Is this the end of OpenAI as we know it? On Friday night, three senior researchers at OpenAI resigned in the aftermath of Sam Altman’s termination and the sudden resignation of president Greg Brockman, as reported by The Information, citing sources familiar with the situation.
The departing individuals include Jakub Pachocki, the company’s Director of Research; Aleksander Madry, who led a team assessing potential AI risks, and Szymon Sidor, a seven-year researcher at the startup.
Pachocki, who began as a research lead in 2017, climbed the ranks over six years to become the Director of Research. In contrast, Aleksander Madry joined just seven months ago, and served as the Head of Preparedness. Sidor joined OpenAI as a Member of Technical staff in 2016.
Associates disclosed that each researcher communicated their resignation. These departures underscore significant discontent among certain employees following Altman’s removal and highlight the challenges currently faced by the company. It is said that a considerable number of top figures at OpenAI are set to depart soon.
OpenAI on Friday said that it removed Altman, following a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently “candid” in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” read the blog.
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In a sad turn of events, OpenAI experienced a significant shake-up in its leadership last night, resulting in the abrupt removal of CEO Sam Altman, and exit of chairman of board, Greg Brockman.
“Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today,” said Brockman, explaining their side of the story, and how Ilya Sutskever was behind all of this, and Mira Murati (now the interim CEO) knew about this the night before.
On a positive note, he also said that they are coming up with something great soon.
Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today. Let us first say thank you to all the incredible people who we have worked with at OpenAI, our customers, our investors, and all of those who have been reaching out. We too are still trying to figure out exactly…
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) November 18, 2023
It is said that considerable number of top figures at OpenAI are set to depart soon.
Sam Altman, who also reposted Brockman’s statement on X, showed his heartfelt gratitude to his team at OpenAI and everyone. “I love you all,” he said, sharing his weird experience, and two cents. “One takeaway: go tell your friends how great you think they are.”
The story so far
OpenAI on Friday said that it removed Altman, following a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently “candid” in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” read the blog.
While OpenAI’s blog remains cryptic, the root cause, however, appears to be a “misalignment” between those focused on profit and those committed to the nonprofit mission within the company. The DevDay event played a crucial role in exacerbating the situation.
The removal of Altman also came after internal disagreements among employees regarding whether the company was sufficiently ensuring the safe development of artificial intelligence.
There is also rumour that Altman was caught testing GPT-4 on train data.
After Brockman’s post, it looks like Sutskever has played a central role in this situation. He might have perceived that Altman was rushing to commercialise the software, which had evolved into a billion-dollar business, potentially overlooking safety concerns. Sadly, Andrej Karpathy remains silent.
Under Altman’s leadership, the company’s profit-oriented approach and rapid development speed, which some perceive as too risky, clashed with the nonprofit side’s commitment to safety and caution. One person aligned with Sam referred to it as a “coup,” while another deemed it the right move.
The ongoing debate within OpenAI revolves around achieving AGI without overlooking safety concerns or focusing solely on business interests. At OpenAI’s DevDay, Sam Altman made a series of announcements specifically tailored for enterprises, with a focus on Microsoft.
As a consequence, ChatGPT experienced a major outage, suggesting a possible DDoS attack. Furthermore, OpenAI has recently temporarily suspended new sign-ups for ChatGPT Plus due to a significant surge in usage following DevDay.
Microsoft’s involvement?
Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, was informed of the decision to remove CEO Sam Altman just moments before it was announced to the public. Unsurprisingly, its stock has been plumbing ever since.
Soon Microsoft’s chief Satya Nadella posted a generic statement that said: “We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI … Together, we will continue to deliver the meaningful benefits of this technology to the world.”
Meanwhile, interim CEO Mira Murati assured OpenAI staff that their crucial partnership with Microsoft, the primary source of funding and computing support, remains solid despite the unexpected departure of CEO Sam Altman.
During OpenAI’s DevDay, Sam Altman put Microsoft’s Satya Nadella on the spot by asking, “How’s Microsoft thinking about the partnership?” Nadella’s first reaction was to laugh nervously.
Sadly, in the statement published by Microsoft, there is no mention of Altman anywhere or his contributions, hinting that the tech giant only cares about OpenAI and not Altman.
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Relying on Microsoft products, which have become indispensable to office-goers, the Ignite event only clarified their plans to further hook everyone to their products. Earlier this year, when we wrote about Microsoft making employees lazy, little did we know that eight months later, the company will announce over 100 new updates including advanced AI features to their office suite to further boost employee productivity and make them more dependable. Perhaps, in the process make employees further lazy.
“77% of people who use Copilot told us that they just don’t want to go back to working without it,” said a confident Jared Spataro, CVP Modern Work and Business Applications of Microsoft, at the company’s annual conference for developers and IT professionals – Microsoft Ignite 2023.
Copilot To Steer Employees
Like the word for the day, Microsoft mentioned ‘Copilot’ more than 250 times during the conference. Two weeks ago, Microsoft announced the general availability of copilot for Microsoft 365 at $30 per month (per user). With Copilot integration across Microsoft’s work-suite applications including Teams, Outlook, Excel, and others, a person can integrate information from their emails, meetings, chats, documents and complete tasks.
Microsoft released findings from a survey conducted with 297 Copilot users in Microsoft 365 Early Access Program. It was found that 70% of copilot users were more productive and 68% said it improved the quality of their work. Microsoft Vice-President, experiences and devices, Rajesh Jha said that Windows 365 has been adopted by over 60% of the Fortune 500 companies.
Copilot brings personalisation by bringing one’s tone. Copilot can analyse a user’s previously sent mail to understand one’s unique style in order to sound like the person. As a result, blurring the lines between a human and machine-generated response.
Furthermore, Microsoft launched Copilot Studio which is a low-code tool tailored for customising Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and building standalone copilots. It offers a set of conversational capabilities including custom GPTs, generative AI plugins and more.
Interestingly, Microsoft announced that it would be renaming its AI search engine-based chatbot Bing Chat to Copilot.
Employees in a ‘Loop’
Microsoft Loop, a collaborative workspace application for managing tasks and projects, was officially launched at the Ignite event. Loop, considered to be Notion’s competitor, was previewed earlier this year, and with its seamless integration with other Microsoft apps such as Teams chat and Outlook, Loop pages can be shared across them. In the process, the company is facilitating an enclosed system that keeps users within the Microsoft ecosystem.
Interestingly, Copilot assistant is also available within Loop, helping with tasks such as crafting text and summarising it within the same space.
Go ‘Teams’
Satya Nadella at Microsoft Ignite 2023. Source: Youtube
As if it wasn’t simplified enough, Microsoft Teams, the messaging platform for organisations for real-time collaboration and communication, which was released in 2017, had its share of limelight at the event. CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, said that more than 320 million users rely on Teams to stay “productive and connected.”
Nadella also confirmed that there are more than 2,000 apps in the Teams store. Apps such as Adobe, Service Now, Workday with more than 1 million active users. 145,000 custom line business applications have been formed in Teams.
To elevate the workspace collaborative experience further, Nadella announced that Mesh would be generally available from January. A cloud-based platform for mixed reality that allows users to join from different locations in an immersive space, Microsoft Mesh will allow users to log into spaces via digital avatars.
Interestingly, Mesh was first announced in 2021, but it is only now that it is coming to fruition. With a number of product features and enhancements, workspace has only been simplified through Microsoft. At this pace, it is unimaginable to see what the fate of employees will be.
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On Nov. 17, the board of directors of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Inc. announced they removed cofounder and CEO Sam Altman as the company’s CEO and from the board of directors. Altman will be replaced by interim CEO Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer. A long-term successor has not yet been named.
The board of OpenAI – which consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner – was blunt with their words regarding why they removed Altman.
“Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” OpenAI representatives wrote in a statement. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
Following the announcement, Altman posted on X (formerly Twitter), “i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. will have more to say about what’s next later.”
The statement also noted that, as part of the transition, Greg Brockman will step down from his role as chairman of the board, though he will remain in his role at the company.
“OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity,” the board of directors said in the statement. “The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted on X, “As you saw at Microsoft Ignite this week, we’re continuing to rapidly innovate for this era of AI, with over 100 announcements across the full tech stack – from AI systems, models, and tools in Azure, to Copilot. Most importantly, we’re committed to delivering all of this to our customers while building for the future. We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI with full access to everything we need to deliver on our innovation agenda and an exciting product roadmap; and remain committed to our partnership, and to Mira and the team. Together, we will continue to deliver the meaningful benefits of this technology to the world.”
Note: This article was updated with posts from Altman and Nadella, and it will be updated to include analysis from AI industry experts.
Who is Mira Murati, OpenAI’s new interim CEO? Kyle Wiggers 9 hours
In a surprising move, OpenAI today abruptly fired Sam Altman, its CEO and a member of its board of directors, and installed CTO Mira Murati as interim CEO. But who, exactly, is Mira Murati?
Murati, who has a degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth College, previously worked as an intern at Goldman Sachs and then at Zodiac Aerospace, the French aerospace group. She spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager of the Model X, the automaker’s crossover SUV, during which Tesla released early versions of Autopilot, its AI-enabled driver-assistance software.
In 2016, Murati joined Leap Motion, a startup building hand- and finger-tracking motion sensors for PCs, as VP of product and engineering. Murati wanted to make the experience of interacting with a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball,” she told Fast Company in an interview. But she soon realized that the tech, which relied on a VR headset, was too early.
In 2018, Murati came to OpenAI as VP of applied AI and partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, she lead the company’s work on the viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E and the code-generating system Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product.
So what sort of interim CEO will Murati be? Perhaps she’ll opt not to rock the boat as OpenAI’s board of directors searches for a permanent replacement. But from what Murati’s said in interviews, it’s clear that she sees multimodal models — i.e. models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Vision, which can understand the context of images as well as text — as the future of the company and one of the most promising paths to ultra-capable AI. Moreover, Murati appears to strongly believe in testing this type of AI out in the open in order to suss out flaws and discover potentially novel use cases.
“One of the reasons that we wanted to pursue DALL-E was to get to a more robust understanding of the world, to have these models understand the world the way that we do,” Murati told Fast Company. “You put the technology in contact with reality; you see how people use it, what the limitations are; you learn from that; and you can feed it back into the technology development. The other dimension is that you can actually see how much [the technology is] moving the needle in solving real-world problems or whether it’s a novelty.”
Murati’s projecting strength, for what it’s worth. During a companywide meeting on Friday, she reportedly told OpenAI employees that Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott — CEO and CTO, respectively, of Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s biggest backers — had “utmost confidence” in OpenAI’s direction. And she reiterated that OpenAI was starting the search for a new CEO.
Shortly before the one-year mark of ChatGPT being unveiled, on Friday, OpenAI revealed in a blog post that Sam Altman is departing his role as CEO and leaving his position on the board of directors due to a lack of confidence in his leadership abilities.
According to the statement, Altman's departure from the company was a result of a "deliberate review process" that found Altman at fault for not being "consistently candid" in his communications with the governing body.
"Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI," said OpenAI in the blog post.
Later in the post, the board of directors collectively thanks Altman for his many contributions to the company, but shares that they believe new leadership is ultimately necessary as the company moves forward.
Replacing Altman is OpenAI's CTO Mira Murati, who will be stepping up to serve as interim CEO effective immediately as the company conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO.
Murati has been on the OpenAI leadership team for five years, and due to Murati's long tenure, close engagement with the company, and experience in governance and policy, the board believes she is qualified for the role.
"As the leader of the company's research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period," said the board of directors in their statement.
The post also revealed that as part of the transition, Greg Brockman will also be stepping down as chairman of the board but will remain in his position reporting to the CEO.
We've reached to OpenAI for comment and will follow up with more information as the story develops
Sam Altman ousted as OpenAI’s CEO Kyle Wiggers 10 hours
Sam Altman has been fired from OpenAI, Inc., the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that acts as the governing body for OpenAI, the AI startup behind ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, GPT-4 and other highly capable generative AI systems. He’ll both leave the company’s board and step down as CEO.
In a post on OpenAI’s official blog, the company writes that Altman’s departure follows a “deliberative review process by the board” that concluded that Altman “wasn’t consistently candid in his communications” with other board members, “hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”
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“The board no longer has confidence in [Altman’s] ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the blog post reads.
In a tweet, Altman said that he “loved his time at OpenAI” and will have “more to say about what’s next later.”
i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people.
will have more to say about what’s next later.
🫡
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 17, 2023
The dramatic leadership change will also see Greg Brockman — who was a member of the team that co-founded OpenAI, as was Altman — step down as chairman of the board but remain as OpenAI’s president, reporting to the company’s newly appointed interim CEO, Mira Murati. Murati was previously OpenAI’s CTO.
OpenAI says that it’ll begin conducting a formal search for a permanent CEO immediately.
“OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity,” the board of directors wrote in a joint statement. “The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period.”
Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 Billion in value, and changed our collective world forever. I can't wait to see what he does next. I, and billions of people, will benefit from his future work- it's going to be simply incredible. Thank you…
— Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) November 17, 2023
OpenAI’s board of directors now consists of OpenAI’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever; Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo; tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley; and Helen Toner, the director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Altman’s removal comes unexpectedly, to say the least. The company just last week hosted its first developer conference, OpenAI DevDay, which Altman emceed. Altman spoke at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference on Thursday. And according to The Verge, citing multiple internal sources, OpenAI employees learned of Altman’s firing when it was announced publicly.
Altman has a long history steering OpenAI. After co-founding the company alongside Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and others, Altman, who formerly headed startup accelerator Y Combinator and also holds a seat on the board at Worldcoin, the ambitious cryptocurrency project, initially served as a co-chair of OpenAI alongside Elon Musk. (Musk left in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla.)
Altman over the past several months played an active role in attempting to shape regulators’ responses to AI, appearing at U.S. congressional hearings and meeting personally with world leaders, including President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, among others, on an international policy tour.
It’s unclear what missteps Altman might’ve made — at present. But it evidently relates to his relationship with OpenAI’s rather unusual board makeup and corporate governance structure.
As a recent piece in VentureBeat explored, OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global, LLC, is fully controlled by OpenAI’s nonprofit. While the for-profit subsidiary is permitted to commercialize its tech, it’s subject to the nonprofit’s mission: attaining artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can — as OpenAI defines it — “outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
The nonprofit OpenAI’s board has the power to both determine when the company has achieved AGI and exclude this AGI from IP licenses and other commercial terms, including with Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s biggest investors.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, but restructured in 2019 as a “capped-profit” company to raise capital — an acknowledgement of the huge costs associated with training cutting-edge AI systems. Underlining the point, Altman said in an interview this week with the Financial Times that he “hoped” Microsoft would increase its investment to help pay for “huge” imminent model training costs.
When contacted for comment, OpenAI declined to comment beyond the blog post. But Microsoft gave this statement from Frank Shaw, its chief communications officer: “We have a long-term partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft remains committed to Mira and their team as we bring this next era of AI to our customers.”
In a significant shift at the helm, OpenAI Inc. has announced the departure of Sam Altman as CEO. The board of directors confirmed that Mira Murati, the Chief Technology Officer of the company, will take over as interim CEO with immediate effect.
This change marks a pivotal moment for OpenAI, a leading entity in the artificial intelligence sector, which was founded as a non-profit in 2015 with the ambitious mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. In 2019, OpenAI underwent a structural transformation to raise capital while preserving its core mission and values.
Mira Murati, a key member of OpenAI's leadership team for the past five years, has been instrumental in the company’s evolution and global recognition. With her extensive experience in AI governance, policy, and overseeing the company's research, product, and safety operations, the board views her as an ideal fit for the interim CEO role. The board expressed its full confidence in Murati’s capabilities to lead OpenAI during this transition and is actively conducting a search for a permanent successor.
The departure of Sam Altman follows a detailed review process by the board, which raised concerns about his candidness in communications, ultimately affecting the board's confidence in his leadership. The board emphasized the importance of OpenAI's mission and the need for leadership that aligns with its foundational principles.
In a formal statement, the board acknowledged Altman's significant contributions to OpenAI's inception and growth. However, it underscored the necessity for new leadership to guide the company forward. The board reaffirmed its commitment to the mission of ensuring AGI benefits all humanity.
Alongside this leadership change, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board, continuing his association with OpenAI in his company role, reporting to the CEO.
OpenAI’s board comprises chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Adam D’Angelo (CEO of Quora), technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner from the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology. The board's composition, primarily independent and non-equity holding, reflects the organization's commitment to its non-profit roots and its charter.
As OpenAI continues to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of AI, this leadership transition is a crucial step in maintaining the balance between rapid growth and steadfast adherence to its mission and governance principles.
OpenAI has revealed that the company has ousted Sam Altman from his position as CEO and board member. The decision, announced in an official blog post, emerged after a board review citing Altman’s inconsistent communication, which hindered the board’s ability to fulfill its responsibilities.
Mira Murati, previously the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), assumes the interim CEO position, emphasising continuity amidst this leadership transition.
In a statement, the board of directors said: “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period.”
OpenAI’s board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner.
As a part of this transition, The departure of Altman, a key figure in OpenAI’s founding, coincides with Greg Brockman stepping down as board chairman while retaining his role as the company’s president
The board emphasised the necessity for new leadership aligned with OpenAI’s mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. Despite Altman’s significant contributions, the board expressed a loss of confidence in his ability to steer the organisation.
This unexpected change arrives shortly after OpenAI’s recent DevDay conference, where Altman actively participated. His departure triggers curiosity about its connection to the company’s intricate governance structure, notably the relationship between its nonprofit and for-profit arms.
OpenAI’s nonprofit arm wields substantial control over its for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global, LLC, which focuses on commercialising AI while aligning with the nonprofit’s mission of achieving artificial general intelligence. The board’s authority includes determining AGI achievements and regulating associated commercial terms, including partnerships with major investors like Microsoft.
This shift in leadership has left questions lingering about the specific circumstances surrounding Altman’s removal, reflecting a pivotal moment in OpenAI’s trajectory as it navigates a critical phase in the AI landscape.
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Imagine if GPT-4 could tell traders how to play on the stock market. For instance, using insider information gathered on the Internet, it could produce winning buy and sell signals, with target prices, for various stocks. Then, anyone could use simple English, or even an API to get the right predictions and trade automatically. Would it work? Of course not, because everyone would use the same arbitraging strategies. It is well known that the end result would be ROI dilution down to zero.
This is just an example. The goal in this article is to debunk a myth: the idea that AI can do everything right. And that soon, we will all lose our job. Even lawyers, doctors, engineers, and mathematicians. While jobs may disappear in large numbers, I see it as a consequence of automation and the move towards lean organizations. This trend will intensify with or without AI or GPT. So here, I focus only on questioning the ability of AI to do certain tasks better than humans. But first, let’s look on the potential impact on the job market.
AI and GPT Impact on Jobs
Will lawyers, teachers, artists, doctors, programmers, recruiters, real estate agents, mathematicians, bloggers, authors and journalists disappear? After all, they all create or gather information. Yet, the change happening now is the information revolution. Indeed, you can now automatically create content or summarize existing one to some extent.
In my case, I don’t need teachers to learn new stuff, or doctors to diagnose and fix health problems, or artists to create image to put in my articles. Also, I want to automate the production of some of my articles. Good candidates are lists of top books to read or top influencers to follow. And I am happy to have GenAI produce the images that I need. Even in mathematics, I don’t compute integrals or solve equations anymore: AI does it for me (tools such as Wolfram Alpha). As for coding, I re-use code from other programmers to a large extent. This is very similar to asking GPT to write your code. Indeed, I would fail any coding interview unless I can use GPT!
All this results in huge time and cost savings. Also, it allows me to focus on what AI can’t do for me.
The Hype and the Reality
When I worked on my PhD in the nineties, it was all about image processing and image remote sensing. Money was flowing freely. Then it sank into oblivion, only to resurface recently as computer vision. Computational statistics was a hot topic. No one probably remembers it, but it gave rise to modern machine learning, in the process creating the split between statistics and ML. There are good reasons why this happened, it’s not just hype. Now, these days, it is as if LLM is the only thing that matters. And if you don’t talk deep learning or transformers, no one will listen to you.
I could see 10 years from now LLM being remembered as Google search: a fantastic technology that had its heydays but did not reach its full potential due to monopoly. After all, Google was at the core of the Internet revolution. And you may say that GPT is the new search engine.
I call it fashion. Sure a lot of progress has been made. Even myself, I don’t code in Perl anymore, and I have embraced generative adversarial networks (GAN). For synthetic data, they work poorly, which is why I created NoGAN and better evaluation metrics (see here). But they had their success in computer vision.
There is no doubt that GPT and OpenAI offer solutions far superior to (say) Google search. The reason is the increasingly poor quality of the content available on the Internet. More on this in the next section. But I am convinced that in 10 years, few will still use the word LLM. It will drift like NLP, with the focus on the new fashion of the day. In the meanwhile, LLM will be a lot more mature and still powering many applications. In the same way that NLP or computational statistics did not exactly die, quite the contrary. LLM is based on both!
My $1m Challenge
Whenever I really need to do an Internet search, I can’t find answers anymore. GPT does a better job than Google, but still can’t answer my questions, no matter how I rephrase them. Sure, I ask research questions, for instance “what is the variance of the range for Gaussian distributions”. At this point, I believe that I will have to create my own tool. GPT works well for the general public, but has yet to produce specialized versions that serve niche audiences. Unless I miss something. Ten years ago, this was not the case. I actually had an answer to that specific question, but I can’t find it anymore. It is now buried, and I blame it to “the race to the bottom”. That is, the exponential growth of the Internet biased towards rudimentary content. But for advanced content, it has been shrinking at a fast pace.
Niche platforms such as Stack Exchange help, but in the end I could not find my answer there anymore. And anyway, both Google and GPT look at websites such as Stack Exchange, and like myself, are unable to retrieve anything meaningful. This was just one example, but all my questions fit in that category and remain unanswered.
Yet you hear time and again how AI can solve everything, and even prove theorems. For the latter, this is not something new. So I decided to offer $1m if I can get an answer to my new math question: in the first n binary digits of square root of 2, is it true that as n increases, the longest run of zeros is no more (asymptotically) than log2(n)?
I know nobody can answer that one. Not even my famous homonym Andrew Granville, or the team that would get the Clay Institute $1m award to solve the Riemann Hypothesis (I am working on it, see here, but not for the award). So here is my proposal: get AI, GPT-4 or any AI tool of your choice to solve it. Send me the answer: a hard mathematical proof or disproof. An independent team of top mathematicians will review your answer (I don’t trust AI to evaluate the solution), and decide if it is worth the $1m award. I have yet to formalize my proposal, but you can see the preliminary version here.
Final Note
I work regularly on hard mathematical problems. Does AI help with this? Yes, to some extent. For instance, I use GenAI to create synthetic functions mimicking real ones, in the same way that companies use synthetic data for training set augmentation and enhanced classification or predictions. My routine computations or math derivations are all automated. But for the most part, it works the other way around: exploring these hard problems led to the construction of new AI algorithms. In the context of the Riemann Hypothesis, it led to denoising technology that automatically detects and isolates chaos, to do better predictions. In this case, the chaos was in the distribution of prime numbers, but it also applies to real life problems. Then, quantum derivatives is another byproduct of my research, with applications in Fintech.
Author
Vincent Granville is a pioneering GenAI scientist and machine learning expert, co-founder of Data Science Central (acquired by a publicly traded company in 2020), Chief AI Scientist at MLTechniques.com, former VC-funded executive, author and patent owner — one related to LLM. Vincent’s past corporate experience includes Visa, Wells Fargo, eBay, NBC, Microsoft, and CNET.
Vincent is also a former post-doc at Cambridge University, and the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS). He published in Journal of Number Theory, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B), and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He is the author of multiple books, including “Synthetic Data and Generative AI” (Elsevier, 2024). Vincent lives in Washington state, and enjoys doing research on stochastic processes, dynamical systems, experimental math and probabilistic number theory. He recently launched a GenAI certification program, offering state-of-the-art, enterprise grade projects to participants.
