OpenAI: Exodus

Previously: OpenAI: Facts From a Weekend, OpenAI: The Battle of the Board, OpenAI: Leaks Confirm the Story, OpenAI: Altman Returns, OpenAI: The Board Expands.

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike have left OpenAI. This is almost exactly six months after Altman’s temporary firing and The Battle of the Board, the day after the release of GPT-4o, and soon after a number of other recent safety-related OpenAI departures. Many others working on safety have also left recently. This is part of a longstanding pattern at OpenAI.

Jan Leike later offered an explanation for his decision on Twitter. Leike asserts that OpenAI has lost the mission on safety and culturally been increasingly hostile to it. He says the superalignment team was starved for resources, with its public explicit compute commitments dishonored, and that safety has been neglected on a widespread basis, not only superalignment but also including addressing the safety needs of the GPT-5 generation of models.

Altman acknowledged there was much work to do on the safety front. Altman and Brockman then offered a longer response that seemed to say exactly nothing new.

Then we learned that OpenAI has systematically misled and then threatened its departing employees, forcing them to sign draconian lifetime non-disparagement agreements, which they are forbidden to reveal due to their NDA.

Altman has to some extent acknowledged this and promised to fix it once the allegations became well known, but so far there has been no fix implemented beyond an offer to contact him privately for relief.

These events all seem highly related.

Also these events seem quite bad.

What is going on?

This post walks through recent events and informed reactions to them. 

The first ten sections address departures from OpenAI, especially Sutskever and Leike.

The next five sections address the NDAs and non-disparagement agreements.

Then at the end I offer my perspective, highlight another, and look to paths forward. 

GPT-4o My and Google I/O Day

At least twice the speed! At most half the price!

That’s right, it’s GPT-4o My.

Some people’s expectations for the OpenAI announcement this week were very high.

Spencer Schiff: Next week will likely be remembered as one of the most significant weeks in human history.

We fell far short of that, but it was still plenty cool.

Essentially no one’s expectations for Google’s I/O day were very high.

Then Google, in way that was not in terms of its presentation especially exciting or easy to parse, announced a new version of basically everything AI.

That plausibly includes, effectively, most of what OpenAI was showing off. It also includes broader integrations and distribution.

It is hard to tell who has the real deal, and who does not, until we see the various models at full power in the wild.

AI #64: Feel the Mundane Utility

It’s happening. The race is on.

Google and OpenAI both premiered the early versions of their fully multimodal, eventually fully integrated AI agents. Soon your phone experience will get more and more tightly integrated with AI. You will talk to your phone, or your computer, and it will talk back, and it will do all the things. It will hear your tone of voice and understand your facial expressions. It will remember the contents of your inbox and all of your quirky preferences.

Monthly Roundup #18: May 2024

As I note in the third section, I will be attending LessOnline at month’s end at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If that is your kind of event, then consider going, and buy your ticket today before prices go up.

This month’s edition was an opportunity to finish off some things that got left out of previous editions or where events have left many of the issues behind, including the question of TikTok.

AI #63: Introducing Alpha Fold 3

It was a remarkably quiet announcement. We now have Alpha Fold 3, it does a much improved job predicting all of life’s molecules and their interactions. It feels like everyone including me then shrugged and went back to thinking about other things. No cool new toy for most of us to personally play with, no existential risk impact, no big trades to make, ho hum.

But yes, when we look back at this week, I expect what we remember will be Alpha Fold 3.

Unless it turns out that it is Sophon, a Chinese technique to potentially make it harder to fine tune an open model in ways the developer wants to prevent. I do not expect this to get the job done that needs doing, but it is an intriguing proposal.

We also have 95 theses to evaluate in a distinct post, OpenAI sharing the first draft of their model spec, Apple making a world class anti-AI and anti-iPad ad that they released thinking it was a pro-iPad ad, more fun with the mysterious gpt2, and more.

The model spec from OpenAI seems worth pondering in detail, so I am going to deal with that on its own some time in the coming week.

I Got 95 Theses But a Glitch Ain’t One

Or rather Samuel Hammond does. Tyler Cowen finds it interesting but not his view.

I put up a market, and then started looking. Click through to his post for the theses. I will be quoting a few of them in full, but not most of them.

I am not trying to be exact with these probabilities when the question calls for them, nor am I being super careful to make them consistent, so errors and adjustments are inevitable.

Dating Roundup #3: Third Time’s the Charm

The first speculated on why you’re still single. We failed to settle the issue. A lot of you were indeed still single. So the debate continues.

The second gave more potential reasons, starting with the suspicion that you are not even trying, and also many ways you are likely trying wrong.

The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over again expecting different results. Another definition of insanity is dating in 2024. Can’t quit now.

AI #62: Too Soon to Tell

What is the mysterious impressive new ‘gpt2-chatbot’ from the Arena? Is it GPT-4.5? A refinement of GPT-4? A variation on GPT-2 somehow? A new architecture? Q-star? Someone else’s model? Could be anything. It is so weird that this is how someone chose to present that model.

There was also a lot of additional talk this week about California’s proposed SB 1047.

Q&A on Proposed SB 1047

Previously: On the Proposed California SB 1047.

Text of the bill is here. It focuses on safety requirements for highly capable AI models.

This is written as an FAQ, tackling all questions or points I saw raised.

Safe & Secure AI Innovation Act also has a description page.

AI #61: Meta Trouble

The week’s big news was supposed to be Meta’s release of two versions of Llama-3.

Everyone was impressed. These were definitely strong models.

Investors felt differently. After earnings yesterday showed strong revenues but that Meta was investing heavily in AI, they took Meta stock down 15%.

DeepMind and Anthropic also shipped, but in their cases it was multiple papers on AI alignment and threat mitigation. They get their own sections.

We also did identify someone who wants to do what people claim the worried want to do, who is indeed reasonably identified as a ‘doomer.’

Because the universe has a sense of humor, that person’s name is Tucker Carlson.

Also we have a robot dog with a flamethrower.