OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will leave and join rival Anthropic

This is probably bad news for ChatGPT 5. I don't think it's that likely this co-founder would leave for a Anthropic if OpenAI were clearly in the lead. Also from a safety perspective you would want to be at the AI company most likely to create truly disruptive AI tech. This looks to me like a bet against OpenAI more than anything else.

OpenAI has a burn rate of about 5 billion a year and they need to raise ASAP. If the fundraising isn't going well or if OpenAI is forced to accept money from questionable investors that would also be a good reason to jump ship.

In situations like these it's good to remember that people are much more likely to take the ethical and principled road when they also stand to gain from that choice. People who put their ideals above pragmatic self-interest self-select out of positions of power and influence. That is likely to be the case here as well.

Must've been a difficult decision with him being a cofounder and all, but afaik he's been the highest ranked safety minded person at openai. He says it's not because openai leadership isn't committed to safety, but I'm not sure I buy that. We've seen numerous safety people leave exactly because of that reason.

What makes this way more interesting to me though is how this announcement coincides with Brockmans sabbatical. Maybe there's nothing to it, but I find it more likely that things really aren't going well with sama.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out and if he actually returns next year or if this is just a soft quitting announcement.

I'm confused with GPT4o. While it's faster than GPT4, the quality is noticeably worse.

It often enters into a state where it just repeats what it already said, when all I want is a clarification or another opinion on what we were chatting about. A clarification could be a short sentence, a snipped of code, but no, I get the entire answer again, slightly modified.

I cancelled Plus for one month, but got back this week, and for some reason I feel that it really isn't worth it anymore. And the teasing with the free tier, which is downgraded really fast, is more of an annoyance than a solution.

There are these promises of "memory" and "talking with it", but they are just ads of something that isn't on the market, at least I don't have access to both of these features.

Gemini used to be pretty bad, but for some reason it feels like it has improved a lot, focusing more on the task than on trying to be humanly friendly.

Claude and Mistral are not able to execute code, which is a dealbreaker for me.

Useful context: Open ai had 11 cofounders. Schulman was one of them.

Schuman was not the original head of ai alignment / safety he was promoted into it when former leader left for Anthropic.

Not everyone who’s a founder of an nonprofit ai research institute wants to be a leader/manager of a much more complicated organization in a much more complicated environment.

Open Ai was founded a while ago. The degree of their long time success is entirely based on their ability to hire and retain the right talent in the right roles.

All of this back-and-forth in the AI scene is the preparation before the storm. Like the opening scene of a chess game, before any pieces are exchanged. Like the Braveheart "Hold!" scene.

The rubber will meet the road when the first free and open AI website gets real traction. And monetizes it with ads next to the answers.

Google search is the best business model ever. Everybody wants to become the Google of the AI era. The "AI answer" industry might become 10 times bigger than the search industry.

Google ran for 2 years without any monetization. Let's see how long the incumbents will "Hold" this time.

Good for him, seems like OpenAI is moving towards a business model of profitability, and Anthropic seems to be more aligned with the original goals of OpenAI.

Will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. It strikes me that OpenAI is better funded, though, and that AI (at their scale) is super expensive. How does Anthropic deal with this? How are they funding their operations?

Edit: just looked it up, looks like they have a $4B investment from Amazon and a $2B investment from Google, which should be sufficient (I’m going to assume these are cloud credits).

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/amazon-doubles-down-on-ant...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-agrees-invest-up-2...

More inclusive title including Greg Brockman and Peter Deng departures:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862

Claude 3.5 Sonnet by Anthropic is the best model out there, if you are trying to have an extremely talented programmer paired to you.

Somehow, OpenAI is playing catch with them rather than vice versa.

"Deepen my focus on AI alignment" is the new "spend more time with friends and family".

What does that even mean? Is OpenAI secretly working on military applications?

Or does it mean neutering the model until it evades all political discussions?

We are in the good timeline. I have a ton of faith in the Anthropic team to do this right.

I still can't believe the sham of current "AI" is just brute forcing LLMs to seem intelligent. I use ChatGPT almost every day which is supposedly best-in-class and it is dumb. Valuation of these companies are in the billions and all we get is unethical / not-safe-for-humanity AI companies popping up everywhere. I'm scared to see what the future holds with these companies scraping all sorts of our data.

So here is my question, Anthropic seems to be trying to say they are a "safer" and more responsible AI company.

And based on the features they have released that seems true so far, but I am legitimately curious if they really are or if its basically marketing disguising not having some features ready yet?

This industry is changing very quickly even in the open source side.

For example people are jumping Stability AI's ship since the disaster that is SD3 over to Flux which seems to be the new favorite in open source models.

[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166862

OpenAI is circling the drain.

Curious why this is allowed? NDA do not apply?

OpenAI seems to be going the wrong direction. GenAI has clear limitations and I’m wondering if OpenAI just refuses to acknowledge those limits.

From one Closed Output company to another, what a huge difference (not)

Is it because OpenAI is slowly turning into Bing and you have to go elsewhere if you want to work on AI?

Go, Anthropic!