> The company pressed forward and launched ChatGPT on November 30. It was considered such a nonevent that no major company-wide announcement about the chatbot going live was made. Many employees who weren’t directly involved, including those in safety functions, didn’t even realize it had happened. Some of those who were aware, according to one employee, had started a betting pool, wagering how many people might use the tool during its first week. The highest guess was 100,000 users. OpenAI’s president tweeted that the tool hit 1 million within the first five days. The phrase low-key research preview became an instant meme within OpenAI; employees turned it into laptop stickers.
> Anticipating the arrival of [AGI], Sutskever began to behave like a spiritual leader, three employees who worked with him told us. His constant, enthusiastic refrain was “feel the AGI,” a reference to the idea that the company was on the cusp of its ultimate goal. At OpenAI’s 2022 holiday party, held at the California Academy of Sciences, Sutskever led employees in a chant: “Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!” The phrase itself was popular enough that OpenAI employees created a special “Feel the AGI” reaction emoji in Slack.
> For a leadership offsite this year, according to two people familiar with the event, Sutskever commissioned a wooden effigy from a local artist that was intended to represent an “unaligned” AI—that is, one that does not meet a human’s objectives. He set it on fire to symbolize OpenAI’s commitment to its founding principles. In July, OpenAI announced the creation of a so-called superalignment team with Sutskever co-leading the research. OpenAI would expand the alignment team’s research to develop more upstream AI-safety techniques with a dedicated 20 percent of the company’s existing computer chips, in preparation for the possibility of AGI arriving in this decade, the company said.
> The phrase itself was popular enough that OpenAI employees created a special “Feel the AGI” reaction emoji in Slack.
I know it's small and kind of a throw-away line, but statements like this make me take this author's interpretation of the rest of these events with a healthy dose of skepticism. At my company we have multiple company "memes" like this that have been turned into reacji, but the vast majority of them are not because it's "popular" but rather because we use it ironically or to make fun of the meme. Just the fact that an employee turned it into a reacji is a total non-event and I don't think you can read anything from it.
Well that's not how any of this works. Connotations and subtext are a thing, particularly in the choice of including or not including a particular quote in a piece of journalism.
Yes it does, it says within the quote that the phrase was "popular" and is using the creation of a reacji as supporting evidence. The fact that an employee made a reacji of something does not mean it is popular. It takes a extremely low amount of effort from an extremely low amount of people (often, just one person) to create a custom reacji.
Being awkwardly goaded by your boss to chant some weird company saying at a company holiday party is _exactly_ the kind of stuff that people make fun of after-the-fact by making memes about it (speaking from experience here... which is why this phrase in the article gave me pause in the first place).
There's not enough info in this article to know if it was seen as weird by the employees or not, but my point is that "they created a reacji of it" isn't evidence one way or the other for it being "popular".
> The company pressed forward and launched ChatGPT on November 30. It was considered such a nonevent that no major company-wide announcement about the chatbot going live was made. Many employees who weren’t directly involved, including those in safety functions, didn’t even realize it had happened. Some of those who were aware, according to one employee, had started a betting pool, wagering how many people might use the tool during its first week. The highest guess was 100,000 users. OpenAI’s president tweeted that the tool hit 1 million within the first five days. The phrase low-key research preview became an instant meme within OpenAI; employees turned it into laptop stickers.
> Anticipating the arrival of [AGI], Sutskever began to behave like a spiritual leader, three employees who worked with him told us. His constant, enthusiastic refrain was “feel the AGI,” a reference to the idea that the company was on the cusp of its ultimate goal. At OpenAI’s 2022 holiday party, held at the California Academy of Sciences, Sutskever led employees in a chant: “Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!” The phrase itself was popular enough that OpenAI employees created a special “Feel the AGI” reaction emoji in Slack.
> For a leadership offsite this year, according to two people familiar with the event, Sutskever commissioned a wooden effigy from a local artist that was intended to represent an “unaligned” AI—that is, one that does not meet a human’s objectives. He set it on fire to symbolize OpenAI’s commitment to its founding principles. In July, OpenAI announced the creation of a so-called superalignment team with Sutskever co-leading the research. OpenAI would expand the alignment team’s research to develop more upstream AI-safety techniques with a dedicated 20 percent of the company’s existing computer chips, in preparation for the possibility of AGI arriving in this decade, the company said.