[embedding-shape]

Not feeling like 1 hour of my Sunday is worth listening to this, do anyone have the non-clickbait answers to the two "previews" mentioned in the description?

> Greg explains how the original Napa offsite produced the three-step technical plan OpenAI has followed for a decade and the real reason OpenAI had to abandon its pure nonprofit structure

What was the technical plan and what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?

[applfanboysbgon]

> What was the technical plan

"1. Solve reinforcement learning

2. Solve unsupervised learning

3. Gradually learn more complicated 'things'"

That three point list is verbatim the extent of the technical plan mentioned.

> what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?

Paraphrasing, "we needed more money for compute and didn't think we could get enough as a non-profit". Brockman's diary might be a stronger indicator of the real real reason, though.

[armchairhacker]

What was the real real reason?

I imagine if they stayed nonprofit, they would’ve survived, but not convinced investors to give them enough $$$ and datacenters to stay the most popular (above Google).

[Lerc]

If they stayed small and 100% non-profit, would the influence or value of the non profit be more, or less, than it is today?

I think the non-profit has around 25% ownership of something that is around a trillion dollars of on-paper money.

I guess we will see what things are still worth when the crazy days come to an end.

[orra]

> I think the non-profit has around 25% ownership of something that is around a trillion dollars of on-paper money.

But the purpose of a non profit is not to maximise profit in a for profit investment.

How well is non profit doing at furthering its goals? It formerly had the purpose of “safely” ensuring artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. It looks like it gave up on that so its staff could be incredibly rich.

[Lerc]

Do you not think money provides some ability to achieve goals? Fund raising is an integral part of most non-profits.

But you ignored the part about influence, would an OpenAI that did not scale up and had no world beating models have much of a say in how AI gets developed

This is not to say that I think they are doing everything right, but I see people bitter that they didn't take the path towards forgotten irrelivance.

What would you reccommend that they should have done that would still lead to them being relevant to the world development of AI?

[tedivm]

Frankly the non-profit has failed. OpenAI is one of the least open of the AI companies (Anthropic is a bit worse). If it wasn't for the labs in China the dream of an actual open ai system would be dead.

[azinman2]

I feel like people don’t give OpenAI enough credit for the early papers they did publish. Those are what showed the way that everyone else has built on.

[greatgib]

I can easily guess also that at the beginning they were more thinking like a research project that they could create something but would like quantum computing today, not really of real world used.

And one things started to become real, they realized the financing potential of the thing, that they were seated on a gold mine and would be stupid of them to create that and not profit much more of it.

[wahnfrieden]

To get rich of course

[coalstartprob]

the real real reason being gdb wanting to be a billionaire ;)

[cma]

Unsupervised

[jstummbillig]

Granola notes are a 1 Minute read: https://notes.granola.ai/d/2c35c84f-6eb4-497a-8419-294d92141...

[bblb]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JoUcQ1qmAc

    00:00:00 Introduction
    00:00:49 Meeting Sam Altman and Starting OpenAI
    00:02:40 Building the Founding Team
    00:04:25 DeepMind's Lead Over OpenAI
    00:04:54 The Change from a Pure Non-Profit
    00:06:05 Breakthrough Moments at OpenAI
    00:08:22 What Dota 2 Meant for OpenAI
    00:10:04 Reasoning Versus Prediction
    00:11:59 Tensions Grow at OpenAI
    00:15:44 Sam Altman's Firing
    00:17:49 Greg Quits OpenAI
    00:19:56 Sam Explores Deal with Microsoft's Satya
    00:20:28 OpenAI Employees Sign Petition for Altman's Return
    00:23:43 Ilya Sutskever Leaves OpenAI
    00:24:59 Lessons Learned in Leadership after Sam Ousting
    00:28:22 The Thing Ilya Said that Greg Can't Forget
    00:32:22 Is AI Going Parabolic?
    00:33:24 How Much of OpenAI's Code is Written by AI?
    00:36:21 Are AI Chatbots Just Telling Us What We Want to Hear?
    00:38:06 The Global AI Race to Reach AGI
    00:38:40 What Happens if US Doesn't Reach AGI First?
    00:39:49 Are Competing Countries Stealing AI Advancements from U.S?
    00:40:38 Why ChatGPT No Longer Shows Reasoning
    00:41:47 The Finite Constraints of Compute
    00:43:38 On Investing Early in Data Centers
    00:46:31 The Future of Data Center Specialization
    00:47:52 How OpenAI Will Decide Whose Queries to Serve
    00:49:08 OpenAI on Consumer vs Enterprise Models
    00:53:05 Data Centers in Space?
    01:00:56 What Should AI Regulation Look Like?
    01:04:33 The Future of AI-Powered Entrepreneurship
    01:04:44 AI and Job Loss
    01:07:15 The Skills Young People Should Invest In
    01:11:30 What Does Success Look Like For You?

[tcp_handshaker]

>> What was the technical plan and what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?

Because they were still downloading from Anna's Archive and the lawyers were in panic?

[dave1010uk]

1. Solve reinforcement learning.

2. solve unsupervised learning.

3. gradually tackle more complicated things.

> what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?

I assume this is referring to why they gave up being a non-profit. The answer is that they needed more money.

[embedding-shape]

Huh, I guess ML people weren't aware of "divide and conquer" that has been successfully employed in software engineering since basically forever?

> I assume this is referring to why they gave up being a non-profit. The answer is that they needed more money.

Ugh, that was more boring than even I expected, thanks a lot for saving me the time though, seems avoiding watching the full thing was worth it.

[adastra22]

Not that they wanted more money personally, but that they needed more money for compute.

[peterdsharpe]

"Financially, what will take me to $1B?" -Greg Brockman, August 2017

[arvid-lind]

> The answer is that they needed more money.

isn't it still an odd choice for a nonprofit? it's hard to imagine a world without OpenAI and ChatGPT now, but at some point they decided being the best is most important. and presumably most profitable, since why just need a little more money?

[mycall]

Don't all nonprofits need more money to improve their sustainment?

[nativeit]

Maybe, but somehow I doubt the American Heart Association is planning to open a chain of pork barbecue restaurants to support its mission against heart disease.

[gizajob]

Trivial to imagine everyone switching to Anthropic or Google or on-device LLMs.

[siva7]

> Not feeling like 1 hour of my Sunday is worth listening to this, do anyone have the non-clickbait answers to the two "previews" mentioned in the description?

I know HN is built around mostly not reading the articles linked but how about you click on the link and surprise, there is already exactly another link providing what you're asking for.

[embedding-shape]

You mean the transcript that is behind a account/paywall? Or is there some other link I'm missing?

[monkey_monkey]

Apparently we're all expected to somehow know that "Granola notes" is a summary of the conversation.

[siva7]

Yes, you're missing the link at the end of the article for free.