Aleksander in particular is deeply invested in AI safety as a mission. It's a very confusing departure, since most of the reporting so far indicates that Ilya and the board fired Sam to prioritize safety and non-profit objectives. A huge loss for OpenAI nonetheless.
Perhaps you could argue that he wants to stick with Sam and the others because if they start a company that competes with OpenAI, there’s a real chance they catch up and surpass OpenAI. If you really want to be a voice for safety, it’ll be most effective if you’re on the winning team.
One funny detail is that the OpenAI charter states that, if this happens, they will stop their own work and help the organisation that is closest to achieving OpenAI's stated goal.
We are about to find out if the moats are indeed that strong.
xAI recently showed that training a decent-ish model is now a multi-month effort. Granted GPT-4 is still farther along than others but curious how many months/resources does that add up when you have the team that built it in the first place
But also, starting another LLM company might be too obvious a thing to do. Maybe Sam has another trick up his sleeve? Though I suspect he is sticking with AI one way or the other
> most of the reporting so far indicates that Ilya and the board fired Sam to prioritize safety and non profit objectives
Maybe Ilya discovered something as head of AI safety research, something bad, and they had to act on it. From the outside it looks as if they are desperately trying to gain control. Maybe he got confirmation that LLMs are a little bit conscious, LOL. No, I am not making this up: https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368
A rudder only works as long as you are moving faster than the current. I can imagine (some) people concerned with safety also feeling a sense of urgency, because their ability to steer the AI toward the good is limited by their organization's engine of progress.
Aleksander in particular is deeply invested in AI safety as a mission. It's a very confusing departure, since most of the reporting so far indicates that Ilya and the board fired Sam to prioritize safety and non-profit objectives. A huge loss for OpenAI nonetheless.
