I can’t wait to read the autobiography of involved parties.
I can absolutely empathize with Ilya here, though. As far as I know the tech making openai function is largely his life’s work. It would be extremely frustrating to have Sam be the face of it, and be given the credit for it.
Sam is clearly a very accomplished businessman and networker. Those people are super important, I wish I had a person like him on my team.
I’ve had the experience of other people tacitly taking credit for my work. Giving talks about it, receiving praise for their vision. It’s incredibly demoralizing.
I’m not necessarily saying Sam did this, since I don’t know any of these people. Just speculating on how it might feel to ge Ilya watching Sam go on a world tour meeting heads of state to talk about what is largely Ilya’s work.
It's probably more of an intellectual / philosophical position, given that they just did not think through the real impact on the business (and thus the mission itself)
I'm inclined to assume that something stupid was done. It happens. They should resolve it, fix the rules for how the board can behave, and move on.
Despite the bungling, Ilya is probably still a good voice to have on the board. His key responsibility (super-alignment), is a key part of OpenAI's mission.
Giving birth to an idea is a necessary condition and sets the boundaries for so much of what it can achieve. But if you're unable to raise it to become a world champion, it isn't worth anything.
I've been on the raising ideas side way more in my 20+ career in tech. I know some people became bitter and scornful of me because I pushed their ideas to become something big and received a lot of credit for that. And I try to give credit where credit is due. But often enough, when I try to share the spotlight (in front of a customer or when presenting at BoD, for example), the brilliant engineer withers under pressure or actively harms his idea by pointing out its flaws excessively. It's a delicate balance.
"Just speculating on how it might feel to Ilya watching Sam go on a world tour meeting heads of state to talk about what is largely Ilya’s work."
The whole point of a CEO is to do this kind of stuff. If your best engineers are going on world tours, talking to politicians, and preparing for keynotes, that's a pretty terrible use of their time. Not to mention that most of them would hate doing it.
As an example, couple years ago Crisis Text Line decided to sell data to a for profit spin off. Their justification was that data was anonymized, which was bs for it’s unstructured text data, and that it’s not against terms of service, which users had agreed to. Mind you, these users were people in crisis maybe even on a brink of a suicide. This was highly unethical and caused a backlash. Then one of the bod members wrote a half assed “reflection” post [1]. If some core employees of CTL did a “coup” to stop this decision, because they believed it’s unethical and dangerous, wouldn’t it be justifies?
[1] http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/01/31/crisis-...
Sama also went on Lex and got over 5M views. The title was: OpenAi ceo on, ChatGPT, GPT4, and the future of AI.
Done.
Any actual AI takeover will be boring and largely voluntary. For certain definitions of voluntary.
So yeah, Ilya is a very known entity. No, ordinary folks don't need to know him, but if you are in IT and especially if you have anything to do with AI, then not knowing about Ilya tells more about your informational bubble than about Ilya's alleged lack of recognition.
It is akin to claiming to be into crypto on development side and not knowing the name of Vitalik Buterin.
It's like imagine a guy has a nice idea to cure cancer, but plays the princess with it and refuses to industrialize it, while people are dying left and right. Surely, it becomes indefensible, and at some point, someone brave will do the right thing and implement the idea. You have a right to reap the benefit of your ideas but you have a duty not to deprive humanity of any benefit just because you thought of it first, I feel ?
My favorite was Rainbow MosAIc, a Rashomon style film taking place mainly from Friday to Monday. It played with all the different potential motivations and theories. It did a half decent metaphor with representing the different points of view via the different video conferencing cameras.
Even the recent OpenAI profile in one of prominent publications covered Mira, Ilya and gdb in addition to Sam.
But the fundamental question is why would a researcher expect (if they do) that they will be as well known as the CEO who is the face of organisation?
If it weren't for the mentality you are rallying against we wouldn't have ChatGPT. Google, Meta, everyone had these LLMs sitting around. OpenAI was the only company with the balls to release it to the public.
The communication was certainly very poor, and we don't know if the reasons were good, but I don't understand the speed complaint.
For instance:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/paul-allen-goes-after-...