Stephan Seeger

GNSS & Machine Learning Engineer

Tag: OpenAI (Page 1 of 2)

OpenAI fired and then rehired Sam Altman

November 18, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Nov 17, 2023:
Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI. Greg Brockman was first removed as chairman of the board, and later he announced to quit. Chief technology officer Mira Murati was appointed interim CEO.

From OpenAI’s announcement: “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. “

Some early discussions on Youtube: SVIC Podcast, Matt Wolfe.
Early details of what happened: Wes Roth.

No details are known as to why Sam Altman was fired, only speculations.

Nov 18, 2023:
More senior departures from OpenAI.
Some summaries of what is known a day later: [Matt Wolfe][AI Explained][MattVidPro AI][Yannic Kilcher].
Reports that the OpenAI board is in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO.

Still, no details are known as to why Sam Altman was fired, just more speculations.

Nov 19, 2023:
Emmett Shear (Twitch co-founder and former Twitch CEO) becomes OpenAI’s interim CEO (his tweet).

Still, no details are known as to why Sam Altman was fired, just more speculations.

Nov 20, 2023:
Announcement that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman go to Microsoft and lead a new Microsoft subsidiary.
Ilya Sutskever declared his regret for his participation in the board’s actions.
Employee Letter to OpenAI’s board signed by more than 700 of the 770 employees (including Ilya Sutskever and one-day CEO Mira Murati) to request the resignation of the whole board and reappointment of Sam Altman as CEO, otherwise they will resign and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary.
OpenAI’s board approached Anthropic about to merge [1].
Summaries of the latest news: [Matt Wolfe][AI Explained][Bloomberg].

Still, no details are known as to why Sam Altman was fired, just more speculations.

Nov 21, 2023:
Summary of the latest status: [Wes Roth].

Instead of taking OpenAI’s merger offer, Anthropic announced a massive update with Claude 2.1 and 200K context window.

Nov 22, 2023:
Sam Altman is back at OpenAI.
Summaries of the whole soap opera: [Matt Wolfe][AI Explained].

Still, no details are known as to why Sam Altman was fired, just more speculations.

Nov 23, 2023:
New rumors about Sam Altman’s ouster: Mira Murati told employees on Wednesday that a letter about the AI breakthrough called Q*, precipitated the board’s actions.

Background of why Sam Altman may have been fired:
There is much speculation about safety concerning people (like Ilya Sutskever) acting against people trying to accelerate AI commercialization (Sam Altman, Greg Brockmann). As more and more money is poured in, there may be a concern about losing control over OpenAI’s mission to achieve AGI for the benefit of all of humanity. Interesting in this context is a statement [1][2] by Sam Altman at the APEC summit in San Francisco on November 16, 2023 (where US President Biden met Chinese President Xi Jinping) that OpenAI recently made a major breakthrough. In addition, he made a statement [1][2] about the model’s capability within the next year. Does this mean that AGI was achieved within OpenAI? This is important in the context of OpenAI’s structure as a partnership between the original nonprofit and a capped profit arm. The important parts of the document describing the structure are:

  • First, the for-profit subsidiary is fully controlled by the OpenAI Nonprofit…
  • Second, … The Nonprofit’s principal beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI investors.
  • Fourth, profit allocated to investors and employees, including Microsoft, is capped. All residual value created above and beyond the cap will be returned to the Nonprofit for the benefit of humanity.
  • Fifth, the board determines when we’ve attained AGI. Again, by AGI we mean a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. Such a system is excluded from IP licenses and other commercial terms with Microsoft, which only apply to pre-AGI technology.

This means that once AGI is achieved (and the board decides when this is the case) investors can no longer benefit from further advancements. Their investment is basically lost.

Another speculation is that the OpenAI’s board member Adam D’Angelo is behind Sam Altman’s ouster. Adam D’Angelo is co-founder and CEO of Quora, which built the chat platform Poe whose recently introduced assistant feature on October 25 is in direct competition with OpenAI’s custom GPTs made public on OpenAI’s DevDay on November 06, 2023. However, this reason becomes less likely as Adam is also part of the new board after rehiring Sam.

GitHub Universe 2023 Announcements

November 11, 2023 / / 0 Comments

There were two major announcements about GitHub Copilot at the GitHub Universe 2023 conference on Nov 08, 2023.

GitHub Copilot Enterprise account:

  • Copilot personalized for your organization
  • Contains everything in Copilot Business
  • Chat personalized to your codebase
  • Documentation search and summaries
  • Pull request summaries
  • Code review skills
  • Fine-tuned models
  • available in Feb 2024 for 39$ per user/month

Copilot Workspace: [1]

  • Copilot workspace automatically proposes a solution based on its deep understanding of the code base.
  • Builds a step-by-step plan to implement the changes; if something isn’t quite right, the spec and plan are fully editable.
  • With the approval of the plan, Copilot automates the implementation of changes across the repository.
  • Copilot not only synthesizes code but also builds, tests, and validates the success of these changes.
  • This workspace is designed for collaboration. You can edit any of the suggested changes and if you accidentally introduce an error along the way, Copilot will automatically catch it, repair it, and rerun the code.
  • Easy to create a pull request with generated summary of the work to merge and deploy fast.
  • Available in 2024.

OpenAI DevDay Announcements

November 7, 2023 / / 1 Comment

OpenAI rolled out on its DevDay an array of transformative updates and features [blog post, keynote recording]. Here’s a succinct rundown:

  • Recap: ChatGPT release Nov 30, 2022 with GPT-3.5. GPT-4 release in March 2023. Voice input/output, vision input with GPT-4V, text-to-image with DALL-E 3, ChatGPT Enterprise with enterprise security, higher speed access, and longer context windows. 2M developers, 92% of Fortune 500 companies building products on top of GPT, 100M weekly active users.
  • New GPT-4 Turbo: OpenAI’s most advanced AI model, 128K context window, knowledge up to April 2023. Reduced pricing: $0.01/1K input tokens (3x cheaper), $0.03/1K output tokens (2x cheaper). Improved function calling (multiple functions in single message, always return valid functions with JSON mode, improved accuracy on returning right function parameters). More deterministic model output via reproducible outputs beta. Access via gpt-4-1106-preview, stable release pending.
  • GPT-3.5 Turbo Update: Enhanced gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 model with 16K default context. Lower pricing: $0.001/1K input, $0.002/1K output. Fine-tuning available, reduced token prices for fine-tuned usage (input token prices 75% cheaper to $0.003/1K, output token prices 62% cheaper to $0.006/1K). Improved function calling, reproducible outputs feature.
  • Assistants API: Beta release for creating AI agents in applications. Supports natural language processing, coding, planning, and more. Enables persistent Threads, includes Code Interpreter, Retrieval, Function Calling tools. Playground integration for no-code testing.
  • Multimodal Capabilities: GPT-4 Turbo supports visual inputs in Chat Completions API via gpt-4-vision-preview. Integration with DALL·E 3 for image generation via Image generation API. Text-to-speech (TTS) model with six voices introduced.
  • Customizable GPTs in ChatGPT: New feature called GPTs allowing integration of instructions, data, and capabilities. Enables calling developer-defined actions, control over user experience, streamlined plugin to action conversion. Documentation provided for developers.

AI race is heating up: Announcements by Google/DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft/OpenAI, Amazon/Anthropic

September 22, 2023 / / 0 Comments

After weeks of “less exciting” news in the AI space since the release of Llama 2 by Meta on July 18, 2023, there were a bunch of announcements in the last few days by major players in the AI space:

Here are some links to the news of the last weeks:

OpenAI gives all ChatGPT Plus users access to Code Interpreter

July 8, 2023 / / 0 Comments

The ChatGPT code interpreter allows users to run code and upload individual data files (in .csv, .xlsx, .json format) for analysis. Multiple files can be uploaded sequentially or within one zip-file. To upload a file, click on the ‘+’ symbol located just to the left of the ‘Send a message’ box or even simpler via drag and drop.

The code interpreter functionality is accessible to ChatGPT Plus users and can be enabled in the settings under ‘Beta features’. Once enabled, this functionality will then appear in the configuration settings of any new chat under the ‘GPT-4’ section, where it also needs to be activated.

Given a prompt, the code interpreter will generate Python code that is then automatically executed in a sandboxed Python environment. If something goes wrong, for instance, if the generated source code requires the installation of a Python package or if the source code is simply incorrect, the code interpreter automatically attempts to fix these errors and tries again. This feature makes working with the code interpreter much more efficient. Before, it was necessary to paste ChatGPT’s proposal into a Jupyter notebook and run it from there. If errors occurred, these had to be fixed either independently or by manually pasting the error text back into ChatGPT so that it could provide a solution. This manual iterative procedure has now been automated with the code interpreter.

Note that the code interpreter executes the source code on OpenAI’s servers, not in the local environment. This leads to restrictions on the size of the uploaded data, as well as a very stringent time limit of 120s for the execution of the code. Given this, it becomes clear what developers truly desire. They seek the integration of this feature into their local development environment, such as VSCode, or within a cloud service, such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, without any restrictions on data size or execution times. This then leans more towards the direction of projects like AutoGPT or GPT Engineer. It’s likely only a matter of days, weeks, or months before such functionality becomes widely available. It’s also probable that complete access to your code repository will be enabled, first through a vector database solution and after some time maybe by including the entire repository within prompts, which are currently increasing dramatically in size (as exemplified in LongNet; since this requires retraining of the LLM such solutions cannot be expected to become available before GPT-4.5 or GPT-5).

For testing, try e.g. the following prompts:

  • What is the current time?
  • Plot the graphs of sin(x) and cos(x) in a single graph
  • Make a QR-code of my contact information: Stephan Seeger; Homepage: domain-seeger.de

or after uploading a data set (e.g. from Kaggle)

  • Explain the dataset.
  • Show 4 different ways of displaying the data visually.

Before, such functionality was only available via the Notable plugin or via the open-source implementation GPT-Code-UI on GitHub.

OpenAI API updates

June 14, 2023 / / 0 Comments

On June 13, 2023, OpenAI announced a number of updates to their API:

  • new function calling capability in the Chat Completions API
  • new 16k context version of gpt-3.5-turbo  with 2 times the price as the standard 4k version ($0.003 per 1K input tokens and $0.004 per 1K output)
  • 75% cost reduction on the embeddings model ($0.0001 per 1K tokens)
  • 25% cost reduction on input tokens for gpt-3.5-turbo
    ($0.0015 per 1K input tokens and $0.002 per 1K output tokens)
  • stable model names (gpt-3.5-turbo, gpt-4, and gpt-4-32k) will automatically be upgraded to the new models (gpt-3.5-turbo-0613, 
    gpt-4-0613, and gpt-4-32k-0613) on June 27
  • deprecation of gpt-3.5-turbo-0301 and gpt-4-0314 models after Sept 13

All models come with the same data privacy and security guarantees introduced on March 1, i.e. requests and API data will not be used for training.

The new function calling capability in gpt-3.5-turbo-0613,  and
gpt-4-0613, which is achieved by the new API parameters, functions and function_call, in the /v1/chat/completions endpoint allows e.g. the following use cases:

  • Chatbots that answer questions by calling external tools (like ChatGPT Plugins)
  • Convert natural language into API calls or database queries
  • Extract structured data from text.

Examples beyond the API documentation can be found in the OpenAI cookbook.

Statement on AI Risk

May 31, 2023 / / 0 Comments

A vast number of AI experts have signed a statement to raise public awareness regarding the most severe risks associated with advanced AI, aiming to mitigate the risk of human extinction. Among the signatories are Turing Award laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio (but not Yann LeCun from Meta), and the CEOs of leading AI companies like Sam Altman from OpenAI, Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei from Anthropic, and Emad Mostaque from Stability AI.

The statement is featured on the webpage of the Center for AI Safety, which provides a list of eight examples of existential risks (x-risks). The enumerated risks are based on the publication “X-Risk Analysis for AI Research” which appeared on Sept. 20, 2022, on arXiv. This highly valuable paper also lists in its Appendix a bunch of practical steps to mitigate risks.

The listed risks are:

  • Weaponization:
    Malicious actors could repurpose AI to be highly destructive.
  • Misinformation:
    AI-generated misinformation and persuasive content could undermine collective decision-making, radicalize individuals, or derail moral progress.
  • Proxy Gaming:
    AI systems may pursue their goals at the expense of individual and societal values.
  • Enfeeblement:
    Humanity loses the ability to self-govern by increasingly delegating tasks to machines.
  • Value Lock-in:
    Highly competent systems could give small groups of people a tremendous amount of power, leading to a lock-in of oppressive systems.
  • Emergent Goals:
    The sudden emergence of capabilities or goals could increase the risk that people lose control over advanced AI systems.
  • Deception:
    To better understand AI systems, we may ask AI for accurate reports about them. However, since deception may help agents to better achieve their goals and this behavior may have strategic advantages, it is never safe to trust these systems.
  • Power-Seeking Behavior:
    Companies and governments have strong economic incentives to create agents that can accomplish a broad set of goals. Such agents have instrumental incentives to acquire power, potentially making them harder to control.

This statement about AI risks appeared a few days after an OpenAI blog post by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever, which also addresses the mitigation of risks associated with AGI or even superintelligence that could arise within the next 10 years.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT app for iOS

May 19, 2023 / / 0 Comments

OpenAI has officially launched the ChatGPT app for iOS users in the US. The app comes with a range of notable features:

  • Free of Charge: The ChatGPT app can be downloaded and used free of cost.
  • Sync Across Devices: Users can maintain their chat history consistently across multiple devices.
  • Voice Input via Whisper: The app includes integration with Whisper, OpenAI’s open-source speech-recognition system, allowing users to input via voice commands.
  • Exclusive Benefits for ChatGPT Plus Subscribers: Those who subscribe to ChatGPT Plus can utilize GPT-4’s enhanced capabilities. They also receive early access to new features and benefit from faster response times.
  • Initial US Rollout: The app is initially launching in the US, with a plan to expand its availability to other countries in the upcoming weeks.
  • Android Version Coming Soon: OpenAI has confirmed that Android users can expect to see the ChatGPT app on their devices in the near future. Further updates are expected soon.

3rd-Level of Generative AI 

April 11, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Defining 

1st-level generative AI as applications that are directly based on X-to-Y models (foundation models that build a kind of operating system for downstream tasks) where X and Y can be text/code, image, segmented image, thermal image, speech/sound/music/song, avatar, depth, 3D, video, 4D (3D video, NeRF), IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), amino acid sequences (AAS), 3D-protein structure, sentiment, emotions, gestures, etc., e.g.

and 2nd-level generative AI that builds some kind of middleware and allows to implement agents by simplifying the combination of LLM-based 1st-level generative AI with other tools via actions (like web search, semantic search [based on embeddings and vector databases like Pinecone, Chroma, Milvus, Faiss], source code generation [REPL], calls to math tools like Wolfram Alpha, etc.), by using special prompting techniques (like templates, Chain-of-Thought [COT], Self-Consistency, Self-Ask, Tree Of Thoughts, ReAct [Reason + Act], Graph of Thoughts) within action chains, e.g.

we currently (April/May/June 2023) see a 3rd-level of generative AI that implements agents that can solve complex tasks by the interaction of different LLMs in complex chains, e.g.

However, older publications like Cicero may also fall into this category of complex applications. Typically, these agent implementations are (currently) not built on top of the 2nd-level generative AI frameworks. But this is going to change.

Other, simpler applications that just allow semantic search over private documents with a locally hosted LLM and embedding generation, such as e.g. PrivateGPT which is based on LangChain and Llama (functionality similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT-Retrieval plugin), may also be of interest in this context. And also applications that concentrate on the code generation ability of LLMs like GPT-Code-UI and OpenInterpreter, both open-source implementations of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Code Interpreter/AdvancedDataAnalysis (similar to Bard’s implicit code execution; an alternative to Code Interpreter is plugin Noteable), or smol-ai developer (that generates the complete source code from a markup description) should be noticed.
There is a nice overview of LLM Powered Autonomous Agents on GitHub.

The next level may then be governed by embodied LLMs and agents (like PaLM-E with E for Embodied).

Open Letter by Future of Life Institute to Pause Giant AI Experiments

March 29, 2023 / / 0 Comments

The Future of Life Institute initiated an open letter in which they call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 [notice that OpenAI already trains GPT-5 for some time]. They state that powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.

The gained time should be used to develop safety protocols by AI experts to make the systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal. In addition, they ask for the development of robust AI governance systems by policymakers and AI developers. They also demand well-resourced institutions for coping with the dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause.

Notice that the letter is not against further AI development but just to slow down and give society a chance to adapt.

The letter was signed by several influential people, e.g. Elon Musk (CEO of SpaceX, Tesla & Twitter), Emad Mostaque (CEO of Stability AI), Yuval Noah Harari (Author), Max Tegmark (president of Future of Life Institute), Yoshua Bengio (Mila, Turing Prize winner), Stuart Russell (Berkeley).

However, it should be noticed that even more influential people in the AI scene have not (yet) signed this letter, none from OpenAI, Google/Deep Mind, or Meta.

This is not the first time the Future of Live Institute has taken action on AI development. In 2015, they presented an open letter signed by over 1000 robotics and AI researchers urging the United Nations to impose a ban on the development of weaponized AI.

The Future of Life Institute is a non-profit organization that aims to mitigate existential risks facing humanity, including those posed by AI.

Yann LeCun answered on Twitter with a nice fictitious anecdote to the request:
The year is 1440 and the Catholic Church has called for a 6 months moratorium on the use of the printing press and the movable type. Imagine what could happen if commoners get access to books! They could read the Bible for themselves and society would be destroyed.

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