146 karma · joined March 13, 2015
I'm reminded of Bob Lee's killing, when many initial reactions assumed it was a random act of violence and blamed city leaders for progressive policies and decarceration, but it later turned out to be personally motivated [1][2].
Similarly, in this case, the truth may not be suicide nor company-initiated morder, but something else entirely.
1. https://x.com/all_in_tok/status/1644752577475805185
2. https://apnews.com/article/bob-lee-cash-app-nima-momeni-tria...
In the research community, "4D" is a commonly used term to differentiate from work on static 3D objects and environments, especially in recent years since the advent of NeRF.
The term "dynamic" has long been used similarly, but sometimes connotes a narrower scope. For example, reconstruction of cloth dynamics from an RGBD sensor, human body motion from a multi-view camera rig, or a scene from video, but assuming that the scene can be decomposed into rigid objects with their individual dynamics and an otherwise static environment. An even narrower related term in this space would be "articulated", such as reconstruction of humans, animals, or objects with moving parts. However, the representations used in prior works typically did not generalize outside their target domains.
So, "4D" has become more common recently to reflect the development of more general representations that can be used to model dynamic objects and environments.
If you'd like to find related work, I'd recommend searching in conjunction with a conference name to start, e.g. "4D CVPR" or "4D NeurIPS", and then digging into webpages of specific researchers or lab groups. Here are a couple interesting related works I found:
https://shape-of-motion.github.io/ https://generative-dynamics.github.io/ https://stereo4d.github.io/ https://make-a-video3d.github.io/
All that considered, "4D dynamical worlds" does feel like buzzword salad, even if the intended audience is the research community, for two main reasons. First, it's as if some authors with a background in physics simulation wanted to reference "dynamical systems", but none of the prior work in 4D reconstruction/generation uses "dynamical", they use "dynamic". Second, as described above, the whole point of "4D" is that it's more general than "dynamic", using both is redundant. So, "4D worlds" would be more appropriate IMO.
He convinced other members of the board that Sam was not the right person for their mission. The original statement implies that Ilya expected Greg to stay at OpenAI, but Ilya seems to have miscalculated his backing.
This appears to be a power struggle between the original nonprofit vision of Ilya, and Sam's strategy to accelerate productionization and attract more powerful actors and investors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/technology/openai-artific...
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.
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.
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.
Based on Ilya's statements, it doesn't seem like safety was the main motivation in the decision, so maybe there's a hope that they'll be more open, but it doesn't seem to indicate either way, so possible that they'll stay tight lipped regardless.
Perhaps Ilya felt Sam was focusing too much on profit and power with his recent world tour and then dev day? Regardless, it's certainly rare, for one of the core scientists to maintain control over their creation, rather than the other way around. Typically the VC business guy would be pushing the scientist out.
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.
Sam is a VC guy who has been going on a world tour to not just get in the spotlight, but to actually accumulate power, influence, and more capital investment.
At some point, this means Ilya no longer trusts that Sam is actually devoted to the original mission to benefit all of humanity. So, I think it's a little more complicated than just being "jealous".
Sam was the VC guy pushing gatekeeping of models and building closed products and revenue streams. Ilya is the AI researcher who believes strongly in the nonprofit mission and open source.
Perhaps, if OpenAI can survive those, then they will actually be more open in the future.
As you say, Altman has been on a world tour, but he's effectively paying lip service to the need for safety when the primary outcome of his tour has been to cozy up to powerful actors, and push not just product, but further investment and future profit.
I don't think Sutskever was primarily motivated by AI safety in this decision, as he says this "was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity." [1]
To me this indicates that Sutskever felt that Sam's strategy was opposed to original the mission of the nonprofit, and likely to benefit powerful actors rather than all of humanity.
1. https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1725707548106580255
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:
So, authors today often submit anonymously following the conference guidelines, but simultaneously post publicly elsewhere, walking a fine line as not to overstep the conference policies. This appears to be the case for this submission. Note, recently, some conferences, such as CVPR, have started to institute new policies forbidding social media promotion until acceptance, as they adapt to the changing landscape of social media promotion. If this were a CVPR submission, the authors would not be allowed to tweet publicly about their work yet, nor have the version of the webpage with their names visible.
I also had a similar experience after a friend was killed in a home burglary, and my news feed started pushing all the latest updates on the case as well as similarly tragic news stories. For a long time, these recommendations were a painful and unwanted reminder of my friend's murder. Even worse was that the algorithm was definitely trying to push increasingly extreme and fear-mongering content about home invasions, all to try to get my clicks, and perhaps unintentionally radicalize me in the process.
As for why this type of thing happens, I think this part from your last point is pretty much right on the mark, "none of this requires any complex algos". All it takes is data of your browsing habits, the webpages you visit, the keywords you search, the webpages your friends and contacts visit, etc. There don't need to be any database fields explicitly encoding this information, which is why it's so worrying, such a system can push personalized traumatic content a global scale with precision, all from keywords and algorithms intended to maximize click revenue.
The other side of the equation is the content that gets recommended. I'm not sure who created the YouTube video that mocked your friend's death, but in my experience I was pushed content from typical local news outlets, then less reputable outrage content farms, and finally even more despicable sources, like white supremacist sites. That's something about this experience that really disturbed me. I've seen uncannily accurate product predictions before, but usually the 3rd party was relatively reasonable. I hadn't really ever been recommended radicalizing propaganda before, not to this degree. I've read articles about some of the operators of such sites, and they often don't even believe the content that they're pushing. They know that it triggers something in people who are vulnerable, and they exploit that for profit. That whole ecosystem just seems pure evil to me. At least the recommender systems work most of the time, usually just showing me stuff related to my hobbies, cute cats, etc.
Anyway, the combination of incomprehensible recommender systems and toxic content on the web is definitely not good for anyone's mental health. Hope you feel better in the future.
Furthermore, Samy Bengio was Timnit's direct manager, but was completely blindsided by Timnit's firing, saying "I was stunned by what just happened to Timnit Gebru, who was in my team until a few days ago ... I stand by you, Timnit". Timnit was notified of her termination by Megan Kacholia, the Vice President of Google Research, who has since been removed from overseeing the remaining members of the Ethical AI team.
Regarding the publication which precipitated Timnit's ousting, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots ...", Samy Bengio granted publication approval for the submission. It was only after this approval that the Google Ethics AI researchers were told to rescind their names from the paper (they could not withdraw the paper entirely, since it was a collaboration with external academic researchers).
Mitchell was fired shortly thereafter for allegedly violating the company's code of conduct and security policies.
Now, only a few months after Gebru and Mitchell's firings, Samy Bengio has also resigned.
Considering the sequence of events reviewed above, it seems clear to me that Samy Bengio's resignation is directly the result of Google's mishandling of this situation. If Timnit had not been fired while away on vacation, and Google leadership had instead found a way to address her concerns, or even accept her resignation more tactfully, then this debacle would have never unfolded in this manner, and Samy Bengio would still be at Google.
I am not particularly surprised by Google's mishandling of this situation though, as it seems completely predictable and even cliche that such corporate behemoths often handle these situations in the most ham-handed ways.
What I do find astonishing is the willingness of some Hacker News commenters to read into Timnit's actions and motivations, often with the most negative interpretations, but when it comes to Samy Bengio's resignation, they seem completely unable to read between the lines, and instead raise their burden of proof, so that they can deny any connection between this chain of events. Resignation letters and company wide farewell emails almost never disclose the real reasons behind a departure. Just because Samy Bengio has not explicitly said something like, "I am resigning because I stand in solidarity with Timnit Gebru", does not mean that these events are not linked, despite the assertions of some comments in this thread. In fact, it's seems to me that one would need to willfully ignore the evidence so far to conclude that these events are not linked, at least to some degree.
When enforcement is more strict, researchers sometimes resort to hosting a draft of their manuscript, and not the final camera ready version.
Unfortunately, in many fields open access or even just personal hosting and is still uncommon, and the vast majority of papers remain behind paywalls.
There are countless articles that romanticize entrepreneurs who were child chess champions, or rubik's cube solving geniuses, who dropped out of college, or were academics who were under-acknowledged, only to build it all by themselves and hit the jackpot. At least that's how the story often goes. It almost seems like a sort of modern mythology, one that taps into the American dream that so many yearn for.
I'm curious because most of the commercials with car collisions I could find are actually safety PSAs, not commercials for a specific make and model.
Aside from those, I found some examples of a brand showing the aftermath of a collision (very briefly) in an ad that skirts the line between being a PSA and a testimonial. Interestingly, most of these were from Subaru.
In any case, that's still quite far from the phone commercial, where the phone is put into a situation that voids the warranty, but no physical damage or any indication thereof is shown. A comparable car commercial would need to show a car in a collision (or compromising condition) that performs unrealistically and ultimately gets away completely unscathed.
My intuition would be that most car advertisers wouldn't want to associate their vehicle with such a scenario, nor set unrealistic expectations around safety critical product features, outside of maybe product placement in a James Bond film.
So, I'm very curious, do you have any examples of comparable car commercials that you could share?
If you were going to take any lessons from Japan regarding housing, wouldn't it be more along the lines of how to build high density housing cost effectively in coordination with world class public transportation infrastructure?
Another response mentioned words like "kill, maim, torture, force, destroy", which also may be used for dramatic effect. I imagine that one criticism of such word choices might be that they lead to sensationalism or hyperbole.
However, the use of sexual violence in analogy is unique in comparison to those examples, precisely because sexual abuse is a trauma that has been experienced by so many, unlike being killed or tortured.
While I mentioned rates of general sexual abuse in my previous comment, rates for forced penetration are particularly relevant, about 1 in 5 for women and 1 in 70 for men [1]. The gender disparity in such rates is important, since it helps explain why different genders have different attitudes regarding this issue.
For example, some studies show that women find sexual violence related humor to be significantly less enjoyable than men, perhaps unsurprisingly. Meanwhile, others show that men's enjoyment of such humor is positively correlated with self reported likelihood of forcing sex [2].
Given this gender imbalance, it's not surprising then that the acceptability of such language would be significantly affected by the demographics of the audience. In male dominated environments it would be less likely that many would raise objections, and thereby more likely that the group would ultimately accept such language (in fact, the parent comment to your "Why" question has now been flagged and hidden while the original analogy remains). However, as the audience increases in size and diversity, it will be more likely that there will be objections to such language.
This is a long way of saying that sexual violence is not treated lightly in most public discourse, while clarifying that by "public" I mean an audience with demographics reflecting the general population, particularly a balanced distribution of genders.
The analogy above may be accepted here or on a forum like r/wallstreetbets, but it would likely be seen as less appropriate on a public earnings call.
Likewise, understanding of the historical conditions and causal factors responsible for racial disparities in wealth, education, incarceration rates, and other outcomes is not equivalent to the regurgitation of FBI statistics. Anyone can cite statistics, what matters is understanding why these disparities exist. In that respect, both the "left" and "right" rely on such statistics, the difference is in their interpretations, or lack thereof. Someone who is familiar with the history of racial discrimination in the U.S. will offer causal explanations of these disparities, which are consistent with these statistics and often distribute responsibility among various institutions and policies. On the other hand, someone who reflexively cites FBI statistics without interpretation, is at best justifying their prejudice by means of willful ignorance. At worst, by omitting the underlying context and offering no explicit explanation, they imply that these disparities are actually explained race, so that the minority can be blamed, conveniently absolving themselves of any responsibility. Thus they perpetuate and spread this prejudice, relying on their others' existing biases, ignorance, and proclivity to accept simple explanations or easy scapegoats.
These behaviors are clearly not equivalent. One is born out of ignorance and desire for self absolution, which are timeless, and that is why the same arguments have been used for decades. The other relies on deeper understanding of historical conditions and acceptance of culpability, which takes significant time and collective effort to build and communicate, which is why it has taken decades for concepts like "institutionalized racism" to enter the broader public discourse. Furthermore, the former is by definition prejudice, bias based on an immutable attribute of others, their race, while the latter is instead critical of others' prejudicial behavior, behavior that can change.
So, this as not an issue of prejudice on "both sides", and framing it as such presents a shallow understanding of the situation. This is also demonstrated by the quotes you've constructed to characterize the "left" on this issue, e.g. "white people who disagree with my politics are white supremacists". No reputable person actually says this, though the quotes from the "right" that you've used are almost direct quotes from sources like the President Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc. So, what would someone on the "left" actually say? Let's check out some quotes from Ibram X. Kendi; "Racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next", and, "whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races". The quote you've constructed is not just an uncharitable interpretation, it's actually in direct contradiction to what people on the "left" are saying.
So, again, these are not equivalent. I also want to point out that you have not engaged with any of the specific points (or references) that I have made in my previous comments, but instead are changing topics, presenting straw man arguments, and doubling down on "both sides" false equivalence fallacies. It is extremely unlikely that everyone else is "brainwashed" while you are somehow an objective observer of "both sides", nothing is that simple. Approaching discussions in this way will only serve to protect your own ego and worldview, and prevent personal growth. I highly recommend that you reflect and seek out opinions different from your own, while thinking critically about the foundations for your beliefs and the environment from which you derived them.