Interesting to me, during that crazy period when Sutskever ultimately ended up leaving OpenAI, I thought perhaps he had shot himself in the foot to some degree (not that I have any insider information—just playing stupid observer from the outside).

The feeling I have now is that it was a fine decision for him to have made. It made a point at the time, perhaps moral, perhaps political. And now it seems, despite whatever cost there was for him at the time, the "golden years" of OpenAI (and LLM's in general) may have been over anyway.

To be sure, I happen to believe there is a lot of mileage for LLMs even in their current state—a lot of use-cases, integration we have yet to explore. But Sutskever I assume is a researcher and not a plumber—for him the LLM was probably over.

One wonders how long before one of these "break throughs". On one hand, they may come about serendipitously, and serendipity has no schedule. It harkens back to when A.I. itself was always "a decade away". You know, since the 1950's or so.

On the other hand, there are a lot more eyeballs on AI these days than there ever were in Minsky's* day.

(*Hate to even mention the man's name these days.)