But neural networks... they're an exercise in empiricism. We only ever understood that it works, never why. It's sort of a miracle that it doesn't produce buggy output all the time.
What do you tell people when they want to know why the miracles have stopped? Root cause: the gods are angry.
Well we wouldn’t have to guess if their PM wasn’t so pointlessly vague would we?
As someone who learned to read in part with the Commodore 64 user manual telling me about PEEK and POKE while I was actually in primary school, I think you're greatly overstating what primary school children write about in their holidays.
Snark aside, is their message vague? Sure. But more words wouldn't actually tell us more unless they also published a lot more about their setup — "we were casting float16 to uint16 on line 249 of server_config.c" isn't going to really help either.
Also, here's a recent security update from Apple to compare against: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT214056
I think your counter-example swings too far in the other direction. Nobody expects a git-diff of the fix, but a solid explanation of the whys and wherefore’s isn’t unreasonable. Cloudflare does, fly.io does, etc etc.
E.g.: Have a gauntlet of 20 moderate complexity questions with machine checkable characteristics in the answer. A couple may fail incidentally now and then but if more than N/20 fail you know something's probably gone wrong.
I used to be an SRE at Google and I wrote up internal postmortems there. To me, this explanation feels a lot like they are trying to avoid naming any of their technical partners, but the most likely explanation for what happened is that Microsoft installed some new GPU racks without necessarily informing OpenAI or possibly only informing part of their ops team, and that this new hardware differed in some subtle way from the existing hardware. Quite possibly that means a driver bug, or some sort of hardware incompatibility that required a workaround. Certainly, they would not want to be seen publicly attacking Nvidia or Microsoft given the importance of these two partners, so keeping it high level would certainly be for the best. Virtually. None of openai's customers would be able to use any further technical detail anyway, and they may still be working out a testing strategy that would allow them to detect changes in the hardware mix that unexpectedly cause regressions without necessarily any software deployments being involved.
For companies this size, with these valuations, everything the public is meant to see is heavily curated to accommodate all kinds of non-technical interests.
Sure, you can "step through" a neural network but all you'll ever see are arrays of meaningless floats moving around.