Methodology: I copied text from the contributors page (down to just before it says “We also acknowledge and thank every OpenAI team member”), used some quick Emacs keyboard macros to munge out the section headers and non-name text (like “[topic] lead”), deduplicated and counted in Python (and subtracted one for a munging error I spotted after the fact), and got 290. Also, you might not count some sections of contributors (e.g., product management, legal) as relevant to your claim.
Yep, that is definitely counterevidence! Though my model did definitely predict that we would also continue seeing huge teams make contributions, but of course each marginal major contribution is still evidence.
I have more broadly updated against this hypothesis over the past year or so, though I still think there will be lots of small groups of people quite close to the cutting edge (like less than 12 months behind).
Currently the multiple on stuff like better coding tools and setting up development to be AI-guided just barely entered the stage where it feels plausible that a well-set-up team could just completely destroy large incumbents. We’ll see how it develops in the next year or so.
Possible counterevidence (10 months later)?—the GPT-4 contributors list lists almost 300 names.[1]
Methodology: I copied text from the contributors page (down to just before it says “We also acknowledge and thank every OpenAI team member”), used some quick Emacs keyboard macros to munge out the section headers and non-name text (like “[topic] lead”), deduplicated and counted in Python (and subtracted one for a munging error I spotted after the fact), and got 290. Also, you might not count some sections of contributors (e.g., product management, legal) as relevant to your claim.
Yep, that is definitely counterevidence! Though my model did definitely predict that we would also continue seeing huge teams make contributions, but of course each marginal major contribution is still evidence.
I have more broadly updated against this hypothesis over the past year or so, though I still think there will be lots of small groups of people quite close to the cutting edge (like less than 12 months behind).
Currently the multiple on stuff like better coding tools and setting up development to be AI-guided just barely entered the stage where it feels plausible that a well-set-up team could just completely destroy large incumbents. We’ll see how it develops in the next year or so.