zlacker

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.

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

>>famous+Aj
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.