OpenAI in throes of executive exodus as three walk at once
theregister.com
theregister.com
> "Yet people are valuing this company at $150 billion dollars.
> "Absolutely insane. Investors shouldn't be pouring more money at higher valuations, they should be asking what is going on."
I've been saying for a while now that the lack of GPT-5 is a huge red flag for their future. They burned all the hype for GPT-5 on 4o, letting the media call their upcoming model GPT-5 for months before coming out with "4 but cheaper". o1 is impressive but again not a new generation—it's pretty clearly just the result of using 4o's cost savings and throwing tons of extra tokens at the problem behind the scenes in a technique that's easily replicable by the competition.
OpenAI has no moat and there has been no serious movement by governments to give them the moat they're so desperately lobbying for. Everything about their actions over the past year—the departures, the weird marketing tactics, the AGI hype, and the restructuring—says to me that Altman is trying to set up an exit before investors realize that the competition has already caught up and he has no plan to regain the lead.
Maybe not. But I always thought that, especially with their lobbying efforts and desire to project a sense of seriousness (even if unfounded) around those efforts, that it was very unlikely they would release a next-gen model before the US election.
I agree that the marketing/messaging, esp on social media, is borderline deranged, swinging between “we are basically The Foundation” and “pweese try my pwoduct i hope u love it (heart hands emoji)”
I agree it's too early to call for sure, but just to clarify: The naysayers are nearly always right. We just only remember the times they were wrong.
Not to worry though, the geniuses at Meta and a16z are sure that AI will stick the landing, after they bet the farm on Metaverse and Blockchain respectively.
The space race had naysayers; the NYT printed the opinion that manned flight would take one to ten million years a week before the Wright Brothers; the iPod was lame with less space than a Nomad; SpaceX and Tesla were both dismissed when they were young; 3D printing likewise dismissed as if it was only plastic trinkets; and I've seen plenty of people here on HackerNews proclaiming that "AI will never ${x}" for various things some of which had already been accomplished by that point.
There's always a naysayer. You can use their mere existence as evidence for much, it has to be the specific arguments.
People here are criticizing the business fundamentals of the openAI company. What are your takes on its finances? Or are you just on board, everything is great, do not look behind the curtain where we hide our five billion dollar losses?
But I’m not so sure the naysayers are right about blockchain though. The ecosystem is still growing and apparently replacing cash in countries that don’t have a functional currency system.
S&P 6x
Nasdaq 24x
Sticking your money in tech may have ups and downs but has not done badly. Also AI will be huge in a way blockchain and the metaverse were not. Also re blockchain if you'd bought bitcoin rather than some bs startup you'd have done well. Though OpenAI may be in the bs startup category... dunno.
Wait what?
Also the most memorable ones are when people were dismissive but ultimately wrong about the viability of the business (like the "dropbox" comment).
But I think a not uncommon pattern with "too big to fail" startups is that they can change their definition of success or failure in order to claim victory. Or at least, in order for Sam to do so.
They might not reach the stated goal of AGI or even general profitability, but if Sam and some key investors manage to come out ahead at the end of their maneuvering, then I'm sure they'll claim victory (and that they changed the world and all that pomp).
It's sad, but at this point I pretty much assume anyone out of SV who claims they're trying to change the world are either liars, incompetents, or both. That whole culture has just been on a tear of goodwill-burning.
There were months worth of articles on how strawberry is considered almost dangerous internally its so smart. I know we only got -mini and -preview but...this doesn't feel like AGI
Like clockwork, every time they need to drum up excitement:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/7/20953040/openai-text-gene...
To be clear, it is true that transformers did change things but the merchants are still over selling it and everyone else laps it up while not meta-thinking about it for even one second.
There's also a huge range of practical demonstrations of non-aligned, monomaniacal and not particularly smart intelligences, that literally eat humans: bacteria.
(Also lions and tigers and bears, if you want to insist that evolution doesn't itself count as intelligence).
Personal opinion: I think this means we've probably exhausted all the low hanging fruit in LLM land. This was the last thing I was reserving judgement for. When the most hyped up big idea openai has rn is basically "we're just gonna have the model dump out a wall of semi-optimized chain of thought every time and not send it over the wire" we're officially out of big ideas. Like I mean it obviously works... but that's more or less what we've _been_ doing for years now! Barring a total rethinking of LLM architecture, I think all improvements going forward will be baby steps for a while, basically moving at the same pace we've been going since gpt-4 launched. I don't think this is the path to AGI in the near term, but there's still plenty of headroom for minor incremental change.
By analogy, i feel like gpt-4 was basically the same quantum leap we got with the iphone 4: all the basic functionality and peripherals were there by the time we got iphone 4 (multitasking, facetime, the app store, various sensors, etc.), and everything since then has just been minor improvements. The current iPhone 16 is obviously faster, bigger, thinner, and "better" than the 4, but for the most part it doesn't really do anything extra that the 4 wasn't already capable of at some level with the right app. Similarly, I think gpt-4 was pretty much "good enough". LLMs are about as they're gonna get for the next little while, though they might get a little cheaper, faster, and more "aligned" (however we wanna define that). They might get slightly less stupid, but i don't think they're gonna get a whole lot smarter any time soon. Whatever we see in the next few years is probably not going to be much better than using gpt-4 with the right prompt, tool use, RAG, etc. on top of it. We'll only see improvements at the margins.
Re "all the basic functionality" if you are talking intelligence then you are kind of talking the things humans can do and LLMs kind of do basic language but are not much good and common sense reasoning, spatial awareness and shape rotation, motor skills and running around, emotional intelligence, figuring what people are thinking, planning and probably some other stuff. It'll be iPhone 4 when those are covered.
its both too linear, and hard to revise. it's hard to undo parts of the conversation that poison it. it's too hard to save important bits that shouldn't be forgotten or drowned out. its not word processor like enough.
i envision the next generation of these products being multipane by default.
on the left I have a chat, in the center I have a whiteboard, and on the right I have a rendered document. throwing a clip of something onto the whiteboard makes it modifiable by chat. "store this, categorize it, summarize it, place it in the document."
whatever comes next needs to function more like onenote or obsidian. just to use an example from current events today, lets say I want to make a Parody Dossier on Walz, similar to todays Vance leak. I should be able to describe the project to chat. It builds a document structure. I tell it we are going to scrape all of the internets jokes on Walz at a bbq or other non-scandals. I should be able to quickly click through a table of contents, and "chat" with each paragraph. "This one needs fleshing out, this one needs summarization." As we scrape a reddit post, we want to incorporate not only the original post, but all the best comments. I should be a be able to "chat with the document editor" and put together a 200 page document in the amount of time it took me to write this post, just by describing what is and isnt working, and dragging and dropping.
chat, the simplicity of it, understanding of complex sentences, and multi sentence conversations was a UI paradigm leap. it went well past keyword search and the new command line of the internet. its a great first step, and a nice reset after a decade of interface stagnation, but now its ubiquity and simplicity, like the search box, is clouding peoples imagination and ability to dream up the next new interactive interface, which I expect to involve more mouse and visual relationships.
tldr: the llm is a component of the next generation interface, not the entire interface itself.
I think it's as they say: reinforcement learning applied to cause it to generate a relatively long 'reasoning trace' of some kind from which the answer is obtained through summarisation.
I think it's likely a cleverly simplified version of QuietSTaR, with no thought tokens, just one big generation to which the RL is applied.
The way I believe it's trained in practice is as follows: they have a bunch of examples, some at the edge of GPT-4s ability to answer, some beyond it, some that GPT-4 can answer if you're lucky with the randomness. Then they give it one of these prompts, generate a fairly long text, maybe 3x the length of the answer, and summarize that to produce the final answer. Then they use REINFORCE to reward the generated texts that increase the probability of the summary being correct.
Is it? I feel like if you don't care about the cost it's pretty easily replicable on any other LLM, just with a lang-chain sort of approach
this may have consequences for how useful it is.
LLMs are going through the same thing now. Better and better every iteration but increasingly we're starting to see a fast approaching wall on what they can really do with the current paradigm.
And finally, we can see from normal human society that it is hardly ever the smartest humans who achieve the most or rise to the highest levels of power. There is no reason to believe that an AI with agency would an inherent "it's over" scenario
What is happening right now is so obvious that people have been predicting it for over 60 years. It is ingrained in our culture. Everyone knows what happens when the AI becomes smarter than us.
If you 'see no reason' then you are looking through a microscope. Lift your head up and look around. Agency isn't black and white, it is a gradient. We already have agency to some degree, and it is improving fast.
I'm not sure you realize this, but computers control everything. A dumb bug shut down windows computers around the world a month ago. A smart AI could potentially rewrite every piece of software and lock us out of everything.
Those medicines your friends and family need to stay alive? Yea the factories that produce them only work if you do what the AI says.
Your main point is true though, even superhuman AI would have a rough time in actual combat. It's just too dependent on electricity and datacenters with known locations to actually have a chance.
Our world is still analogue.
1. IMHO, genocidal apocalypse scenarios like you describe are the wrong way to think about the societal danger of AGI. I think a far more likely outcome, and nearly as disastrous, is AGI eliminating the dependency of capital on labor, leading to a global China Shock on steroids (e.g. unimaginable levels of inequality and wealth concentration, which no level of personal adaptability could overcome).
2. Even in your apocalypse scenario, I think you underestimate the damage that could be done. I don't have an orchard, so I know I'm fucked if urban life-support systems get messed up over large enough area that no aid is coming to my local area afterwards. And a genocidal AI that wasn't blindingly stupid would wait until it had control of enough robots to act in the real world, after which it could agent-orange your orchard.
2. Which robots?? Until robots can, without any human input, make any sort of other robots, then there is nothing to fear from AGI. Right now they barely walk, and the really big boys can solder one joint real good. That's not enough.
How do you come to that conclusion?
I think we'll get massive inequality because it'll be far easier to develop new technology than change the core ideology of capitalist society through some secular process. If a "better redistribution of wealth" were in the cards, it probably should have happened already, and probably cannot happen after the 99% loose most of their economic power by being replaced by automation.
If the 1% are forward-thinking, they'll push a UBI scheme to keep the 99% from getting too disruptive before they become irrelevant.
Always, happy to take the other side of the bet of popular HN comments. (see META, TSLA)
You're welcome to whichever side you want to take, but you're not right by the simple virtue of being contrary.
Happy to bet on Sam Altman and go short on Gary Marcus and popular HN in this case.
They're also rapidly replicable. I don't believe for a moment that Apple is designing their system in a way that doesn't allow switching at a moment's notice, and everything they're doing is copied within 6 months by competitors including LLaMA, which Meta keeps releasing for free.
> The idea that they have been resting on their laurels and have nothing else to show is just demonstrably untrue to date.
I didn't assert that they were resting on their laurels, I asserted that they have no path forward to the next generation and AGI. If they did have a path they wouldn't keep burning their hype for it on applications of the previous generation that are easy to replicate.
What's changed very recently, which is a moat and which they may or may not get, is seven 5 GW data centres — the equivalent of "can we tile half of Rhode Island in PV?"
This is a form of regulatory capture. You get a lead against your competition and then persuade governments to make it hard for people to follow you by imposing rules and regulations.
Regulatory capture is used in this way to build moats.
They were not making it hard to follow them. That's the point. They were saying they themselves don't really know what they're doing, while saying open source should be protected from any regulations imposed on them.
Hard to go past them, perhaps; but even then, given the scale of compute for training bigger models, the only people who could even try would have an easy time following whatever rules are created.
I agree, the capabilities and reasoning are really nice compared to 4o. But my first thought when testing it- how are they going to pay for it.. trivial questions burn 15s and more complex 30-40s of some processing time. How does this scale to millions of users??
Maybe next up is o2 then o3 and so on.
What a coincidence they all want to go on a break at the same time.
quote:
The departure of executives who were present at the time of the crisis suggests that Altman’s consolidation of power is nearing completion. Will this dramatically change what OpenAI is or how it operates? I don’t think so. For the first time, OpenAI’s public structure and leadership are simply honest reflections of what the company has been—in effect, the will of a single person. “Just: Sam.”
end quote
The data already shows this, it's a well-established result: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 . Well, less established for inference-time compute, but OpenAI even said they saw the same thing for inference compute in their release post for o1. But there's still room for at least an order of magnitude speedup with specialised hardware (as opposed to more general-purpose GPUs) and ternary nets.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-24/openai-pi...
Posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642905 but it didn't get traction
This is why they are planning what 5,6,7 data centers and re-opening 3-mile island.
They will need more nuclear reactors as well to reach their goals.
Even if they are motivated by compensation, they may be looking around and thinking both that Altman's approach is reckless and that it is a distraction from the core research. This would give them confidence that they can beat Altman in the long term by focusing on research and creating an environment that is most attractive to the best researchers in the field while he is busy chasing dollars today by scaling out what they already have rather than truly innovating. There is plenty of money sloshing around (see Ilya, e.g.) so it's not like they will struggle finding funding.
Now, it could be the case that there is some incredible insider tech that we don't know about publicly, but if they are way ahead of everyone it is hard to see from the public information. It certainly does not look good when the early employees who actually built the technology are leaving and the businessman who has a track record of lies, manipulation and a general lack of human empathy is consolidating power, abandoning the company's core mission and asking for huge amounts of funding along with a plan to extract an enormous amount of the world's natural resources to serve his profit margins.
In other words, I am quite suspicious that Sam Altman is a ruthless con man. That is what all the reporting I've seen around him most strongly suggests. I don't believe it is in the long term interest of an organization to be helmed by that kind of leader. I could be wrong, but I am still waiting for the people who have left to clarify that his leadership had nothing to do with their departures.
Any other company seeing this kind of exodus would generate massive ridicule and concern.
But “AI” is supposedly the “next big thing” and the media and a lot of people with “get rich quick schemes” are trying to keep the hype alive.
The hype is clearly overblown and reality is setting in.
The bubble is about to burst.
And Tesla survived because the federal government bailed them out. Not because Merlin was some badass businessman.
There is a lot of hype, but there is something real underneath and we haven't yet tapped its current potential to the fullest in terms of product integrations, etc.
No AGI is coming any time soon because LLMs are not the correct technology for it and no one has figured out what technology is required for AGI.
Mere existence is the lowest of bars, kind of a funny way to clarify how core something is.
Rumor is the minimum check they'll accept is $250 million. Valuation in the $150 billion range.
It would be surprising if these exits weren't in some way connected to the fundraising. (And not sure if these exits will be seen as a positive or a negative to would-be investors)
Or the execs figure a ~150x growth ride in 6 years is about the best that they can hope for and are ready to bounce. If I were in their shoes I'd look to take out 50-100 MM and decide what I want in life.
We won't see any improvements until the next generation of hardware comes out and allows us to do things that were computationally impossible before.
Yes, of course we can develop better transformers and improve reasoning capabilities, but that's not what I am talking about. I am mostly referencing the ability for newest "AI" hardware to multiply 256 matrices in a single clock cycle per core.
https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/sam-altman-ai-superintelligen...
I know a bit naive from various angles, and a bit over the top, but I stand by the core concern.
It seems like Altman was a poor choice to run an organization meant to benefit and protect humanity, as reports increasingly make him sound like a lying, manipulative sociopath (albeit a powerful, competent, and lucky one).
> "This could have significant impact on OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft, which clearly stated they view OpenAI as a competitor. Microsoft has already started to downplay the importance of OpenAI models in their overall AI strategy. For enterprises, uncertainty is not good for business and key tech investments like generative AI. Other frontier models – especially more open ones – have caught up to OpenAI, which will further influence decisions to derisk by moving away from OpenAI or spread their risk using other models."
Now that's some happy news. According to https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/, OpenAI is already losing absurd, unsustainable amounts of money even with massive discounts from Microsoft. I wonder what fun things could happen to OpenAI if Microsoft started charging their competitor full price?
I wouldn't hold onto that too tightly as a way to make you feel better. Google and Facebook initially lost tons of money but when they did become profitable, they became wildly profitable.
Then you have the fact that Facebook is giving LLaMA away for free, which gives OpenAI Netscape vibes.
I mean may be investors are just stupid which really makes me ponder how life would just be better if resources were allocated differently in society.
OpenAI spun up the for-profit arm called OpenAI Global, LLC in 2019 [1] shortly after GPT2. If you pay for ChatGPT plus or for the API, that's where your money has been going.
The big change is that they want to allow the for-profit arm to issue shares to other people and investors. Until now, the for-profit arm has been owned and controlled by the nonprofit's holding company [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#2019:_Transition_from_n...
[2] https://images.ctfassets.net/kftzwdyauwt9/4200df88-28fe-4212... from https://openai.com/our-structure/
If the future unfolds where AI does really take off, his power may be unmatched by anyone in the past if he stays in control of it.
I think this is purposeful consolidation of power by Sam. He sees what is coming and the value of being in singularly control of it.
Feels like a movie script.
(I think he needs to acquire an android company next, AI needs at least some type of embodiment. Boston Dynamics?)
They feel the danger of the law. /s
Just like crypto, the AI hype is coming to an end.
It’ll stick around as an important feature in a lot of things. It’s more useful than cryptocurrency, at least.
Now, in the end, it likely won't amount to much, but if it keeps Microsoft stock up for a while, it may pay off for the executives involved. Apparently not OpenAI execs, though...
Is this just a wall street thing? I'm betting that this is an excellent tax shelter as well.