OpenAI ignored the ‘have a problem to solve’ rule, says president Greg Brockman(fortune.com)
fortune.com
OpenAI ignored the ‘have a problem to solve’ rule, says president Greg Brockman
https://fortune.com/2023/05/04/openai-success-chatgpt-business-technology-rule-greg-brockman/
82 comments
Where have they replaced people with GPUs? Or made people cost less than GPUs?
I'm already seeing people reduce the number of people they need to hire based on chatgpt.
Right... but where? If you can't say what industry, then I don't believe you.
Elsewhere we have “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” [1] and it doesn't paint a bright future for OpenAI.
If they didn't target any problem, will OpenAI continue to be worth $30 billion if/when LLMs become as accessible as, say, relational databases?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322
If they didn't target any problem, will OpenAI continue to be worth $30 billion if/when LLMs become as accessible as, say, relational databases?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322
That article makes a convincing argument that there is no moat around GPT-3.5 or Bard, but at present no one else is anywhere near GPT-4.
RDMS are a solved problem, but Oracle is still a quarter-trillion dollar company.
It sounds like they solved a wide problem instead of a narrow one
They demonstrated that "build it, and they will come" works if what you build turns out to be useful enough.
I also ignore this rule, in my life and work.
As do most of us.
I will accept my billion-dollar valuation now. Thanks.
As do most of us.
I will accept my billion-dollar valuation now. Thanks.
I don't know about that, we've been trying to solve natural language as an interface to computing for like 30 years or more.
OpenAI is just the first case where this is so good it's viable and lo and behold it took off like fire.
That is a well defined established problem that anyone paying attention said there was money in.
I was trying to get seq2seq networks to take english and generate API calls all the way back in 2016.
OpenAI is just the first case where this is so good it's viable and lo and behold it took off like fire.
That is a well defined established problem that anyone paying attention said there was money in.
I was trying to get seq2seq networks to take english and generate API calls all the way back in 2016.
Survivor bias. You can have enough money, time, and talent to tackle a category without a precise milestone plan, but it's not the wisest move if you're struggling to stay alive. "Build a survivable business first" should be the general rule.
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It might be my imagination, but it seems like the team over there has some smart people but they happened to hit the ML lottery at the right time, really don't have a clue about business, and now they have to scramble to top what they did before. Brockman and a few of the ML researchers are definitely good at what they do. I don't see the company itself really turning into something profitable when faced with sustained competition.
What do you base this on exactly? At the time of the GPT-3.5 release, they didn't really have much technology-wise that every other tech company didn't have. And yet OpenAI is the only one to have released a useful product.
I base it on sevearl things- I worked at Google on TPUs and regularly saw google training so I would expect they likely have GPT-4 parity or better internally but can't figure out how to productize it.
I was also an evaluator for Google Ventures, which meant I'd go look at all the details in a startup and decide if it made sense to invest. I've seen many companies with similar splashy hype who failed to reach orbit.
I was also an evaluator for Google Ventures, which meant I'd go look at all the details in a startup and decide if it made sense to invest. I've seen many companies with similar splashy hype who failed to reach orbit.
> I've seen many companies with similar splashy hype who failed to reach orbit.
Really? Because I don't think I can think of a single company in the last decade that has achieved this level of hype. Maybe Tesla.
Really? Because I don't think I can think of a single company in the last decade that has achieved this level of hype. Maybe Tesla.
It seems like it definitely solves a problem, though, that of automatically expressing, summarizing, and refining ideas.
Those are interesting problems, though, like where it doesn't seem like it's a problem at first, but then you find the solution, and then you're like... holy moly, how did I ever manage? The hidden problems.
Those are interesting problems, though, like where it doesn't seem like it's a problem at first, but then you find the solution, and then you're like... holy moly, how did I ever manage? The hidden problems.
Did they really succeed economically though? Or did they jump-start crowd-sourced open source LLM assistant work that will end up giving people ChatGPT for free on their phones. OpenAI seems to have a slight first mover advantage as of May 2023, but it's not a real moat.
Their brand value is worth billions of dollars, right now. Sure they could screw it up, but they objectively have produced a massively positive ROI
> massively positive ROI
This feels like a stretch considering the massive investments they've received.
Massive investments = massive growth expectations
This feels like a stretch considering the massive investments they've received.
Massive investments = massive growth expectations
if only you could convert brand value into actual dollars.
You can. You just sell it to another company that wants to start from OpenAI/ChatGPT instead of starting from scratch.
> Or did they jump-start crowd-sourced open source LLM assistant work that will end up giving people ChatGPT for free on their phones
Given the computer power required behind ChatGPT isn't that unlikely at this point? Aren't they one of the few games in town with both the software and required hardware?
Given the computer power required behind ChatGPT isn't that unlikely at this point? Aren't they one of the few games in town with both the software and required hardware?
I think their view point is that AGI "can solve any problem" so the problem they're solving for is "all of them", to which AGI is "the answer".
I’m not entirely sure that AGI being able to solve any problem is a correct assumption, humans are fairly intelligent and aren’t able to solve every problem either.
Some problems are likely to be too big for AGI to solve, many others would be bottlenecked by the same thing that bottlenecks human intelligence - real world evidence/experimentation.
The idea that somehow the right answer is hidden in preexisting data and that a sufficiently complex algorithm would be able to find it is amusing and quit likely wrong.
Some problems are likely to be too big for AGI to solve, many others would be bottlenecked by the same thing that bottlenecks human intelligence - real world evidence/experimentation.
The idea that somehow the right answer is hidden in preexisting data and that a sufficiently complex algorithm would be able to find it is amusing and quit likely wrong.
this is a pretty silly fluff piece.
OpenAi is peaking though. We’ll see how not having a problem to solve and a technology that’s easily reproduced plays out in the long run.
AI can potentially solve a lot of problems as OpenAI is from get go targeting AGI
Well they have them now, from regulators to critics and everyone in between.
The problem they're to solve is labor costs.
This reminds me of the unabomber manifesto. He claimed that 'have a problem to solve' was not the rule, that technology advances for its own end. Humans adapt to changing technology rather than technology advancing to support humans.
Fwiw - I’m not sure it’s wise to ground one’s moral philosophy from mass murderers. The invisible hand in economics seems both more causal to technology’s advancement and less dubious.
Also there’s a fantastic BBC docuseries called “Connections” by James Burke that makes the case that nothing in tech could have happened sooner or later than it did, and that each progression was an inevitable next step from the previous. It has interesting implications.
Also there’s a fantastic BBC docuseries called “Connections” by James Burke that makes the case that nothing in tech could have happened sooner or later than it did, and that each progression was an inevitable next step from the previous. It has interesting implications.
I'm not here to have a Death of the Author debate. Aristotle said the mark of an educated mind is the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it.
I just thought the parallel was particularly insidious in the context of AI.
I just thought the parallel was particularly insidious in the context of AI.
If you can't intellectually critique Ted Kaczynski's philosophy (or Adolf Hitler's philosophy) without critiquing the person, then you don't really have a critique in the first place. FWIW, I think both philosophies are deeply flawed AND that the actions each individual took were horrific, but a critique of their actions is not necessary to critique their ideologies; the ideologies themselves are deeply flawed in and of themselves.
To GP's point, the idea of technology evolving for its own end is thought provoking and perhaps a little scary /because/ it does have historical basis, if for no other reason than for war, the ongoing constant of historical life. I guess it's most thought provoking to me because I want deeply to believe in the enlightenment, which seems diametrically opposed to the idea of technology evolving for its own end. But it's hard to convince myself of the realism of intrinsic technoprogressivism. It seems to me that progressivism in technological development must be very deliberately crafted and diplomatically achieved through global pacts between many nations and the will of their people.
To GP's point, the idea of technology evolving for its own end is thought provoking and perhaps a little scary /because/ it does have historical basis, if for no other reason than for war, the ongoing constant of historical life. I guess it's most thought provoking to me because I want deeply to believe in the enlightenment, which seems diametrically opposed to the idea of technology evolving for its own end. But it's hard to convince myself of the realism of intrinsic technoprogressivism. It seems to me that progressivism in technological development must be very deliberately crafted and diplomatically achieved through global pacts between many nations and the will of their people.
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Technology is just the tip of the iceberg that is knowledge and understanding. The deepest advancements to knowledge and understanding come primarily from self-driven and self-motivated investigation. The closer you get to "technology", the more development is driven by the necessity to solve a problem. But technological advancement would stagnate and plateau without advancements in knowledge and understanding.
> I guess it's most thought provoking to me because I want deeply to believe in the enlightenment, which seems diametrically opposed to the idea of technology evolving for its own end.
It's not as much technology developing for its own ends, but rather things happening when conditions are ripe.
I haven't studied the period well enough to have a strong opinion here, but my current feeling is that enlightenment became inevitable once the printing press spread around the world - giving many more people access to knowledge and opinions, allowing many more people to broadcast their views, and do it much faster and more thoroughly than secular and religious establishment could ever hope to suppress.
This isn't to take away the achievement of individuals coming up with ideas we now consider important - it's more of a recognition that those ideas are products of their times, that there were people in the past with the same ideas, but they didn't spread because conditions weren't right.
This is a similar take to explaining why scientific breakthroughs were usually made by many people, independently, at roughly the same time: that's because the limiting factor of progress isn't individual genius, but the conditions - existing scientific body work, economics, technology for testing and measuring. Once conditions are right to enable the next incremental step, it pretty much immediately gets made by multiple geniuses around the world.
It's not as much technology developing for its own ends, but rather things happening when conditions are ripe.
I haven't studied the period well enough to have a strong opinion here, but my current feeling is that enlightenment became inevitable once the printing press spread around the world - giving many more people access to knowledge and opinions, allowing many more people to broadcast their views, and do it much faster and more thoroughly than secular and religious establishment could ever hope to suppress.
This isn't to take away the achievement of individuals coming up with ideas we now consider important - it's more of a recognition that those ideas are products of their times, that there were people in the past with the same ideas, but they didn't spread because conditions weren't right.
This is a similar take to explaining why scientific breakthroughs were usually made by many people, independently, at roughly the same time: that's because the limiting factor of progress isn't individual genius, but the conditions - existing scientific body work, economics, technology for testing and measuring. Once conditions are right to enable the next incremental step, it pretty much immediately gets made by multiple geniuses around the world.
Burke's series at least implicitly made that case. But, in general, I'd be hard put to argue for major technological advances centuries before their time given the right person with the right knowledge and the right ruler's ear. (I'm open to exceptions like stirrups.)
> Humans adapt to changing technology rather than technology advancing to support humans.
I suppose this is half of the truth. The way I see it, it's a feedback loop: people develop technology for reasons, technology ends up transforming societies well beyond predictions or intentions of the inventors, which leads to new problems requiring new technologies, ... rinse repeat.
My current belief is that something I heard labeled as "technological determinism" holds at the high level: culture is primarily driven by economic incentives, like water flowing down and around a landscape; development of technology is one of the primary ways this landscape changes. Technology and economics are in tight feedback loop. Culture just follows, perhaps occasionally influencing the economics/technology feedback loop.
I'm not holding that belief strongly. It's just that so far, I've seen plenty of evidence for it - i.e. social transformations that were inevitable given the economical and technological landscape, and human nature - while I can't think of a single case of social progress that was independent of the economics, and solely conditioned on critical mass of people making an ethics-driven decision.
I suppose this is half of the truth. The way I see it, it's a feedback loop: people develop technology for reasons, technology ends up transforming societies well beyond predictions or intentions of the inventors, which leads to new problems requiring new technologies, ... rinse repeat.
My current belief is that something I heard labeled as "technological determinism" holds at the high level: culture is primarily driven by economic incentives, like water flowing down and around a landscape; development of technology is one of the primary ways this landscape changes. Technology and economics are in tight feedback loop. Culture just follows, perhaps occasionally influencing the economics/technology feedback loop.
I'm not holding that belief strongly. It's just that so far, I've seen plenty of evidence for it - i.e. social transformations that were inevitable given the economical and technological landscape, and human nature - while I can't think of a single case of social progress that was independent of the economics, and solely conditioned on critical mass of people making an ethics-driven decision.
It does feel like the manifesto is taking the opposite side of the same argument. Goes right back to Prometheus giving the humans fire in Greek mythology...
The conditions that created OpenAI (oodles of money from some of the wealthiest people on the planet) are not reproducible for the vast majority of businesses.
If you have oodles of money from the wealthiest people on the planet to spend on the worlds best researchers, you too can ignore this rule.
If you have oodles of money from the wealthiest people on the planet to spend on the worlds best researchers, you too can ignore this rule.
Didn't work out too well for the Metaverse.
What people from the "worlds best researchers" section of researchers ended up/are currently working on Facebook's Metaverse?
I mean literally off the top of my head, John Carmack? Doesn't really get much better than that in terms of practical on-hands VR research and development.
You can check for yourself though: https://research.facebook.com/people/research-area/augmented...
You can check for yourself though: https://research.facebook.com/people/research-area/augmented...
That list is general VR/VR which includes any work on Oculus and more, not specifically Metaverse.
Going through that list regardless, I don't find Carmac there, and searching about it, seems he quit ~5 months ago. Might want to dig up a better example :)
Going through that list regardless, I don't find Carmac there, and searching about it, seems he quit ~5 months ago. Might want to dig up a better example :)
...he quit because the product was a failure. Which was my point. But sure, here you go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash
And if you don't think one of the richest companies in the world can afford to hire whoever they want, then you're just being intentionally obtuse.
And if you don't think one of the richest companies in the world can afford to hire whoever they want, then you're just being intentionally obtuse.
Thanks :)
It's not that I believe they couldn't afford worlds best researchers, mostly questioning that the worlds best researchers would want to work at Facebook, no matter what the pay is.
It's not that I believe they couldn't afford worlds best researchers, mostly questioning that the worlds best researchers would want to work at Facebook, no matter what the pay is.
he ragequit
He saw the writing on the wall.
He realized the noclip cheat didn't work in the Metaverse.
It's too early to say it hasn't worked out. Apple is planned to reveal their headset this year. If thats the case, VR/AR may become the norm the same way Smart Phones and Smart Watches are.
If you don't think Meta will release Horizon on Apple's headset, then you havn't been watching.
If you don't think Meta will release Horizon on Apple's headset, then you havn't been watching.
I wouldn't put smartwatches and smartphones in the same category. I have a smartwatch but my day-to-day life wouldn't change in a material way if I didn't.
They can release it as cranial implant for all that matters, doesn't mean it's going to be a success.
Obviously it didn't work out for meta. That isn't even up for debate.
Meta has admitted to pivoting to AI and cutting down their metaverse teams significantly.
Besides, even if Apple succeed. Meta will still be stuck in the exact same situation - under Apple's boots again, which it so desperately tried to escape from by going hardware heavy in VR in the first place.
Meta has admitted to pivoting to AI and cutting down their metaverse teams significantly.
Besides, even if Apple succeed. Meta will still be stuck in the exact same situation - under Apple's boots again, which it so desperately tried to escape from by going hardware heavy in VR in the first place.
I don’t see that Zuckerberg avatar, or whatever Apple equivalent of that, pans out in coming 5 years… who does? Who bothers to visually stimulate themselves with recreated face of a living person in VR?
Did we ever find out how soon that bet was supposed to pay off? I'm sure there were people talking about OpenAI's decision to double down on LLMs as a failure before ChatGPT came out.
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What are you talking about? $META's strategy that has only been in play for 18 months?
Or are you talking about the grifter-laden crypto/NFT-adjacent "metaverses"?
Or are you talking about the ridiculously successful Second Life, Roblox, or MMORPGs like World of Warcraft?
Or are you talking about the grifter-laden crypto/NFT-adjacent "metaverses"?
Or are you talking about the ridiculously successful Second Life, Roblox, or MMORPGs like World of Warcraft?
Technically they've been building on the Metaverse idea since 2014 when they acquired Oculus. 8 years later and people still do not care about VR.
I'd agree that VR has yet to be proven for any serious adoption, but I don't think the "metaverse" as a concept is contingent upon VR at all. Companies have tried pushing VR headsets for 35 years and none of them have yet to succeed.
Despite that, video games and persistent virtual worlds have thrived.
Despite that, video games and persistent virtual worlds have thrived.
Well the Metaverse as a standalone product then is even more of a failure by every reasonable metric. Could it pop off tomorrow? Sure. Is it? Probably not.
People expressed similar skepticism about the world wide web in the mid 90’s, despite proving utility and entertainment value (unlike cryptocurrencies).
Metaverse hasn't proven utility or entertainment though?
Your narrow definition of metaverse is making it very difficult for you navigate this conversation.
Metaverse isn't solely defined by Facebook's "Horizon Worlds".
Metaverse isn't solely defined by Facebook's "Horizon Worlds".
Your definition of a successful product is making it very difficult for to you navigate this conversation. At no point has Facebook provided demonstrable success in regards to what we know as "The Metaverse". Frankly I don't even know what your argument is.
"The metaverse is a virtual reality (VR) space that enables users to interact with each other inside a computer-generated environment."
Maybe you're unaware of what the Metaverse is, and you're projecting some imagined reality 5-10 years down the road where the "Metaverse" is just web6 or web8 in terms of VR/AR integration with the internet as a whole. In that sense, yes, everyone with a foot in the game will have adopted to whatever that future looks like, but the Metaverse as we know it today will still not have been a success.
I think Microsoft is even ahead of Facebook in terms of a "Metaverse" style UI integration 10+ years ago.
"The metaverse is a virtual reality (VR) space that enables users to interact with each other inside a computer-generated environment."
Maybe you're unaware of what the Metaverse is, and you're projecting some imagined reality 5-10 years down the road where the "Metaverse" is just web6 or web8 in terms of VR/AR integration with the internet as a whole. In that sense, yes, everyone with a foot in the game will have adopted to whatever that future looks like, but the Metaverse as we know it today will still not have been a success.
I think Microsoft is even ahead of Facebook in terms of a "Metaverse" style UI integration 10+ years ago.
People had been building AI for decades, with nothing to show for. Until one day they did.
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Magic Leap
Also if you have oodles of money then creating a problem for everyone instead of solving a problem for everyone appears to be a viable strategy.
Oodles of money helps but is neither necessary nor sufficient. What matters here is having a product that’s captivating and revolutionary.
Exactly. This is shown by metaverse. Tons of money thrown at a product that never had a defined market fit.
You cannot just throw reams of cash at something and expect it to be a hit.
You cannot just throw reams of cash at something and expect it to be a hit.
They literally had 10+ millions to spend on research with no prototype and only a vague idea of how to produce a profitable product by saying they will create an AGI and "ask it how to make money." for several years
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It's a large an ambitious problem but they pulled it off.