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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

If Ilya unknown-to-anyone thinks people prefer him to Altman, he has another thing coming. I'm not an Altman fanboy, but anyone can see Altman is a rockstar and richt or wrong, that matters HUGELY to OpenAI.

If it's truly about a power play then this will be undone pretty quick, along with the jobs of the people who made it happen.

Microsoft has put a vast fortune into this operation and if Satya doesn't like this then it will be changed back real fast, Ilya fired and the entire board resign. That's my prediction.

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Sorry, what do you mean by "unknown -to-anyone"?

Ilya is a co-founder of OpenAI, the Chief Scientist, and one of the best known AI researchers in the field. He has also been touring with Sam Altman at public events, and getting highlights such as this one recently:

https://youtu.be/9iqn1HhFJ6c

Altman is virtually a household name. Relative to that - Ilya is unknown.

Altman is a heck of a lot less famous than CHATGPT-- so if fame is the issue, OpenAI seems fine?

Altman is NOT a household name. ChatGPT is in the western world to some extent.

I see, thanks for clarifying. I agree that Ilya is relatively lesser known publicly, but in the grander scheme of things I don't think Altman is really that well known either.

I mean, anecdotally, most non-tech friends and family I know probably have heard of ChatGPT, but they don't know any of the founders or leadership team at OpenAI.

On the other hand, since I work in the field, all of my AI research friends/colleagues would know Ilya's work, and probably think of Sam more as a business guy.

In that sense, as far as attracting and maintaining AI researcher talent, I think it's arguable that people would prefer Ilya to Sam.

>> in the grander scheme of things I don't think Altman is really that well known either.

Wall Street Journal front page, top item right this minute: "Sam Altman Is Out at OpenAI After Board Skirmish"

Times Of London front page, right this minute: "Sam Altman sacked by OpenAI after directors lose confidence in him"

The Australian front page, right now: "OpenAI pushes out co-founder Sam Altman as CEO"

MSNBC front page, right now: "OpenAI says Sam Altman exiting as CEO, was 'not consistently candid' with board"

That's his name right there, front page news around the world - they assume people know his name, that's why they put it there.

How do those headlines assume readers know who Sam Altman is? All of them tell you the company he was fired from and half tell you he was CEO. If anything, they assume the reader doesn't know who he is.

If I asked my mom who Sam Altman was, she'd have no idea. Most of my friends wouldn't either, even some who work in tech. Having one's name in headlines isn't the same as being a household name.

Like I said, I agree that Sam Altman, relatively speaking, is better known than Ilya Sutskever to the general public. Although, as other users have replied, this isn't necessarily the same as being a household name.

In any case, I feel like we largely agree, so I'm confused as to why your reply focused solely on this small detail, in a rather condescending manner, while missing my larger point about retaining and attracting AI talent.

I couldn't have told you the name of anyone at OpenAI until this news, and I come in here every day.

That seems like an incredibly foolish measure of credibility. Donald Trump and Taylor Swift have far greater name recognition than Altman, and yet they aren’t going to be leading the AI revolution.

OpenAI is where it is because its models are much, much better than the alternatives and pretty much always have been since their inception, not because of anything on the business side. The second alternative or open source models reach parity, they will start shedding customers. Their advantage is entirely due to their R&D, not anything on the business side.

Which has very little to do with OpenAI’s success. It’s not enough to make a new technology, as too many tech-focused entrepreneurs have found out. You have to find product-market fit, manage suppliers and customers, and negotiate deals.

Typically I would agree, but in the case of OpenAI, they were themselves blindsided when their free conversational LLM demo, ChatGPT, went viral less than a year ago now.

It is a rare counter case, where a tech-focused research demo, without any clear "product-market fit, suppliers, or customers" became a success almost overnight, to the surprise of it's own creators.

The early days were people playing around with ChatGPT just to see what it could do. All the market fit, fine tuning, and negotiation of deals came later.

Of course, OpenAI capitalized on that initial success very skillfully, but Ilya was the critical world renowned AI researcher who had a lot to do with enabling OpenAI's initial success.

> Of course, OpenAI capitalized on that initial success very skillfully

That’s the key point there. Without leadership talent to capitalize on success, technical advances are for naught.

But also, GPT had been around for some years before ChatGPT. The model used in ChatGPT was an improvement in many ways and I don’t mean to diminish Ilya’s contribution to that, but it is the packaging of the LLM into a product that made ChatGPT a success. I see more of Sam’s fingerprints on that than Ilya’s.

Agreed, both were critical for their success, the underlying LLM technology, and the vision and leadership to package the tech into ChatGPT.

However, my original comment on this thread was simply to point out that Ilya is not "unknown-to-anyone", but a world renowned AI researcher and a core part of OpenAI's team and their success. Your reply implied that Ilya "has very little to do with OpenAI’s success", which I thought undersells his importance.

That's what Microsoft was doing on their behalf.

Completely agree. Sam is on the phone with Satya as we speak.

Alternative is Sam goes in house to MS who already have all the weights of GPT-4 and build again, but constrained by any existing charter.

The most likely outcome at this stage IMO is Sam will start a new thing with a huge equity stake and just do it again.

Sam is not an engineer. He can't do it without Ilya or Ilya-lite. And there are like 4 of those in the world.

>>He can't do it without Ilya or Ilya-lite.

The wrongest thing I've read on HN for a long while.

The world has alot more smart people in it than you realise, and Sam's rockstar profile gives him direct access to them.

How many people do you think are capable of pushing the state of the art in AI research?

There is a massive amount of tooling and infrastructure involved. You can't just get some Andrew Ng Coursera guy off the street and buy 50,000 H100s at your local Fry's electronics. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't even enough GPUs in the world for Altman to start a competitor in a reasonable amount of time.

I stand by my number, there are like 4 people in the world capable of building OpenAI. That is, a quality deep learning organization that pushes the state of the art in AI and LLMs.

Maybe you can find ~1,000 people in the world who can build a cheap knock-off that gets you to GPT3 (pre instruct) performance after about two years. But even that is no trivial effort.

Did you see Greg Brockmann also quit? Who do you think has contributed more to OpenAI code base??

I agree that it’s far than a one man show at OpenAI, but on the other hand megacorps full of many of the smartest, best compensated research scientists and engineers haven’t been able to touch OpenAI at this point, even with much greater resources. There is a significant advantage that OpenAI has built for themselves with their research and development.

And Ilya can't do anything without lots of funding, which is given on premise of future profits.

> If it's truly about a power play then this will be undone pretty quick, along with the jobs of the people who made it happen.

The board that made this decision to fire Altman and they are the captain of the ship.

> if Satya doesn't like this then it will be changed back real fast, Ilya fired and the entire board resign. That's my prediction.

MS does not own openAI if the board does not want Satya to have a say Satay does not have a say. MS/Satay could throw lawyers at the issue, try to find a crack where the board has violated the law and or their own rules. The key is they can try, but MS/Satay have no immediate levers of power to enforce their will.

I am pretty sure that Satya Nadella would want Altman booted.

It sounds like someone neutral from MSFT leadership needs/ed to moderate and bring people together before the wheels fell off.

People don't know who Ilya is?

Do a survey of ordinary smart people you know, ask if they have heard of Sam Altman. Ask if they know Ilya.

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