He was removed as Chairman of the Board but was allowed to remain in his other role as President reporting to the new acting CEO, but apparently wasn't interested.
OTOH, I don't think it would surprise anyone that he would quit, and that may well have been the intent.
> OpenAI's statement implies he was aware of the demotion.
Maybe my experience with corporate communications is different, but all it implies to me is that he was not removed as President and was being permitted to stay on under the new CEO.
>As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.
Its totally fair (your interpretation) to think that. He was removed as chairman though, which IMO is a demotion. I think its disingenuous on the part of OpenAI _unless_ originally Greg said he was ok with the new terms. If a company says "Person X will remain as President and report to the CEO" you would think they have worked it out with person X _before_ announcing it.
This suggests that Greg Brockman wasn't in the board meeting that made the decision, and only "learned the news" that he was off the board the same way the rest of us did.
He was renoved as Chairman at the same time (close enough that they were announced together, and presumably linked in cause, though possibly a separate vote) as Altman was removed as CEO.
Just guessing here, but I think the board can form a quorum without the chair, and vote, and as long as they have a majority, i think they can proceed with a press release based on their vote.
> He was chairman of the board, no? surely he was in the meeting?
Since he was removed as Chairman at the same time as Altman was as CEO, presumably he was excluded from that part of the meeting (which may have been the whole meeting) for the same reason as Altman would have been.
You've put "learned the news" in quote, but what Greg Brockman wrote was "based on today's news".
That could simply mean that he disagreed with the outcome and is expressing that disagreement by quitting.
EDIT: Derp. I was reading the note he wrote to OpenAI staff. The tweet itself says "After learning today's news" -- still ambiguous as to when and where he learned the news.
It's all very ambiguous, but if he had been there for the board meeting where he was removed, I imagine he would have quit then and it would have been in the official announcement. It comes across like he didn't quit until after the announcement had already been made.
> and it would have been in the official announcement.
It is:
> As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.
I'm glad OpenAI happened, but I'd be happier if it stumbles a little and does not full-on capture the entirety of AI. I think a shake-up is good for the world.
I guess we'll see much faster enshittification now?
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Altman was the one who stood to benefit financially from OpenAI selling out. The rest of the board do not have equity in the company. If anything we'll see a reversal of the whole "Open"(to paying customers)AI
I'm highly suspicious of these types of claims. Steve Jobs was famously on a salary of $1, to get Apple back on track....no mention of the 7.8 million stock options backdated to maximize the gains on the share price.
time to stop playing with existential fire. humans suffice. every flaw you see in humans will be magnified X times by an intelligence X times stronger than humans. whether it is autonomous or human lead.
what a fucking ridiculous statement - sam altman is just a YC VC machine man, and I'm sure openai can find another CTO in the hottest ML market in history.
We just don’t know enough yet. Sam could’ve been let go over a disagreement about direction. Or he could’ve been cooking the books. Or he could’ve been concealing the true operating costs. Or subscriber numbers. Some of those things just require a change in leadership. Others are existential risks to OpenAI.
If the AI ecosystem is so fragile that the ouster of two men from one start up is enough to destroy it then it wasn't ever a solid bet. I don't think this will mean much for the broad viability of these systems. Gpt is clearly valuable, but I guess we need to figure out if these systems can be run profitably. I'm not sure people have given much thought to how insanely expensive running massive gpu clusters is. It might just fundamentally not scale well.
Yea cause Steve Jobs dying stopped apple from becoming a juggernaut. People need to stop idolizing the fact that one or two people are "indispensable". Humanity moves forward eventually, even if Einstein wasn't born, someone would have figured out general relativity.
Unrelated, but maybe you mean special relativity. Poincaré was very close and others like Lorentz would have made the logical leap to discover special relativity.
Most scientists however agree that GR would have taken much longer for someone to fill in the crucial gap of modeling gravity as the geometry of space time.
It's also quite silly that society often credits one guy at the top who supposedly has "incredible vision" and yet would likely fail at explaining even the most basic technical details. And if such a person must be credited, why not the CTO, chief engineers, or principal scientists, who are at least closer to what actually drive the technical innovations than the CEO?
In reality, it's actually the 1000s of actual engineers that deserve most of the credit, and yet are never mentioned. Society never learns about the one engineer (or team) that solves a problem that others have been stuck on for some time. The aggregate contributions of such innovators are a far more significant driving force behind progress.
Why do we never hear of the many? It's probably because it's just easier to focus on a single personality who can be marketed as an "unconventional genius" or some such nonsense.
Our stupid monkey brains are evolved to work in a primitive, human centric way, we always need a "figure", a "leader" to look up to, we can't comprehend that many people can be involved in something, that doesn't satisfy our primate brains need to follow or worship someone.
Human motivations and effort are like Brownian motion completely stochastic and hard to direct in any one direction to make any significant impact .
A effective leader whether it is Musk, Jobs, Altman, Gandhi, Mandela (or Hitler for that matter) has the unique to skill to be able to direct everyone in a common direction efficiently like a superconducting material.
They are not individually contributing like say a Nobel laureate doing theoretical research. They get accolades they get is because they were able to direct many other people to achieve a very hard objective and keep them motivated and focused on the common vision, That is rare and difficult to do.
In the case of Altman, yes there were 1000s researchers, programmers who did the all the actual heavy lifting of getting OpenAI where it is today.
However without his ability and vision to get funding none of them would be doing what they are doing today at OpenAI.
All those people would not work a day more if there is no pay, would not be able train any model without resources. A CEO's first priotity is to make that happen by selling that vision to investors, Secondly he has to sell the vision to all these researchers to leave their cushy academic and large company jobs to work in small unproven startup and create an environment they can thrive in their roles. He has done both very well.
i'm sick and tired of everyone sticking a chatbot on random crap that doesn't need it and has no reason to ever need it. it also made HN a lot less interesting to read
Usually mandatory for decisions about a board member for them to be recused. That there is an overwhelming potential for conflict between personal interest and the firm’s is pretty clear in that case.
Because it's a conflict of interest - a CEO should absolutely recuse themselves from a vote on whether they should be removed. If a CEO refused to do so, the board should adjourn and reconvene without the CEO present.
The cat's out of the box for profit or not ... those who make living off of copyright will just have to deal with it as they dealt with Napster and all other innovations.
Oh no not Britain's largest newspaper! A nation known for the quality of its media. It's over for openai, I'm sure they'll fold rather than just not doing business with a comparatively small market if anything came out of that lol.
You’re missing the point. Raising awareness of the scale of this theft is aimed at swaying public opinion.
That way, legitimate machine learning companies can thrive and research for ai can continue without the nuisance.
Incidentally forums are filling up with horror stories from people working at or interviewing with openai, in spite of their paid trolls spamming forums left and right and reporting reddit posts to suppress people. Perhaps the bubble has burst.
Openai has done more harm to ai than any other company.
And the person who decided that the settings (disable usage for training data) and (save prompts) can't be individually controlled. Also that the default is that your data is used for training purposes. Both are clear indications that privacy was no importance to them.
It was previously a Google form without any confirmation. As of late October, they moved it to this privacy center that they keep conveniently well hidden.
Verifying phone number is one of the last things which is still effective when fighting against bot registrations. Alternative is to ask money for registration.
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I'm 100% ok with this. I have the choice of using a Visa/MC gift card I bought with cash. Same as I can do with Netflix. Better than linking a unique ID I use everywhere else.
I think what bugs me the most is that there's no direct need for the phone. It's reasonable to give my phone number to a doctor's office because I need to hear from them over the phone.
> I have the choice of using a Visa/MC gift card I bought with cash.
Technically you can also pay for a burner service to get temporary phone numbers to receive SMSs for registering to services. Can’t attest if any of them are good or trustworthy. I recently looked into it but everything I found was a subscription and/or shady looking.
That's why we offloaded phone validation to Telegram - it is too costly to send SMS in other countries than our home market and spammers are finding ways to get phone numbers for free from different VoIP providers. We need to implement complicated SMS sending limit logic to avoid abuse
So you know that they are rule and norm breakers, no rule too tiny to be broken and skipped in the name of productivity/health/insert-hot-thing-of-the-day
I've seen this from a couple of VP/SVP level execs at companies I've worked. My pet theory is it's some kind of weird "My time is too important to even use the shift key" signal. They probably add up the cumulative amount of time they would spend using the shift key and multiply by their compensation and realize they could buy another car if they just optimized that useless key out of their lives.
personally, it comes from spending too much time on IRC back in the day and now thinking it's normal not to capitalize ;-) a bit of a stylistic choice
but over time I've become accustomed to capitalizing a bit more often and it's become sort of random. I actually have auto-capitalization turned off on my phone
Some people just don't like to press shift. I moaned at one of my friends about this, years ago, and I got a 1-word reply that really stuck in my mind:
> thomas.
And there is indeed no law against not pressing shift.
This all seems so weird, and the list of Board members doesn't make this any easier to understand. Apart from the 3 insiders, there are 3 other board members. 2 of them seem complete no names and might not qualify for any important corporate board. In a for profit shareholders in theory control the board, in a non profit I am not even sure of who really has control over things.
The board does and they are not supposed to have a financial stake in the non-profit. Usually they just vote their friends on. Welcome to the loony tunes that is nonprofit management.
Clearly Microsoft staked its whole product roadmap on 4 random people with no financial skin in the game.
That is one problem with non-profits. They end up with completely unprofessional leadership because they hire their friends who are crazies just like themselves.
When things cool down in a few months we will learn Altman and Brockman were some of the few sane people on the board.
But Jeff was the shareholder and those were his nominees right? Not to mention he was mostly able to pick the board as needed. In for profit corporation there is a clear ultimate ownership in shareholders. No such thing here.
Sure, the investors own the company and the board answers to them. Nonprofits are significantly disconnected from their own financial incentives. I have witnessed it at every nonprofit I have worked for.
In the early stage the investor does not own the startup. 20-30% stake would be typical. Hence why a Series A investor usually demands a board seat and special considerations.
Investor here is not someone who puts cash in professionally without running the company. Investor here means whoever owns the stock. There is always an investor in a company even if its just the founder owning 100% stock.
The board reports to the shareholders and the management reports to the board.
In early stage companies it is possible and likely that all three are the same person, that doesn't change the different fiduciary responsibilities for each role they play.
This has not do with beneficial ownership of the underlying asset alone. Principals sometimes do not have that relationship. Asset ownership is a common way to benefit from a entity, but not the only way.
Specifically here Sam Altman does not own shares in the for-profit entity and non profit entities do not have shares.
I don't have direct knowledge on how OpenAI handles it, however it is not uncommon to do revenue sharing, or lease an underlying asset like a brand name (WeWork did this) from the Principal directly, or pay for perks like housing, planes etc, or pay lot of money in Salary/Cash compensation, there are myriad ways to benefit from control without share ownership.
I mean.. the OpenAI foundation is literally not motivated by profit. I guess the main question here is how was the board chosen, and why didn't Sam much sure they were friendly to them.
From Tom Perkins’s biography - after serving on boards both big private companies and non-profjts, he said that non profits were much worse. His theory was that with no money on the stake it’s all about egos, and they cause weird situations to happen.
Also, I worked in startups and my ex-gf in various nonprofits, and the amount of drama she saw was way higher than in the commercial world
> I am not even sure of who really has control over things.
Honestly, this is the big problem with Big Non Profit (tm). The entire structure of non-profits is really meant for ladies clubs, Rotary groups, and your church down the street, not openai and ikea.
Ikea has the wildest legal structure, but yes, a lot of IKEA is technically owned by a couple of "nonprofits" which happen to pay out a lot of money to the Kamprad family.
They don't need you to be their pr department. Their products are based on research done at Google and Meta, they're not the only ones working on this and they're also one of the smaller players in the space.
I never made any of the points you are contesting and my point still stands. And they are not a smaller player in this space, they are the most well known player.
Governments will have their own black-budget private LLM networks, they don't need OpenAI. The NSA probably has a whole cluster of them in its data center in Utah, trained on every public and private communication they've slurped up over the years, likely a generation or two ahead of what's available to the public.
This is immensely dumb. What secret cabal of researchers would they be hiring that would be capable of being ahead of Deepmind/OpenAI? Where exactly would they find these people? Shadow MIT? CalTech2?
Military and intelligence technology is almost always ahead of the private sector. Governments have practically infinite money and resources to throw at the problem, including for recruiting and industrial espionage.
The only people who think this are people who have never been associated with a top research org. You NEVER hear about anyone, let alone the top people, going to work for government. They all get scooped up with big tech salaries or stay in academia.
The military would need to be literally breeding geniuses and cultivating a secret scientific ecosystem to be ahead on AI right now.
The military does have a secret scientific ecosystem. Where do you think all of its advanced classified technology and cryptography comes from, the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog?
yes. this is a very strange event and given the relationship to what we may call "cutting edge applied DL" technology, right after DevDay, with two key players dropping out. GDB leaving is pretty wild, IMO. indicates something maybe on the engineering level wasn't above board. Anyways, we shall see. I think some conspiratorial thinking is fine, especially if its backed up with some evidence. This comment isn't, but the fact remains this is pretty weird and people should let their minds wander and connect dots that maybe they half-remember. IMO
CIA has been destabilizing and puppeteering governments around the world. Why are you so steadfastly assured that they wouldn't meddle in the US?
Not saying there is proof, but we just found out Ukraine blew up the Russian pipeline so it seems weird to just squash debate at the 'that's too crazy to ever happen'. Way crazier things have happened/are constantly happening.
The Illuminati are a front for the Jews™ (not to be confused with Jewish people).
The Jews™ are a front for the Catholic Church.
The Catholic church is a front for the Lizard People.
The Lizard People are a front for the Government.
Nobody is in control. The conspiracy is circular. There is no conspiracy. Everything in this post is false. Only an idiot cannot place his absolute certainty in paradoxes.
Microsoft has zero ownership of the entity the board controls (the OpenAI nonprofit), and a for-profit firm having seats on a nonprofit board especially if it was because they invested in a for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit would raise serious issues of the “nonprofit” being run for purposes incompatible with its status.
Sure; but its still weird that Microsoft agreed to the deal with the board in the state that it was; not just no board seat, but three absolute outsiders, two of them extremely unqualified. We may look back on their decision to buy 49% of OpenAI as a big misstep.
Wasn't it a Hail Mary for Microsoft? They're not doing anything else particularly earth shattering, and if this came out without them, they'd be even less relevant. If OpenAI fought this and won without them, Microsoft would have nothing to compete against Google and everyone else with.
Did Microsoft have any other route to AI relevance?
Sure, they could simply copy the GPT papers (as they are entirely public) and implement them inside their own products, as they are doing already with GitHub and Office. There is really no need to hang onto OpenAI's word.
There is one OpenAI board member who has an art degree and is part of some kind of cultish "singularity" spiritual/neo-religious thing. That individual has also never had a real job and is on the board of several other non-profits.
What the hell were they thinking? Just because you are a non-profit doesn't mean you should imitate other non-profits and put crazies on the board.
The only explanation I can find is that their importance went through a step function at the launch of ChatGPT, and before that it didn't matter who was a board member.
No, all native Californians are like this (this just replaces hippie Buddhism with hippie computer worship) and the singularity stuff is the reason OpenAI was founded in the first place. And the reason Elon is mad at them, because they pivoted from it.
Non profits too often can be uniquely bureaucratic, undertrained in governance and efficiency, and more tied to deeper personal interpretations or none at all and being open to bouts of oversimplification.
> in a non-profit I am not even sure of who really has control over things
The board is in absolute control in a not-for-profit. The loophole is that some have bylaws that make ad-hoc board meetings and management change votes very difficult to call for non-operating board members, and it can take months to get a motion to fire the CEO up for a vote.
In some not-for-profits, the board often even manages to recruit and seat new board members. Some not-for-profits operate as membership associations, where the organization’s membership elects the board members to terms.
On the few not-for-profits where I was a board member, we started every meeting with a motion to retain the Executive Director (CEO). If the vote failed, so did the Executive Director.
Edit: My bad for not expanding. Noone knows the identity of this "Jimmy Apples" but this is the latest in a series of correct leaks he's made for Open AI for months now. Suffice to say he's in the know somehow.
Nobody knows who he is but this is the latest in a series of correct leaks he's made at Open AI for months now. Fair enough I didn't expand but "Jimmy Apples" of all people being unphased by this revelation that supposedly even Microsoft was unaware of is the funniest timeline.
You probably could have included that information in the original comment, as it’s super useful anyone not intimately familiar with the twitter-sphere around openAI.
Given the way the board announcement ended on the commitment to the original charter of AI for everyone and the way this mention of safety is being thrown in, I suspect it may have been strong disagreements over continuing to be closed with research in the name of safety or open with the research community in the sake of advancement for all.
GPT4 has been closed for a long long time, nothing technical was ever released. The board can't suddenly one day wake up from a long sleep and decide that things have to become open right this minute.
Maybe it didn't. Maybe it's been pushing on this for a bit and Altman kept paying lip service to it or made commitments in their eyes, and those weren't being followed through on
A non profit board is not as professional as a public company board.
Looking at the people on the current board, it doesn't seem they have a lot of experience being independent board members in large public corporations.
No non-profit has this level of public scrutiny, It could just be that they were sloppy because they are not professional board members.
I think claiming to quit over AGI danger is more believable to outsiders than “I want to spend time with family, totally coincidentally after my boss was fired”
Ignore and focus on your life, the grapevine in your neighborhood about who is selling their car or their house is not as exciting but will net you way more money than this happening thousands of miles away from you. And most importantly without having to fuck with leverage.
That is true for millionaires and billionaires alike, the best ROI opportunities investments are geographically close to you before they are sniffed out by other people.
Betting on the World Cup Final vs. betting on a local match where you know a team has been clubbing and drinking until late into the night at your bar.
Who isn't? That does not mean you cannot do well on financial news. The best way forward is to buy VTI/VTSAX (they are eqiivalent, just based on whether you want to buy a mutual fund or ETF) and wait 20 to 50 years.
MSFT stock already dropped a bit before the bell on the news. That may be baked in by faster movers. This is not stock advice but I'm more inclined to sell NVDA as whatever happens next is a distraction and will slow AI market growth and inclined to buy Google as they have an opportunity here to do some poaching.
But for clarity sake I'm doing neither personally because I'm not a day trader and look more long term.
if you wanted to day trade, you'd buy msft because this drop is clearly nominally related but the odds that it has a substantive effect is really unlikely. similar stuff happened during Trump's tenure where they just had bots trading on Trump tweets.
What an unbelievable turn of events! To the outside observer, OpenAI is one of the most successful, well-oiled machines, shipping nearly weekly and doing an unbelievably good job marketing itself. Clearly, there's a lot of turmoil going on behind the scenes.
We don't really know anything about the internal finances at this point. The product is solid but who knows how fucked up things are. Maybe they were on track to run out of money. GPU compute ain't cheap.
None of that can be a reason for a step like this. OpenAI can easily charge much more for their products, and there is a market for even extremely high prices (even if not as big) and given this is a non profit, it doesn't even need to make billions of dollars in money.
OpenAI exists both as a nonprofit and, for several years now, as a for-profit company [1] that has taken billions of dollars in investment. It needs to make billions of dollars to return to investors just as much as any other for-profit company does.
Since it's a private non-profit corp it might be whatever they want the rules to be.
Arms-length neutrality on a board in silicon valley might still work like the rest as other comments have stated. Maybe someone can shed some light on it
I’m presuming it was put into place as part of creating the capped-for-profit entity, to make sure the for-profit couldn’t itself permanently misalign the non-profit’s board.
There's 8 billion people on the planet nowadays, of those, about 7.9 billion would not lift a finger if there's no material benefit to them. Hence why it's strange.
no, I live in a US urban environment and my experience is that most people enjoy doing good and helping others, especially when it is simple and low effort.
Just look at how this news is doing on reddit (a service i conflate a little more with the general public than hacker news which learns towards silicon valley technology) and you can easily see the truth of your statement.
Interestingly parts of this comment section are behaving in Reddit-y ways, posting board members' Linkedins and questioning their credentials, as if their jobs are to just rubber stamp the CEO's calls.
700 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadWasn't he essentially demoted before quitting though? I guess this means he wasn't even aware he was demoted.
OTOH, I don't think it would surprise anyone that he would quit, and that may well have been the intent.
OpenAI's statement implies he was aware of the demotion... but his statement seems to imply he wasn't.
I guess the most likely situation is that they put out the press release, told him (or vice versa) and it took him a bit to decide to quit.
Maybe my experience with corporate communications is different, but all it implies to me is that he was not removed as President and was being permitted to stay on under the new CEO.
Its totally fair (your interpretation) to think that. He was removed as chairman though, which IMO is a demotion. I think its disingenuous on the part of OpenAI _unless_ originally Greg said he was ok with the new terms. If a company says "Person X will remain as President and report to the CEO" you would think they have worked it out with person X _before_ announcing it.
Probably a similar situation.
just base logic.
Since he was removed as Chairman at the same time as Altman was as CEO, presumably he was excluded from that part of the meeting (which may have been the whole meeting) for the same reason as Altman would have been.
That could simply mean that he disagreed with the outcome and is expressing that disagreement by quitting.
EDIT: Derp. I was reading the note he wrote to OpenAI staff. The tweet itself says "After learning today's news" -- still ambiguous as to when and where he learned the news.
It is:
> As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.
https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transiti...
The portion you quoted says he will remain at the company. This post is about him quitting, and no longer remaining with the company.
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https://x.com/sama/status/1725748751367852439
Though any fund containing MSFT must be correlated.
They're all getting paid one way or another.
That's the reason nobody does stock options anymore though, it's all RSUs now.
The next AI winter may have just begun...
time to stop playing with existential fire. humans suffice. every flaw you see in humans will be magnified X times by an intelligence X times stronger than humans. whether it is autonomous or human lead.
Because two executives were ousted from a company? That's dramatic.
But sooner or later someone would have done it.
In reality, it's actually the 1000s of actual engineers that deserve most of the credit, and yet are never mentioned. Society never learns about the one engineer (or team) that solves a problem that others have been stuck on for some time. The aggregate contributions of such innovators are a far more significant driving force behind progress.
Why do we never hear of the many? It's probably because it's just easier to focus on a single personality who can be marketed as an "unconventional genius" or some such nonsense.
A effective leader whether it is Musk, Jobs, Altman, Gandhi, Mandela (or Hitler for that matter) has the unique to skill to be able to direct everyone in a common direction efficiently like a superconducting material.
They are not individually contributing like say a Nobel laureate doing theoretical research. They get accolades they get is because they were able to direct many other people to achieve a very hard objective and keep them motivated and focused on the common vision, That is rare and difficult to do.
In the case of Altman, yes there were 1000s researchers, programmers who did the all the actual heavy lifting of getting OpenAI where it is today.
However without his ability and vision to get funding none of them would be doing what they are doing today at OpenAI.
All those people would not work a day more if there is no pay, would not be able train any model without resources. A CEO's first priotity is to make that happen by selling that vision to investors, Secondly he has to sell the vision to all these researchers to leave their cushy academic and large company jobs to work in small unproven startup and create an environment they can thrive in their roles. He has done both very well.
i'm sick and tired of everyone sticking a chatbot on random crap that doesn't need it and has no reason to ever need it. it also made HN a lot less interesting to read
FWIW, radio silence from Ilya on twitter https://twitter.com/ilyasut
Usually mandatory for decisions about a board member for them to be recused. That there is an overwhelming potential for conflict between personal interest and the firm’s is pretty clear in that case.
I’m never going back to Noe Valley for less than $500,000/yr and a netjets membership
I wouldn't ... but you do you!
I wouldn't move back to San Francisco anywhere and hybrid would be a midweek affair
The game is over boys. The only question is how to make these types of companies pay for the crimes committed.
That way, legitimate machine learning companies can thrive and research for ai can continue without the nuisance.
Incidentally forums are filling up with horror stories from people working at or interviewing with openai, in spite of their paid trolls spamming forums left and right and reporting reddit posts to suppress people. Perhaps the bubble has burst.
Openai has done more harm to ai than any other company.
The cat’s out of the bag.
This page provides confirmation that your request is processed: https://privacy.openai.com/policies
Here is idea for hacker news crowd: make service which is a proxy for phone number validation: user needs to validate his phone number once in that app and any other 3rd-party service can ask this app for security code which confirms phone number ownership. We use something similar by offloading phone number confirmation via Telegram bot. Also this proxy service could optionally offload management of "bad" phone numbers used by spammers and add other protections
I'm 100% ok with this. I have the choice of using a Visa/MC gift card I bought with cash. Same as I can do with Netflix. Better than linking a unique ID I use everywhere else.
I think what bugs me the most is that there's no direct need for the phone. It's reasonable to give my phone number to a doctor's office because I need to hear from them over the phone.
Technically you can also pay for a burner service to get temporary phone numbers to receive SMSs for registering to services. Can’t attest if any of them are good or trustworthy. I recently looked into it but everything I found was a subscription and/or shady looking.
Is it some cute attempt at saying “an AI didn’t write this”?
I was wondering the same thing. Always, on purpose, avoiding starting sentences with capital letters. Both this guy and Sam Altman. What ... why ... ?
but over time I've become accustomed to capitalizing a bit more often and it's become sort of random. I actually have auto-capitalization turned off on my phone
> thomas.
And there is indeed no law against not pressing shift.
Clearly Microsoft staked its whole product roadmap on 4 random people with no financial skin in the game.
When things cool down in a few months we will learn Altman and Brockman were some of the few sane people on the board.
You actually think that for-profit corporate boards are significantly different, especially in the startup/early IPO phase?
The board reports to the shareholders and the management reports to the board.
In early stage companies it is possible and likely that all three are the same person, that doesn't change the different fiduciary responsibilities for each role they play.
This has not do with beneficial ownership of the underlying asset alone. Principals sometimes do not have that relationship. Asset ownership is a common way to benefit from a entity, but not the only way.
Specifically here Sam Altman does not own shares in the for-profit entity and non profit entities do not have shares.
I don't have direct knowledge on how OpenAI handles it, however it is not uncommon to do revenue sharing, or lease an underlying asset like a brand name (WeWork did this) from the Principal directly, or pay for perks like housing, planes etc, or pay lot of money in Salary/Cash compensation, there are myriad ways to benefit from control without share ownership.
Huh? Plenty of startups in the stage being referenced are still majority owned by the founders.
Also, I worked in startups and my ex-gf in various nonprofits, and the amount of drama she saw was way higher than in the commercial world
Honestly, this is the big problem with Big Non Profit (tm). The entire structure of non-profits is really meant for ladies clubs, Rotary groups, and your church down the street, not openai and ikea.
https://www.economist.com/business/2006/05/11/flat-pack-acco...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk_Foundation
Or lads clubs. Don't leave us out.
The military would need to be literally breeding geniuses and cultivating a secret scientific ecosystem to be ahead on AI right now.
Not saying there is proof, but we just found out Ukraine blew up the Russian pipeline so it seems weird to just squash debate at the 'that's too crazy to ever happen'. Way crazier things have happened/are constantly happening.
Anyway if I was in business of destabilizing governments around the world I would not bother dealing with board meetings. But maybe that's just me.
Man I'm drunk in conspiracy theories tonight. Between a huge lay off and the Open AI fiasco please allow me indulge myself...
The Illuminati are a front for the Jews™ (not to be confused with Jewish people).
The Jews™ are a front for the Catholic Church.
The Catholic church is a front for the Lizard People.
The Lizard People are a front for the Government.
Nobody is in control. The conspiracy is circular. There is no conspiracy. Everything in this post is false. Only an idiot cannot place his absolute certainty in paradoxes.
Likely it's already brought them more than $10B they paid.
Did Microsoft have any other route to AI relevance?
What the hell were they thinking? Just because you are a non-profit doesn't mean you should imitate other non-profits and put crazies on the board.
The board is in absolute control in a not-for-profit. The loophole is that some have bylaws that make ad-hoc board meetings and management change votes very difficult to call for non-operating board members, and it can take months to get a motion to fire the CEO up for a vote.
In some not-for-profits, the board often even manages to recruit and seat new board members. Some not-for-profits operate as membership associations, where the organization’s membership elects the board members to terms.
On the few not-for-profits where I was a board member, we started every meeting with a motion to retain the Executive Director (CEO). If the vote failed, so did the Executive Director.
Really wonder what this is all about.
Edit: My bad for not expanding. Noone knows the identity of this "Jimmy Apples" but this is the latest in a series of correct leaks he's made for Open AI for months now. Suffice to say he's in the know somehow.
Random twitter guy has thoughts on $Current_Event and a witty quip about the “vibes”. It’s crucial we post this without context to the discussion
Random? Twitter account who's leaked a few things at Open AI for months now.
They could have waited another 30 mins for the markets to close before making the move. This isn’t the culmination of a long-standing problem.
Looking at the people on the current board, it doesn't seem they have a lot of experience being independent board members in large public corporations.
No non-profit has this level of public scrutiny, It could just be that they were sloppy because they are not professional board members.
Ignore and focus on your life, the grapevine in your neighborhood about who is selling their car or their house is not as exciting but will net you way more money than this happening thousands of miles away from you. And most importantly without having to fuck with leverage.
Betting on the World Cup Final vs. betting on a local match where you know a team has been clubbing and drinking until late into the night at your bar.
Local advantage.
But for clarity sake I'm doing neither personally because I'm not a day trader and look more long term.
They're probably firing up the eyeball scanning machines on this news.
[1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp
Arms-length neutrality on a board in silicon valley might still work like the rest as other comments have stated. Maybe someone can shed some light on it
There's 8 billion people on the planet nowadays, of those, about 7.9 billion would not lift a finger if there's no material benefit to them. Hence why it's strange.
You would agree the OpenAI is neither ? the comparison doesn't do well then?
If you want to talk about rarer cases, there at lots of examples of people that literally sacrifice their lives and die for no personal benefit