The key figures in the OpenAI infighting turmoil have resigned! Will the conservatives weaken and OpenAI accelerate commercialization?

CBN

2024-05-15 16:08Posted on the official account of Shanghai Yicai

After the infighting turmoil at the end of last year, OpenAI ushered in personnel changes again.

OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever announced on social media today that he has decided to leave OpenAI, where he has worked for nearly a decade. In the future he will have his own projects to do and will share details in due course.

"I am very sad that Sutskovo and OpenAI are about to part ways. OpenAI wouldn't be where it is today without him. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said quickly on social media.

Sutskovo, who played a key role in the infighting at the end of last year, voted on the board to fire Altman, and a few days later expressed regret for his participation in the board and supported Altman's return to the company. Although the infighting has subsided on the surface, Sutskovo's situation at OpenAI is still awkward.

Soon after Sutskovo announced his departure, Altman announced that Jakub Pachocki, the main director of GPT-4, would take over as chief scientist.

The infighting turmoil followed

"The company's growth is miraculous, and I am confident that OpenAI will create AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of Altman, Greg Brockman (President), Mira Murati (CTO), and Yakubu Pachoki." Sutskovo said today.

OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman recalled on social media that when OpenAI was founded in 2015, it was a nonprofit with a mission to make AGI grow. Both he and Sutskovo realized that in order to build a supercomputer on an unprecedented scale, more money needed to be raised than anyone could have imagined. Since then, Sutskovo and he have continued to adjust and shape the company's position, maintaining a focus on AGI's mission and working to solve practical problems.

However, before announcing his departure, Sutskovo was almost "invisible" to OpenAI for a while.

It was previously rumored that Altman was ousted because of a disagreement with Sutskovo over AI safety, the speed of technology development, and the company's commercialization. Altman believes that AGI can be better achieved by iteratively deploying products, raising money, and building more powerful computers, while Sutskovo believes that it is necessary to delve deeper into aspects such as AI alignment (making AI conform to human intentions and values) and devote fewer resources to making consumer-facing products.

Altman then returned to OpenAI, and the return statement referred to Sutskovo, saying: "I have no ill will towards him, and although he will no longer be a member of the board, we want to continue our working relationship." "

The first financial reporter saw on the official website of OpenAI that among the newly released GPT-4o contributors, there is no name of Sutskovo, and there is no name of Sutskovo in Sora's special thank you list. After saying in November last year that he was happy about Altman's return, Sutskovo has not spoken on social media for a long time.

Conservative Weakness?

The outside world believes that there are two attitudes towards the development of AI within OpenAI, with conservatives emphasizing security and OpenAI's basic values, Sutskovo being a representative of conservatives, and another group emphasizing accelerating development and commercialization, and Altman is a representative of this faction. Sutskovo is very concerned about the security of AI, and after he left OpenAI, the outside world is quite concerned about whether the conservative power of OpenAI will be weakened and whether the development direction of OpenAI will change.

In July last year, Sutskovo and OpenAI researcher Jan Leike formed a new team to work on technical solutions to prevent anomalies in AI systems. In October of that year, Sutskovo said in an interview that ChatGPT may be conscious and that the world needs to wake up to the true power of the technology that his company and others are creating.

Before Sutskovo announced his departure from OpenAI, OpenAI was promoting the implementation of AI applications. OpenAI has just released the desktop version of GPT-4o and AI chatbot ChatGPT, focusing on multimodal and device-side applications, which is interpreted by the industry as OpenAI's acceleration of the implementation of large model applications and even the acceleration of commercialization.

With a large amount of money invested in the field of large models, the industry is paying more attention to the commercialization process. A practitioner and investor in the field of AI told reporters that there is no particularly clear direction for the commercialization of generative AI, and similar to the previous wave of AI, the direction chosen by startups that ran out early may be easily surpassed by giants in the future, and the opportunities for startups are not necessarily great.

OpenAI is also accelerating the search for application landing and commercialization opportunities. In this case, Sutskovo was succeeded by Yakub Pachoki, director of research at OpenAI.

According to the OpenAI website, Yakubu Pachocki has been leading transformative research projects at OpenAI since 2017, leading the development of GPT-4 and "OpenAI Five", as well as fundamental research on large-scale reinforcement learning and deep learning optimization, and has played a significant role in refocusing the company's vision on scaling deep learning systems.

Yakubu Pachoki will become the new chief scientist. Yakubu is undoubtedly one of the top talents of our generation and I am very happy to have him take the baton and he has been responsible for many of our important projects. Altman said he is confident that Yakubu Pachoki will lead OpenAI to make rapid and safe progress toward ensuring that AGI benefits everyone.

(This article is from Yicai)

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