I repeatedly keep seeing praise for Ilyas achievements as a scientist and engineer, but until ChatGPT OpenAI was in the shadow of DeepMind, and to my knowledge (I might be wrong) he has not been that much involved with ChatGPT?
the whole LLM race seems deaccelerate, and all the hard problems about LLMs seems not do have had that much progress the last couple of years (?)
In my naaive view I think a guy like David Silver the creator/co-lead of Alpha-Zero deserves more praise, atleast as a leader/scientist. He even have lectures about Deep RL after doing AlphaGo: https://www.davidsilver.uk/teaching/
He has no LinkedIn and came straight from the game-dev industry before learning about RL.
I would put my money on him.
I’m not optimistic about AGI, but it’s important to give credit where credit is due.
Even assuming the public breakthroughs are the only ones that happened, the fact that openai was able to make an llm pipeline from data to training to production at their scale before anyone else is a feat of research and engineering (and loads of cash)