It's easy to have missed this part of the story in all the chaos, but from the NYTimes in March:
Ms. Murati wrote a private memo to Mr. Altman raising questions about his management and also shared her concerns with the board. That move helped to propel the board’s decision to force him out.
It should be no surprise if Sam Altman wants executives who opposed his leadership, like Mira and Ilya, out of the company. When you're firing a high-level executive in a polite way, it's common to let them announce their own departure and frame it the way they want.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI President and co-founder is also on extended leave of absence.
And John Schulman, and Peter Deng are out already. Yet the company is still shipping, like no other. Recent multimodal integrations and benchmarks of o1 are outstanding.
> Yet the company is still shipping, like no other
If executives / high level architects / researchers are working on this quarter's features something is very wrong. The higher you get the more ahead you need to be working, C-level departures should only have an impact about a year down the line, at a company of this size.
C-level employees are about setting the company's culture. Clearing out and replacing the C-level employees ultimately results in a shift in company culture, a year or two down the line.
Indeed Anthropic is just as good, if not better in my sample size of one. Which is great because OpenAI as an org gives shady vibes - maybe it's just Altman, but he is running the show.
> Yet the company is still shipping, like no other.
I don't see it for OpenAI, I do see it for the competition. They have shipped incremental improvements, however, they are watering down their current models (my guess is they are trying to save on compute?). Copilot has turned into garbage and for coding related stuff, Claude is now better than gpt-4.
Yeah, I have the same feeling. It seems like operating GPT-4 is too expensive, so they decided to call it "legacy" and get rid of it soon, and instead focus on cheaper/faster 4o, and also chain its prompts to call it a new model.
I understand why they are doing it, but honestly if they cancel GPT-4, many people will just cancel their subscription.
In my humble opinion you're wrong, Sora and 4o voice are months old and no signs they're not vaporware, and they still haven't shipped a text model on par with 3.5 sonnet!
Are they? In my recent experience, ChatGPT seems to have gotten better than Claude again. Plus their free limit is more strict, so this experience is on the free account.
Well, I use both of them all of the time, so I'm in a better position to compare them. Sometimes, I tend to prefer one, like ChatGPT after Claude decreased the free quota, but I still choose it sometimes, because I still find value in its answers.
The features shipped by Anthropic in the past month are far more practical and provide clear value for builders than o1's chain of thought improvements.
- Prompt Cache, 90% savings on large system prompts for 5 mins of calls. This is amazing
- Contexual RAG, while not ground breaking idea, is important thinking and method for better vector retrieval
Companies are held to the standard that their leadership communicates (which, by the way, is also a strong influencing factor in their valuation). People don't lob these complaints at Gemini, but the CEO of Google also isn't going on podcasts saying that he stares at an axe on the wall of his office all day musing about how the software he's building might end the world. So its a little understandable that OpenAI would be held to a slightly higher standard; its only commensurate with the valuation their leadership (singular, person) dictates.
Assuming a normal cut, this isn't a question about how you define a sandwich, this is a question about the number of servings, and only you can answer that.
> It's a very relevant fact that Greg Brockman recently left on his own volition.
Except that isn’t true. He has not resigned from OpenAI. He’s on extended leave until the end of the year.
That could become an official resignation later, and I agree that that seems more likely than not. But stating that he’s left for good as of right now is misleading.
Does that actually mean anything? Didn't 95% of the company sign that letter, and soon afterwards many employees stated that they felt pressured by a vocal minority of peers and supervisors to sign the letter? E.g. if most executives on her level already signed the letter, it would have been political suicide not to sign it
Exactly, Sam Altman wants group think, no opposition, no diversity of thought. That's what petty dictators demand. This spells the end of OpenAI IMO. Huge amount of money will keep it going until it doesn't
Ms. Murati wrote a private memo to Mr. Altman raising questions about his management and also shared her concerns with the board. That move helped to propel the board’s decision to force him out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/technology/openai-executi...
It should be no surprise if Sam Altman wants executives who opposed his leadership, like Mira and Ilya, out of the company. When you're firing a high-level executive in a polite way, it's common to let them announce their own departure and frame it the way they want.