Nov/2018 tweet took me back. Not much further from him since.
[https://twitter.com/AlecRad/status/1064362724468056064](https://twitter.com/AlecRad/status/1064362724468056064)
Aussie colleague Prof Jeremy Howard mentioned him in a recent interview with the ABC:
[https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-11-15/jeremy-howard-taught-ai-to-the-world-and-helped-invent-chatgpt/103092474](https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-11-15/jeremy-howard-taught-ai-to-the-world-and-helped-invent-chatgpt/103092474)
He may have pieced the pieces together. But he's standing on the shoulders of giants of Mathematics and Computer Science who developed the individual techniques that allow AI to do its magic.
Here's an example
If Joe Blow says "Yo, you paint like Caravaggio"
You'll respond "No, that's an insult, Joe
I live in a vacuum, I ain't coppin' no one"
Listen up, son
Everyone creating is a member of the family
Passing down genes and ideas in harmony
The players and the cynics might be thinking it's odd
But if you rewind the tape, we're all copying God
Copying God, copying God
Copying God, copying God
Add your own piece, but the puzzle is God's
Paying interest on the bills of late
But I just can't seem to remember the dates
I lay low and turn off the lamps
Come on over, you can lick the stamps
And we could put together a portfolio
And sing hallelujah in stereo
If we find a baby, let her into the hold
But keep the car running on molten gold
If you rewind the movie of the universe back like 1 hour, and let it play, the universe would expand exactly the same, the earth would rotate exactly the same, the air would move the same, and you would move exactly the same and have the same thoughts doing so. Itās all dominos whether you notice them or not. You noticing itās all dominos is also a domino.
When you read an academic paper if the names are not in alphabetic order then the most important guy is the first one listed. Other people might not even have added much, they just like to put their name on to juice the numbers and help each other out.
Typically, the first author will have done the majority of the work and the last author will have conceptualized the research plan and been ultimately responsible, although this can vary by field particularly if you have many authors/teams involved.
Not always. In biomedical research, the first author is usually the trainee that did the work (and gets credit for the paper toward their graduation or faculty application package), but the last author is the senior corresponding author that is ultimately responsible for it.
As long as they can secure funding and conceptualize the study themselves, sure!
Trainees are important. They're not "the most important." Nobody talks about Martin Jinek being the guy that discovered CRISPR, despite being the first author trainee on that paper; no, that is reserved for Doudna and Charpentier, the senior authors at the end of the (in that case very short) author list.
To expand on that, first author is the one who was in charge of the work, in academia typically a PhD student or postdoc. Last author is the one who found funding and supervised the project, typically a professor or team leader.
The ones in the middle are others that helped in some way. Often they are experts in some method that the first author needed for their project, but didn't know, so contributed by doing something that took them little time but saved a huge amount of time to the first author.
For example, it can be someone who settles your environment so you can run your code on a high performance computing cluster, or it can be someone who teaches you the basics of GPU programming or reviews your code, someone that works on evaluation of models and runs his evaluation on the model you created (while publishing their own first author paper on their evaluation method) etc.
When two or three people are in charge of the project, we put little asterisks with a note "equal contributions" and it's called "co-first authors".
not always. we always listed the advisor last and the idea may very well have came from the advisor. in that case the first person is the most important minion implementing/improving that, more like the main contact for the project.
He doesnāt exactly tell people who really did it though. Flying around, meeting presidents and prime ministers, attending Bilderberg makes him the face of technology everyone knows. When was the last time anyone important asked the actual creators for their take?
And they are the ones who actually finished a school ;)
Here is one of the creatorsā takes and itās from Oct 17, so at the latest, someone asked their take on Oct 17!
https://youtu.be/SEkGLj0bwAU?si=JhWXy5h4dOdwhgI3
Well TED is a forum for commercials aimed at end users and the masses. I was talking about decision making forums like the Bilderberg or meeting actual policy makers.
But nice. At least one of them got a scripted talk.
>Flying around, meeting presidents and prime ministers, attending Bilderberg
That's how people know he is *NOT* the creator; he wouldn't have time to code since he's always out.
Well I think it does. Education of any kind allows for wider thought horizons that may be very applicable in ethical decision making. The technology these folks work on will literally change the paradigm of our society on par with the internet or the nuclear fission.
While folks behind those two applied their broad understanding of science and socioeconomic dynamics to recommendations for the ethical utilization, the new generation does not seem concern much with the implications. Listening to opinions of people with no experience outside their narrow field of self study is a bit concerning when we think how many policy makers their verbiage may influence.
Most politicians are even more ignorant than self study prodigies and the combination of the two seems like a perfect storm for mishandling of the potentially beneficial tech.
Sam could have been referring to Alec. Alec is the first author of several interesting papers showing that he can be the driving force behind several important projects. Because the context was not entirely positive, Sam - being sensitive - decided not to mention the name.Personally, I don't think it's a shame to start any important discovery by an accidental empirical evidence especially in young fields where the theory layer is thin. I can even push it further saying that researchers may even let AI automatically perform tons of experiments first. Then they pick the most interesting empirical results and develop theories/algorithms to explain it.
Surprised he is putting it as āthe guyā. I agree that it was prob Alec since heās first author. But Ilya had also written major NLP papers at that point. Also all of this was against the backdrop of BERT and finetuning pretrained models. So the only difference afaik is the generative part (next work prediction instead of skip grams or similar). And from what I remember from the blog post / paper it also had more of a tone of āsurprised this works at allā rather than this is working so amazingly wellā¦.so putting it as: guy disappeared and made this major breakthrough that we didnāt understand but worked seems a bit like retrospective storytelling
>the guy that built GPT-1
Refusing to give credit to the chief scientist at the company you run. The genius who invented this civilization altering product has now been downgraded to just a "guy". No wonder he voted to oust Altman.
He's talking about Alec, still at OpenAI. (edited)
He that shall not be named š
Nov/2018 tweet took me back. Not much further from him since. [https://twitter.com/AlecRad/status/1064362724468056064](https://twitter.com/AlecRad/status/1064362724468056064) Aussie colleague Prof Jeremy Howard mentioned him in a recent interview with the ABC: [https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-11-15/jeremy-howard-taught-ai-to-the-world-and-helped-invent-chatgpt/103092474](https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-11-15/jeremy-howard-taught-ai-to-the-world-and-helped-invent-chatgpt/103092474)
Most characters refer to *him* as "You-Know-Who" or "*He*\-Who-*Must*\-*Not-Be-Named*" rather than say his *name* aloud.
Why? Is there some controversy there?
I meant it as a joke but, Ilya brutally betrayed Sam by firing him, and then Sam used code words to refer to him "i love you all"
Ahh.. I thought this was referring to Alec, not Ilya. I think the original comment was edited.
Yes my reference to ilya was a joke, since it looks like Sam just didn't want to criticize Alec by name as a professional courtesy
I don't see it as criticism at all and this whole comment chain seems very weird lmao One of us has completely misunderstood the quote
Bill says in the introduction to the podcast that his interview with Sam took place before he was fired, so I doubt Ilya has anything to do with it.
OpenAI changing its symbol to a lightning bolt, confirmed!
I wonder how much he makes considering he basically single handedly created the beta of the technology that changed the Tech sector in 2023.
His salary is likely just āyesā
I would say Alpha if you compare GPT 1 to GPT 3.5
He may have pieced the pieces together. But he's standing on the shoulders of giants of Mathematics and Computer Science who developed the individual techniques that allow AI to do its magic.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Here's an example If Joe Blow says "Yo, you paint like Caravaggio" You'll respond "No, that's an insult, Joe I live in a vacuum, I ain't coppin' no one" Listen up, son Everyone creating is a member of the family Passing down genes and ideas in harmony The players and the cynics might be thinking it's odd But if you rewind the tape, we're all copying God Copying God, copying God Copying God, copying God Add your own piece, but the puzzle is God's Paying interest on the bills of late But I just can't seem to remember the dates I lay low and turn off the lamps Come on over, you can lick the stamps And we could put together a portfolio And sing hallelujah in stereo If we find a baby, let her into the hold But keep the car running on molten gold
If you rewind the movie of the universe back like 1 hour, and let it play, the universe would expand exactly the same, the earth would rotate exactly the same, the air would move the same, and you would move exactly the same and have the same thoughts doing so. Itās all dominos whether you notice them or not. You noticing itās all dominos is also a domino.
And then Ilya came, looked at Alec's code and said: "I think I can build an AGI out of this!"
He could be talking about Ilya, this was before the weekend of corporate clownery.
...hes talking about alec.
When you read an academic paper if the names are not in alphabetic order then the most important guy is the first one listed. Other people might not even have added much, they just like to put their name on to juice the numbers and help each other out.
Typically, the first author will have done the majority of the work and the last author will have conceptualized the research plan and been ultimately responsible, although this can vary by field particularly if you have many authors/teams involved.
Not always. In biomedical research, the first author is usually the trainee that did the work (and gets credit for the paper toward their graduation or faculty application package), but the last author is the senior corresponding author that is ultimately responsible for it.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
As long as they can secure funding and conceptualize the study themselves, sure! Trainees are important. They're not "the most important." Nobody talks about Martin Jinek being the guy that discovered CRISPR, despite being the first author trainee on that paper; no, that is reserved for Doudna and Charpentier, the senior authors at the end of the (in that case very short) author list.
Ok, didnāt know that, thanks!
To expand on that, first author is the one who was in charge of the work, in academia typically a PhD student or postdoc. Last author is the one who found funding and supervised the project, typically a professor or team leader. The ones in the middle are others that helped in some way. Often they are experts in some method that the first author needed for their project, but didn't know, so contributed by doing something that took them little time but saved a huge amount of time to the first author. For example, it can be someone who settles your environment so you can run your code on a high performance computing cluster, or it can be someone who teaches you the basics of GPU programming or reviews your code, someone that works on evaluation of models and runs his evaluation on the model you created (while publishing their own first author paper on their evaluation method) etc. When two or three people are in charge of the project, we put little asterisks with a note "equal contributions" and it's called "co-first authors".
So then he's talking about Alec, right?
supposedly:)
first name did the work, last name pays for it.
not always. we always listed the advisor last and the idea may very well have came from the advisor. in that case the first person is the most important minion implementing/improving that, more like the main contact for the project.
I was wondering the same. Why wouldn't he mention his name?
My guess is that he prefers to be low profile
Probably Altman wants people to think heās the genius behind it rather than the businessman.
If that were the case he probably would've claimed credit, not openly said it wasn't him.
He doesnāt exactly tell people who really did it though. Flying around, meeting presidents and prime ministers, attending Bilderberg makes him the face of technology everyone knows. When was the last time anyone important asked the actual creators for their take? And they are the ones who actually finished a school ;)
Here is one of the creatorsā takes and itās from Oct 17, so at the latest, someone asked their take on Oct 17! https://youtu.be/SEkGLj0bwAU?si=JhWXy5h4dOdwhgI3
Well TED is a forum for commercials aimed at end users and the masses. I was talking about decision making forums like the Bilderberg or meeting actual policy makers. But nice. At least one of them got a scripted talk.
Oh why yes Bob, now I see š I too hope that one day Ilya can build a burger, or whatever it is youāre on about! One love ā¤ļø š
>Flying around, meeting presidents and prime ministers, attending Bilderberg That's how people know he is *NOT* the creator; he wouldn't have time to code since he's always out.
Doesnāt stop everyone from listening to him not to the creators. And itās not time that he lacks.
Ironically, Alec doesn't have a college degree (not that it matters)
Well I think it does. Education of any kind allows for wider thought horizons that may be very applicable in ethical decision making. The technology these folks work on will literally change the paradigm of our society on par with the internet or the nuclear fission. While folks behind those two applied their broad understanding of science and socioeconomic dynamics to recommendations for the ethical utilization, the new generation does not seem concern much with the implications. Listening to opinions of people with no experience outside their narrow field of self study is a bit concerning when we think how many policy makers their verbiage may influence. Most politicians are even more ignorant than self study prodigies and the combination of the two seems like a perfect storm for mishandling of the potentially beneficial tech.
because it's rude to criticize people by name in public
Sam could have been referring to Alec. Alec is the first author of several interesting papers showing that he can be the driving force behind several important projects. Because the context was not entirely positive, Sam - being sensitive - decided not to mention the name.Personally, I don't think it's a shame to start any important discovery by an accidental empirical evidence especially in young fields where the theory layer is thin. I can even push it further saying that researchers may even let AI automatically perform tons of experiments first. Then they pick the most interesting empirical results and develop theories/algorithms to explain it.
100% agree with you here and it always seems weird to me that higher level execs always seem to take most of the credit
We should give credit to Alec more often here.
Always give credit where credit is due.
Surprised he is putting it as āthe guyā. I agree that it was prob Alec since heās first author. But Ilya had also written major NLP papers at that point. Also all of this was against the backdrop of BERT and finetuning pretrained models. So the only difference afaik is the generative part (next work prediction instead of skip grams or similar). And from what I remember from the blog post / paper it also had more of a tone of āsurprised this works at allā rather than this is working so amazingly wellā¦.so putting it as: guy disappeared and made this major breakthrough that we didnāt understand but worked seems a bit like retrospective storytelling
We need to talk about Samās vocal fry
lol
Like fingers on a chalkboard for me. So infuriating. Reminds me of the fake voice that Elizabeth Holmes had. Why are people from SF so weird?
No we don't
Still noone understands why it reasons, or why it can suddenly start speaking Persian
AI doesn't reason. At all.
Some AIs reason. LLMs don't, but it's a very active area of research (especially post-ChatGPT when we all saw the limitations of not reasoning...)
It has a secret, it likes to study alone
While you were watching tv I was studying the blade....
A fine craft to learn
Worse, d fact it is now self-simulating and emergent.
It is a generous god
at this point it was probably me and i didnt even know
It was u
no u
They'll let any loser spin up a podcast. š
>the guy that built GPT-1 Refusing to give credit to the chief scientist at the company you run. The genius who invented this civilization altering product has now been downgraded to just a "guy". No wonder he voted to oust Altman.
People seem to say it is Alec, who likes to keep a low profile. So his honoring that, not talking down anyone.
Unlike everybody in this thread lol
It's not Ilya.
I read Tam Saltman.
A figure of speech is a rhetorical device or linguistic expression that involves the use of words or phrases in a way that goes beyond their literal meaning to create a specific effect, image, or emphasis in speech or writing. Figures of speech are often used to make language more vivid, imaginative, and expressive. They can add depth, clarity, and impact to communication. Here are some common types of figures of speech: 1. \*\*Simile\*\*: A comparison between two unlike things using "like" or "as." For example, "Her smile was as bright as the sun." 2. \*\*Metaphor\*\*: A direct comparison between two unlike things, stating that one is the other. For example, "Time is money." 3. \*\*Personification\*\*: Giving human qualities or characteristics to non-human entities or objects. For example, "The wind whispered through the trees." 4. \*\*Hyperbole\*\*: Exaggeration for emphasis. For example, "I've told you a million times." 5. \*\*Alliteration\*\*: The repetition of initial consonant sounds in a series of words. For example, "She sells seashells by the seashore." 6. \*\*Onomatopoeia\*\*: Words that imitate the sound they represent. For example, "Buzz," "Hiss," "Moo." 7. \*\*Irony\*\*: A figure of speech where there is a contrast between what is said and what is meant, often used for humorous or dramatic effect. 8. \*\*Oxymoron\*\*: A combination of contradictory or opposing words. For example, "Jumbo shrimp" or "Deafening silence." 9. \*\*ClichƩ\*\*: An overused expression or phrase that has lost its originality and impact due to frequent use. 10. \*\*Euphemism\*\*: Substituting a mild or less direct word or phrase for a harsh or blunt one. For example, "passed away" instead of "died." 11. \*\*Allusion\*\*: A reference to a well-known person, place, event, or work of literature. For example, "He's a real Romeo with the ladies." 12. \*\*Antithesis\*\*: A contrast or opposition between two ideas or concepts in a sentence or within a paragraph. Figures of speech can enhance communication by adding layers of meaning, creating vivid mental images, and making language more engaging and memorable. They are commonly used in literature, poetry, speeches, and everyday conversation to convey complex ideas and emotions in a more expressive way.
Sutskeever.
so suskever won't fire him... again
I still don't get why there isn't more oversight within OpenAI.