Greg Brockman interview [video]

fs.blog

145 points by prakashqwerty 10 hours ago


wolvoleo - 5 hours ago

I don't think it would have killed openai. It would have fixed it.

batu1509 - 6 hours ago

building products on top of their api makes these drama weekends terrifying. really makes you realize how fragile your whole stack is when a board decides to act up.

bix6 - 4 hours ago

I just don’t understand why a non-profit was allowed to do this. Does this not set a precedent that non-profit doesn’t actually mean anything? You can just use a favorable structure until it’s time to enrich yourself.

throwaway_2494 - 6 hours ago

I remember when computer magazines were aimed at programmers and had code listings in them.

Then there seemed to come a time when all they talked about was the IBM vs. Microsoft lawsuit. From then on they must have felt that they had discovered a formula, because all they ever yapped about after was insider baseball of computer companies.

I find this sort of corp. vs. corp. coverage boring, sort of like techie reality TV. Who will be voted out tonight, Debra, or Deborah...?

intev - 3 hours ago

If anyone else doesn't want to listen to the whole thing: https://apecast.app/podcast/the-knowledge-project/episode/op...

YetAnotherNick - 6 hours ago

Why can't someone ask what happened in Ilya's mind. Firing Sam and then signing the solidarity letter of Sam to leave OpenAI if was fired. Other than that, all other information seems kind of just going over the surface.

H8crilA - 8 hours ago

As far as Brockman account of the past goes, there's also his personal diary which was made public as a part of that lawsuit by Musk. Includes for example the line: "Financially what will take me to $1B?". BTW, if you don't know, Musk lost it because he filed too late, lol.

jonstewart - 6 hours ago

Point of order: Anthropic is the most important AI company now.

- 6 hours ago
[deleted]
cold_harbor - 7 hours ago

what's wild is they accidentally solved it — pretraining IS unsupervised learning at scale, RLHF IS reinforcement learning. they just didnt know the recipe yet

mikkkee - 6 hours ago

not sure why but this episode feels v boring perhaps because he didn't share anything unexpected / unknown

stuaxo - 6 hours ago

Thankful for the mention of "AGI" in the first lines as I can bail out from reading the rest.

Whatever AGI is, it "AGI" is not glueing a load of text prediction machines together.

- 5 hours ago
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quantum_state - 5 hours ago

It’s a matter of fact that OpenAI betrayed its origin.

booleandilemma - 5 hours ago

If only we should have been so lucky.

optimalsolver - 8 hours ago

>So many people were trying to sign the petition at once that it actually crashed Google Docs

I still wonder how much peer pressure was behind that. Like, what if you think Sam is a scumbag and you're glad he's gone, but people are waving this petition in your face. What would you do? It would be really bad for you if the emperor returned and you were one of the few who didn't sign it.

Also, going by this video, the first order of business for an AGI should be finding a cure for hair loss.

photochemsyn - 4 hours ago

Obviously OpenAI betrayed their stated mandate by going to the largely closed-source API-access business model, which is the one that Anthropic, Google, and xAI also adopted, i.e. the high-margin hosted model businesses, while DeepSeek, Alibaba/Qwen, Baidu/ERNIE, and Tencent/Hunyuan are breaking that model by releasing various open weight models.

I think the Chinese labs have a fundamentally different viewpoint: they’re building infrastructure, and looking at it more like how a US corporation might like having some of its employees making core contributions to compiler ecosystems like LLVM/clang and so on. The payoff is down the road, partially reputational, but also having a great compiler is good for everyone in the computational business world. The rentier-finance capitalist instead wants to privatize the compiler and extract rents for access.

The thing about infrastructure is this: you don’t get a direct financial return on investment in infrastructure (think roads, which make other economic activity possible) unless you have some ridiculously corrupt system controlled by rent-collectors (which is how the US electricity grid and fiber optic backbone works). That’s all the major US LLM providers are doing: trying to collect rents on systems that were built using the global human knowledge base as inputs.

At the very least OpenAI should be releasing their older models on a steady timetable. Sure it might reduce some revenue streams but it would be good for their reputation.

pjmlp - 7 hours ago

Unfortunately they survived, not going to spend time with this.

From my point of view they are yet another big tech bros company.

embedding-shape - 8 hours ago

Not feeling like 1 hour of my Sunday is worth listening to this, do anyone have the non-clickbait answers to the two "previews" mentioned in the description?

> Greg explains how the original Napa offsite produced the three-step technical plan OpenAI has followed for a decade and the real reason OpenAI had to abandon its pure nonprofit structure

What was the technical plan and what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?

bmitc - 8 hours ago

So firing a grifter means it would kill the company? Doesn't that mean the company is grifting? If no one else can possibly lead the supposedly the most important company, with billions/trillions (?) of so called value, do you have a good company and product?

Or do I forget that this guy sleeps with an Ayn Rand doll tucked under his arms?

nekosama - 4 hours ago

[flagged]

PunchTornado - 6 hours ago

isn't this the friend of scam altman? who cares of what he has to say?

jordemort - 5 hours ago

too bad, eh

throw6999 - 6 hours ago

Sky net from future protected itself.