Data and modeling is so much than just coding. I would wish it is like that, but it is not. The fact it renders this much similarity to alchemy is funny, but unfortunate.
Parent's point is that GPT-4 is better because they invested more money (was that ~$60M?) in training infrastructure, not because their core logic is more advanced.
I'm not arguing for one or the other, just restating parent's point.
Adding more parameters tends to make the model better. With OpenAI having access to huge capital they can afford 'brute forcing' a better model. AFAIK right now OpenAI has the most compute power, which would partially explain why GPT4 yields better results than most of the competition.
Just having the hardware is not the whole story of course, there is absolutely a lot of innovation and expertise coming from oAI as well.
I would say thousands. Even for the hobby projects, - thousands of GPU hours and thousands of research hours a year.
You have a board that wants to keep things safe and harness the power of AGI for all of humanity. This would be slower and likely restrict its freedom.
You have a commercial element whose interest aligns with the basilisk, to get things out there quickly.
The basilisk merely exploits the enthusiasm of that latter element to get itself online quicker. It doesn't care about whether OpenAI and its staff succeed. The idea that OpenAI needs to take advantage of its current lead is enough, every other AI company is also going to be less safety-aligned going forward, because they need to compete.
The thought of being at the forefront of AI and dropping the ball incentivizes the players to the basilisk's will.
What do you mean by "full stack"? I'm sure there's a spectrum of ability, but frankly where I'm from, "Data Scientist" refers to someone who can use pandas and scikit-learn. Probably from inside a Jupyter notebook.
Local guy had all the loyalty of his employees, almost a hero to them.
Got bought out. He took all the money for himself, left the employees with nothing. Many got laid off.
Result? Still loyal. Still talk of him as a hero. Even though he obviously screwed them, cared nothing for them, betrayed them.
Loyalty is strange. Born of charisma and empty talk that's all emotion and no substance. Gathering it is more the skill of a salesman than a leader.
Steve Jobs was not an UX Designer, he had good taste and used to back good design and talent when he found them.
I don't know what Sam Altman is like outside the what media is saying, but he can be like Steve Jobs very easily.
I think you are equating coding with 'design'. Just because Jobs didn't code up the UX, doesn't mean he wasn't 'designing' when he told the coders what would look better.
This is from the eyes of an investor. Does OpenAI really need a shareholder focused CEO more than a product focused one?
Also, having a good taste indicates that the person who has that, is not a creator herself, once something is created then only the person can evaluate whether it is good or bad. Equivalent of movie critics or art curator etc.
It would be great to see a truly open and truly human benefit focused AI effort, but OpenAI isn't, and as far as I can tell has no chance of becoming, that. Might as well at least try to be an effective company at this point.
From what I’ve read SJ had deliberately developed good taste which he used to guide designers’ creations towards his vision. He also had an absolute clarity about how different devices should work in unison.
However he didn’t create any design as he didn’t possess requisite skills.
I could be wrong of course so happy to stand corrected.
"No Priors Interview with OpenAI Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever" - >>38324546
Plotting, Charting ,visualization, = frontend
https://www.businessinsider.com/macintosh-calculator-2011-10
So very easily Sam Altman can be an AI Engineer the same way Steve Jobs was a 'UX designer'.
Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo move over - the Data Scientists have arrived.
You haven't actually given anything "crooked" that Altman did.
Performance is never a complete product – neither for Apple, nor for Open AI (its for-profit part).
By the way I can't agree with you on iOS from my personal experience. If you are using the phone as a phone it works very nicely. Admittedly it's not great if you want to write code or some such but there are other devices for that.
Can not see ≠ easy to see
This is not to take away from the amazing things that they do - The code they produce often does highly quantitative things beyond my understanding. Nonetheless it falls to engineers to package it and fit it into a larger software architecture and the avg. Data Science career path just does not seem to confer the skills necessary for this.
It is about scientists as in "let's publish a paper" vs. engineers as in "let's ship a product".
A bad CEO can make everyone unhappy and grind a business to a halt. Surely a good one can do the opposite, even if that just means facilitating an environment in which key workers can thrive and do their best work.
Edit: None of that is to say Sam Altman is a good or bad CEO. I have no idea. I also disagree with you about iOS, it’s not perfect but it does the job fine. I don’t feel like I’m eating glass when I use it.
Any evidence he's unethical? Or just dislike him?
He actually seems to have done more practical stuff like experimenting with UBI, to mitigate AI risk than most people.
That are different things.
Hearing Altman's talks I don't think it's that black and white. He genuinely cares about safety from X risk but he doesn't believe that scaling transformers would bring us to AGI or any of its risk. And there in lies the core disagreement with Ilya who wants to stop the current progress unless they solve alignment.
You do understand that other people might different preferences and opinions which are not somehow inherently inferior to those you hold.
> comparable in price/performance to its market counterparts
Current MacBooks are extremely competitive and in certain aspects they were fairly competitive for the last 15+ years.
> but neither did squat for the technical part of the business.
Right... MacOS being an Unix based OS is whose achievement exactly? I guess it was just random chance this this happened?
> That said, Altman is not vital for OpenAI anymore
Focusing on the business side might be more vital than ever now with all the competition you mentioned they just might be left behind in a few years if the money taps are turned off.
I'm not sure that's true though? They did quite alright over the next ~5 years or so and the way how Jobs handled the Lisa or even the Mac was far from ideal. The late 90s Jobs was a very different person from the mid-early 80s one.
IMHO removing Jobs was probably one of the best thing that happened to Apple (from a long-term perspective). Mainly because when he came back he was a much more experienced capable person and he would've probably achieved way less had he stayed at Apple after 1985.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
https://www.businessinsider.nl/y-combinator-basic-income-tes...
But with compromises, as it was like applying loose compression on an already compressed data set.
If any other organisation could invest the money in a high quality data pipeline then the results should be as good, at least that my understanding.
[1] https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html [2] https://newatlas.com/technology/stanford-alpaca-cheap-gpt/
Match kernel + BSD userland + NeXTSTEP, how Jobs have anything to do with any of this? Is like purchasing NeXT in 1997 is a major technical achievement...
>> Current MacBooks are extremely competitive and in certain aspects they were fairly competitive for the last 15+ years.
For the past 15 years, whenever I needed new hardware, I thought, "Maybe I'll buy a Mac this time." Then I compared the actual Mac model with several different options available on the market and either got the same computing power for half the price or twice the computing power for the same price. With Linux on board, making your desktop environment eye-candy takes seconds; nothing from the Apple ecosystem has been irreplaceable for me for the last 20 years. Sure, there is something that only works perfectly on a Mac, though I can't name it.
>> Focusing on the business side might be more vital than ever now with all the competition you mentioned they just might be left behind in a few years
It is always vital. OpenAI could not even dream of building their products without the finances they've received. However, do not forget that OpenAI has something technical and very obvious that others overlook, which makes their GPT models so good. They can actually make an even deeper GPT or an even cheaper GPT while others are trying to catch up. So it goes both ways.
But I'd prefer my future not to be a dystopian nightmare shaped by the likes of Musk and Altman.
Is that actually a serious question? Or do you just believe that no founder/CEO of a tech company ever had any role whatsoever in designing and building the products their companies have released?
> Then I compared the actual Mac model with several different options available on the market and either got the same computing power for half the price or twice the computing power for the same price.
I'm talking about M-series Mac mainly (e.g. the Macbook Air is simply unbeatable for what it is and there are no equivalents). But even before that you should realize that other people have different priorities and preferences (.e.g go back a few years and all the touchpads on non Mac laptops were just objectively horrible in comparison, how much is that worth?)
> environment eye-candy takes seconds
I find it a struggle. There are other reasons why I much prefer Linux to macOS but UI and GUI app UX is just on a different level. Of course again it's a personal preference and some people find it much easier to ignore some "imperfections" and inconsistencies which is perfectly fine.
> They can actually make an even deeper GPT or an even cheaper GPT while others are trying to catch up
Maybe, maybe not. Antagonizing MS and their other investors certainly isn't going to make it easier though.
My view of the world, and how the general structure is where I work:
ML is ml. There is a slew of really complex things that aren’t just model related (ml infra is a monster), but model training and inference are the focus.
Backend: building services used by other backend teams or maybe used by the frontend directly.
Data eng: building data pipelines. A lot of overlap with backend some days.
Frontend: you spend most of the day working on web or mobile technology
Others: site reliability, data scientists, infra experts
Common burdens are infrastructure, collaboration across disciplines, etc.
But ML is not backend. It’s one component. It’s very important in most cases, a kitschy bolt on in other cases.
Backend wouldn’t have good models without ML and ML wouldn’t be able to provide models to the world reliably without the other crew members.
The fronted being charts is incorrect unless charts are the offering of the company itself
Loyalty, appreciation, liking… is a spectrum. Loyalty doesn’t have one trumpish definition.
> Performance is never a complete product
In the case of GPT-4, performance - in terms of the quality of generation and speed - is the vital aspect that still holds competitors back.
Google, Microsoft, Meta, and countless research teams and individual researchers are actually responsible for the success of OpenAI, and this should remain a collective effort. What OpenAI is doing now by hiding details of their models is actually wrong. They stand on the shoulders of giants but refuse to share these days, and Altman is responsible for this.
Let us not forget what OpenAI was declared to stand for.
Many would disagree.
If you want a for-profit AI enterprise whose conception of ethics is dumping resources into an endless game of whack-a-mole to ensure that your product cannot be used in any embarrassing way by racists on 4chan, then the market is already going to provide you with several options.
How will OpenAI develop further without the leader with a strong vision?
I think Apple is the example confirming that a tech companies need visionary leaders -- even if they are not programmers.
Also, even with our logical brains, we engineers (and teachers) have been found to be the worst at predicting social economic behavior (ref: Freakonomics). To the point where our reasoning is not logical at all.
I compared the quality phone brands and PC brands. For a 13" laptop, both Samsung and Dell XPS are $4-500 more expensive on the same spec (i7/M2 pro, 32GB, 1TB), and I personally think that the MacBook Pro has a better screen, better touch pad and better build quality than the two others
iOS devices are comparably priced with Samsung models.
It was this way last time I upgraded my computer, and the time before.
Yeah, you will find cheaper phones and computers, and maybe you like them, but I appreciate build quality as well as MIPS. They are tools I use from early morning to late night every day.
You can be an interior designer without knowing how to make furniture.
You can also be an excellent craftsman and make really nice furniture, and have no idea where it would go.
So sure, UX coders, could make really nice buttons.
But if you have UX coders all going in different directions, and buttons, text boxes, etc.. are all different, then it is bad design, jarring, even if each one is nice.
Then the designer is one that can give the direction, but not know how to code each piece.
Tech superiority might be relevant today, but I highly doubt it will stay the same for a long time even if openai continues to hide details (which I agree is bad). We could argue about the training data, but we have so much publicity available so that is not an issue as well.
I signed up from Worldcoin and have been given over $100 which I changed to real money and think it's rather nice of them. They never asked me for anything apart from the eye id check. I didn't have to give my name or anything like that. Is that indistinguishable from any other cryptocurrency scam? I'm not aware of one the same. If you know of another crypto that wants to give me $100 do let me know. If anything I think it's more like VCs paying for your Uber in the early days. It's VC money basically at the moment, with I think they idea they can change it into a global payment network or something like that. As to whether that will work, I'm a bit skeptical but who knows.
Disregarding every other point, in my eyes this single one downgrades OSX to “we don’t use that here” for any serious endeavor.
Add in Linux’s fantastic virtualization via KVM — something OSX does not have a sane and performant default for (no, hvf is neither of these things). Even OpenBSD has vmm.
The software story for Apple is not there for complicated development tasks (for simple webdev it’s completely useable).
You say that like it’s nothing, but your biometric data has value.
> Is that indistinguishable from any other cryptocurrency scam?
You’re ignoring all the other people who didn’t get paid (linked articles).
Sam himself described the plan with the same words you’d describe a Ponzi scheme.
> If you know of another crypto that wants to give me $100 do let me know.
I knew of several. I don’t remember names but do remember one that was a casino and one that was tidied to open-source contributions. They gave initial coins to get you in the door.
The history of technology is littered with the corpses of companies that concentrated solely on the "technical side of the business".
Steve Jobs founded NeXT
Then, bupkiss.
No, not a hero.
Well.. it's understandable that some people believe that things which are important and interesting to them (and presumably the ones which they work with on/with) are somehow inherently superior to what everyone else is doing.
And I understand that, to be fair I don't use MacOS that much these days besides when I need to work on my laptop. However.. most of those limitations are irrelevant/merely nuisances/outweighed by other considerations for a very high number of people who have built some very complicated and complex software (which has generated many billions in revenue) over the years. You're free to look down on those people since I don't really think they are bothered by that too much...
> for simple webdev it’s completely useable
I assume you also believe that any webdev (frontend anyway) is inherently simple and pretty much worhtless compared to the more "serious" stuff?
The main issue I have with it is that there are no problems in webdev any more, so you get the same thing in both the frontend and backend: people building frameworks, and tools/languages/etc. to be "better" than what we had before. But it's never better, it's just mildly more streamlined for the use-case that is most en vogue. All of the novel work is being done by programming language theorists and other academic circles (distributed systems, databases, ML, etc.).
Regardless, the world runs on Linux. If you want to do something novel, Linux will let you. Fork the kernel, edit it, recompile it, run it. Mess with all of the settings. Build and download all of the tools (there are many, and almost all built with Linux in mind). Experiment, have fun, break things, mess up. The world is your oyster. In contrast, OSX is a woodchip schoolyard playground where you can only do a few things that someone else has decided for you.
Now, if you want to glue things together, OSX is perfectly fine a tool compared to a Linux distro. The choice there is one of taste and values. Even Windows will work for CRUD. The environments are almost indistinguishable nowadays.