[adastra22]

Which has very little to do with OpenAI’s success. It’s not enough to make a new technology, as too many tech-focused entrepreneurs have found out. You have to find product-market fit, manage suppliers and customers, and negotiate deals.

[rirarobo]

Typically I would agree, but in the case of OpenAI, they were themselves blindsided when their free conversational LLM demo, ChatGPT, went viral less than a year ago now.

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.

[adastra22]

> Of course, OpenAI capitalized on that initial success very skillfully

That’s the key point there. Without leadership talent to capitalize on success, technical advances are for naught.

But also, GPT had been around for some years before ChatGPT. The model used in ChatGPT was an improvement in many ways and I don’t mean to diminish Ilya’s contribution to that, but it is the packaging of the LLM into a product that made ChatGPT a success. I see more of Sam’s fingerprints on that than Ilya’s.

[rirarobo]

Agreed, both were critical for their success, the underlying LLM technology, and the vision and leadership to package the tech into ChatGPT.

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.

[aamoyg]

That's what Microsoft was doing on their behalf.