The OpenAI Plot Thickens
That last post? From an hour ago? About all the crazy things that happened today? Already obsolete. Today was wilder — and darker for OpenAI, and by extension the industry – than I thought.
Over the last several months they have lost Ilya Sutskever, a whole bunch of safety people, and (slightly earlier) Andrej Karpathy. and now this, just in, reported by The Information:
Paul Graham famously said of Sam Altman, “You could parachute [him] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king.”
Maybe because everyone else got tired of playing? An awful lot of key players have left the island. Most voluntarily. (Brockman’s extended leave shocks me the most.) The board, which basically said it couldn’t trust Sam, may have had a point.
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I said it before, and I will say it again: OpenAI could wind up being seen as the WeWork of AI. Huge operating losses, big staff expenses, an apparent morale problem, no GPT-5 yet, competitors catching up, Meta giving away similar tech for free, Microsoft cutting deals with competitors.
Will they earn enough to justify their $80B valuation? Raise a future round at even higher valuation, when the money runs out? Prospects don’t seem as strong as they once did.
Gary Marcus has had his eye on OpenAI for a long time.
I for one would not voluntarily leave a company if I believe some earth-shattering breakthrough is imminent, in days, weeks, months or even a year. The truth is, there is no earth-shattering breakthrough forthcoming. There never was. Engineering + statistics get you only so far. Show me one AI paper that is seriously on a theoretical level on par with those from Einstein, Schrödinger, Feynman, or Dirac? There is a reason why the "AI" industry is derided as the "Linear Algebra Industry", because that's what it is, and that's what it takes. A sophomore Linear Algebra course is enough credential for you get million dollar investment and be worshiped as thought leader of human race.
Brilliant people don't like games. Evil narcissist less brilliant people do. Bill gates will all be that guy with a operating system he didn't make and conned someone out of for pennies. Not a brilliant man. A brilliant con. Remember our world is run by psychopaths. Expect the worst outcome here.