Ask HN: Why is OpenAI firing Sam Altman such a big deal?
I understand it’s a big deal, as AI is the current big thing and OpenAI is the center of it. And it’s good gossip. But the firing post is now the third most upvoted post on HN ever!
It got more upvotes than Steve Jobs death announcement. In my point of view, considering fame and impact on the world, which I think is what translates to HN upvotes, Steve Jobs is of much higher stature than Sam Altman. Also, a death is a much more significant event than a firing.
So, why this is such a big deal?
UPDATE: I understand there is upvote inflation, I just don’t think it alone accounts for the number of upvotes. After all, the 12yo Steve Jobs post is still #4.
UPDATE 2: The Jobs’ post comparison was intended just as a reference. The more significant fact is that it’s #3 of all time. I am more curious about why is such a big deal compared to everything else, not just Jobs post.
150 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadIf Apple had very suddenly fired Jobs at the hight of the Apple Renaissance during market hours and very publicly accused him of lying it would have been a bigger deal than his eventual death.
There are many open questions right now about what exactly Altman did that was bad enough to get him fired on the spot (and for openAI to burn all their bridges with him in a harshly worded press release) and what it means for the future of OpenAI and the AI field in general and the rest of Altman’s companies. It’s a highly salient topic for discussion and speculation, so no wonder that it does well on HN.
Altman obviously also has much more of a YC connection
So far, from my viewpoint, OpenAI was perfectly as a product - both in terms of features and their deployments. Now anything can be possible.
but why would that not have been the case regardless of whether sam was fired or not? Just because they are a non-profit, doesn't really mean they have anyone's interest at heart (except the controllers of said non-profit).
1. It came completely out of left field, at a time when OpenAI has had an astonishingly successful year.
2. It was much more harshly worded than most corporate press releases letting their CEO go, basically accusing Sam Altman of serious wrongdoing.
3. It occurred during market hours and blindsided their investors and partners.
4. It revealed a schism inside the company that the public had little awareness of.
5. It has deep implications for the trajectory of a technology that many see as heralding a revolution at least as significant as — if not more than — agriculture or industry, with truly existential implications for humanity.
6. The revealed schism appears to go right to the heart of heated debates over those existential risks and the right course to navigate through them.
Are there really people out there who believe that? I mean, agriculture was a BIG BIG BIG deal for humanity, it is not unreasonable to thing that this will have been out biggest deal.
EDIT: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-18/ai-can-do... | https://archive.today/b37TG ("Bloomberg: AI Can Do Your Admin Tasks, Britain Tells Its Public Workers")
> Governments around the world are increasingly turning to AI to help streamline operations and increase productivity in public services as they face higher costs and aging populations.
> In the UK, Hunt said that Al is already helping doctors and nurses treat stroke victims, and build high-quality lesson plans for teachers.
> Further use of the technology would cut teachers’ workloads by as many as five hours each week over three years, while new technologies could save the country’s police force around 750,000 hours every week he said.
[edited for clarity]
Doesn't AI depend on humans feeding it data. how can it be self sustainable.
i guess i don't follow what this means.
What will they be replicating once humans are obsolete?
This statement is nonsensical. Unless you consider the end goal to be something other than humanity, which is obviously silly if you give it 5 minutes of thinking, various applications of ML can be either helpful or harmful but it cant make humans useless any more than a electricity and its application as washing machine can make clothing wearers useless.
Which isn't that nonsensical, if an AGI is created and follows similar processes as humans to acquire knowledge, skills, etc. it is a quite logical conclusion that it will be able to render humans useless: a very advanced AGI can imagine and develop technologies just like we do, it can direct resources and machinery to build whatever it creates, including self-replication, given access to resources it can potentially render humans useless.
That's at least what I interpreted from the comment.
One could say some future technology might be so good that humans need to do almost nothing in order to survive. Perhaps that’d pose some challenges in terms of mental health, but that is a very different issue, assuming it would be a issue at all (and assuming such technology is even possible in theory).
One could say some advanced technology could go out of control, or magically acquire self-awareness and agency (same thing in a philosophically dubious wrapper), or (more prosaically) be (intentionally or not) misused by humans so that it harms humans, but that just puts it into the bad category.
That said, I do doubt it is likely. What is much more likely is that, more prosaically, humans can control it, but some humans misuse it and, intentionally or not, harm other humans; a story as old as civilisation itself.
If we are talking about some software tool, you can't be unnecessary because the tool exists for you not the other way around. If your tool starts occupying your place in life, getting all the praise, taking away your job, taking away all your purpose of life, living in your family, parenting your children, taking care of your parents, sleeping with your wife (OK I'm joking at this point) then maybe the tool is harming your human rights, bad tool should be banned. Maybe someone who runs this tool now gets paid more and they should answer to the law. Maybe they even trained this tool on your data and you didn't think to object back then.
If you want to take care of your parents and do stuff in your home yourself, why would AGI force you not to? Id classify that as entertaining yourself. With purpose sure, but still.
> people with smarter assistants are indeed deluding themselves by thinking they're necessary
If they were not necessary then they would not be in a higher up position would they?
> If you want to take care of your parents and do stuff in your home yourself, why would AGI force you not to?
Yes. You can't be rendered useless by tech if tech is there for your benefit. (Though you can be harmed by tech if it is harmful or someone uses it against you for own benefit as part of obsolete dog eat dog society dynamic.)
An extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence. If you use the word "may", then I agree. But I don’t think it’s a certainty at this point.
I’m bullish on AI but with comments like that I sympathize with people who think it’s just a bunch of rebranded cryptocoin scammers.
If I understand it correctly.
Yes, this is likely to be one of the most important events in human history. We are living through a special period of evolution on Earth.
(Possibly dumb) question: OpenAI isn't publicly traded right? Do market hours really matter for this sort of thing for private companies?
I personally am unsure, but I worry Sam's departure is bad news for our trajectory. (Though I also feared his influence, as I fear anyone with heavy influence.)
Think all hospitals being administered by AI, all logistical chains bringing food to your plates, etc... it is not far fetched to bet on us relying a lot on AI, iff it works as well as some people think
It's hard to even argue, cause these things stand on very disparate levels of civilizatory pressure. AI has, no question, potential to deeply change human experience, but even if it does, that will be mostly due to extreme optimization of existing processes, not likely the development of new modes of living.
And it's very, very, very far from getting there. All this hype over Generational AI is, sadly, more of a Marketing stunt than anything else. Generational AI don't bring any great innovation in what AI can achieve, only in how people perceive what AI already does. GPT's biggest achievement is to sound coherent, not to leap forward human knowledge in any meaning full way.
I think about cars as an "extreme optimization of the wheel" and it completely changed the way people live. (See Suburbs)
I do share that AI is quite overhyped, but I think the seeds are juuuuuust starting to germinate.
Electric bulbs are neat, but there was inneficient artifical light before.
On the other hand, a caveman might look at the moon, but he would never land there without modern tools.
GAI doesn't allow us to overcome any Human inherent limitations, it's just an efficient tool (in certain scenarios).
Railways and Ocean Freighters, on the other hand, enable some pretty incredible cases. They allow food and goods to reach otherwise impossible places, regardless of the seasons, which allowed previously impossible developments.
And then there's airplanes
GAI doesn't enable Humanity to do anything that wasn't possible before. Perhaps we can do it more efficiently, but it's not turning the impossible into possible, like many other previous advancements did.
Until the AIs can build better AIs without needing humans. Give it 20 years.
As I understand the growth of chatGPT (both in number of users and capabilities) is only possible with more servers.
I'm right now developing on top of openAI API and I wonder if it's a good idea after all.
Computer energy needs grow exponentially so at some point we will hit a wall. Hard to estimate when. Energy tech is also an evolving field and fusion might arrive some day
Lol no, CEOs are overated, they don't contribute much to anything. Open AI will be just fine.
This use of "many" refers to HN voters not people in general.
The way the statement was phrased is practically unheard of at the board/executive level. The board essentially accused Sam Altman of lying to them, which would normally be a permanent black mark against someone. On top of that OpenAI’s corporate structure makes the outcome of this exercise particularly unpredictable with a bunch of board members that - frankly - probably have no idea what they’re doing.
Altman also ran YC at one point but at the end of the day ChatGPT is all the hype nowadays and we just abso-fucking-lutely love drama.
YC has grown a a lot in that time too.
Lots of changes. No comparison.
It's a small world, the one where money pours round.
It occurred while we were already paying heightened attention to OpenAI (seriously, have you seen the front page of HN?)
There is inherent drama — a guy got kicked out of his own company
There is no explanation, so people want to speculate about it, which means lots of comments
This looks like that
That said, this is pretty big. OpenAI is a wildly successful company and as CEO Sam Altman is one of the big players in that.
Not only was he fired, but he was fired unexpectedly and very publicly, this rarely happens. Usually companies try to prevent the media storm that is happening right now by quietly moving people to less important roles and or they “want to spent more time with family” or “are looking for another challenge”.
So it’s not just the firing of the ceo of one of, if not the most, successful startups of this time, it’s completely unexpected, and the wording suggests something really big has happened or will be happening, or the board is making reckless decisions, which would be newsworthy on its own.
Not having all the information makes people wonder what’s going on adding to the attention as we all speculate on what’s going on and how it is going to change things.
Another factor in this is that a lot of startups and companies rely on OpenAI making it directly relevant to a lot of people, especially those on this website.
Usually, an ouster will come with preceding signs of trouble, but not this. Imagine if Tim Cook was suddenly fired today with a press release bluntly stating they lost confidence in his abilities (despite Apple's stellar performance). I bet you'll get a similar number of votes.
https://content.sfstandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/sc...
On one side, there are proponents of an argument that Sam hid evidence of the achievement of AGI from the board, or that he pushed for acceleration of development in a way that scared the board.
On the other side, there are proponents of an argument that the board wasn't happy with OpenAI Dev Day pushing commercialization directly within OpenAI (e.g. the marketplace) against the wishes of the board and OpenAI's charter.
Until Sam, OpenAI, or others comment further, this is the perfect playground for speculation and court intrigue about what is arguably the most prominent technology company of the 2020's (thus far).
Sadly that has me hoping personal or professional misconduct is behind it, he does give me a bad vibe, but that could be easily internal bias and bad stereotyping on my part.
If it is revealed to be from an interference or slow down the progress the only silver lining is perhaps this gives open source projects some space to try and catch up.
Of course, I feel the same way. But I would have reacted the same way if someone had told me yesterday that sama would be fired - that seemed utterly ridiculous for so many reasons. And that's the point.