zlacker

0% chance of Ilya failing upwards from this. He dunked himself hard and has blasted a huge hole in his organizational-game-theory quotient.

>>browni+(OP)
He's shown himself to be bad at politics, but he's still one of the world best researchers. Surely, a sensible company would find a position for him where he would be able to bring enormous value without having to play politics.

>>browni+(OP)
countless people are looking to weaponize his autism

>>kvetch+wc
Let's please stop using mental health as an excuse for backstabbing.

>>golerg+rc
Upwards, I said. And I was responding to a post.

I don't see a trajectory to "head of Microsoft Research".

>>browni+(OP)
The same could have been said for Adam Neumann, and yet...

>>golerg+rc
This is the guy who supposedly burned some wooden effigy at an offsite, saying it represented unaligned AI? The same guy who signed off on a letter accusing Altman of being a liar, and has now signed a letter saying he wants Altman to come back and he has no confidence in the board i.e. himself? The guy who thinks his own team's work might destroy the world and needs to be significantly slowed down?

Why would anyone in their right mind invite such a man to lead a commercial research team, when he's demonstrated quite clearly that he'd spend all his time trying to sabotage it?

This idea that he's one of the world's best researchers is also somewhat questionable. Nobody cared much about OpenAI's work up until they did some excellent scaling engineering, partnered with Microsoft to get GPUs and then commercialized Google's transformer research papers. OpenAI's success is still largely built on the back of excellent execution of other people's ideas more than any unique breakthroughs. The main advance they made beyond Google's work was InstructGPT which let you talk to LLMs naturally for the first time, but Sutskever's name doesn't appear on that paper.

>>kibwen+in
Adam had style. Quite seriously, that can’t be underestimated in the big show.

>>kibwen+in
The remaining board members will have their turn too, they have a long way to go down before rock bottom. And Neumann isn't exactly without dents on his car either. Though tbh I did not expect him to rebound.

>>browni+Pk
I find this very surprising. How do people conclude that OpenAI's success is due to its business leadership from Sam Altman, and not from it's technological leadership and expertise driven by Illya and the others?

Their asset isn't some kind of masterful operations management and reign in cost and management structure as far as I see. But about the fact they simply put, have the leading models.

So I'm very confused why would people want to following the CEO? And not be more attached to the technical leadership? Even from investor point of view?

>>nvm0n2+9q
Ilya Sutskever is one of most distinguished ML researchers of his generation. This was the case before anything to do with Open AI.

>>didibu+yz
505 OpenAI people signed that letter demanding that the board resign. Bet ya some of them were technical leaders.

>>famous+JJ
Right, it was the case. Is it still? It's nearly the end of 2023, I see three papers with his name on them this year and they're all last-place names (i.e. minor contributions)

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=x04W_mMAAAAJ...

Does OpenAI still need Sutskever? A guy with his track record could have coasted for many, many years without producing much if he'd stayed friends with those around him, but he hasn't. Now they have to weigh the costs vs benefits. The costs are well known, he's become a doomer who wants to stop AI research - the exact opposite of the sort of person you want around in a fast moving startup. The benefits? Well.... unless he's doing a ton of mentoring or other behind the scenes soft work, it's hard to see what they'd lose.