Don’t shoot the messenger. No one else has given you a plausible reason why Sama was abruptly fired, and this is what a reporter said of Ilya:
‘He freaked the hell out of people there. And we’re talking about AI professionals who work in the biggest AI labs in the Bay area. They were leaving the room, saying, “Holy shit.”
The point is that Ilya Sutskever took what you see in the media, the “AGI utopia vs. potential apocalypse” ideology, to the next level. It was traumatizing.’
OpenAI and its people are there to maximize shareholder value.
This is the same company that went from "non-profit" to "jk, lol, we are actually for-profit now". I still think that move was not even legal but rules for thee not for me.
They ousted sama because it was bad for business. Why? We may never know, or we may know next week, who knows? Literally.
Clearly not, as Sama has no equity and a board of four people with little, if any, equity, just unilaterally decided to upend their status quo and assured $ printer, to the bewilderment of their $2.5T 49% owner, Microsoft.
Even if they say this was for safety reasons, let's not blindly believe them. I am on the pro safety side, but I'm gonna wait till the dust settles before I come to any conclusions on this matter.
GPT 4 is clearly AGI. All of the GPTs have shown general intelligence, but GPT 4 is human-level intelligence.
When you compare it to an entry level data entry role, it's absolutely AGI. You loosely tell it what it needs to do, step-by-step, and it does it.
Was the original launch of ChatGPT "safe?" Of course not, but it moved the industry forward immensely.
Swisher's follow up is even more eyebrow raising: "The developer day and how the store was introduced was in inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast. My bet: He’ll have a new company up by Monday."
What exactly from the demo day was "pushing too far?" We got a dall-e api, a larger context window and some cool stuff to fine tune GPT. I don't really see anything there that is too crazy... I also don't get the sense that Sam was cavalier about AI safety. That's why I am so surprised that the apparent reason for his ousting appears to be a boring, old, political turf war.
My sense is that there is either more to the story, or Sam is absolutely about to have his Steve Jobs moment. He's also likely got a large percentage of the OpenAI researcher's on his side.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03762
If it was really AGI, there won't even be ambiguity and room for comments like mine.
Also, the fact that it can't incorporate knowledge at the same time as it interacts with us kind of limits the idea of an AGI.
But regardless, it's absurdly impressive what it can do today.
Yes, other companies had similar models. I know Google, in particular, already had similar LLMs, but explicitly chose not to incorporate them into its products. Sam / OpenAI had the gumption to take the state of the art and package it in a way that it could be interacted with by the masses.
In fact, thinking about it more, the parallels with Steve Jobs are uncanny. Google is Xerox. ChatGPT is the graphical OS. Sam is...
Then you haven't been paying any attention to them.
https://chat.openai.com/share/986f55d2-8a46-4b16-974f-840cb0...
This thing is two years old. Be patient.
Do you have any data that shows that we’ll plateau any time soon?
Because if this trend continues, we’ll have superhuman levels of compute within 5 years.
People that have lost those abilities still have human level of intelligence.
https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725678074333635028?t...
Kara's reporting on who is involved: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725702501435941294?t...
Confirmation of a lot of Kara's reporting by Ilya himself: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1725717129318560075?t...
Ilya felt that Sam was taking the company too far in the direction of profit seeking, more than was necessary just to get the resources to build AGI, and every bit of selling out gives more pressure on OpenAI to produce revenue and work for profit later, and risks AGI being controlled by a small powerful group instead of everyone. After OpenAI Dev Day, evidently the board agreed with him - I suspect Dev Day is the source of the board's accusation that Sam did not share with complete candour. Ilya may also care more about AGI safety specifically than Sam does - that's currently unclear, but it would not surprise me at all based on how they have both spoken in interviews. What is completely clear is that Ilya felt Sam was straying so far from the mission of the non-profit, safe AGI that benefits all of humanity, that the board was compelled to act to preserve the non-profit's mission. Them expelling him and re-affirming their commitment to the OpenAI charter is effectively accusing him of selling out.
For context, you can read their charter here: https://openai.com/charter and mentally contrast that with the atmosphere of Sam Altman on Dev Day. Particularly this part of their charter: "Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit."
The only thing that is real is the PR from OpenAI and the "candid" line is quite ominous.
sama brought the company to where it is today, you don't kick out someone that way just because of misaligned interests.
I'm on the side that thinks that sama screwed up badly, putting OpenAI in a (big?) pickle and breaking ties with him asap is how they're trying to cover their ass.
I don't think LLMs have really demonstrated anything interesting around generalized intelligence, which although a fairly abstract concept, can be thought of as being able to solve truly novel problems outside their training corpora. I suspect there still needs to be a fair amount of work improving both the model design itself, the training data, and even the mental model of ML researchers, before we have systems that can truly reason in a way that demonstrates their generalized intelligence.
> As if most humans would do any better on those exercises.
Thats not the point. If you claim you have a machine that can fly, you can't get around a proof of that by saying "mOsT hUmAns cAnt fly" so therefore this machine not flying is irrelevant.
This thing either objectively reasons or not. It is irrelevant how well humans do on those tests.
> This thing is two years old. Be patient.
Nobody is cutting off the future. We are debating the current technology. AI has been around for 70 years. Just open any history book on AI.
At various points from 1950, the gullible mass claimed AGI.
OpenAI's performance is not and has never been proportional to the size of their models. Their big advantage is scale, which lets them ship unrealistically large models by leveraging subsidized cloud costs. They win by playing a more destructive and wasteful game, and their competitors can beat them by shipping a cheaper competitive alternative.
What exactly are we holding out for, at this point? A miracle?
Who's claiming it now? All I see is a paper slagging GPT4 for struggling in tests that no one ever claimed it could pass.
In any case, if it were possible to bet $1000 that 90%+ of those tests will be passed within 10 years, I'd be up for that.
(I guess I should read the paper more carefully first, though, to make sure he's not feeding it unsolved Hilbert problems or some other crap that smart humans wouldn't be able to deal with. My experience with these sweeping pronouncements is that they're all about moving the goalposts as far as necessary to prove that nothing interesting is happening.)
"GPT 4 is clearly AGI. All of the GPTs have shown general intelligence, but GPT 4 is human-level intelligence. "
Being able to emit code to solve problems it couldn't otherwise handle is a huge deal, maybe an adequate definition of intelligence in itself. Parrots don't write Python.