Right but if the true issue was with a major and unambiguously bad transgression by Sam and Sam alone (e.g., there was a major leak of data and he lied about it, etc), why would they go after his ally as well? It makes the whole thing look more political rather than a principled “we had no choice“ reaction to a wrongdoing.
I think he's just saying that Brockman leaving sort of rules out scandalous revelations about Altman being the cause. Think about it. For Brockman to voluntarily align himself on the side of the man before scandalous revelations about him hit the news cycle would seem absurd and unnecessarily destroy his reputation also. Before news of Brockman leaving, I was near certain it had to be upcoming scandalous revelations about Altman.
It is not at all uncommon for people to staunchly defend their friends, even after they have done terrible things. I don't think this rules out anything.
No way. Demon in your midsts. Some people actually have amazing options with no associations to molestation.
When stuff like this happens it’s an insane abandon ship moment. Of course, obviously it is, but people will act in ways that are strange if you don’t know what’s going on internally.
Things like smooth transitions don’t happen and people basically willing to crawl into a cannon and get hurled away if it removes that person NOW.
Yes this is even more surprising. Why would the board annouche he would continue with the company just to have him resign 1 hour later? Clearly the board would not have written that decision without his consent.
How much is Altman contributing to product, though? Product in its broadest sense - not only improving LLM performance and breadth but applications, or "productization": new APIs, ChatGPT, enterprise capabilities, etc.?
I think Altman is a brilliant guy and surely he'll fall on his feet, but I think it's legitimate to ask to what extent he's responsible for many of us using ChatGPT every single day for the last year.
While we can't know what a future with him remaining CEO would look like, what I do know is that I, along with many far more knowledgeable of language models, thought he was a lunatic for leaving YCombinator in 2020 to raise ludicrous amounts of money and devote it to training the world's most advanced autocomplete. Does that mean he still possesses seemingly prophetic insight into the future of generative models? I have no clue. All I know is that many knowledgeable people (and myself) vastly underestimated him before and we were dead wrong. Even if OpenAI's decision is wrong and he possesses such level of insight, it doesn't matter because it would mean he doesn't need them. If he's a one-trick pony whose vision for the future ends at 2023, then they made the right decision.
I may be in minority here but I tried using this thing for coding. It's horrible. Bootstrapping (barely) a basic API that even a scaffolding tool from 10 years ago can do is not something I would brag about. If you need anything more complicated that involves 1 or 2 if statements .. good luck.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this, GPT4 has become an indispensable coding sidekick for me. Yes it needs rigorous coaxing and nudging, and sometimes it hallucinates, but I’ve also seen it produce great things that have saved me dozens or hundreds of hours of work this year. Including non-trivial code with far more than two if blocks.
Same here. I find it lowers the barrier to entry for me starting something, it also sends me down roads I would not have travelled before, which expand my range of solutions to problems.
It does all this in sub 10% of the time I would have spent “googling” things.
I don’t want it to write the whole thing for me anyway :)
Oh, I totally agree. Documentation summarization .. perfect for it.
I was talking more about actually coding with it. Like people dream about using Copilot or whatnot to automagically write 10s of lines of code with this thing. I tried it. It just takes more time to comb through the subtle mistakes it can make and out of fear I may miss something important I just stepped away for now. You're going to say: but you should have tests. Not when the tests are written by the thing itself :). It's turtles all the way down.
But otherwise I do use it to explore technology I'm not familiar with. Just because it mentions things I'm going to read more about next. It's great for that. Just not for coding .. yet.
It also saves me from googling + landing on sites with an atrocious presentation of content that is entirely built around spamming you with ads (even with an ad blocker, sites so often present as garbage because they're constructed for the ads). Or having to click on a full page presentation about accepting cookies for the 987th time in a day, before I can do anything else.
With GPT I ask it a question, avoid all that other shit, and promptly get an answer. That's it. I paid for a service and they delivered. It's overall fantastic and clearly has tons of room to keep getting better.
Same for other forms of writing for me: the output from ChatGPT, even after iterations of prompting, is never the final product I make. It gets me 80-90% of the way there to get me over the initial jump, and then I add the polish and flavor.
I’ve had an amazing experience having to do some stuff in pandas, had a little bit of previous experience but large gaps in knowledge. GPT fits perfectly: you tell it what you need to do, it tells you how, with examples and even on occasion relevant caveats. Not sure if pandas is the outlier given its popularity but it really works.
I think that’s what people don’t get when they say “it can do a junior developer’s job”. No, you have to know what you’re doing and then it can augment your abilities. I always have fun when my non-developer colleagues try to analyze data by asking ChatGPT. The thing is clueless and just outputs code that calls non-existing APIs.
I think either way, your leadership has an impact. Clearly there’s been some internal strife for a minute, but the amount of innovation coming out of this company in the last year or two has been staggering.
Altman now doubt played a role in that, objectively this means change. Just not sure in which direction yet.
While we're on conspiracy theories, Elon Musk would have more motives (they seem to not be in good acquaintances nowadays based on their Twitter profiles and he also has a competing LLM (Grok)), such a games of thrones petty revenge from him would be less surprising than from Google. But Ilya convincing the rest of the board seems much more realistic.
I think you may be underestimating the value of someone brokering deals with mega-corps like Microsoft and managing to raise revenue and capital from various sources to finance the ongoing costs to stay at the top. Bear in mind that I'm not saying their decision was wrong. It's possible his forte is limited to building companies at early stages. Richard Branson was known for being better at building companies early on and indifferent to managing them as cash cows. It would also align with Altman's background with YCombinator.
I do it from time to time and I feel like it's a mix of several things (1) it's counter culture, (2) it's early internet culture, (3) aesthetic/uniformity, (4) laziness, (5) carelessness, (6) a power move, (7) "hyper rationality".
And all of these contribute to it being a power move.
I use all lowercase on platforms where I share original content because I like the aesthetic of lowercase letters. They look more harmonious to me. I only use uppercase when using acronyms because I think they're recognized quicker by their shape.
Oh no! :) Yes, I use all lowercase on Twitter and Eksi Sozluk mostly. I don't write in all lowercase on Reddit, HN, or Quora, or forums, etc where different type of capitalizations mix up. I find non-uniformity less pleasing to the eye than proper capitalization.
I also write my emails with proper capitalization too, for similar reasons.
Not a power move at all! It's just that people who are this smart, whose brains operate in a higher dimension than you can possibly imagine, won't waste precious mental cycles on silly uppercases just the rest of us commoners.
Speed. The fact he even decided to Tweet/Xeet during a period of personal and professional upheaval is notable on its own. I’m cool adding in my own capitalization as needed. Or maybe I could past it in ChatGPT!
I've always seen it as a way of peacocking. A way for people to make themselves stand out from others. But I think it also stems from a mindset of "I'm aware that professional communication involves proper capitalization, but I'm not going to bother because I don't feel the need to communicate professionally to the person I'm typing to"
I'm fine with it as long as everyone is typing in lowercase. But if the culture of a company or community is to type a certain way, there's some level of disrespect (or rebellion) by doing the opposite.
If others are willing to voluntarily follow you out, I would say it points to some internal power struggle that underlies this whole affair.