The Fall of the House of Altman:
suggests that OpenAI has lost its mojo, along with the key employees that made it extraordinary a few years ago. Plausibly it’s now a zombie cargo ship cruising on momentum.
This is a fascinating essay from the person who, more than anyone, predicted the dramatic AI progress in 2021-22. That took pretty much everyone outside OpenAI (including me) by surprise, and apparently most of the OpenAI people as well.
What does this suggest for the future? As Gwern points out, OpenAI has not produced a compelling successor to GPT-4, which they built almost two years ago. So maybe they were already dysfunctional. But no one else has anything much better than GPT-4 either, and Anthropic (the foremost competitor) seems to be highly functional still. So maybe GPT scaling has run out. That’s my guess, for what it is worth.
Gwern is the great prophet of brute-force AI scaling, and for several years was right where I (and most other AI experts) were wrong. Does he still believe that will continue? The essay ends on what may be a note of uncertainty about that.
Via