zlacker

Greg is the one who announced GPT-4. Sam enabled Greg and vice-versa.

The next AI winter may have just begun...

>>jumplo+(OP)
"the next AI winter may have just begun" -- good!

time to stop playing with existential fire. humans suffice. every flaw you see in humans will be magnified X times by an intelligence X times stronger than humans. whether it is autonomous or human lead.

>>jumplo+(OP)
what a fucking ridiculous statement - sam altman is just a YC VC machine man, and I'm sure openai can find another CTO in the hottest ML market in history.

>>jumplo+(OP)
Thermonuclear winter is more likely at this point. 4 AI safety believers that formed a board majority just got spooked.

>>jumplo+(OP)
If the AI ecosystem is so fragile that the ouster of two men from one start up is enough to destroy it then it wasn't ever a solid bet. I don't think this will mean much for the broad viability of these systems. Gpt is clearly valuable, but I guess we need to figure out if these systems can be run profitably. I'm not sure people have given much thought to how insanely expensive running massive gpu clusters is. It might just fundamentally not scale well.

>>jumplo+(OP)
> The next AI winter may have just begun...

Because two executives were ousted from a company? That's dramatic.

>>banana+r1
We just don’t know enough yet. Sam could’ve been let go over a disagreement about direction. Or he could’ve been cooking the books. Or he could’ve been concealing the true operating costs. Or subscriber numbers. Some of those things just require a change in leadership. Others are existential risks to OpenAI.

>>jumplo+(OP)
Thomas Crapper stepped down from the Crapper company in 1904, which is why we don't have Crappers today.

>>Legibl+h4
this entire thread is a fascinating treatise on AI philosophy mixed with business conspiracy.

>>jumplo+(OP)
The CEO and board aren't the people who create the actual products or do the research.

>>jumplo+(OP)
Yea cause Steve Jobs dying stopped apple from becoming a juggernaut. People need to stop idolizing the fact that one or two people are "indispensable". Humanity moves forward eventually, even if Einstein wasn't born, someone would have figured out general relativity.

>>woeiru+h5
Or their first real AGI could have ousted him.

>>strike+ug
Unrelated, but maybe you mean special relativity. Poincaré was very close and others like Lorentz would have made the logical leap to discover special relativity. Most scientists however agree that GR would have taken much longer for someone to fill in the crucial gap of modeling gravity as the geometry of space time.

But sooner or later someone would have done it.

>>strike+ug
It's also quite silly that society often credits one guy at the top who supposedly has "incredible vision" and yet would likely fail at explaining even the most basic technical details. And if such a person must be credited, why not the CTO, chief engineers, or principal scientists, who are at least closer to what actually drive the technical innovations than the CEO?

In reality, it's actually the 1000s of actual engineers that deserve most of the credit, and yet are never mentioned. Society never learns about the one engineer (or team) that solves a problem that others have been stuck on for some time. The aggregate contributions of such innovators are a far more significant driving force behind progress.

Why do we never hear of the many? It's probably because it's just easier to focus on a single personality who can be marketed as an "unconventional genius" or some such nonsense.

>>sicari+Nt
Our stupid monkey brains are evolved to work in a primitive, human centric way, we always need a "figure", a "leader" to look up to, we can't comprehend that many people can be involved in something, that doesn't satisfy our primate brains need to follow or worship someone.

>>jumplo+(OP)
we can only hope

i'm sick and tired of everyone sticking a chatbot on random crap that doesn't need it and has no reason to ever need it. it also made HN a lot less interesting to read

>>sicari+Nt
Human motivations and effort are like Brownian motion completely stochastic and hard to direct in any one direction to make any significant impact .

A effective leader whether it is Musk, Jobs, Altman, Gandhi, Mandela (or Hitler for that matter) has the unique to skill to be able to direct everyone in a common direction efficiently like a superconducting material.

They are not individually contributing like say a Nobel laureate doing theoretical research. They get accolades they get is because they were able to direct many other people to achieve a very hard objective and keep them motivated and focused on the common vision, That is rare and difficult to do.

In the case of Altman, yes there were 1000s researchers, programmers who did the all the actual heavy lifting of getting OpenAI where it is today.

However without his ability and vision to get funding none of them would be doing what they are doing today at OpenAI.

All those people would not work a day more if there is no pay, would not be able train any model without resources. A CEO's first priotity is to make that happen by selling that vision to investors, Secondly he has to sell the vision to all these researchers to leave their cushy academic and large company jobs to work in small unproven startup and create an environment they can thrive in their roles. He has done both very well.