Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI
Jakub Pachocki, director of research; Aleksander Madry, head of AI risk team, and Szymon Sidor.
Scoop: theinformation.com
Paywalled link: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/three-senior-openai-...
Submitting information since paywalled links are not permitted.
711 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/sama/status/1635700851619819520
https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/J.-Pachocki/2713380?s...
As @eachro pointed out, Aleksander Madry is on leave from his MIT professorship. His publications:
https://madry.mit.edu/
xAI recently showed that training a decent-ish model is now a multi-month effort. Granted GPT-4 is still farther along than others but curious how many months/resources does that add up when you have the team that built it in the first place
But also, starting another LLM company might be too obvious a thing to do. Maybe Sam has another trick up his sleeve? Though I suspect he is sticking with AI one way or the other
Second paragraph of the "Long-term safety" section.
If an AI said that, we'd be calling it "capability gain" and think it's a huge risk.
With evidence, or is this the kind of pure speculation that media indulges in when they have no information and have to appear knowledgeable?
Maybe Ilya discovered something as head of AI safety research, something bad, and they had to act on it. From the outside it looks as if they are desperately trying to gain control. Maybe he got confirmation that LLMs are a little bit conscious, LOL. No, I am not making this up: https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368
In other news, Tesla FSD has been rebranded Saneer-Weeksbooth Autobot. So be careful out there folks.
https://madry.mit.edu/
Advice: you can't win over a narrative, which is what Sam has become. People and resources will come to him, by themselves.
If I was OpenAI I'd want to quit today not because I want to follow Sam, but because the same bullshit that people left Google Brain et al. for has managed to catch up with them at OpenAI. It's a shame honestly, it was so exciting to see a company finally free itself of the shackles of navel gazing and just build things, but it seems like that's over today.
The narrative I am referring to is a simple one: take back what should be his. A.k.a, revenge. That is for sure a strong word.
People live on stories (collective imagination, if fancier), and what they like most is a wronged prince/princess took back his/her crown. It is the same with Taylor Swift rerecording her albums. The story potential will feed itself, until it is fully realized. The OpenAI board had committed a historical misstep, but maybe it is indeed what it is designed for: they hold no stakes in the business, so their view can't be held accountable in a business microscope. But money will really dislike it.
Sounds like I did? I think this is kind of a bad take, no one is quitting OpenAI before Sam has even had 24 hours to process being fired to help him take on his revenge arc.
Instead it sounds like people are angered by the process and powers that lead to him being fired like that, which is extremely understandable given the history of OpenAI. People forget half of OpenAI's competitive advantage was just not letting themselves be mired in self-sabtoage, the exact kind their board just demonstrated today.
the dataset is the crucial bit of openAI. that takes a lot of time and money to make. So its perfectly possible for openAI to carry on innovating without these people.
But equally, it could turn to shit.
However, Sam isn't jesus, so its not like he's going to magically make another successful company.
But I think one thing is certain, he WILL create another AI company. It seems very unlikely he would quit the business.
I bet he'll train models on copious amounts of synthetic data made with GPT-4. There are lots of datasets in the open. That makes catching up easier.
No public facing model can be protected from data exfiltration and distillation. All deployed skills leak, your competition will replicate with less effort. And they only need to leak once and every subsequent model can inherit the skill. I think the first movers paid a high price for being first, and will quickly see their advantage erode. Latecomers will catch up and find AI easier to work with. The difference is made by the great fine-tuning datasets that are in the open, a growing lake of distilled abilities.
Another latecomer advantage is benefiting from significant innovation in the engineering part: flash attention, quantization, continuous batching, KV caching, LoRA, and more.
The new AI era will be more equalitarian. Catching up is much easier than discovering, and we can run AI privately, unlike search engines and social networks. You can't exploit SOTA advantage at scale. Being first is a fleeting advantage, the moment you go in the open everyone replicates.
Maybe one reason this is happening is because AI skills are very composable. Any addition to the skill repertoire already fits with other skills. This makes open sourcing skills very attractive. Of course, the datasets are what is being open sourced.
openai was that backed by a nonprofit structure. and it still caused sam to be michael dell'ed/steve job'ed.
seems like the issue was with having a board/didnt have a majority on it. Zuckerberg having 53% voting power on the board is probably the greatest thing he managed. Anything sam does from now should follow the same.
/disclaimer - i have no idea how voting shares work.
Who's supposed to pay for that?
AI is as real as the mobile/internet/pc revolution of the past.
So many use it obsessively every single day.
Sam & Greg could start a new AI company by Monday and instantly achieve unicorn valuation. Hardly a burst.
That's got to be worth something, since Alphabet is a $1.7T company mostly on the strength of ads associated with Google search.
Again - to each their own. But what people use google for GPT doesn’t replicate anyway (and what the Google business was built on) - which is commercial info retrieval.
And for my single query above, ChatGPT searched multiple sources, aggregated the results, and offered a summary and recommendations, which is a lot more than Google would have done.
ChatGPT's major current limitation is that it just refuses to answer certain questions [what is the email address for person.name?] or gets very woke with some other answers.
To each their own.
For the majority of my use of ChatGPT and Google, I need to be able to get useful answers to vague questions - answers that I can confirm for myself through other means - and I need to iterate on those questions to hone in on the problem at hand. ChatGPT is undoubtedly superior to Google in that regard.
Google search reminds me of Amazon reviews. Years ago, basically trustworthy, very helpful. Now ... take them with a tablespoon of salt and another of MSG.
And this is separate from the time-efficiency issue: "how quickly can I answer my complex question which requires several logical joins?", which is where ChatGPT really shines.
I haven't finished making up my mind, the the AI's are doing OK. I have only been asking it for code snippets that are easily verifiable.
GPT is very useful as a knowledge tool, but I don’t see people going there to make purchasing decisions. It replaces stackoverflow and quora, not Google. For shopping, I need to see the top X raw results, with reviews, so I can come to my own conclusion. Many people even find shopping fun (I don’t) and wouldn’t want to replace the experience with a chatbot even if it were somehow objectively better.
Did you see the recent article about a restaurant changing its name to "Thai Food near me"?
People stopping to use google for the small stuff will be the beginning of the end of google being the mental default for searches.
I go to Amazon if I want to find a book or a specific product.
For the latest news, I come here, or Reddit, or sometimes twitter.
If I want to look up information about a famous person or topic, I go to Wikipedia (usually via google search). I know I can ask ChatGPT, but Wikipedia is generally more up to date, well-written and highly scrutinized by humans.
The jury’s still out on exactly what role ChatGPT will serve in the long term, but we’ve seen this kind of unbundling many times before and Google is still just as popular and useful as ever.
It seems like GPT’s killer app is helping guide your learning of a new topic, like having a personal tutor. I don’t see that replacing all aspects of a general purpose search engine though.
She/he/it/them is an amazing programming tutor.
I agree, it's greatly undervalued!
We've already trained it on all the data there is, it's not going to get "smarter" and it'll always lack true subjective understanding, so the overhype has been real, indeed to bubble levels as per OP.
What is your basis for those claims? Especially the first one; I would think it's obvious that it will get smarter; the only questions are how much and how quickly. As far as subjective understanding, we're getting into the nature of consciousness territory, but if it can perform the same tasks, it doesn't really impact the value.
1) we should agree on what we mean by smart or intelligent. That's really hard to do so let's narrow it down to "does not hallucinate" the way GPT does, or more high level has a subjective understanding of its own that another agent can reliably come to trust. I can tell you that AI/deep learning/LLM hallucination is a technically unsolvable problem, so it'll never get "smarter" in that way.
2) This connects to number 2. Humans and animals of course aren't infinitely "smart;" we fuck up and hallucinate in ways of our own, but that's just it, we have a grounded truth of our own, born of a body and emotional experience that grounds our rational experience, or the consciousness you talk about.
So my claim is really one claim, that AI cannot perform the same tasks or "true" intelligence level of a human in the sense of not hallucinating like GPT without having a subjective experience of its own.
There is no answer or understanding "out there;" it's all what we experience and come to understand.
This is my favorite topic. I have much more to share on it including working code, though at a level of an extremely simple organism (thinking we can skip to human level and even jump exponentially beyond that is what I'm calling out as BS).
Compare ChatGPT to a dog-- a dog's experience of an audible "sit" command maps to that particular dog's history of experience, manipulated through pain or pleasure (i.e. if you associate treat + "sit", you'll have a dog with its own grounded definition of sit). A human also learns words like "sit," and we always have our own understanding of those words, even if we can agree on them together too certain degrees in lines of linguistic corpora. In fact, the linguistic corpora is borne out of our experiences, our individual understandings, and that's a one way arrow, so something trained purely on that resultant data is always an abstraction level away from experience, and therefore from true grounded understanding or truth. Hence GPT (and all deep learning) unsolvable hallucination or grounding problems.
Look, I'm an AGI/AI researcher myself. I believe and bleed this stuff. AI is here to stay and is forever a part of computing in many ways. Sam Altman and others bastardized it by overhyping it to current levels, derailing real work. All the traction OpenAI has accumulated, outside of github copoilot / codex, is itself so far away from product-market fit that people are playing off the novelty of AGI / the GPT/AI being on its way to "smarter" than human rather than any real usage.
Hype in tech is real. Overhype and bubbles are real. In AI in particular, there's been AI winters because of the overhype.
You’re talking about hype cycles now. Previously it seemed like you said AI was not going to be advancing.
LLMs are maybe headed into oversold territory, but LLMs are not the end of AI, even in the near term. They are just the UI front end.
Peak is perhaps the wrong word, local maximum before falling into the Trough of Disillusionment.
It's a bubble if the valuation is inflated beyond a level compared to a reasonable expected future value. Usefulness isn't part of that. The important bit is 'reasonable', which is also the subjective bit.
AI Art is currently in very early stage. In the real art space (3d modeling, sculpting, animation, vfx, animation, rigging, retargeting), it could make huge breakthroughs and multiply true artists' productivity in significant ways
I call the first hour true productivity. The last part is, from the perspective of the end product, simply a wasted time. That's very similar to the boilerplate code everybody agrees is a necessary evil in the programming.
If AI allows to reduce the #2 it truly will have positive impact
Like, GitHub Copilot may be amazing, but if it looses money for every added user, if power users loose the company 4 or 8 times what they already pay, then maybe it's not an efficient use of compute resources.
Are there any good examples of this? I struggle to use ChatGPT, maybe I'm using it not cleverly (or deeply) enough.
I know that lots of people have personal stories of using ChatGPT but I was hoping something publicly reported on or like a showcase of truly impressive usages somewhere.
Have you ever tried to make a Python program to do exactly that?
I only used couple of sentences to build my prompt...
I don't know your CS background but perhaps I do not view the terms "complex" and "tedious" the way you assume. A tedious parser is certainly tedious to write, but it is not (necessarily) complex. And from an engineering standpoint it is questionable that you lost all the formatting information from Word, which would have already demarcated what things were headers, code, and so forth. So, you had to use a roundabout way—an LLM—to recover that information from the semantics.
If what you're really arguing is that ChatGPT works well for language translation tesks, in this case translating mixed prose, code, and foreign languages--sure I guess that's great at productivity and removing tedium, but it's not that surprising a usage given what LLMs are. They are language translators.
In other words you're saying it's complex but your argument reduces a task that is straightforward but tedious for humans, to the problem complexity of natural language processing.
"Goddamn, how dare they invent the bigger cannons!?" - Romans, 1453, in Constantinople probably. (One incident where I can use my exempt powers).
And those which are carried in our pockets are no longer capable of being home brewed.
The rich will ALWAYS get their piece of the pie, and once they've had their fill, we'll be left fighting for the crumbs and thanking them for their generosity.
AI won't solve world hunger, it will make millions of people jobless. It won't stop wars, it will be used as a tool for the elite to spread propaganda. The problems that plague society today are ones that technology (that has existed for decades) can fix but greed prevents it.
Well here comes AI to take those jobs. What happens, you think? Where do we go next? Do you imagine we'll all just sit idle and give out orders for the AI to fulfill? Recall: the system throws away parts that are not useful. And we're not better at orchestrating this system than we are at implementing it. Most people already struggle to handle the complexity of modern life. So they'll be thrown out.
Now think what happens with a society where most people are unemployed, unhappy and hungry, and businesses are mostly, not ENTIRELY mind you, but most self-sufficient machinery that does the thinking and does the footwork?
But even that doesn't describe the problem alone. It's more of an end game. Before this we'll see not-so-superior AI pollute our web, media, public space with quickly generated content, as actual artists and thinkers are displaced, unable to compete. Our culture will die first. And then, eventually, we'll start dying.
As I'm describing this, note I don't say this from place of fear. I don't fear this. I see it more as an obvious place for our civilization to go. We can't help it, because we don't decide where this civilization goes any more than your cells decide where you go, or any more than the atoms of your cells "decide" where the cell goes.
We're not in control. That's just evolution.
Say, when you're sick and you have cancer, those cells are part of you, but they harm you, so you cut them out, apply chemotherapy, and then if there's a prosthesis to substitute the organ you removed with a machine, you do it, and you don't think twice about it.
What makes you think our society as a whole is different? If humans are not good at what society needs, it cuts those people out, and replaces them with working machines. It's so plainly obvious. We pay lip service to human rights and the value of an individual, but clearly that's not what we end up doing. A politician is chasing money and power, and they don't mind starting wars to get them if they can. A business chases profit, so they don't mind automating away any employee they can. It's always been this way. So now that you can replace the human thinkers, businesses won't need human thinkers. And since there's nothing left humans are good at, society won't need humans.
Have you used gpt4? it's reasoning capabilities match human ability. The more you think about it, the more scary the reality becomes. GPT 4 can reason through any mental exercise as well as a human. The rest of the work to make it autonomous is simple in comparison.
So can I.
And yet, people don't consider me an existential threat.
Mostly because I do not have nukes.
Current GPT doesn't have a physical threat.
But, take something like the movie "Colossus". Where they did give control of nukes. That was scary.
Now, go watch the Netflix show about AI. This GPT stuff is so far just fun apps.
The military already has AI that can out pilot a human in a F-16, you think it will stop there ? That is probably already old news.
All research that I have seen disagrees with this take. Ask GPT-4 a few basic block world problems and see for yourself if it can match human ability.
Lol try giving it any of the puzzles from here: https://momath.org/home/varsity-math/complete-varsity-math/
Don’t just accept its confident tone, read through and actually parse the logic. It totally falls apart.
I use it every day, and I have to often guide it like a 5 year old to come to the conclusion to help me the way I want it to.
>GPT 4 can reason through any mental exercise as well as a human.
So can my alcoholic neighbor. That should not be a benchmark of anything.
We could try to think a little more deeply about things than "let jesus take the wheel"
How much more cost effective to just fool half the board of a nonprofit into taking unnecessarily aggressive action.
Don't know what to do. Is my investment into their API still worth it? It feels very unstable at this moment.
Though my investment will be still tiny at the moment, but not other multi-modal model on the market right is as good.
Microsoft seems like one of the more reliable partners to build on compared to Google etc. just for the simple reason that their customers are large businesses and not breaking things for them is in their blood. Just like Windows backwards compatibility.
What exactly are you saying?
That being said, I might not go further relying on their APIs for something more serious
In addition, it would likely be some time, possibly years, before it would be ready for production.
Perhaps recent events have just brought that more clearly into focus for you.
Hugely more interested in the open source models now, even if they are not as good at present. Because at least there is a near-100% guarantee that they will continue to have community support no matter what; the missing problem I suppose is GPUs to run them.
For example, i have an assistant which is supposed to parse an uploaded file and extract useful info from it. To use this assistant, I create a thread and a run and attach it to the assistant with a different file-id. About half the time, the assistant simply throws up its hands and says it can’t parse the file I supplied with the thread. Retrying a few times seems to do the trick.
Do you know if there are any projects working on this? Even something like a high quality json-tuned base model would go a huge way toward replicating OpenAI's current product.
If you build out this way then when the next greatest LLM comes out you can plug that into your interface and switch the tasks it’s best at over.
If it does have considerable training data including prompt and response when people are interacting with itself then I suppose it isn't that surprising.
That does sound like self awareness, in the non magical sense. It is aware of its own behaviour because it has been trained on it.
AI tools will need a similar plugin like approach.
They wouldn't have been able to do that even before Sam's dismissal
> Can they give reassurances about their products going into the future?
emotional comfort is not the thing you should be looking for mate.
The board of OpenAI should have been replaced by adults a long time ago.
In all three languages I frequently use (Common Lisp, Python, and Racket) it is easy to switch between APIs. You can also use a library like LangChain to make switching easier.
For people building startups on OpenAI specific APIs, they can certainly protect themselves by using Azure as an intermediary. Microsoft is in the “stability business.”
If they try to integrate OpenAI, they will suffocate it.
The fact that it’s all well connected wealthy people is kind of the point, the board is there (among others) to bring advice and experience
OpenAI non-profit --owns---> Holding Company for Open AI non-profit
That makes no sense. How does a non-profit "own" a holding company, that own the non-profit?
Only time employees leaving is a bad sign had been when the company had been in zombie mode too long(few years) and haven’t delivered anything yet or still in alpha/beta stage with crappy deliveries no one is using or has no significant uptake.
Also, if there are financial difficulties, then a lot of people leave in droves and some actually come back after finances get better.
And people who are invested into “social impact” still care about their wealth and well-being despite living luxurious lives by the standards even of the developed world, let alone all other countries.
Like, sure you’d be able to live off your savings if you were allowed to stay in the country, but most countries have a short limit on a tourist visa and then you’d need to leave…
My guess is they know something we don't Or they assume sama being fired means the trajectory of OpenAI as a company has changed or is likely to change significantly?
it's like you wrote this comment yesterday, and not in the context of what has happened
Would it really have been so hard to find out Sam Altman just got fired without notice?
These are huge losses. Pachocki led pre-training for GPT-4, and probably GPT-5. Brockman is the major engineer responsible for the efficiency improvements that enabled ChatGPT and GPT-4 to be even remotely cost-effective. That is a piece that is often overlooked, but OpenAI's advantage over the competition in compute efficiency is probably even larger than the model itself.
https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...
But yeah, since Sam and Greg were apparently pushed out because they were building too good of a business any OpenAI employees that were aligned with them are likely to jump ship and join them, and OpenAI will revert to the non-profit research lab it started out as.
Could a nuclear energy company be at escape velocity to fusion because they are the best at fission? I wouldn't think so
Apple surely doesn’t have a cluster that at all compares with the big cloud giants.
Oracle and AWS are really the only cloud left, and oracle is already renting to Microsoft for GPU compute.
Apple has a lot of cash to throw at it. Question would be if Apple is even interested in it.
The best they can do is out-bid their competitors, for the competitors hardware. I'm sure apple doesn't want to pay Google for GCP resource to train an AI. Again, there may not be enough companies renting out GPUs at all.
Edit: apparently ALDI VS LIDL is an urban myth. It's ALDI that was split in two ..
It would be my life's dream to spend 80 hours per week coding without having to communicate with others... but no one is an island...
You really have to have a passion for coding to put in the hours and be very good at it. Incredibly rare, believe it or not. Lots of people think they are good coders but this is another level. Proof is in your commit/code review count/async comms being 10x-100x of everyone else in your org, and it's clear you're single-handedly enabling delivery of major projects earlier than anyone else could. Think of the pressure of doing this continuously.
You have to watch out with that.. I've seen whole projects pushed through by management where no one else was involved enough to review normally, but everyone had an interaction that implied they had only seen the top of the iceberg of problems with it.
I don't know this guy in particular so I have no clue though.
I asked him whether as a boy he had speculated much about his gift. Had he asked himself why he had this special power? Why he was so bright?
Dyson is almost infallibly a modest and self-effacing man, but tonight his eyes were blank with fatigue, and his answer was uncharacteristic.
“That’s not how the question phrases itself,” he said. “The question is: why is everyone else so stupid?”
The topic at hand is “how did a high level engineer got to focus on programming”. And I am saying that the reason has to do more with his influence and role within the organization, rather than other reason.
1) Moves fast, flexes their authority to sweep small stuff under the rug until it is out of scope and can be "fixed real quick" later. Often leverages many subject matter experts through effective and persistent communication and learns quick enough to get PRs through the door (that sometimes need "quick" fixes later). Enjoys selecting items that benefit their career the most, at the expense of others on their team. Mentors only enough to onboard and increase his team's yield, not to aid their careers. Fueled by the recognition and validation of peers through PR/project completion.
2) Gets shit done, is the SMI themself. Solo code cannon, but PRs go in clean, beautiful to look at. May not get along well with some but not necessarily abrasive to work with especially being part of their direct team. Can be a great altruistic mentor if they spare 5% of their time. Enjoys what they do, and the technologies they work with. Fueled by personal satisfaction in their achievements, and in uplifting their team.
Because most 10x engineers recognized by management as such are characterized chiefly by building out shoddy software extremely quickly that only they can understand.
In a similar dynamic, Doctors that are scored highly by patients often have pretty bad medical outcomes.
That's a nice insight. I have been in that place many times, I was overfitting on my own imagination.
Management and leadership of a team has a way bigger impact than any single individual contributor could ever have. Humans are generally limited not by intelligence but by motivation and vision. Directing people to achieve what you want is what allows the scaling of innovation.
Hero worship is a very human thing, but unscientific.
When it comes to sports it's fairly obvious what outliers look like and well accepted that they exist. I don't see a single reason to believe, that the same would not be true in every other walk of life or thinking that OpenAI just got lucky (considering how many people are trying to get lucky right now with less success in this space).
There are extraordinarily effective people in this world, and they are sparse and it's probably not you or me (but that's completely fine with me, I am happy to stretch myself to the best of my abilities).
For a certain definition of "software": when only doing one training run costs an 8 digits sum (requiring hardware one order of magnitude more expensive than that to run) I kinda dispute the "all they do is software".
It's definitely not "all software": a big part of their advantage compared to actually free and open models is the insane hardware they have access to.
The free and open LLMs are doing very well compared to OpenAI once you take into account that the cost to train them is 1/100th to 1/1000th what it costs to train the OpenAI models.
This can be seen with StableDiffusion: once the money is poured in training the models and then the model made free, suddenly the edge of proprietary solutions is tiny (if it even exists at all).
I'd like to see the actually open and free models trained on the hardware used to train OpenAI: then we'd see how much of a "software edge" OpenAI has.
And my guess is it'd be way less impressive than you make it out to be.
It would seem like you're talking about what "software edge" OpenAI has in the future, when others have caught up, while parent is talking about the existing "software edge" OpenAI has today, which you seem to implicitly agree with, as you're talking about OpenAI maybe not having any edge in the future.
I do not wanna be flippant here: Obviously having easy access to money and a good standing with the right people is making things A LOT simpler, but other people could have reasonably convinced someone to give them money to built the same software. That's what VCs do, after all.
Regarding the rest: Feels very much like a different topic. I'll pass.
In my company, 80% coding for a senior SWE is rare. But if they deliver, management will give them some slack on the other evaluation axis. I have colleagues who work almost by themselves on new high impact projects. This has many benefits. No need to argue about designs, code reviews (people just approve blindly their code). The downside is that you need to deliver.
What also happens is regular developers (like me) want the same treatment as if they could end-to-end deliver "if they only let me", but many times can't, and actually need the structure and processes of a team. I've seen this freedom not working at all.
- an equalizer (entire team treated the same)
- a confidence booster (approval of others gives feeling of having done well)
- a way of distributing information (everyone is aware of all other team work)
You can run a team as a form of "competitive sport", and race everyone against each other; who churns out most "wins", and helpfulness, non-code-work, cross-team work are "distractors" to that objective hence undesirable and definitely not rewarded.
If the personalities in your team are "right" then this can work and by striving to best each other, all achieve highly. Have a single non-competitive person in there though... and it'll grate. Forcing a collaborative element into the work (whether by approval/review procedures, or by things like mentoring/coaching, or even just to force briefings to the team on project completion) creates a balance between the "lone crusaders" and the "power of the masses". Make the loners aware of, and contribute to, the concept of "team success", and give the "masses" insight into contributing factors of high individual performance.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/21/why-apple-co-founder-steve-w...
My take: He’s the Keanu Reeves of tech (or Keanu is the Woz of the film industry). The world can use more of this.
https://chat.openai.com/share/c35e3fd1-d94e-477b-a331-b14384...
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312704
What about he spends 4 hours a week coding cause he’s so good at coding.
Way more impressive.
However! The best engineers I've been around do work a lot and they like it.
If instead of work it was something else it would be seen as a problem. 100 hours per week doesn’t leave room for anything else other than basic human needs.
“They like it”, well all addicts like what they’re addicted to, it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
What I’m trying to say is that it is an addiction like any other and should be treated as such, not glorified.
It’s ok to not enjoy it yourself. Different strokes for different folks.
I don’t think it should be culturally championed but I don’t see it as an immediate red flag especially in the case of a bleeding edge company like OpenAI.
Surely all addicts love the thing they’re addicted to, but that doesn’t make it ok, even in the case where their addiction doesn’t ruin their lives short or mid term.
OK now back to my 12 hour day. Not burnt out yet so I'm going to keep going. And yes, I LIKE IT!
Being good at something lies in the result and/or appreciation of your work by skilled pairs, which also seem to be there.
Can we get a pllleeeeeeaaaase????
He’s clearly a terrible programmer and/or a terrible chairman and to be honest this news says he’s at least 1 of 2 on the above.
I don't see any comments here claiming that it's something that most people could do well.
I don’t like nonsense PR stories or myths about people’s extraordinary prowess.
I just respond badly to BS and these statement have obvious BS if you stop for even a second to think about them.
On some level too, it offends me when I see right minded intelligent people in my community lapping it up.
So a couple of things.
Say I were to tell you that he was the President of openAI but he also did 80 hours of janitorial work per week.
Would you say that was a good use of his time?
Would you say that maybe he should be spending his time on being president of the company and not mopping up? You would be right.
Now substitute programming for janitorial work.
Now be a little more critical about things you see online.
Most programming work in any project and company is mundane, so I do agree someone taking care of all that without whining is actually extremely valuable. I couldn’t do it.
Still doesn’t really make sense to put him on such a pedestal like many in this thread. It seems like a cultural thing in the US to overvalue individuals, and downplay the importance of good teams.
But it is your right to assume what he works on from reading his tweets and leap from that to how this is an American cultural thing tho.
Personally, I find it much easier to get lost in time and focused when I am working on something challenging. Time just flies by.
If I have to work on something boring / routine / repetitive I find it much hard to focus and time goes by so slowly.
Then my brain decides to look for ways to automate what I am doing. Perhaps a DSL or .. or .. o .. No work, remember work, but I could hmm if I write a Perl script i, No work you need to work, but it woud be work if i cold only
(I am diagnosed with ADHD)
So basically, my brain is lazy and try to find a way to keep it in that state.
You will see the distance to be travelled and say let's build a airplane.
but incentives in most companies demand "progess" hence most projects start by piling the car high and driving off. it's when they are attaching floats to the car and paddling across the atlantic shouting progess reports back to shore that the value of automation comes to mind
don't worry about the ADHD - embrace it. (my hint - of the boring has to be done, make it the only thing, have nothing else).
Let's first define 'coding' before we jump into the details: 'coding' for me is sitting at your computer doing the work. It's not getting a coffee, chatting with a colleague, going to toilet or reading hacker news. So if you're reading this and claiming to do 100 hours per week of productive time, I call bullshit on that.
Being at the office for 60 to 100 hours, sure, I believe that.
When I was studying for exams at University, I did more than half of the work before noon. The rest was spread out over the afternoon and evening. At 20:00 my brain was dead. I could read a sentence, and nothing would stick. Read it again, impossible to process it.
So I always wondered how these other students could study until 2am in the morning. Well, turned out they didn't do shit in the morning. That's how they studied "all the way into the night".
Now back to my programming career: At my best I do 4 to 6 hours of concentrated coding per day. At my best, nobody seriously outperformed me. So if you claim to do more than x2 the work that I'm doing, I would love to see the output of that.
People like Cal Newport basically confirm what I've seen over the years. So do habits of the most famous authors.
Now, I can be convinced that it's actually possible. Take a look at Carmack, who claims to do 12 hours a day. He doesn't seem to be a bullshitter to me. So either he's counting time that I wouldn't count, like dungeon mastering a D&D game, or playtesting, or whatever. Or he's actually a super human work machine. Now he worked with Abrash, who seemed to do more sane hours. And in the end Carmack had high respect for the output of Abrash.
So yeah, if you know people who can actually do 14 hours of high concentrated coding 7 days out of 7, I would love to hear it and get some kind of confirmation that they're not browsing reddit and HN 50% of that time. And if you're reading this and claim to do 14 hours a day of concentrated work, I call bullshit on that you HN addict!
If I know what to write, and I just have to crunch out pretty straightforward code, I can do more hours (nowhere near 12 hours though, maybe 8 at best).
I can imagine the work your dad did, didn't include juggling a big complex system in his head, which seems to require a lot of mental energy.
That's basically also what Carmack states, that you can reach 12 hours if you plan your work to include some easier tasks for that day. But then again, I was never able to really apply that strategy.
Thanks for you take on it! :)
I understand that sometimes is worth it, to create a great product, solve something important or just for fun. But beware
Did nobody read this damn article? It's 5 paragraphs long, take 1 minute.
So here's my theory which might sound crazy. Sam planned to open a new AI company and taking away openAI's top talents to his company. And breaking up openAI into non profit and his for profit company.
Sam's first tweet after all this has, just hours after this article:
> will have more to say about what’s next later.
So either he knew that he was about to be fired or at least was prepared.
Also based on the wording of the press release, Sam did something that the board absolutely hated. Because most of the time even if he did something illegal it doesn't make sense to risk defamation by accusing him publically. Also based on his video of yesterday at the APEC summit, he repeated the similar lines few times:
> I am super excited. I can't imagine anything more exciting to work on.
So here if we assume he knew he was about to get fired, the conclusion is clear.