Ilya Susskever has not been seen in twitter space or publicly since the Open AI drama involving Sam Altman. However, he will be doing interviews and talks when GPT-5 is revealed, as any cheif scientist would do.
Related questions
As in, will reemerge before the release, and not seem to be disappearing again when it's out?
Like, how soon after the release will this resolve? Does he need to be in a Twitter space on the same day it's released? The exact hour/minute?
What if he doesn't ever go on Twitter again, but an interview with him is published the same day - or he announces his leaving OA a day after release, and goes on a podcast a day later?
Is this "do we see Ilya at some point during the huge rush of news/excitement following GPT-5 dropping?"
Does it resolve N/A if there's huge drama and Ilya goes public saying GPT-5 shouldn't be released, and he's fired after, disappears, and then GPT-5 is released anyway?
@NevinWetherill great questions! The prediction is that we will hear from Ilya after GPT-5 is released. Let's give it 3 more months after the release. It could be either on twitter or elsewhere. He will will make public statements.
@FabAdams Idk if it's cope but I'm hoping Ilya is in the process of going full Yudkowsky doomer.
His interview with Dwarkesh Patel reminded me vaguely of this passage from Eliezer's Sequences:
A few years back, my great-grandmother died, in her nineties, after a long, slow, and cruel disintegration. I never knew her as a person, but in my distant childhood, she cooked for her family; I remember her gefilte fish, and her face, and that she was kind to me. At her funeral, my grand-uncle, who had taken care of her for years, spoke. He said, choking back tears, that God had called back his mother piece by piece: her memory, and her speech, and then finally her smile; and that when God finally took her smile, he knew it wouldn’t be long before she died, because it meant that she was almost entirely gone.
I heard this and was puzzled, because it was an unthinkably horrible thing to happen to anyone, and therefore I would not have expected my grand-uncle to attribute it to God. Usually, a Jew would somehow just-not-think-about the logical implication that God had permitted a tragedy. According to Jewish theology, God continually sustains the universe and chooses every event in it; but ordinarily, drawing logical implications from this belief is reserved for happier occasions. By saying “God did it!” only when you’ve been blessed with a baby girl, and just-not-thinking “God did it!” for miscarriages and stillbirths and crib deaths, you can build up quite a lopsided picture of your God’s benevolent personality.
Hence I was surprised to hear my grand-uncle attributing the slow disintegration of his mother to a deliberate, strategically planned act of God. It violated the rules of religious self-deception as I understood them.
If I had noticed my own confusion, I could have made a successful surprising prediction. Not long afterward, my grand-uncle left the Jewish religion. (The only member of my extended family besides myself to do so, as far as I know.)
I sorta feel like the vibe was that Ilya was starting to poke at the pillars holding up the culture of AI optimism + AI acceleration + "it'll be okay guys, we're gonna make a lot of money and make the future wonderful."
I may make a market about that if I can figure out how to base it on a solid observable instead of vibes.