"I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company."
Trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I seriously doubt this will work out for him. He has to be the smartest stupid person that the world has seen.
Ilya is hard to replace, and no one thinks of him as a political animal. He's a researcher first and foremost. I don't think he needs anything more than being contrite for a single decision made during a heated meeting. Sam Altman and the rest of the leadership team haven't got where they are by holding petty grudges.
He doesn't owe us, the public, anything, but I would love to understand his point of view during the whole thing. I really appreciate how he is careful with words and thorough when exposing his reasoning.
Just because hes not a political animal it doesn't mean he's inured from politics. I've seen 'irreplaceable' a-political technical leaders be reason for schisms in organizations thinking they can lever their technical knowledge over the rest of the company only to watch them get pushed aside and out.
Oh that's definitely common. I've seen it many times and it's ugly.
I don't think this is what Ilya is trying to do. His tweet is clearly about preserving the organization because he sees the structure itself as helpful, beyond his role in it.
I've worked with this type multiple times. Mathematical geniuses with very little grasp of reality, easily manipulated into doing all sorts of dumb mistakes. I don't know if that's the case, but it certainly smells like it.
He seriously underestimated how much rank and file employees want $$$ over an idealistic vision (and sam altman is $$$) but if he backs down now, he will pretty much lose all credibility as a decision maker for the company.
That seems rather harsh. We know he’s not stupid, and you’re clearly being emotional. I’d venture he probably made the dumbest possible move a smart person could make while also in a very emotional state. The lessons for all to learn on the table is making big decisions while in an emotional state do not often work out well.
So this was completely unnecessary cock-up -- still ongoing. Without Ilya' vote this would not even be a thing. This is really comical, Naked Gun type mess.
Ilya Sutskever is one of the best in the AI research, but everything he and others do related to AI alignment turns into shit without substance.
It makes me wonder if AI alignment is possible even in theory, and if it is, maybe it's a bad idea.
i always thought it was the opposite. the different entities in a society are frequently misaligned, yet societies regularly persist beyond the span of any single person.
companies in a capitalist system are explicitly misaligned with eachother; success of the individual within a company is misaligned with the success of the company whenever it grows large enough. parties within an electoral system are misaligned with eachother; the individual is often more aligned with a third party, yet the lesser-aligned two-party system frequently rules. the three pillars of democratic government (executive, legislative, judicial) are said to exist for the sake of being misaligned with eachother.
so AI agents, potentially more powerful than the individual human, might be misaligned with the broader interests of the society (or of its human individuals). so are you and i and every other entity: why is this instance of misalignment worrisome to any disproportionate degree?
To be fair, lots of people called this pretty early on, it's just that very few people were paying attention, and instead chose to accommodate the spin, immediately went into "following the money", a.k.a. blaming Microsoft, et al. The most surprising aspect of it all is complete lack of criticism towards US authorities! We were shown this exciting play as old as world— a genius scientist being exploited politically by means of pride and envy.
The brave board of "totally independent" NGO patriots (one of whom is referred to, by insiders, as wielding influence comparable to USAF colonel.[1]) who brand themselves as this new regime that will return OpenAI to its former moral and ethical glory, so the first thing they were forced to do was get rid of the main greedy capitalist Altman; he's obviously the great seducer who brought their blameless organisation down by turning it into this horrible money-making machine. So they were going to put in his place their nominal ideological leader Sutzkever, commonly referred to in various public communications as "true believer". What does he believe in? In the coming of literal superpower, and quite particular one at that; in this case we are talking about AGI. The belief structure here is remarkable interlinked and this can be seen by evaluating side-channel discourse from adjacent "believers", see [2].
Roughly speaking, and based from my experience in this kind of analysis, and please give me some leeway as English is not my native language, what I see is all the infallible markers of operative work; we see security officers, we see their methods of work. If you are a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail. If you are an officer in the Clandestine Service or any of the dozens of sections across counterintelligence function overseeing the IT sector, then you clearly understand that all these AI startups are, in fact, developing weapons & pose a direct threat to the strategic interests slash national security of the United States. The American security apparatus has a word they use to describe such elements: "terrorist." I was taught to look up when assessing actions of the Americans, i.e. most often than not we're expecting noth' but highest level of professionalism, leadership, analytical prowess. I personally struggle to see how running parasitic virtual organisations in the middle of downtown SFO and re-shuffling agent networks in key AI enterprises as blatantly as we had seen over the weekend— is supposed to inspire confidence. Thus, in a tech startup in the middle of San Francisco, where it would seem there shouldn’t be any terrorists, or otherwise ideologues in orange rags, they sit on boards and stage palace coups. Horrible!
I believe that US state-side counterintelligence shouldn't meddle in natural business processes in the US, and instead make their policy on this stuff crystal clear using normal, legal means. Let's put a stop to this soldier mindset where you fear any thing that you can't understand. AI is not a weapon, and AI startups are not some terrorist cells for them to run.
You can't get a negative zero with a constant declaration, nor can you get NaN, infinity. These are documented language facts.
"""Numeric constants represent exact values of arbitrary precision and do not overflow. Consequently, there are no constants denoting the IEEE-754 negative zero, infinity, and not-a-number values."""
I'm kind of impressed at the mental gymnastics needed to make journalists wanting to hear what powerful people are talking about in a semi-public place into the stasi.
I haven't paid close attention, but I think he wouldn't have a complaint if these journalists had uncovered a conspiracy worthy of public attention and instead were basically tattling on people for using bad words when the bad words were just quoting e.g. reddit.
Well, Murdoch always support the liberals/conservatives but if he doesn’t get what he wants then he starts enthusiastically encouraging a good stabbing/knifing (rolling the prime mister).
Have you seen what Murdoch-owned media publish these days? It's biased clickbait and gossip, there is nothing quality about News Corp content. Look at the front-page of news.com.au and you'll see what alleged News Corp quality news looks like.
There are much better news sources out there not crying about Google (and writing quality investigative journalism) like; crikey.com.au, abc.net.au, theguardian.com.au, theconversation.com/au, independentaustralia.net, michaelwest.com.au.
We weren't discussing the uniqueness of low-quality content or clickbait, nor were we even discussing politics. We are discussing the introduction of changes which will largely benefit News Corp who owns 70% of newspaper circulation, Rupert Murdoch isn't even Australian. It boggles my mind an American media mogul (with clear historically proven cases of political bias) cannot only have plenty of influence in the USA, but also here in Australia.
We talk about Google and Facebook being these influential corporate conglomerates (and they are), how bad monopolies are and all the while, News Corp continues to get favours from the Australian government, if it's not millions in no strings attached money, it's laws like these which should not even exist in their current form. And the kicker here is: News Corp doesn't even pay tax in Australia. Thanks to some clever accounting (which others are also guilty of), they pay no tax on their profits and they are expecting us to feel sorry for them? Shouldn't the fact they don't even pay tax be good enough.
There are a lot of clickbait/low-quality news sites, but the ones not owned by Rupert Murdoch or big media companies aren't complaining to the Australian government about how unfair it is Google is linking to their news and providing free snippets. Things get even crazier when you realise that many news sites in Australia (especially News Corp) are already paywalled, many of the links from Google to the news stories results in a paywall notice asking you to pay. You essentially get a headline and an opening paragraph. Sometimes the headlines are clever, but they're not worth paying for. So, are they asking Facebook and Google to pay for the privilege of being able to link to their own site for free, which they are subsequently monetising through ads and subscriptions? None of this makes sense.
I agree that good quality journalism is worth paying for, which is why I personally have both a Crikey subscription as well as a Guardian subscription. I would never pay for the Courier Mail or Australian, the content is subpar and often republished news from other sources. Even former Fairfix news which Nine Entertainment purchased have gone downhill since the purchase.
He may not be Aussie any more, but he was born here to a father involved in news media so it's not really a surprise to me that Australia is one of the places he has an iron fist over media. I mean, he ran media here from the 60s to the 80s before renouncing AU citizenship for US in order to make inroads there.
The state of news media in Australia is utterly dire and I cannot wait for Newscorp to collapse.
His Australian media properties have been losing money for years, long before the recent collapse of advertising revenues. He only runs them as a vanity project, because he enjoys the political power it gives him in his former homeland.
I'm in the same boat, I pay for the guardian, a couple of smaller newspapers and the Australia institute just trying to even out the balance a little bit since Murdoch and what I would now call the extreme right have over 90% of newspaper of newspaper circulation Australia. A really sad state of affairs, the Australian at least used to have some decent conservative articles with a considered opinion but now it's just rabid and unreadable trash.
Reporter A spends 50 hours researching and writing about a topic. She publishes it on her own blog.
Now I scrape this text (as summary) and display it on my own "Latest news" blog and the original author does often not even get a click-through. I do not think that is fair towards the original author.
If the reporter lives from ads on her blog then she needs traffic, because more traffic is more income.
So bringig traffic to the blog is a big value, so she should pay for this service. But she doesn't, because search engines are free.
News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.
>News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.
I was feeling different about this topic until you brought this up. I think this is a really good argument. Yes, google scrapes and gets value from what they scrape without paying, however you can block this as a publisher if you don't want this.
The problem these attempts try to adress is that it's not a real choice: doing that would likely end your business, while boycotting would have little effect on google/Facebook. So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.
> So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.
You do have a choice though. You can choose not to use google ads and stop performing SEO and drive business in alternative ways. Further, there are more search engines than just google. If your business model depends on google it may be time to rethink that strategy. Any competent marketing strategy would rely on diversified channels anyway.
The search engines also receive value in being an index or directory that people can use to lookup articles. The situation here is somewhat unique because Google is in a position to reap all of the benefit from this relationship by just scraping the content and displaying it directly to the user.
A comparable scenario would be something like the phone book or yelp where these directories have value to users but they simply refer users to the businesses advertising in the directory.
Isn't that pretty much all news works? After all, investigations are a rarity, and most stories in media outlets are basically sourced/paraphrased from elsewhere. If one site/network/paper finds something interesting like this, you bet anything that every other outlet will have their own story on the subject online in the next few minutes.
To some degree it's also how aggregator sites like Reddit and Hacker News work. Maybe even with anti paywall methods, archivers, etc getting the story in plain text format.
I can't even downvote on this site, but I think it is because your post seems to say Google News copies news without a link to the source, which is not the case.
Presumably he means they would've happened in the same time period otherwise it's a meaningless statement. On a long enough timescale everyone who died of Covid would've died anyway.
Whether it's meaningless depends on the timescale. For zero months its very meaningful while for infinity months it's completely meaningless. And in-between it's meaningful, e.g. they would have died in the next 12 months.
"I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company."
https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028