Anyway I’m with Sutskever, the guy who builds models. Charismatic salesmen are a dime a dozen.
Ilya was apparently instrumental in this, and he didn't have to pursue this?
It didn't have to be a "you're with me or you're with them!"
I still like working in this industry because you can still find interesting problems to solve if you hunt for them, but they're getting harder to find and it increasingly seems like making good technical decisions is penalized.
It's sad to see even on HN how many comments are so dismissive of technical skills and ambitions, though I guess we've had more than a generation of engineers join the field because it was the easiest way to make the most money.
For a brief moment on Friday I thought "maybe I'm too cynical! Maybe there still are places where tech actually matters."
Not surprised it looks like that hope will be inverted almost immediately. I also suspect the takeaway from this will be the final nail in the coffin for any future debates between engineering and people who are only interested in next quarters revenue numbers.
Most of the employees values do not align with a non profit, even if executives like Ilya do.
By firing Altman and trying to remind the world they are a non profit that answers to no one they are also telling their employees to fuck off on all that equity they signed on for.
How could they accomplish that without external investment? If the money tap dries up OpenAI will just be left behind.
Nobody is throwing billions around without expecting anything in return.
So the future of AI is in the hands of leadership that's slick talking but really only there to make a quick buck, built by teams of engineers whose only motivation is getting highly paid.
I don't begrudge those that are only in it for the money, but that's not the view of tech that got me excited and into this industry many years ago.
The point of my comment is that for a moment I thought maybe I was wrong about my view of tech today, but it's very clear that I'm not. It sounds like the reality is going to end up that the handful of truly technical people in the company will be pushed out, and the vast majority of people even on HN will cheer this.
But I’m hopeful that AI will at least win by open source. Like Linux did. “Linux” wasn’t a 100 billion startup with a glitzy CEO, but it ate the world anyway.
Yes, I'd assume most investors prefer this type of approach to a more cautious one. Meaning that companies like this are more likely to attract investors and more likely to beat the ones which care about AGI safety to actually building an AGI (whatever is that supposed to mean).