I can absolutely empathize with Ilya here, though. As far as I know the tech making openai function is largely his life’s work. It would be extremely frustrating to have Sam be the face of it, and be given the credit for it.
Sam is clearly a very accomplished businessman and networker. Those people are super important, I wish I had a person like him on my team.
I’ve had the experience of other people tacitly taking credit for my work. Giving talks about it, receiving praise for their vision. It’s incredibly demoralizing.
I’m not necessarily saying Sam did this, since I don’t know any of these people. Just speculating on how it might feel to ge Ilya watching Sam go on a world tour meeting heads of state to talk about what is largely Ilya’s work.
I think Sam has been given credit for being a good CEO and leader, which clearly is deserved. I've never heard him take credit for technical accomplishments. Ilya has been doing plenty of talks, podcasts, etc.--if anyone's the technical face of OpenAI, it's him. There's no lack of praise or credit given to him.
"Just speculating on how it might feel to Ilya watching Sam go on a world tour meeting heads of state to talk about what is largely Ilya’s work."
The whole point of a CEO is to do this kind of stuff. If your best engineers are going on world tours, talking to politicians, and preparing for keynotes, that's a pretty terrible use of their time. Not to mention that most of them would hate doing it.
I'm a developer and have used Open AI as a beta user from before their public launch and been interested in the structure and business side of AI and had never heard of Ilya until this recent blowup. I'm just one data point, but my guess is that the vast, vast majority of the public that knows anything about AI has also never heard of Ilya.
Yes, you are only one data point. Check the views on Ilya's interviews on youtube. E.g. his interview on Lex (which he did years before Sam Altman) has 400k views, which demonstrated that he is a very well known entity in tech/AI space.
Ilya's podcast was over 3 years ago and Lex's average IT podcasts had 50-100k views. Ilya got 400k. For reference, the absolute legend Jim Keller got 600k at the same time.
So yeah, Ilya is a very known entity. No, ordinary folks don't need to know him, but if you are in IT and especially if you have anything to do with AI, then not knowing about Ilya tells more about your informational bubble than about Ilya's alleged lack of recognition.
It is akin to claiming to be into crypto on development side and not knowing the name of Vitalik Buterin.
Obviously Ilya will not be as famous as Sam since Sam is doing world tours and talking to who's who of world politics. But Ilya, Karpathy, gdb all are well respected and know in dev circles.
Even the recent OpenAI profile in one of prominent publications covered Mira, Ilya and gdb in addition to Sam.
But the fundamental question is why would a researcher expect (if they do) that they will be as well known as the CEO who is the face of organisation?
Ideas are like children. You don't just need to give birth to them; you also need to raise them, teach them, challenge them, and show them the world.
Giving birth to an idea is a necessary condition and sets the boundaries for so much of what it can achieve. But if you're unable to raise it to become a world champion, it isn't worth anything.
I've been on the raising ideas side way more in my 20+ career in tech. I know some people became bitter and scornful of me because I pushed their ideas to become something big and received a lot of credit for that. And I try to give credit where credit is due. But often enough, when I try to share the spotlight (in front of a customer or when presenting at BoD, for example), the brilliant engineer withers under pressure or actively harms his idea by pointing out its flaws excessively. It's a delicate balance.
This isn’t a given and not everyone’s view. Doing a thing and choosing what to do with said thing is that person’s prerogative. The specifics will matter but I don’t agree that someone else’s idea is something someone else must push and profit of if they don’t. The idea of patents also agree with this too.
Patents are a compromise: you keep your prerogative, yes, but for a limited amount of time and you agree to publicly publish it so that everyone can access it. Eventually, if you do nothing with it, why would we limit humanity from benefitting from it ?
It's like imagine a guy has a nice idea to cure cancer, but plays the princess with it and refuses to industrialize it, while people are dying left and right. Surely, it becomes indefensible, and at some point, someone brave will do the right thing and implement the idea. You have a right to reap the benefit of your ideas but you have a duty not to deprive humanity of any benefit just because you thought of it first, I feel ?
What makes you think it is 'his' work and not theirs? I remember when OpenAI was just a joke compared to Deepmind. The turning point (as I remember) was when they used [1] deep reinforcement learning on dota2. clearly iyla (also one of the authors) contributed, but so did many others on the team I assume?
Ilya doesn’t want to be known as the Steve Wozniak in this relationship while Sam is perceived as the Steve Jobs. Unless you’re technically inclined no one remembers or praises the contributions of the Woz.
A LOT of people have put a ton of energy in to OpenAI, and a lot have put A LOT of money into it. If it was as petty as credit, then screw them all as they just don’t get it. It’s all on the shoulders of others too….
I was under the impression that the transformer is the tech making openai function, and that Ilya's name is not on the 2017 paper introducing the idea.
I can absolutely empathize with Ilya here, though. As far as I know the tech making openai function is largely his life’s work. It would be extremely frustrating to have Sam be the face of it, and be given the credit for it.
Sam is clearly a very accomplished businessman and networker. Those people are super important, I wish I had a person like him on my team.
I’ve had the experience of other people tacitly taking credit for my work. Giving talks about it, receiving praise for their vision. It’s incredibly demoralizing.
I’m not necessarily saying Sam did this, since I don’t know any of these people. Just speculating on how it might feel to ge Ilya watching Sam go on a world tour meeting heads of state to talk about what is largely Ilya’s work.