Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI

This is escalating rather quickly. It is an incredibly irresponsible move by the OpenAI board. Hypergrowing company, and now they managed to shake up their user's trust in leadership stability. This has Adam's (D'Angelo) fingerprints all over it (for context, he did overthrow his co-founder, and Quora has been struggling ever since). This guy shouldn't sit on any board ever again.

I predict the board will be fired, and Sam and the team will return and try to contain the situation.

This is Olek Madry and Jakub Pachocki we are talking about. Check out their respective dblps if you don't get it. It's a kind of loss that will be hard to recover from.

In relation to other comments here. There is "coding" and there is "God's spark genius of algorithms" kind of work. This is what made the magic of OpenAI. Believe me, those guys were not "just coding". My bet is that it could be all about some research directions that were "shielded" by Sam.

It seems like firing Sam and causing this massive brain drain might be antithetical to the whole AGI mission of the original non-profit. If OpenAI loses everyone to Sam and he starts some new AI company, it probably won't be capped-profit and just be a normal company. All of the organizational safeguards OpenAI had inked with Microsoft and protection against "selling AGI" once-developed are out-the-window if he just builds AGI at a new company.

I'm not saying this will happen, but it seems to me like an incredibly silly move.

Jakub Pachocki and Szymon Sidor have worked on mu-parametrization/tensor programs and Dota 2.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/J.-Pachocki/2713380?s...

As @eachro pointed out, Aleksander Madry is on leave from his MIT professorship. His publications:

https://madry.mit.edu/

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.

In March, Sam Altman said that Pachocki's "overall leadership and technical vision" was essential for pre-training GPT-4.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1635700851619819520

So what was he lying about that got the board so pissed? A story that fits is that they assumed/knew that he had different goals and/or was going to create a spinoff.

If they waited for the GPT5 pretraining to finish and then they minimized the cost of the loss of Altman and the engineers.

The whole secrecy, compartmentalization and urgency of their actions could only be explained by being against a wall. Otherwise if it was about ethics, future plans or whatever political it would happen at a slower pace.

Hope they involved their investors beforehand but I don't know if they had time, OpenAI probably still exists and evolves on other people's money. But what else could they do?

Makes me wonder whether to keep building upon OpenAI? Given that they have an API and it takes effort to build on that vs. something else. I am small fry but maybe other people are wondering the same? Can they give reassurances about their products going into the future?

GPT5 pre-training just ended I believe. Brock, Pachocki, Szymon Sidor, would have likely all been involved.

These are huge losses. Pachocki led pre-training for GPT-4, and probably GPT-5. Brockman is the major engineer responsible for the efficiency improvements that enabled ChatGPT and GPT-4 to be even remotely cost-effective. That is a piece that is often overlooked, but OpenAI's advantage over the competition in compute efficiency is probably even larger than the model itself.

I really wonder if a dividing line started to emerge internally regarding the path to take the company.

[1] On one hand they serve Microsoft and developers, building digital AI infrastructure.

[2] On the other hand, they seem to try and want to build some monopoly and destroy as many startups (and companies) as possible.

In the last developer day, they did a half-ass job of both. GPTs suck. The OpenAI Assistants don't have enough documentation to be used and therefore, equally suck.

I really hope for the sake of the AI community (and economy) that [1] is the outcome. I really do not know how they could scale both. As an AI startup, I have a love-hate relationship with GPT and am eager to grow independent on them because how can I trust a company doing [2]?

If the speculation that the board want to open up everything so that it is truly open/public domain "for the benefit of humanity" turns out to be accurate, I can't see Microsoft being terribly happy about this now that they own 49% of OpenAI and want not only to recoup their investments but make ongoing profit.

An exodus of staff might provoke a very quick release of a lot of code, pipelines, and training data by the remaining board before investors' lawyers have a chance to stop it.

This looks more and more like a coup, rather than a proper removal of a CEO.

If there was some real misconduct by Altman, others won't be resigning with him, would they?

Well it begins. OpenAI will be a shell of itself in very short time.

Advice: you can't win over a narrative, which is what Sam has become. People and resources will come to him, by themselves.

I'm embarrassed to say, being Polish myself, I had no idea that key people in OpenAI were Polish - I assume it was a coordinated resignation then.

Madry is actually spelled Mądry, which translates to "Wise".

people can have multiple overlapping reasons for things, it doesn't have to be they are on "sam's side" or the "board's side" or whatever. you can agree w/ a firing and for whatever reason disagree w/ the way it was done or future direction of a company, etc. all just guessing anyway.

I know Jakub Pachocki and in my feeling, Jakub leaving is worse for gpt than Greg or Sam.

Im not claiming to know more than everyone else, but Sam was IMO just a face. Greg is backend engineer - that's less important than actual research.

OpenAI was started as non profit and it went the profit route with capping.

For profit will always win non-profit because It’s run by people - once they see money , they want more not less.

This was meant to happen when it changed its structure to cap profits at 100x . If Microsoft invests $10 billion openAI Can make $1 trillion in profits before giving a dime to its non profit. If it makes $1 trillion it can just ask someone to invest $1 billion and wait until it makes another $100 billion .

Sam, Brockman and others who resigned will start a new for-profit company. Sam will use his influence to get funding and contracts. They know the tech and with know how of everything, build better model. And OpenAI will be forced to give up and work with them as it’s part of their founding policy.

We need to know why he was let go. All else is speculation. I doubt people would follow Sam if he was let go for a good reason.

Could we say that OpenAI is not only the company with the fastest product traction and impact in the world but the fastest to implode? When there are a lot of things at stake, not only money, people collide. This is a rant but we are seeing several examples now in 2023. There are "rules" for normal startups and different ones in another scale.

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As I said in the other thread, this is 100% a AI doomerist hijack.

Ilya’s job won’t survive this power play…….

Satya has been humiliated and will be furious.

Makes we wonder how much of the investor’s money was put in to OpenAI as a company or in Sam and the leadership. I think the answer is probably the latter, and the fact that Sam’s firing was this easy (and would likely have the effect of others going in quick order) seems like a massive oversight in terms of investor due diligence in board structure etc.

While I don’t know what is happening in OpenAI, from my experience(long enough to have an opinion), top people often leave when the employer is doing well or passing the last hurdle because, by that time the employer has gained adequate presence and brand identity that anyone leaving can immediately end up in top FAANG or equivalent Corps with much better benefits and of course pay/equity and other things.

Only time employees leaving is a bad sign had been when the company had been in zombie mode too long(few years) and haven’t delivered anything yet or still in alpha/beta stage with crappy deliveries no one is using or has no significant uptake.

Also, if there are financial difficulties, then a lot of people leave in droves and some actually come back after finances get better.

2024 for OpenAI is looking bleak.

How difficult would it be for Altman and these guys to start OpenAI² tomorrow and become competitive with their old company?

Presumably it would require enormous startup capital?

I keep seeing so many comments about how the move was irresponsible from the board because it was a hyper growth company and blah blah blah. This board was not set up to care at all about shareholder value.

I’m not making any judgement about whether they made the correct decision. I’m just stating that everyone keeps talking about this as if it were a normal company structure and it absolutely is not.

My prediction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611&p=7#38311488

So here's my theory which might sound crazy. Sam planned to open a new AI company and taking away openAI's top talents to his company. And breaking up openAI into non profit and his for profit company.

Sam's first tweet after all this has, just hours after this article:

> will have more to say about what’s next later.

So either he knew that he was about to be fired or at least was prepared.

Also based on the wording of the press release, Sam did something that the board absolutely hated. Because most of the time even if he did something illegal it doesn't make sense to risk defamation by accusing him publically. Also based on his video of yesterday at the APEC summit, he repeated the similar lines few times:

> I am super excited. I can't imagine anything more exciting to work on.

So here if we assume he knew he was about to get fired, the conclusion is clear.

It would be ironic but sincere if the new company is named ClosedAI or sth

Was Madry at OpenAI for a sabbatical? I thought he was a professor at MIT.

Sam and his friends will land on their feet, likely at $NVDA

This news is worrying for the AI community. Three important researchers, Jakub Pachocki, Aleksander Madry, and Szymon Sidor, have resigned from OpenAI. It makes us wonder about the direction and teamwork at OpenAI. Aleksander Madry was in charge of the AI risk team, a group focused on making sure AI is used safely. Their leaving might affect how OpenAI works on AI and deals with potential risks. OpenAI needs to tell us more about why they left so that people can trust that OpenAI is still committed to developing AI responsibly. We hope to get more information to understand what happened.

Sam should lead a group of outstanding engineers to rebuild another AI company. Maybe in the long run, leaving openai's naive board of directors might not be a bad thing for him.

ChatGPT is a toy, OpenAI isn't open, no one can download the models or the data, and no one can buy the chips needed to work with them. This whole thing is a joke. Shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.

So now you've got the CTO, CEO, and 3 top engineers creating a new company pronto, with VCs and the usual suspects queueing up to throw money at them. Bad move from OpenAI.

Meanwhile, in the parallel universe, they founded a new company with Sam and Greg, and Apple entered the scene as a significant partner or investor.

Hear today Microsoft hires Sam Altman to lead advanced AI research team after OpenAI ousting – business live.

Is it a coincidence that all of them are Polish?

Forgive my ignorance but I am asking this because a lot of people have been mentioning AGI. Does OpenAI say anywhere that they want to achieve AGI at somw point in the future? While GPT and other generative AIs are extremely innovative and cool they are really really far away from being AGI. Setting sights on something like AGI seems delusional or a marketing stunt at this point.