My guess is that Ilya is the one that saddled OpenAI with it's insane structure.

He's brilliant, no doubt, but he shouldn't be in leadership.

Insane structure? I was unaware. What do you mean?

Ilya Wozskever

Just the opinion of an outsider, so not worth very much. But Ilya seemed to be one of the few who actually believed in the mission. I’m sure it was hard for him to watch the company become so product focused.

OpenAI under Sam strikes me as completely disingenuous - and the constant hyperbolic tweeting by many OpenAI employees just reinforces that.

Too bad. While I don’t really think that OpenAI is on the right track for general intelligence, it certainly could have been a positive for the world.

Yeah - he's one of the only people I've seen talk on the topic who really seems to understand where it's going and how to get there. It's possible he's evangelized others at OAI who can carry the torch, but I'm skeptical given the degree of pushback the statements most in need of being represented got from his peers.

I wonder if that's true at a certain stage of OpenAI, which because of the product bootstrapping skills of Sam and co, has made his role irrelevant?

I mean, Jakub can take it forward at the current scale and leadership team of Sam and other people, but maybe he could not have earlier, which is where Ilya shone?

OpenAI is the Altavista of AI. There's nothing there to scale yet - their product needs another batch of innovations to get good first.

"Was irreplaceable" != "is still irreplaceable". OpenAI as a company has outgrown any individual engineer or scientist, no matter how smart.

There's no evidence to that.

Depends if top talent prioritizes money over values. But usually money wins.