Honestly I don’t understand the drama around 2 executives who have not done any transformer research or whatever will come after transformers
The GenAI world will be fine without the ceo of cryptoballs or whatever his other company is
So while Greg's work would have been extremely valuable, it's value is on a lesser order of magnitude than many of the other researchers and engineers who OpenAI had collected into its ranks. More essential innovative value will be lost to the bleed of loyalists and startup bettors who will peel off from those ranks.
That's not necessarily true for (say) the rare high-end graphics board you use for running local inferences. It's also expensive -- even less expensive than the car -- but replacing it can be a bigger deal and cause a complete interruption.
There are countless experienced late-career generalists who can keep projects moving by contributing to critical, smart support. I'm one of them. We're extremely valuable indeed.
But there really are far fewer people who were ahead of the curve and years-deep into the AI research central to OpenAI's entire existence. Those people are beyond critical, they're essential.
That doesn't make them better people, or smarter people, or in any other way elite. It just means that in the context of OpenAI those people are much harder to come by and can be much more disruptive when lost.
The founding team does however bring tactical experience that is (maybe) unmatched. They also have experience solving problems that turn cutting edge AI models into usable products. It's easy to devalue non research contributions, but they have legitimate value and are instrumental in OpenAIs success.
I feel like this is a point that is not being talked about enough. Yes, OpenAI gave us GPT and DALL-E. But had sama and gdb remained there, would we have gotten anything new that is as groundbreaking as the original GPT and DALL-E, or would we have continued getting GPT-12 and DALL-E-19? Sure, iPhone 15 sells, but some may say Apple has stagnated since iPhone was released.
I'd argue right now that we're at the "iPhone 3G" point on the technology curve, with significant improvements to come over the next few years as the tech gets polished.
OpenAI was releasing innovations in the GenAI space at a breakneck pace. Remember, GPT-1 didn't change the world, it was GPT-3.5/4 from earlier this year. OpenAI was at peak innovation when sama and gdb left.
And folks used to say Apple was stagnant, but after Apple Silicon completely upended the personal computer world (along with some other things) the dissidents have been mostly silent.
How did it upend the personal computer world? Apple's chip developments are an amazing technological achievement, but they don't have anything innovative to put them in. Apple slaps them in grossly thermally limited form factors, where the chips can't operate anywhere close to their capability. It's kind of a silly exercise, in my opinion. At the end of the day, Apple has made the same computers, phones, and tablets for the past 10 years. I'm not sure where the innovation is.
Checks temp of iMac, while encoding video and maxing all cores.... nope.
And, outside of the Cynicism-Is-Intelligence hackernews crowd, basically everyone has been fawning over the breakneck speed of progress coming out of OpenAI, even at the recent OpenAI devdays.