Advice: you can't win over a narrative, which is what Sam has become. People and resources will come to him, by themselves.
If I was OpenAI I'd want to quit today not because I want to follow Sam, but because the same bullshit that people left Google Brain et al. for has managed to catch up with them at OpenAI. It's a shame honestly, it was so exciting to see a company finally free itself of the shackles of navel gazing and just build things, but it seems like that's over today.
The narrative I am referring to is a simple one: take back what should be his. A.k.a, revenge. That is for sure a strong word.
People live on stories (collective imagination, if fancier), and what they like most is a wronged prince/princess took back his/her crown. It is the same with Taylor Swift rerecording her albums. The story potential will feed itself, until it is fully realized. The OpenAI board had committed a historical misstep, but maybe it is indeed what it is designed for: they hold no stakes in the business, so their view can't be held accountable in a business microscope. But money will really dislike it.
the dataset is the crucial bit of openAI. that takes a lot of time and money to make. So its perfectly possible for openAI to carry on innovating without these people.
But equally, it could turn to shit.
However, Sam isn't jesus, so its not like he's going to magically make another successful company.
But I think one thing is certain, he WILL create another AI company. It seems very unlikely he would quit the business.
I bet he'll train models on copious amounts of synthetic data made with GPT-4. There are lots of datasets in the open. That makes catching up easier.
No public facing model can be protected from data exfiltration and distillation. All deployed skills leak, your competition will replicate with less effort. And they only need to leak once and every subsequent model can inherit the skill. I think the first movers paid a high price for being first, and will quickly see their advantage erode. Latecomers will catch up and find AI easier to work with. The difference is made by the great fine-tuning datasets that are in the open, a growing lake of distilled abilities.
Another latecomer advantage is benefiting from significant innovation in the engineering part: flash attention, quantization, continuous batching, KV caching, LoRA, and more.
The new AI era will be more equalitarian. Catching up is much easier than discovering, and we can run AI privately, unlike search engines and social networks. You can't exploit SOTA advantage at scale. Being first is a fleeting advantage, the moment you go in the open everyone replicates.
Maybe one reason this is happening is because AI skills are very composable. Any addition to the skill repertoire already fits with other skills. This makes open sourcing skills very attractive. Of course, the datasets are what is being open sourced.
Sounds like I did? I think this is kind of a bad take, no one is quitting OpenAI before Sam has even had 24 hours to process being fired to help him take on his revenge arc.
Instead it sounds like people are angered by the process and powers that lead to him being fired like that, which is extremely understandable given the history of OpenAI. People forget half of OpenAI's competitive advantage was just not letting themselves be mired in self-sabtoage, the exact kind their board just demonstrated today.