zlacker

Contrarian prediction: OpenAI will be just fine.

The board will bring in an adult CEO who can balance the nonprofit charter with Microsoft and the commercial business, and who doesn't have a million side projects taking his or her focus away. Some employees will leave but the vast majority will stay for the usual reasons (i.e. inertia), the business will keep growing because ChatGPT is already a worldwide brand at this point and the vast majority of users don't give a hoot about any of this palace intrigue as long as the product works.

And the board will ultimately be vindicated for acting as fiduciaries for the nonprofit's mission and bylaws -- and not for the financial interests of Satya Nadella, Vinod Khosla, and the like.

>>roddyl+(OP)
If they don't get Altman back, Altman starts a new company AkshuallyOpenAI and most talent moves there. They quickly get the funding and the contracts with MS. OpenAI is left in the dust.

>>roddyl+(OP)
The issue is they’ve burned a million bridges with what they’ve done. No one in SV is going to be on their side in any of this. So hard to see how they succeed if nobody wants the perception of being on their team.

>>buffer+z
You know, we are dealing with people and people think differently so they won't move altogether. Moving to a new company under Alt is not an easy choice, at least the new company:

- Does not yet have a big model (need $$$ and months to train, if code is ready)

- Does not have proprietary code OpenAI has right now

- Does not have labeled data ($$$ and time) and chatgpt logs

- Does not have ChatGpt brand...

>>buffer+z
> They quickly get the funding and the contracts with MS. OpenAI is left in the dust.

I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure OpenAI has many patents in the field and they won't be willing to share them with another company, especially with AkshuallyOpenAI.

>>tempsy+V
Is it true? Lot of folks have left the OpenAI board recently (Musk, Hoffman etc). For various reasons but its not that everyone in SV is happy in the direction OpenAI was going.

Plus giant competitors like Google, Facebook might step in to fill the void.

>>buffer+z
Yes, but data for the training, model development and other things requires a lot of time and investment, with OpenAI having a huge head start.

It is to be seen if investors will likely pour another set of billions of dollars, just to catch up to speed with OpenAI, which, by that time, would have even further evolved.

There is a ray of hope that, as it so happens in this field, that old things are quickly obsolete and new things are the cutting edge, Sam Altman can convince investors to invest in the cutting edge with him. Then investors have a choice on an almost level field, to choose between people, companies and personalities, for a given outcome.

>>azurez+f1
I thought GPT-4 was not trained on labeled data, but simply on a large volume of text / code. Most of it is publicly accessible: wikipedia, archives of scientific articles, books, github, plus probably purchased data from text-heavy sites like Reddit.

>>buffer+T2
Assuming it's a reference to RLHF? Not sure

>>roddyl+(OP)
I agree. People are making noise now, but in the end almost everyone just cares about money, and won't keep any persistent opinion against OpenAI.

Microsoft will fall in line and do what makes sense once the dust settles, and that probably means continuing to work with OpenAI for the foreseeable future. Most of the employees, even if they supported Sam, will probably also remain until a better option truly appears, and it remains to be seen whether Sam will really open up a competitor and try to hire everyone.

>>buffer+T2
No it's reinforcement learning with human feedback, RLHF lots of labeling

>>buffer+T2
Whatever they've built this year presumably uses all the positive/negative feedback on ChatGPT that they have a year worth of data now...

Another examples is the Be My Eyes data - presumably the vision part of GPT-4 was trained on the archive of data the blind assistance app has, and that could be an exclusive deal with OpenAI.

>>kumarv+C1
You are definitely over estimating how much time and effort it needs to build large models.

Sam will get billions of dollars if he starts a new company. So there's no issue of money. In terms of data and training models, look at Anthropic - they did train a reasonable model. Heck look at Mistral, a bunch of ex Meta folks and their LLaMA team lead who spinned up a good models in months.

The only bottle neck i could think of would probably be RLHF data - but given enough money, that's not an issue either.

>>roddyl+(OP)
Where is OpenAI going to get money? They just said, loudly, that they don’t care about money.

Money is exchanged for goods and services, like GPUs, hiring researchers and coders, and acquiring data.

No one is going to trust them. They will be able to use their whole 120M they got as donations to operate the company for a full week or two.

Good luck, twats.

(Maybe they have AGI/ASI in the basement. If so, kudos, they will be fine and it was classless to fire Sam)

>>roddyl+(OP)
I lean this way too, but how ever it ends up I think this is plainly the better outcome for the potential of the space. OpenAI was on the trajectory to acting like any other company. Now it at least has the chance to act different from every other player. We are all benefactors of this chance at more diversity of motivations in this race.