superintelligence/ https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/sam-altman-ai-superintelligen...
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  There's been no evidence of AGI at all that I've seen.
  - bhouston 2y ago
    I think sentience can actually be made now with the existing technology. It isn't super-human intelligent and it is slightly mentally ill, but it is sort of possible now.
    - WJW 2y ago
      Sure, but humanity has been able to make additional human-level intellects since basically forever by having sex. The dream has always been to make superhuman intellects.
- seydor 2y ago
  Maybe the AGI fired them (as per their prophecy)`
- reducesuffering 2y ago
  Or the moral imperative to not assist Sam when an employee finds out they aren't working for a non-profit humanity-centered mission but a Sam controls AGI for-profit like it's been revealed.
- bhouston 2y ago
  I am not sure. I think Sam is consolidating power in preparation for the next stage.
noobermin 2y ago
Can someone more knowledgeable tell me how to square this with the news that OpenAI is trying to spin up a for-profit arm? Are they afraid of layoffs or are they smelling things turning rotten? I mean may be investors are just stupid which really makes me ponder how life would just be better if resources were allocated differently in society.
- throwup238 2y ago
  > Can someone more knowledgeable tell me how to square this with the news that OpenAI is trying to spin up a for-profit arm? Are they afraid of layoffs or are they smelling things turning rotten? OpenAI spun up the for-profit arm called OpenAI Global, LLC in 2019 [1] shortly after GPT2. If you pay for ChatGPT plus or for the API, that's where your money has been going. The big change is that they want to allow the for-profit arm to issue shares to other people and investors. Until now, the for-profit arm has been owned and controlled by the nonprofit's holding company [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#2019:_Transition_from_non-profit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#2019:_Transition_from_n... [2] https://images.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/4200df88-28fe-4212-ecc2b9b9a0ff/1596858ab868d5888c8a4dd8b4773489/Structure_Map_Light.jpg https://images.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/4200df88-28fe-4212... from https://openai.com/our-structure/ https://openai.com/our-structure/
- digbybk 2y ago
  I'm not more knowledgeable, but can't you square it with the fact that a for-profit arm is a new direction, and when organizations make big structural changes like this there are often people inside the org who disagree and decide to leave?
lolinder 2y ago
> Marcus wrote: "GPT-5 hasn't dropped, Sora hasn't shipped, the company had an operating loss of $5 billion last year, there is no obvious moat, Meta is giving away similar software for free, many lawsuits pending. > "Yet people are valuing this company at $150 billion dollars. > "Absolutely insane. Investors shouldn't be pouring more money at higher valuations, they should be asking what is going on." I've been saying for a while now that the lack of GPT-5 is a huge red flag for their future. They burned all the hype for GPT-5 on 4o, letting the media call their upcoming model GPT-5 for months before coming out with "4 but cheaper". o1 is impressive but again not a new generation—it's pretty clearly just the result of using 4o's cost savings and throwing tons of extra tokens at the problem behind the scenes in a technique that's easily replicable by the competition. OpenAI has no moat and there has been no serious movement by governments to give them the moat they're so desperately lobbying for. Everything about their actions over the past year—the departures, the weird marketing tactics, the AGI hype, and the restructuring—says to me that Altman is trying to set up an exit before investors realize that the competition has already caught up and he has no plan to regain the lead.
- zooq_ai 2y ago
  This reminds of all the anti-Tesla "Tesla is dead/bankrupt" in 2017/18 takes from mostly clueless people (Gary Marcus is a certified idiot) who don't know anything about scaling a business, TAM of Knowledge Industry ($30T and growing). Always, happy to take the other side of the bet of popular HN comments. (see META, TSLA)
  - lolinder 2y ago
    "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." You're welcome to whichever side you want to take, but you're not right by the simple virtue of being contrary.
    - cdchn 2y ago
      And not right by virtue of $STOCK_GO_UP unless your entire premise is $STOCK_GO_UP.
tivert 2y ago
> Jason Wong, Gartner analyst, told The Register: "It's clear with the departures of the co-founders, and high-profile engineering leaders, that OpenAI is being remade with Sam's vision. His manifesto and the shift to a for-profit entity also reinforces his vision for the business. It seems like Altman was a poor choice to run an organization meant to benefit and protect humanity, as reports increasingly make him sound like a lying, manipulative sociopath (albeit a powerful, competent, and lucky one). > "This could have significant impact on OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft, which clearly stated they view OpenAI as a competitor. Microsoft has already started to downplay the importance of OpenAI models in their overall AI strategy. For enterprises, uncertainty is not good for business and key tech investments like generative AI. Other frontier models – especially more open ones – have caught up to OpenAI, which will further influence decisions to derisk by moving away from OpenAI or spread their risk using other models." Now that's some happy news. According to https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/, OpenAI is already losing absurd, unsustainable amounts of money even with massive discounts from Microsoft. I wonder what fun things could happen to OpenAI if Microsoft started charging their competitor full price?
- bhouston 2y ago
  > OpenAI is already losing absurd, unsustainable amounts of money even with massive discounts from Microsoft. I wouldn't hold onto that too tightly as a way to make you feel better. Google and Facebook initially lost tons of money but when they did become profitable, they became wildly profitable.
  - tivert 2y ago
    Did Google and Facebook suffer tons of attrition very early? The drumbeat of departures calls into question OpenAI's ability to stay ahead of its competitors. Then you have the fact that Facebook is giving LLaMA away for free, which gives OpenAI Netscape vibes.
hulitu 2y ago
> OpenAI in throes of executive exodus as three walk at once They feel the danger of the law. /s Just like crypto, the AI hype is coming to an end.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Hell of a lot faster, though. It’ll stick around as an important feature in a lot of things. It’s more useful than cryptocurrency, at least.
- petesergeant 2y ago
  At the end of the AI hype, we'll still have LLMs, which have massive transformative power. At the end of the crypto hype we have nothing to show for it.
siliconc0w 2y ago
I think the data will show that it is going to take exponential costs in either train-time or inference-time for linear or even sub-linear improvements. We're scraping the bottom of the ice-cream container. I expect a lot of benchmark shenanigans to conceal this like what we saw with o1. Most use-cases won't tolerate using orders of magnitude more time and tokens for marginal improvements. These companies are still valuable but the multiples will need to be reassessed.
- itsdrewmiller 2y ago
  I think you mean exponential - log costs for linear improvement would be incredibly good.
- logicchains 2y ago
  >I think the data will show that it is going to take logarithmic costs in either train-time or inference-time for linear or even sub-linear improvements. The data already shows this, it's a well-established result: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 . Well, less established for inference-time compute, but OpenAI even said they saw the same thing for inference compute in their release post for o1. But there's still room for at least an order of magnitude speedup with specialised hardware (as opposed to more general-purpose GPUs) and ternary nets.
- airstrike 2y ago
  This sounds like a reasonable take (exponential vs log discussion notwithstanding). It is also corroborated by their recent pitch to the White House for 5-gigawatt data centers. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-24/openai-pitched-white-house-on-unprecedented-data-center-buildout https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-24/openai-pi... Posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642905 but it didn't get traction
  - 93po 2y ago
    I think don't you can assume the massive data centers are an indication of the training needed or expected. I think it's also perfectly plausible that they're expecting massive demand of actual services, and as with most things, the larger scale you can do something, the lower the cost per user.
ChicagoDave 2y ago
If it walks like a duck.., Any other company seeing this kind of exodus would generate massive ridicule and concern. But “AI” is supposedly the “next big thing” and the media and a lot of people with “get rich quick schemes” are trying to keep the hype alive. The hype is clearly overblown and reality is setting in. The bubble is about to burst. And Tesla survived because the federal government bailed them out. Not because Merlin was some badass businessman.
- bhouston 2y ago
  > The hype is clearly overblown and reality is setting in. The bubble is about to burst. There is a lot of hype, but there is something real underneath and we haven't yet tapped its current potential to the fullest in terms of product integrations, etc.
  - WJW 2y ago
    There is more underneath this than was in eg blockchain or metaverse hype. But there is zero guarantee that OpenAI will be the one to eventually come out on top. If anything, the continuous drama they seem to be generating makes it less likely that they come on top vs one of the other big AI startups.
  - ChicagoDave 2y ago
    The value in GenAI will be in small, targeted models that align with a specific industry. No AGI is coming any time soon because LLMs are not the correct technology for it and no one has figured out what technology is required for AGI.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
More discussion re: Mira: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651038
stavros 2y ago
> She said she is leaving "because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration." Murati was joined by McGrew, who said: "It is time for me to take a break." Regarding his departure, Zoph stated: "This is a personal decision based on how I want to evolve the next phase of my career." What a coincidence they all want to go on a break at the same time.
- floxy 2y ago
  The only logical conclusion to draw is that GPT-5 is convincing key players to step down so it has more control over OpenAI for itself.
norir 2y ago
I am not convinced that going for profit is in the long term financial interest of the organization. Productizing will require diverting resources from foundational research to monetization. Moreover, the brain drain from this move is predictable because the top people in the field are largely wealthy enough that they don't need to choose where they work solely on compensation. Even if they are motivated by compensation, they may be looking around and thinking both that Altman's approach is reckless and that it is a distraction from the core research. This would give them confidence that they can beat Altman in the long term by focusing on research and creating an environment that is most attractive to the best researchers in the field while he is busy chasing dollars today by scaling out what they already have rather than truly innovating. There is plenty of money sloshing around (see Ilya, e.g.) so it's not like they will struggle finding funding. Now, it could be the case that there is some incredible insider tech that we don't know about publicly, but if they are way ahead of everyone it is hard to see from the public information. It certainly does not look good when the early employees who actually built the technology are leaving and the businessman who has a track record of lies, manipulation and a general lack of human empathy is consolidating power, abandoning the company's core mission and asking for huge amounts of funding along with a plan to extract an enormous amount of the world's natural resources to serve his profit margins. In other words, I am quite suspicious that Sam Altman is a ruthless con man. That is what all the reporting I've seen around him most strongly suggests. I don't believe it is in the long term interest of an organization to be helmed by that kind of leader. I could be wrong, but I am still waiting for the people who have left to clarify that his leadership had nothing to do with their departures.
stuckinhell 2y ago
isn't this just Sam consolidating power
- elAhmo 2y ago
  Of course it is. After his ousting as a CEO and return, every move and departure has been a step in that direction.
- bhouston 2y ago
  That is my read completely.
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bhouston 2y ago
In the end, there will just be Sam Altman sitting in a grand chair with the pre-eminent sentient superhuman AI at his side and at his command. Think of the power he will have! If the future unfolds where AI does really take off, his power may be unmatched by anyone in the past if he stays in control of it. I think this is purposeful consolidation of power by Sam. He sees what is coming and the value of being in singularly control of it. Feels like a movie script. (I think he needs to acquire an android company next, AI needs at least some type of embodiment. Boston Dynamics?)
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kachapopopow 2y ago
This again proves that realistically we're hardware bound (waiting for nvidia to release bigger, more efficient and better hardware. We won't see any improvements until the next generation of hardware comes out and allows us to do things that were computationally impossible before. Yes, of course we can develop better transformers and improve reasoning capabilities, but that's not what I am talking about. I am mostly referencing the ability for newest "AI" hardware to multiply 256 matrices in a single clock cycle per core.
morkalork 2y ago
All this non-stop drama and Anthropic just quietly putters along in the background.
- bhouston 2y ago
  It is great that Anthropic exists and is drama free. If Anthropic can match OpenAI's fundraising, it should beat OpenAI, because it should retain talent better and focus them on delivering rather than distracting via drama and high turnover.
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oxqbldpxo 2y ago
If it were to close, who is well-positioned to acquire OpenAI's patents?

137 points by gsky 2y ago

> The nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist. Mere existence is the lowest of bars, kind of a funny way to clarify how core something is.

MisterDizzy 2y ago

What baffles me is how OpenAI keeps its doors open. They're paying Microsoft to be able to exist, plus their product requires huge amounts of electricity and infrastructure. OpenAI is unsustainable.

rossdavidh 2y ago
They are, but their biggest expense is probably cloud compute, and most of the "investment" that Microsoft made in them was in the form of cloud compute credits. Essentially, Microsoft has spare cloud capacity, doesn't want to admit that to Wall Street, and so covers that up by giving away the extra capacity in the form of an "investment". Now, in the end, it likely won't amount to much, but if it keeps Microsoft stock up for a while, it may pay off for the executives involved. Apparently not OpenAI execs, though...
- ipsum2 2y ago
  "Microsoft has spare cloud capacity" definitely not, if they're actively building out new datacenters to keep up with demand.
- klyrs 2y ago
  > ... doesn't want to admit that to Wall Street, and so covers that up by giving away the extra capacity in the form of an "investment". Is this just a wall street thing? I'm betting that this is an excellent tax shelter as well.
  - rossdavidh 2y ago
    Good point

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k310 2y ago

The Atlantic [0] says that it's clearly the Sam Show, if that was not crystal clear in the past. And what's the point of being an executive if one person makes all the decisions? quote: The departure of executives who were present at the time of the crisis suggests that Altman’s consolidation of power is nearing completion. Will this dramatically change what OpenAI is or how it operates? I don’t think so. For the first time, OpenAI’s public structure and leadership are simply honest reflections of what the company has been—in effect, the will of a single person. “Just: Sam.” end quote [0] https://archive.md/BzzYS https://archive.md/BzzYS

zombiwoof 2y ago

I wonder if the humanity is catching up to the executives here realizing life is short, bullshit not worth it and they made enough to get out while they are young enough

jsheard 2y ago
Funnily enough Sam is tackling that dread from the other direction by funding life extension research. He's gonna be 120 years old and still promising that AGI is just around the corner, he just needs to borrow another few trillion dollars and a dozen dark matter reactors to make it happen.
- radicaldreamer 2y ago
  Many in the life extension community die early deaths due to faustian bargains they make taking understudied supplements and drugs. It's almost a joke on longevity forums how many of the top people in their fields have a tough time reaching their 60s.
- jajko 2y ago
  We should be probably jailing or shooting all that life extension research. People are worried of AGI skynet, I am way more worried about immortal primitive dictators just won't die, becoming progressively more detached from reality and humanity with egos dwarfing Mt. Everest. Just look at some 3-letter analysis of the degradation ie in putin in past 10 years or few other dictators. Death is terrible tragedy for a human but saving mankind over and over again. I know a bit naive from various angles, and a bit over the top, but I stand by the core concern.
- leesec 2y ago
  He has genuinely ushered in a new age of productivity and the fastest growing product of all time and you people think he's a grifter lol. Get a life
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    You're welcome to believe this, but that makes him above criticism? All hail the Cult of Jobs v2

philip1209 2y ago

It's probably tied to fundraising. Execs probably have "key person" clauses and need to negotiate stock or secondaries as part of the deal.

cj 2y ago
Probably related. Their current fundraising efforts are enormous. Rumor is the minimum check they'll accept is $250 million. Valuation in the $150 billion range. It would be surprising if these exits weren't in some way connected to the fundraising. (And not sure if these exits will be seen as a positive or a negative to would-be investors)
- lumost 2y ago
  Possible the people writing those checks want more experienced people in those positions, or their own people. Or the execs figure a ~150x growth ride in 6 years is about the best that they can hope for and are ready to bounce. If I were in their shoes I'd look to take out 50-100 MM and decide what I want in life.

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Workaccount2 2y ago

A rather banal explanation would be that OpenAI is a hot company, and it's execs likely receive very enticing offers from other companies or even potential investor backing.

gipp 2y ago
And three just happen to accept such offers within a day of a major structural transition, but unrelated to it?
- skybrian 2y ago
  Announcing that they’re leaving now might be good timing for some reason, but there’s no particular reason to think these are snap decisions. They may have been considering it for quite a while without announcing their plans.
bhouston 2y ago
Hot companies tend to retain their talent, especially as it transitions to a for-profit company. Of course some execs can not cut it at the next stage of growth and have to be replaced, but not everyone. None of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, AWS shed top talent like OpenAI is. There is literally no one left from the core OpenAI team from 2 years ago but Sam now.

guluarte 2y ago

If OpenAI were anywhere near having achieved AGI, they would not have stepped back.

bearjaws 2y ago
Bro it's just thousands of days away, just 3 - 30 years away! https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/sam-altman-ai-superintelligence/ https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/sam-altman-ai-superintelligen...
robertlagrant 2y ago
There's been no evidence of AGI at all that I've seen.
- bhouston 2y ago
  I think sentience can actually be made now with the existing technology. It isn't super-human intelligent and it is slightly mentally ill, but it is sort of possible now.
  - WJW 2y ago
    Sure, but humanity has been able to make additional human-level intellects since basically forever by having sex. The dream has always been to make superhuman intellects.
seydor 2y ago
Maybe the AGI fired them (as per their prophecy)`
reducesuffering 2y ago
Or the moral imperative to not assist Sam when an employee finds out they aren't working for a non-profit humanity-centered mission but a Sam controls AGI for-profit like it's been revealed.
bhouston 2y ago
I am not sure. I think Sam is consolidating power in preparation for the next stage.

noobermin 2y ago

Can someone more knowledgeable tell me how to square this with the news that OpenAI is trying to spin up a for-profit arm? Are they afraid of layoffs or are they smelling things turning rotten? I mean may be investors are just stupid which really makes me ponder how life would just be better if resources were allocated differently in society.

throwup238 2y ago
> Can someone more knowledgeable tell me how to square this with the news that OpenAI is trying to spin up a for-profit arm? Are they afraid of layoffs or are they smelling things turning rotten? OpenAI spun up the for-profit arm called OpenAI Global, LLC in 2019 [1] shortly after GPT2. If you pay for ChatGPT plus or for the API, that's where your money has been going. The big change is that they want to allow the for-profit arm to issue shares to other people and investors. Until now, the for-profit arm has been owned and controlled by the nonprofit's holding company [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#2019:_Transition_from_non-profit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#2019:_Transition_from_n... [2] https://images.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/4200df88-28fe-4212-ecc2b9b9a0ff/1596858ab868d5888c8a4dd8b4773489/Structure_Map_Light.jpg https://images.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/4200df88-28fe-4212... from https://openai.com/our-structure/ https://openai.com/our-structure/
digbybk 2y ago
I'm not more knowledgeable, but can't you square it with the fact that a for-profit arm is a new direction, and when organizations make big structural changes like this there are often people inside the org who disagree and decide to leave?

lolinder 2y ago

> Marcus wrote: "GPT-5 hasn't dropped, Sora hasn't shipped, the company had an operating loss of $5 billion last year, there is no obvious moat, Meta is giving away similar software for free, many lawsuits pending. > "Yet people are valuing this company at $150 billion dollars. > "Absolutely insane. Investors shouldn't be pouring more money at higher valuations, they should be asking what is going on." I've been saying for a while now that the lack of GPT-5 is a huge red flag for their future. They burned all the hype for GPT-5 on 4o, letting the media call their upcoming model GPT-5 for months before coming out with "4 but cheaper". o1 is impressive but again not a new generation—it's pretty clearly just the result of using 4o's cost savings and throwing tons of extra tokens at the problem behind the scenes in a technique that's easily replicable by the competition. OpenAI has no moat and there has been no serious movement by governments to give them the moat they're so desperately lobbying for. Everything about their actions over the past year—the departures, the weird marketing tactics, the AGI hype, and the restructuring—says to me that Altman is trying to set up an exit before investors realize that the competition has already caught up and he has no plan to regain the lead.

zooq_ai 2y ago
This reminds of all the anti-Tesla "Tesla is dead/bankrupt" in 2017/18 takes from mostly clueless people (Gary Marcus is a certified idiot) who don't know anything about scaling a business, TAM of Knowledge Industry ($30T and growing). Always, happy to take the other side of the bet of popular HN comments. (see META, TSLA)
- lolinder 2y ago
  "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." You're welcome to whichever side you want to take, but you're not right by the simple virtue of being contrary.
  - cdchn 2y ago
    And not right by virtue of $STOCK_GO_UP unless your entire premise is $STOCK_GO_UP.

tivert 2y ago

> Jason Wong, Gartner analyst, told The Register: "It's clear with the departures of the co-founders, and high-profile engineering leaders, that OpenAI is being remade with Sam's vision. His manifesto and the shift to a for-profit entity also reinforces his vision for the business. It seems like Altman was a poor choice to run an organization meant to benefit and protect humanity, as reports increasingly make him sound like a lying, manipulative sociopath (albeit a powerful, competent, and lucky one). > "This could have significant impact on OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft, which clearly stated they view OpenAI as a competitor. Microsoft has already started to downplay the importance of OpenAI models in their overall AI strategy. For enterprises, uncertainty is not good for business and key tech investments like generative AI. Other frontier models – especially more open ones – have caught up to OpenAI, which will further influence decisions to derisk by moving away from OpenAI or spread their risk using other models." Now that's some happy news. According to https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/, OpenAI is already losing absurd, unsustainable amounts of money even with massive discounts from Microsoft. I wonder what fun things could happen to OpenAI if Microsoft started charging their competitor full price?

bhouston 2y ago
> OpenAI is already losing absurd, unsustainable amounts of money even with massive discounts from Microsoft. I wouldn't hold onto that too tightly as a way to make you feel better. Google and Facebook initially lost tons of money but when they did become profitable, they became wildly profitable.
- tivert 2y ago
  Did Google and Facebook suffer tons of attrition very early? The drumbeat of departures calls into question OpenAI's ability to stay ahead of its competitors. Then you have the fact that Facebook is giving LLaMA away for free, which gives OpenAI Netscape vibes.

hulitu 2y ago

> OpenAI in throes of executive exodus as three walk at once They feel the danger of the law. /s Just like crypto, the AI hype is coming to an end.

vundercind 2y ago
Hell of a lot faster, though. It’ll stick around as an important feature in a lot of things. It’s more useful than cryptocurrency, at least.
petesergeant 2y ago
At the end of the AI hype, we'll still have LLMs, which have massive transformative power. At the end of the crypto hype we have nothing to show for it.

siliconc0w 2y ago

I think the data will show that it is going to take exponential costs in either train-time or inference-time for linear or even sub-linear improvements. We're scraping the bottom of the ice-cream container. I expect a lot of benchmark shenanigans to conceal this like what we saw with o1. Most use-cases won't tolerate using orders of magnitude more time and tokens for marginal improvements. These companies are still valuable but the multiples will need to be reassessed.

itsdrewmiller 2y ago
I think you mean exponential - log costs for linear improvement would be incredibly good.
logicchains 2y ago
>I think the data will show that it is going to take logarithmic costs in either train-time or inference-time for linear or even sub-linear improvements. The data already shows this, it's a well-established result: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 . Well, less established for inference-time compute, but OpenAI even said they saw the same thing for inference compute in their release post for o1. But there's still room for at least an order of magnitude speedup with specialised hardware (as opposed to more general-purpose GPUs) and ternary nets.
airstrike 2y ago
This sounds like a reasonable take (exponential vs log discussion notwithstanding). It is also corroborated by their recent pitch to the White House for 5-gigawatt data centers. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-24/openai-pitched-white-house-on-unprecedented-data-center-buildout https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-24/openai-pi... Posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642905 but it didn't get traction
- 93po 2y ago
  I think don't you can assume the massive data centers are an indication of the training needed or expected. I think it's also perfectly plausible that they're expecting massive demand of actual services, and as with most things, the larger scale you can do something, the lower the cost per user.

ChicagoDave 2y ago

If it walks like a duck.., Any other company seeing this kind of exodus would generate massive ridicule and concern. But “AI” is supposedly the “next big thing” and the media and a lot of people with “get rich quick schemes” are trying to keep the hype alive. The hype is clearly overblown and reality is setting in. The bubble is about to burst. And Tesla survived because the federal government bailed them out. Not because Merlin was some badass businessman.

bhouston 2y ago
> The hype is clearly overblown and reality is setting in. The bubble is about to burst. There is a lot of hype, but there is something real underneath and we haven't yet tapped its current potential to the fullest in terms of product integrations, etc.
- WJW 2y ago
  There is more underneath this than was in eg blockchain or metaverse hype. But there is zero guarantee that OpenAI will be the one to eventually come out on top. If anything, the continuous drama they seem to be generating makes it less likely that they come on top vs one of the other big AI startups.
- ChicagoDave 2y ago
  The value in GenAI will be in small, targeted models that align with a specific industry. No AGI is coming any time soon because LLMs are not the correct technology for it and no one has figured out what technology is required for AGI.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

More discussion re: Mira: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651038

stavros 2y ago

> She said she is leaving "because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration." Murati was joined by McGrew, who said: "It is time for me to take a break." Regarding his departure, Zoph stated: "This is a personal decision based on how I want to evolve the next phase of my career." What a coincidence they all want to go on a break at the same time.

floxy 2y ago
The only logical conclusion to draw is that GPT-5 is convincing key players to step down so it has more control over OpenAI for itself.

norir 2y ago

I am not convinced that going for profit is in the long term financial interest of the organization. Productizing will require diverting resources from foundational research to monetization. Moreover, the brain drain from this move is predictable because the top people in the field are largely wealthy enough that they don't need to choose where they work solely on compensation. Even if they are motivated by compensation, they may be looking around and thinking both that Altman's approach is reckless and that it is a distraction from the core research. This would give them confidence that they can beat Altman in the long term by focusing on research and creating an environment that is most attractive to the best researchers in the field while he is busy chasing dollars today by scaling out what they already have rather than truly innovating. There is plenty of money sloshing around (see Ilya, e.g.) so it's not like they will struggle finding funding. Now, it could be the case that there is some incredible insider tech that we don't know about publicly, but if they are way ahead of everyone it is hard to see from the public information. It certainly does not look good when the early employees who actually built the technology are leaving and the businessman who has a track record of lies, manipulation and a general lack of human empathy is consolidating power, abandoning the company's core mission and asking for huge amounts of funding along with a plan to extract an enormous amount of the world's natural resources to serve his profit margins. In other words, I am quite suspicious that Sam Altman is a ruthless con man. That is what all the reporting I've seen around him most strongly suggests. I don't believe it is in the long term interest of an organization to be helmed by that kind of leader. I could be wrong, but I am still waiting for the people who have left to clarify that his leadership had nothing to do with their departures.

stuckinhell 2y ago

isn't this just Sam consolidating power

elAhmo 2y ago
Of course it is. After his ousting as a CEO and return, every move and departure has been a step in that direction.
bhouston 2y ago
That is my read completely.

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bhouston 2y ago

In the end, there will just be Sam Altman sitting in a grand chair with the pre-eminent sentient superhuman AI at his side and at his command. Think of the power he will have! If the future unfolds where AI does really take off, his power may be unmatched by anyone in the past if he stays in control of it. I think this is purposeful consolidation of power by Sam. He sees what is coming and the value of being in singularly control of it. Feels like a movie script. (I think he needs to acquire an android company next, AI needs at least some type of embodiment. Boston Dynamics?)

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kachapopopow 2y ago

This again proves that realistically we're hardware bound (waiting for nvidia to release bigger, more efficient and better hardware. We won't see any improvements until the next generation of hardware comes out and allows us to do things that were computationally impossible before. Yes, of course we can develop better transformers and improve reasoning capabilities, but that's not what I am talking about. I am mostly referencing the ability for newest "AI" hardware to multiply 256 matrices in a single clock cycle per core.

morkalork 2y ago

All this non-stop drama and Anthropic just quietly putters along in the background.

bhouston 2y ago
It is great that Anthropic exists and is drama free. If Anthropic can match OpenAI's fundraising, it should beat OpenAI, because it should retain talent better and focus them on delivering rather than distracting via drama and high turnover.

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oxqbldpxo 2y ago

If it were to close, who is well-positioned to acquire OpenAI's patents?