Archived link below. NB THIS IS 4CHAN - THERE WILL OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE.
"Investing in OpenAI Global, LLC is a high-risk investment"
"Investors could lose their capital contribution and not see any return"
"It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world"
These are some heavy statements. It's fine to accept money from private investors who really do believe in that mission. It seems like you can't continue with the same mission if you're taking billions from public companies which have investors who are very much interested in profit. It's like putting your head in the sand with your hand out.
One of the board members seemed to believe that destroying OpenAI could still be inline with the mission. If that's the case, then they should have accepted slow progress due to funding constraints and killed the idea of creating the for-profit.
Why not? Public companies contribute to charities all the time.
Sure, should have. I think indicators in the last year have pointed to the domain developing much faster than anticipated, with Ilya seemingly incredulous at how well models he spend his career developing, suddenly started working and scaling incredibly well. If they thought billions of "donations" would sustain development in commercial capabilities X within constraints of the mission, but got X^10 way outside constraints, and their explicit goal was to to make sure X^10 doesn't arrive without Y^10 in consideration for safety, it's reasonable for hard liners to reevaluate, and if forces behind the billions get in the way, to burn it all down.
Prior post was 5 years ago!
part 1 There is a massive disagreement on AI safety and the definition of AGI. Microsoft invested heavily in OpenAI, but OpenAI's terms was that they could not use AGI to enrich themselves. According to OpenAI's constitution: AGI is explicitly carved out of all commercial and IP licensing agreements, including the ones with Microsoft. Sam Altman got dollar signs in his eyes when he realized that current AI, even the proto-AGI of the present, could be used to allow for incredible quarterly reports and massive enrichment for the company, which would bring even greater investment. Hence Dev Day. Hence the GPT Store and revenue sharing. This crossed a line with the OAI board of directors, as at least some of them still believed in the original ideal that AGI had to be used for the betterment of mankind, and that the investment from Microsoft was more of a "sell your soul to fight the Devil" sort of a deal. More pragmatically, it ran the risk of deploying deeply "unsafe" models. Now what can be called AGI is not clear cut. So if some major breakthrough is achieved (eg Sam saying he recently saw the veil of ignorance being pushed back), can this breakthrough be called AGI depends on who can get more votes in the board meeting. And if one side can get enough votes to declare it AGI, Microsoft and OpenAI could loose out billions in potential licence agreements. And if one side can get enough votes to declare it not AGI, then they can licence this AGI-like tech for higher profits.
Few weeks/months ago OpenAI engineers made a breakthrough and something resembling AGI was achieved (hence his joke comment, the leaks, vibe change etc). But Sam and Brockman hid the extent of this from the rest of the non-employee members of the board. Ilyas is not happy about this and feels it should be considered AGI and hence not licensed to anyone including Microsoft. Voting on AGI status comes to the board, they are enraged about being kept in the dark. They kick Sam out and force Brockman to step down. Ilyas recently claimed that current architecture is enough to reach AGI, while Sam has been saying new breakthroughs are needed. So in the context of our conjecture Sam would be on the side trying to monetize AGI and Ilyas will be the one to accept we have achieved AGI. Sam Altman wants to hold off on calling this AGI because the longer it's put off, the greater the revenue potential. Ilya wants this to be declared AGI as soon as possible, so that it can only be utilized for the company's original principles rather than profiteering. Ilya winds up winning this power struggle. In fact, it's done before Microsoft can intervene, as they've declared they had no idea that this was happening, and Microsoft certainly would have incentive to delay the declaration of AGI. Declaring AGI sooner means a combination of a lack of ability for it to be licensed out to anyone (so any profits that come from its deployment are almost intrinsically going to be more societally equitable and force researchers to focus on alignment and safety as a result) as well as regulation. Imagine the news story breaking on /r/WorldNews: "Artificial General Intelligence has been invented." And it spreads throughout the grapevine the world over, inciting extreme fear in people and causing world governments to hold emergency meetings to make sure it doesn't go Skynet on us, meetings that the Safety crowd are more than willing to have held.
part 3 This would not have been undertaken otherwise. Instead, we'd push forth with the current frontier models and agent sharing scheme without it being declared AGI, and OAI and Microsoft stand to profit greatly from it as a result, and for the Safety crowd, that means less regulated development of AGI, obscured by Californian principles being imbued into ChatGPT's and DALL-E's outputs so OAI can say "We do care about safety!" It likely wasn't Ilya's intention to ouster Sam, but when the revenue sharing idea was pushed and Sam argued that the tech OAI has isn't AGI or anything close, that's likely what got him to decide on this coup. The current intention by OpenAI might be to declare they have an AGI very soon, possibly within the next 6 to 8 months, maybe with the deployment of GPT-4.5 or an earlier-than-expected release of 5. Maybe even sooner than that. This would not be due to any sort of breakthrough; it's using tech they already have. It's just a disagreement-turned-conflagration over whether or not to call this AGI for profit's sake.
The beauty of the Assistants is you're not limited to OpenAI models. You can wire them up to any model anywhere (out they can wire themselves up), so you can have specialist threads going for specific functions.
So I don't thing it's this - otherwise someone would've done this long time ago and killed us all.
Also not like all the "value adds" for ChatGPT are in any way original or innovative - "plugins" / "agents" were something you could use months ago via alternative frontend like TypingMind, if you were willing to write some basic JavaScript and/or implement your own server-side actions for the LLM to invoke. So it can't be this.
I'm very sure anything revolutionary would have been more of a leap than deeply integrating a agent/RAG pipeline into the OpenAI API. They have the compute...
They eventually ... lose the thread.
My hunch is that one big LLM isn't the answer, and we need specialization much like the brain has specialized regions for vision, language, spatial awareness, and so on.
What you described is rather akin to hiring better workers, but we need better managers. Whether it’s a single or multiple models is more of an implementation detail, as long as there’s at least one model capable of satisfactory goal planning _and_ following.
That's just not the way such huge $$$ mega-corp contracts work.
It's easy to take advantage of people who have blinded themselves, as some of the board members at OpenAI have.
The AGI article now seems heavily biased towards GPT/LLM style models and reads more like list of OpenAI achievements at certain points.
I much prefer Gartner's definition of AGI and I think when most informed people talk about about AGI, they are talking about this:
https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/a...
You can see the edit warring in the history, around "economically valuable tasks".
That actually makes perfect sense.
Also love the "formally declared AGI".
It's kind of funny because we've gone from mocking that poor guy who got fired from Google because he claimed that some software was sentient, to some kind of mass hysteria where people expect the next version of OpenAI's LLM to be superhuman.
This all sounds like hype momentum. People are creating conspiracy theories to backfit the events. That's the real danger to humanity: the hype becoming sentient and enslaving us all.
A more sober reading is that the board decided that Altman is a slimebag and they'd be better off without him, given that he has form in that respect.
Between this and the 4chanAGI hypothesis, the latter seems more plausible to me, because deciding that someone "is a slimebag and they'd be better off without him" is not something actual adults do when serious issues are at stake, especially not as a group and in a serious-business(-adjacent) setting. If there was a personal reason, it must've been something more concrete.
It's kind of incredible, people seem to have been trained to think that being unethical is just a part of being the CEO a large business.
Yeah, my point is that considering someone's character doesn't happen at the level of "is/is-not a slimebag", but at more detailed and specific way.
> people seem to have been trained to think that being unethical is just a part of being the CEO a large business
Not just large. A competitive market can be heavily corrupting, regardless of size (and larger businesses can get away with less, so...).
Qanon started as one of these, obviously at first just to troll. Then it got out of hand and got jacked by people using it for actual propaganda.
As a general rule, you should give very little thought to anonymous 4chan posts.
But
They have leaked real things in the past, in exactly the same way. It may be 5% or less that turn out to be true, but there's the rub. That's why no one can completely dismiss it out of hand (and why were even discussing it on an HN comment thread in the first place).
> Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success, the source said.
however if they've really got something that can eventually solve math problems better than wolfram alpha / mathematica that's great, i got real disappointed early in chatgpt being entirely useless at math.
lemme know when the "AGI" gets bored and starts grinding through the "List of unsolved problems in mathematics" on its own and publishing original research that stands up to scrutiny.
/s, maybe.
If this model is more along the lines of what DeepMind is doing starting from scratch and building up learnings progressively, then depending on (a) how long it was running, (b) what it was fed, and (c) how long until it is expected to hit diminishing returns, then potentially solving grade school math might be a huge deal or a nothing burger.
The details really matter quite a lot.
Once they have a system capable of settling on a single correct answer through its own reasoning rather than yet another probability, it it gets much easier to build better and better AI with a series of incremental improvements. Without this milestone they might've just kept on building LLM's all with the same fundamental limitations, no matter how much computing power they add to them.
Almost. Nor VPN, nor Tor are sufficient to protect you against NSA with global traffic view.
If they sponsor enough exit nodes, they have a view into traffic; similar to a crypto 51% attack
Were they expecting it to never happen and were just ready to throw a mountain of lawyers at any claim?
So it's facially subjective, but not practically once you include resolving a dispute in court.
I'd even argue that Microsoft may have taken advantage of the board's cult-like blindspots and believes that a court-acceptable qualifying AGI isn't a real enough possibility to jeopardize their contract at all.
"an autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities in the majority of economically valuable tasks."
That doesn't sound too subjective to me.
I think the closest way you could truly measure that is to point at industries using it and proving the theory in the market. But by then it’s far too late.
Having some billions of dollars of profits hanging over this issue is a good test of value. If the "is AGI" side can use their AI to help their lawyers defeat the much better/numerous army of lawyers of a billion-dollar corporation, and they succeed, then we're really talking about AGI now.
https://static.space/sha2-256:83702fe65434e138af0421c560b5da...
(including its digest in the URL -- even if the content is moved elsewhere, we can know for sure whether it was modified)
For example:
Sam spent the last 4 years making controversial moves that benefited Microsoft a lot https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros... at the cost of losing a huge amount of top talent (Dario Amodei and all those who walked out with him to found Anthropic).
In November, Sam loses his job for unknown reasons, and is accused of having molested his younger sister Annie. https://www.themarysue.com/annie-altmans-abuse-allegations-a...
Despite this, his best buddy Satya Nadella immediately gives him a huge job offer without even putting him through an interview loop.
Whistleblower cases take about 12-18 months to process, and the whistleblower eventually gets awarded 10-30% of the monetary sanctions.
If the sanctions end up being $1 billion (a reasonable 10% of the Microsoft investment in OpenAI), you would stand to make between $100M to $300M this way, setting you and your descendants up for generations. Comparably wealthy centi-millionaires include J.K. Rowling, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey.
Any member of the public can do this. From the SEC site: "You are not required to be an employee of the company" https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/frequently-asked-questions...
To try to understand how many people might be racing each other to file the first complaint, I've been tracking the number of points on the above comment.
So far, the parent comment has 3 upvotes (i.e. it peaked at 4 points recently) and 2 downvotes, bringing the current total to 2 points. Its 3 upvotes might be interpretable as 3 people in a sprint to file the first complaint. The two downvotes might even indicate an additional 2 people, having the clever idea to try to discourage others from participating (: ... if true, very clever lol.
Hiring an attorney doesn't actually even cost you anything upfront until you win, if you hire them via what's called a Contingency Fee Arrangement, which you should definitely ask for.
For those interested in a benchmark for how fast you should expect to have to move to be competitive, my guess is that an extremely fast-moving lawyer could sign a retainer agreement with you in 1 hour if you go in person to their office, and could file a complaint in an additional 3-4 hours.
In 18 months we will learn which lucky person was fastest. Stay tuned.
See also the Twitter hashtag #OpenAICharter
> be strong agi