So questioning whether they will survive seems very silly and incredibly premature to me
I'm sure that's a sign that they are all team Sam - this includes a ton of researchers you see on most papers that came out of OpenAI. That's a good chunk of their research team and that'd be a very big loss. Also there are tons of engineers (and I know a few of them) who joined OpenAI recently with pure financial incentives. They'll jump to Sam's new company cause of course that's where they'd make real money.
This coupled with investors like Microsoft backing off definitely makes it fair to question the survival of OpenAI in the form we see today.
And this is exactly what makes me question Adam D'Angelo's motives as a board member. Maybe he wanted OpenAI to slow down or stop existing, to keep his Poe by Quora (and their custom assistants) relevant. GPT Agents pretty much did what Poe was doing overnight, and you can have as many as them with your existing 20$ ChatGPT Plus subscription. But who knows I'm just speculating here like everyone else.
There's an idealistic bunch of people that think this was the best thing to happen to OpenAI, time will tell but I personally think this is the end of the company (and Ilya).
Satya must be quite pissed off and rightly so, he gave them big money, believed in them and got backstabbed as well; disregarding @sama, MS is their single largest investor and it didn't even warrant a courtesy phone call to let them know of all this fiasco (even thought some savants were saying they shouldn't have to, because they "only" owned 49% of the LLC. LMAO).
Next bit of news will be Microsoft pulling out of the deal but, unlike this board, Satya is not a manchild going through a crisis, so it will happen without it being a scandal. MS should probably just grow their own AI in-house at this point, they have all the resources in the world to do so. People who think that MS (a ~50 old company, with 200k employees, valued at almost 3 trillion) is now lost without OpenAI and the Ilya gang must have room temperature IQs.
I would imagine that if you based hiring and firing decisions on the metric of 'how often this employee tweets' you could quite effectively cut deadwood.
With that in mind...
But this is a disaster that can't be sugarcoated. Working in an AI company with a doomer as head is ridiculous. It will be like working in a tobacco company advocating for lung cancer awareness.
I don't think the new CEO can do anything to get back trust in record short amount of time. The sam loyalists will leave. The question remain, how is the new CEO going to hire new people, and will he be able to do so fast enough, and the ones who remain will accept the company that is a drastically different.
Yes, agreed, but on _twitter_?
The massive_disgruntled_engineer_rant does have a lot of precedent but I've never considered twitter to be their domain. Mailing lists, maybe.
If you're an employee at OpenAI there is a huge opportunity to leave and get in early with decent equity at potentially the next giant tech company.
Pretty sure everyone at OpenAI's HQ in San Francisco remembers how many overnight millionaires Facebook's IPO created.
Follow-up: Why is only some fraction on Twitter?
This is almost certainly a confounder, as is often the case when discussing reactions on Twitter vs reactions in the population.
What other places are there to engage with the developer community?
Literally the literal definition of 'selection bias' dude, like, the pure unadulterated definition of it.
Come on. “By 5 pm everyone will quit if you don’t do x”. Response: tens of heart emojis.
But also, if you're a cutting edge researcher, do you want to stay at a company that just ousted the CEO because they thought the speed of technology was going too fast (it's sounded like this might be the reason)? You don't want to be shackled when by the organization becoming a new MIRI.
If the CEO of my company got shitcanned and then he/she and the board were feuding?
... I'd talk to my colleagues and friends privately, and not go anywhere near the dumpster fire publicly. If I felt strongly, hell, turn in my resignation. But 100% "no comment" in public.
Which likely most of the company was working on.
But people in AI/learning community are very active on twitter. I don't know every AI researcher on OpenAIs payroll. But the fact that most active researchers (looking at the list of OpenAI paper authors, and tbh the people I know, as a researcher in this space) are on twitter.
Of course, OpenAI as a cloud-platform is DoA if Sam leaves, and that's a catastrophic business hit to take. It is a very bold decision. Whether it was a stupid one, time will tell.
It was a question of whether they'd leave OpenAI and join a new company that Sam starts with billions in funding at comparable or higher comp. In that case, of course who the employees are siding with matters.
https://the-decoder.com/openai-lures-googles-top-ai-research....
On twitter != 'active on twitter'
There's a biiiiiig difference between being 'on twitter' and what I shall refer to kindly as terminally online behaviour aka 'very active on twitter.'
It's created huge noise and hype and controversy, and shaken things up to make people "think" they can be in on the next AI hype train "if only" they join whatever Sam Altman does now. Riding the next wave kind of thing because you have FOMO and didn't get in on the first wave.
It’s a signal. The only meaning is the circumstances under which the signal is given: Sam made an ask. These were answers.
(That's the religious text of the anti-AI cult that founded OpenAI. It's in the form of a very long Harry Potter fanfic.)
I also wasn't being facetious. If there are other places to share work and ideas with developers online, I'd love to hear about them!
But they will.
There’s nothing wrong with not following, it’s a brave and radical thing to do. A heart emoji tweet doesn’t mean much by itself.
Work is work. If you start being emotional about it, it's a bad, not good, thing.
Give me a break. Apple Watch and Air pods are far and away leaders in their category, Apple's silicon is a huge leap forward, there is innovation in displays, CarPlay is the standard auto interface for millions of people, while I may question the utility the Vision Pro is a technological marvel, iPhone is still a juggernaut (and the only one of these examples that predate Jobs' passing), etc. etc.
Other companies dream about "coasting" as successfully.
As soon as one person becomes more important than the team, as in the team starts to be structured around said person instead of with the person, that person should be replaced. Because otherwise, the team will not be functioning properly without the "star player" nor is the team more the sum of its members anymore...
> Also lol "religious text", how dare people have didactic opinions.
That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post. It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive.
Just as another perspective.
You can disagree. You can say only explicit non-emoji messages matter. That’s ok. We can agree to disagree.
By what metric? I prefer open hardware and modifiable software - these products are in no way leaders for me. Not to mention all the bluetooth issues my family and friends have had when trying to use them.
You just need to temper that before you start swearing oaths of fealty on twitter; because that's giving real Jim Jones vibes which isn't a good thing.
The example of Steve Jobs used in the above post is probably a prime example - Apple just wouldn’t be the company it is today without that period of his singular vision and drive.
Of course they struggled after losing him, but the current version of Apple that has lived with Jobs and lost him is probably better than the hypothetical version of Apple where he never returned.
Great teams are important, but great teams plus great leadership is better.
It doesn't matter if it's large, unless the "very active on twitter" group is large enough to be the majority.
The point is that there may be (arguably very likely) a trait AI researchers active on Twitter have in common which differentiates them from the population therefore introducing bias.
It could be that the 30% (made up) of OpenAI researchers who are active on Twitter are startup/business/financially oriented and therefore align with Sam Altman. This doesn't say as much about the other 70% as you think.
> That's not what a religious text is, that'd just be a blog post.
Yes, almost as if "Lesswrong is a community blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality."
> It's the part where reading it causes you to join a cult group house polycule and donate all your money to stopping computers from becoming alive.
I don't think anybody either asked somebody to, or actually did, donate all their money. As to "joining a cult group house polycule", to my knowledge that's just SF. There's certainly nothing in the Sequences about how you have to join a cult group house polycule. To be honest, I consider all the people who joined cult group house polycules, whose existence I don't deny, to have a preexisting cult group house polycule situational condition. (Living in San Francisco, that is.)
I rarely see a professor or PhD student voicing a political viewpoint (which is what the Sam Altman vs Ilya Sutskever debate is) on their Twitter.
It's what kind of got it achieved. Because every other company didn't really see the benefit of going straight to AGI, instead working on incremental addition and small iteration.
I don't know why the board decided to do what it did, but maybe it sees that OpenAI was moving away from R&D and too much into operations and selling a product.
So my point is that, OpenAI started as a charity and literally was setup in a way to protect that model, by having the for-profit arm be governed by the non-for-profit wing.
The funny thing is, Sam Altman himself was part of the people who wanted it that way, along with Elon Musk, Illya and others.
And I kind of agree, what kind of future is there here? OoenAI becomes another billion dollar startup that what? Eventually sells out with a big exit?
It's possible to see the whole venture as taking away from the goal set out by the non for profit.
A lot of researchers like to work on cutting edge stuff, that actually ends up in a product. Part of the reason why so many researchers moved from Google to OpenAI was to be able to work on products that get into production.
> Particularly with a glorified sales man > Sounds like they aren't spending enough time actually working. Lmao I love how people come down to personal attacks on people.
Seems like a bit of a commercial risk there if the CEO can 'make' a third of the company down tools.
This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical", and then decide they need to spend their life fighting evil computer gods because the Bayes' theorem thing is weak to an attack called "Pascal's mugging" where you tell them an infinitely bad thing has a finite chance of happening if they don't stop it.
Also they invent effective altruism, which works until the math tells them it's ethical to steal a bunch of investor money as long as you use it on charity.
https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating
Bit old but still relevant.
The most recent case was notably in the Bahamas though.
Yes, which is 100% because of "LessWrong" and 0% because groups of young nerds do that every time, so much so that there's actually an XKCD about it (https://xkcd.com/592/).
The actual message regarding Bayes' Theorem is that there is a correct way to respond to evidence in the first place. LessWrong does not mandate, nor would that be a good idea, that you manually calculate these updates: humans are very bad at it.
> Also they invent effective altruism, which works until the math tells them it's ethical to steal a bunch of investor money as long as you use it on charity.
Given that this didn't happen with anyone else, and most other EAs will tell you that it's morally correct to uphold the law, and in any case nearly all EAs will act like it's morally correct, I'm inclined to think this was an SBF thing, not an EA thing. Every belief system will have antisocial adherents.
I have no idea what the actual proportion is, nor how investors feel about this right now.
The true proportion of researchers who actively voice their political positions on twitter is probably much smaller and almost certainly a biased sample.
No, there isn't a correct way to do anything in the real world, only in logic problems.
This would be well known if anyone had read philosophy; it's the failed program of logical positivism. (Also the failed 70s-ish AI programs of GOFAI.)
The main reason it doesn't work is that you don't know what all the counterfactuals are, so you'll miss one. Aka what Rumsfeld once called "unknown unknowns".
https://metarationality.com/probabilism
> Given that this didn't happen with anyone else
They're instead buying castles, deciding scientific racism is real (though still buying mosquito nets for the people they're racist about), and getting tripped up reinventing Jainism when they realize drinking water causes infinite harm to microscopic shrimp.
And of course, they think evil computer gods are going to kill them.
Agree to disagree? If there's one thing physics teaches us, it's that the real world is just math. I mean, re GOFAI, it's not like Transformers and DL are any less "logic problem" than Eurisko or Eliza were. Re counterfactuals, yes, the problem is uncomputable at the limit. That's not "unknown unknowns", that's just the problem of induction. However, it's not like there's any alternative system of knowledge that can do better. The point isn't to be right all the time, the point is to make optimal use of available evidence.
> buying castles
They make the case that the castle was good value for money, and given the insane overhead for renting meeting spaces, I'm inclined to believe them.
> scientific racism is real (though still buying mosquito nets for the people they're racist about)
Honestly, give me scientific racists who buy mosquito nets over antiracists who don't any day.
> getting tripped up reinventing Jainism when they realize drinking water causes infinite harm to microscopic shrimp.
As far as I can tell, that's one guy.
> And of course, they think evil computer gods are going to kill them.
I mean, I do think that, yes. Got any argument against it other than "lol sci-fi"?
It is wild to see how closely connected the web is though. Yudkowsky, Shear, and Sutskever. The EA movement today controls a staggering amount of power.
Hmm, they're not a complete anything but they're pretty different as they're not discrete. That's how we can teach them undefinable things like writing styles. It seems like a good ingredient.
Personally I don't think you can create anything that's humanlike without being embodied in the world, which is mostly there to keep you honest and prevent you from mixing up your models (whatever they're made of) with reality. So that really limits how much "better" you can be.
> That's not "unknown unknowns", that's just the problem of induction.
This is the exact argument the page I linked discusses. (Or at least the whole book is.)
> However, it's not like there's any alternative system of knowledge that can do better.
So's this. It's true; no system of rationalism can be correct because the real world isn't discrete, and none are better than this one, but also this one isn't correct. So you should not start a religion based on it. (A religion meaning a principle you orient your life around that gives it unrealistically excessive meaning, aka the opposite of nihilism.)
> I mean, I do think that, yes. Got any argument against it other than "lol sci-fi"?
That's a great argument. The book I linked calls it "reasonableness". It's not a rational one though, so it's hard to use.
Example: if someone comes to you and tries to make you believe in Russell's teapot, you should ignore them even though they might be right.
Main "logical" issue with it though is that it seems to ignore that things cost money, like where the evil AI is going to get the compute credits/GPUs/power bills to run itself.
But a reasonable real world analog would be industrial equipment, which definitely can kill you but we more or less have under control. Or cars, which we don't really have under control and just ignore it when they kill people because we like them so much, but they don't self-replicate and do run out of gas. Or human babies, which are self-replicating intelligences that can't be aligned but so far don't end the world.
> So's this. It's true; no system of rationalism can be correct because the real world isn't discrete, and none are better than this one, but also this one isn't correct. So you should not start a religion based on it.
I mean, nobody's actually done this. Honestly I hear more about Bayes' Theorem from rationality critics than rationalists. Do some people take it too far? Sure.
But also
> the real world isn't discrete
That's a strange objection. Our data channels are certainly discrete: a photon either hits your retina or it doesn't. Neurons firing or not is pretty discrete, physics is maybe discrete... I'd say reality being continuous is as much speculation as it being discrete is. At any rate, the problem of induction arises just as much in a discrete system as in a continuous one.
> Example: if someone comes to you and tries to make you believe in Russell's teapot, you should ignore them even though they might be right.
Sure, but you should do that because you have no evidence for Russell's Teapot. The history of human evolution and current AI revolution are at least evidence for the possibility of superhuman intelligence.
"A teapot in orbit around Jupiter? Don't be ridiculous!" is maybe the worst possible argument against Russell's Teapot. There are strong reasons why there cannot be a teapot there, and this argument touches upon none of them.
If somebody comes to you with an argument that the British have started a secret space mission to Jupiter, and being British they'd probably taken a teapot along, then you will need to employ different arguments than if somebody asserted that the teapot just arose in orbit spontaneously. The catch-all argument about ridiculousness no longer works the same way. And hey, maybe you discover that the British did have a secret space program and a Jupiter cult in government. Proposing a logical argument creates points at which interacting with reality may change your mind. Scoffing and referring to science fiction gives you no such avenue.
> But a reasonable real world analog would be industrial equipment, which definitely can kill you but we more or less have under control. Or cars, which we don't really have under control and just ignore it when they kill people because we like them so much, but they don't self-replicate and do run out of gas. Or human babies, which are self-replicating intelligences that can't be aligned but so far don't end the world.
The thing is that reality really has no obligation to limit itself to what you consider reasonable threats. Was the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs a reasonable threat? It would have had zero precedents in their experience. Our notion of reasonableness is a heuristic built from experience, it's not a law. There's a famous term, "black swan", about failures of heuristics. But black swans are not "unknown unknowns"! No biologist would ever have said that black swans were impossible, even if they'd never seen nor heard of one. The problem of induction is not an excuse to give up on making predictions. If you know how animals work, the idea of a black swan is hardly out of context, and finding a black swan in the wild does not pose a problem for the field of biology. It is only common sense that is embarrassed by exceptions.