Simon Willison’s Weblog

I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars.

— Kelsey Piper # 17th May 2024, 7:11 pm

I’ve been at OpenAI for almost a year now. In that time, I’ve trained a lot of generative models. [...] It’s becoming awfully clear to me that these models are truly approximating their datasets to an incredible degree. [...] What this manifests as is – trained on the same dataset for long enough, pretty much every model with enough weights and training time converges to the same point. [...] This is a surprising observation! It implies that model behavior is not determined by architecture, hyperparameters, or optimizer choices. It’s determined by your dataset, nothing else. Everything else is a means to an end in efficiently delivery compute to approximating that dataset.

— James Betker # 25th April 2024, 5:13 am

One year since GPT-4 release. Hope you all enjoyed some time to relax; it’ll have been the slowest 12 months of AI progress for quite some time to come.

— Leopold Aschenbrenner, OpenAI # 16th March 2024, 3:23 pm

If a hard takeoff occurs, and a safe AI is harder to build than an unsafe one, then by opensourcing everything, we make it easy for someone unscrupulous with access to overwhelming amount of hardware to build an unsafe AI, which will experience a hard takeoff.

As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes).

— Ilya Sutskever # 6th March 2024, 3:02 am

We believe that AI tools are at their best when they incorporate and represent the full diversity and breadth of human intelligence and experience. [...] Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression– including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents–it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.

— OpenAI to the Lords Select Committee on LLMs # 8th January 2024, 5:33 pm