Still though, this isn't something that will just go away with Sam back. OAI will undergo serious changes now that Sam has shown himself to be irreplaceable. Future will tell but in the long terms, I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust.
Whose trust?
OpenAI is now just a vehicle to commercialize their LLM - and everything is subservient to that goal. Discover a major flaw in GPT4? You shut your mouth. Doesn’t matter if society at large suffers for it.
Altman's/Microsoft’s takeover of the former non-profit is now complete.
Edit: Let this be a lesson to us all. Just because something claims to be non-profit doesn't mean it will always remain that way. With enough political maneuvering and money, a megacorp can takeover almost any organization. Non-profit status and whatever the organization's charter says is temporary.
This whole thing started with Altman pushing a safety oriented non-profit into a tense contradiction (edit: I mean the 2019-2022 gpt3/chatgpt for-profit stuff that led to all the Anthropic people leaving). The most recent timeline was
- Altman tries to push out another board member
- That board member escalates by pushing Altman out (and Brockman off the board)
- Altman's side escalates by saying they'll nuke the company
Altman's side won, but how can we say that his side didn't cause any of this instability?
But I said this because: They've retained the entire company, reinstated its founder as CEO, and replaced an activist clown board with a professional, experienced, and possibly* unified one. Still remains to be seen how the board membership and overall org structure changes, but I have much more trust in the current 3 members steering OpenAI toward long-term success.
I mean it is what they want isn't it. They did some random stuff like, playing dota2 or robot arms, even the Dalle stuff. Now they finally find that one golden goose, of course they are going to keep it.
I don't think the company has changed at all. It succeeded after all.
That event wasn't some unprovoked start of this history.
> That board member escalates by pushing Altman out (and Brockman off the board)
and the entire company retaliated. Then this board member tried to sell the company to a competitor who refused. In the meantime the board went through two interim CEOs who refused to play along with this scheme. In the meantime one of the people who voted to fire the CEO regretted it publicly within 24 hours. That's a clown car of a board. It reflects the quality of most non-profit boards but not of organizations that actually execute well.
It's true that this doesn't really pattern-match with the founding story of huge successful companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. But somehow, I think it's still possible that a huge company could be created by a person like this.
(And of course, more important than creating a huge company, is creating insanely great products.)
If you worked for old OpenAI, you would be free to talk about it - since old OpenAI didn't give a crap about profit.
Altman's OpenAI? He will want you to "go to him first".
Did they company change? I am not convinced.
See this article for all that context (>>38341399 ) because it sure didn't start with the paper you referred to either.
All of the big ad companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook) have, like, a scandal per month, yet the ad revenue keeps coming. Meltdown was a huge scandal, yet Intel keeps pumping out the chips.
It seems that the safety team within OpenAI lost. My biggest fear with this whole AI thing is hostile takeover, and openAI was best positioned to at least do an effort to prevent that. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.
It was a classic antisocial academic move; all she needed to do was talk to Altman, both before and after writing the paper. It's incredibly easy to do that, and her not doing it is what began the insanity.
She's gone now, and Altman remains, substantially because she didn't know how to pick up a phone and interact with another human being. Who knows, she might have even been successful at her stated goal, of protecting AI, had she done even the most basic amount of problem solving first. She should not have been on this board, and I hope she's learned literally anything from this about interacting with people, though frankly I doubt it.
The board was incompetent. It will go down in the history books as one of the biggest blunders of a board in history.
If you want to take drastic action, you consult with your biggest partner keeping the lights on before you do so. Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley had no business being on this board. Even if you had safety concerns in mind, you don't bypass everyone else with a stake in the future of your business because you're feeling petulant.
She had many, many other options available to her that she did not take. That was a grave mistake and she paid for it.
"But what about academic integrity?" Yes! That's why this whole idea was problematic from the beginning. She can't be objective and fulfill her role as board member. Her role at Georgetown was in direct conflict with her role on the OpenAI board.
Iirc, the NP structure was implemented to attract top AI talent from FAANG. Then they needed investors to fund the infrastructure and hence gave the employees shares or profit units (whatever the hell that is). The NP now shields MSFT from regulatory issues.
I do wonder how many of those employees would actually go to MSFT. It feels more like a gambit to get Altman back in since they were about to cash out with the tender offer.
Unfortunately, in the past few days, the only thing they've accomplished is significantly damaging their brand.
In fact this observation is pertinent to the original stated goals of openAI. In some sense companies and organisations are superinteligences. That is they have goals, they are acting in the real world to achieve those goals and they are more capable in some measures than a single human. (They are not AGI, because they are not artificial, they are composed of meaty parts, the individuals forming the company.)
In fact what we are seeing is that when the superinteligence OpenAI was set up there was an attempt to align the goals of the initial founders with the then new organisation. They tried to “bind” their “golem” to make it pursue certain goals by giving it an unconventional governance structure and a charter.
Did they succeed? Too early to tell for sure, but there are at least question marks around it.
How would one argue against? OpenAI appears to have given up the lofty goals of AI safety and preventing the concentration of AI provess. In their pursuit of economic success the forces wishing to enrich themselves overpowered the forces wishing to concentrate on the goals. Safety will be still a figleaf for them, if nothing else to achieve regulatory capture to keep out upstart competition.
How would one argue for? OpenAI is still around. The charter is still around. To be able to achieve the lofty goals contained in it one needs a lot of resources. Money in particular is a resource which enables one greater powers in shaping the world. Achieving the original goals will require a lot of money. The “golem” is now in the “gain resources” phase of its operation. To achieve that it commercialises the relatively benign, safe and simple LLMs it has access to. This serves the original goal in three ways: gains further resources, estabilishes the organisation as a pre-eminent expert on AI and thus AI safety, provides it with a relatively safe sandbox where adversarial forces are trying its safety concepts. In other words all is well with the original goals, the “golem” that is OpenAI is still well aligned. It will achieve the original goals once it has gained enough resources to do so.
The fact that we can’t tell which is happening is in fact the worry and problem with superinteligence/AI safety.
They did, and fell, IIRC, vastly short (IIRC, an order of magnitude, maybe more) short of their minimum short-term target. The commercial subsidiary thing was a risk taken to support the mission because it was clear it was going to fail from lack of funding otherwise.
It doesn't matter if OpenAI or AWS or GCP encoded the entire works of Shakespeare in their LLM, they can all write/complete a valid limerick about "There once was a man from Nantucket".
I seriously doubt AWS is going to license OpenAI's technology when they can just copy the functionality, royalty free, and charge users for it. Maybe they will? But I doubt it. To the end user it's just another locally hosted API. Like DNS.
They still have gpt4 and rumored gpt4.5 to offer, so people have no choice but to use them. The internet has such short an attention span, this news will get forgotten in 2 months
what's keeping people with OpenAI for now is that chatGPT is free and GPT3.5 and GPT4 are the best. over time I expect the gap in performance to get smaller and the cost to run these to get cheaper.
if google gives me something close to as good as OpenAI's offering for the same price and it pull data from my gmail or my calendar or my google drive then i'll switch to that.
You forgot about Apple.
Ok, the first few times you use it maybe it's good to know it doesn't think it's a person, but short and sweet answers just save time, especially when the result is streamed.
The efficiency of finetuned models is quite, quite a bit improved at the cost of giving up the rest of the world to do specific things, and disk space to have a few dozen local finetunes (or even hundreds+ for SaaS services) is peanuts compared to acquiring 80GB of VRAM on a single device for monomodels
Languages other than English exist, and RLHF at least does work in any language you make the request in. regex/nlp, not so much.
Next up would be an EVE corp run entirely by LLMs
What do you mean? It recommends things that it thinks people will like.
Also I highly suspect "Altman's OpenAI" is dead regardless. They are now Copilot(tm) Research.
They may have delusions of grandeur regarding being able to resist the MicroBorg or change it from the inside, but that simply does not happen.
The best they can hope for as an org is to live as long as they can as best as they can.
I think Sam's 100B silicon gambit in the middle east (quite curious because this is probably something the United State Federal Government Is Likely Not Super Fond Of) is him realizing that, while he is influential and powerful, he's nowhere near MSFT level.
If it's really valuable to society, it needs to be a government entity, full stop.
More likely, they're a loss-leader and generating publicity by making it as cheap as possible.
_Everything_ we've seen come out of silicon valley does this, so why would they suddenly be charging the right price?
I thought the was a somewhat clear agreement that openAI is currently running inference at a loss?
People use "the chatbot from OpenAI" because that's what became famous and got all the world a taste of AI (my dad is on that bandwagon, for instance). There is absolutely no way my dad is going to sign up for an Anthropic account and start making API calls to their LLM.
But I agree that it's a weak moat, if OpenAI were to disappear, I could just tell my dad to use "this same thing but from Google" and he'd switch without thinking much about it.
Quake and Counter-Strike in the 1990s ran like garbage in software-rendering mode. I remember having to run Counter-Strike on my Pentium 90 at the lowest resolution, and then disable upscaling to get 15fps, and even then smoke grenades and other effects would drop the framerate into the single digits. Almost two years after Quake's release did dedicated 3d video cards (voodoo 1 and 2 were accelerators, depended on a seperate 2d VGA graphics card to feed it) begin to hit the market.
Nowadays you can run those games (and their sequels) in the thousands (tens of thousands?) of frames per second on a top end modern card. I would imagine similar events with hardware will transpire with LLM. OpenAI is already prototyping their own hardware to train and run LLMs. I would imagine NVidia hasn't been sitting on their hands either.
And then presumably the other board members read the writing on the wall (especially seeing how 3 other board members mysteriously resigned, including Hoffman https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...), and realized that if Altman can kick out Toner under such flimsy pretexts, they'd be out too.
So they allied with Helen to countercoup Greg/Sam.
I think the anti-board perspective is that this is all shallow bickering over a 90B company. The pro-board perspective is that the whole point of the board was to serve as a check on the CEO, so if the CEO could easily appoint only loyalists, then the board is a useless rubber stamp that lends unfair legitimacy to OpenAI's regulatory capture efforts.
You mean like they already do on Amazon Bedrock?
So far we don't have any open source models that are close to GPT4, so we don't know what it takes to run them for similar speeds.