what would the role and deliverable of the non-profit be though? so far they innovated, shipped fast, cut costs and sold plus subscriptions and dev apis for personal and enterprise use. and to be fair i really liked using their apis. so how would them being fully non-profit look like even? genuinely curious.
How exactly would that happen? It’s a non profit that owns a staggeringly valuable piece of IP.
Do you understand that this is conceptually the same thing as the directors of a public art museum deciding to just take millions of dollars of paintings for themselves?
With the way they fired him and the statement they made, it's hard to see how any of the remaining four could stay on if he did come back... as was previously mentioned, if you shoot at the king, don't miss.
Assuming you don't mean the insiders or the Quora CEO, which aspects of these remaining backgrounds do you find unusual for a Silicon Valley board member?
Tasha McCauley is an adjunct senior management scientist at RAND Corporation, a job she started earlier in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously cofounded Fellow Robots, a startup she launched with a colleague from Singularity University, where she’d served as a director of an innovation lab, and then cofounded GeoSim Systems, a geospatial technology startup where she served as CEO until last year. With her husband Joseph Gorden-Levitt, she was a signer of the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of 23 AI governance principles published in 2017. (Altman, OpenAI cofounder Iyla Sutskever and former board director Elon Musk also signed.)
McCauley currently sits on the advisory board of British-founded international Center for the Governance of AI alongside fellow OpenAI director Helen Toner. And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement through the Centre for Effective Altruism; McCauley sits on the U.K. board of the Effective Ventures Foundation, its parent organization.
Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in September 2021. Her role: to think about safety in a world where OpenAI’s creation had global influence. “I greatly value Helen’s deep thinking around the long-term risks and effects of AI,” Brockman said in a statement at the time.
More recently, Toner has been making headlines as an expert on China’s AI landscape and the potential role of AI regulation in a geopolitical face-off with the Asian giant. Toner had lived in Beijing in between roles at Open Philanthropy and her current job at CSET, researching its AI ecosystem, per her corporate biography. In June, she co-authored an essay for Foreign Affairs on “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess” that argued — in opposition to Altman’s cited U.S. Senate testimony — that regulation wouldn’t slow down the U.S. in a race between the two nations.
. . .
EDIT TO ADD:
The question wasn't whether this is scintillating substance. The question was, in what way is this unusual in Silicon Valley.
None of that sounds like actual work or results. It's just a bunch of empty business speak. They are definitely not qualified to serve on the board of a company like OpenAI.
Would Altman's bio be any more impressive if framed the same way? A trash tier startup, failing upwards to a VC, and starting one of the sleziest cryptocurrencies around. Sure sounds like no actual work, qualifications, competence or results.
Their achievements are already framed in their best light.
Hopefully you're able to tell the difference between serving as CEO or president of real reputable companies (the "trash tier startup" still exited for mid-8 figures) versus what looks like being a figure head for fake companies.
He was president of YC, I think it's fair to say people will think he's got a better set of credentials on a YC forum than some omg-ai-is-dangerous-please-fund-me think tank thinker.
Maybe the problem is the meteoric rise of OpenAI--at the time this board was instituted, the company was much smaller, and wouldn't have been able to draw a more illustrious set of board members?
Didnt they have Elon Musk and Jessica Livingston as founding members, their social network would have someone with more credibility to be on the board compared to the current members.
FTX wasn't a Ponzi scheme per se. SBF committed fraud by saying they had risk controls in place when they had an exemption for his hedge fund: Alameda Research. FTX could be viable if it let Alameda fail.
Alameda played a significant role in propping up the value of FTX through their investment in FTT. Worth questioning how much FTX would have been worth if it hadn't been for various tricks like this.
I agree, but it's a difference believing in a concept vs engaging with persons in that same area. and together with everything else, that just seem to be half political organizations to farm funding from governments or ESG VCs, it doesn't look very good to me
She just sounds like a typical Silicon Valley trend grifter
Did you find out e.g. Facebook will do the damage that it did and continues to do in social terms?
Have you done anything or has Facebook changed its way based on your ‘findings’?
The choice here is: does capital coupled with runaway egos provide better stewardship of socially impactful technology development or paper pushers or CIA plants?
Near as I can tell they never actually launched a product. Their webpage is a GoDaddy parked domain page. Their Facebook page is pictures of them attending conferences and sharing their excitement for what Boston Dynamics and other ACTUAL robotics companies were doing.
>she launched with a colleague from Singularity University
It doesn't appears she's ever had a real job. Someone in the other thread commented that her profile reeks of a three letter agency plant. Possible. Either that or she's just a dabbler funder by her actor husband.
So what? Regardless of launch/no launch, the company was a flop. This is a cheap shot. Just because someone was successful in the past (or not) is not an automatically relevant signal they'll be a great fit when placed in a different domain. Sometimes they have other relevant background and experience, and other times... Maybe they're just connected. What is the level of scrutiny of qualifications in other companies, even public ones? When looking closely at other companies, I've noticed board compositions can vary substantially. As outsiders, we're undoubtedly missing part of the context about what is relevant (to the board) or not.
Suggested reading: Black Swan by Taleb.
p.s. I am not partial to anyone involved, especially clueless board members. I found this comment annoying due to the breathless, baseless, and flawed logic. What was this supposed to add to the conversation?
> So what? Regardless of launch/no launch, the company was a flop.
Nothing wrong with that but a company like Open AI which is literally changing the world does not have a board member who is qualified to be in that position.
Lol. You literally know nothing about this person other than what you found online. She could be brilliant or offer a perspective the business needs.
Suggesting that some inarguably brilliant technologists and business people would invite a moron to crash their party makes you look petty (at best) and like an idiot (at worst)
Treating the non-profit OpenAI board like the board for a regular for-profit is weird.
This isn't just a non-profit holding company for tax purposes - the whole thing is structured with the intent of giving the non-profit complete control over the for-profit to help achieve the non-profit's charter.
The board being full of typical business people would likely be counterproductive to the goal of staying focused on the non-profit charter vs. general commercial business interests.
I don't know enough about most of the board to have any sort of real judgment about their ability, but there's a lot of comments here that are judging board members based on very different criteria than what they were actually brought in for.
None are out of the ordinary. It’s like Steel Perlot. It’s an indulge-the-wife tchotchke company position. There are lots of these for the wives and girlfriends of successful people.
Just a sinecure and someone you trust for some other reason. But you’ve got to trust them.
Looking at their CVs, they're more qualified than some rando on the internet. So from my point of view, they look more qualified than you, DebtDeflation, rando from the internet.
Adam has competing interests. It's hard to see why he is even allowed in non profit board. And for other two members, their profile seem pretty weak for being in a board of one of most important companies in the world.
I don’t understand why and how they didn’t consider this sort of discussion before so unceremoniously firing him. The others on the board outside Ilya need to go.
I don’t consider anybody beyond forgiveness and if Ilya takes a professional lesson from this and Sam learns to be more mindful of others’ concerns, I consider this a win for all. Starting over in a new entity sounds great but would be years of setback.
Yes, this attempt was a mess from the start. I don’t know which rumors to believe or care about, but the underlying story for me was that the board was acting like children with an $80b company that some believe to be strategically important to the US or maybe even mankind. If they had done this “properly” and their message was about irreconcilable differences between productization and research they could have made an actual go at this.
If they really believed in the non-profit mission, and Sam didn’t, they probably torpedoed their chances of winning.
This was all they had to write and today would be a different day:
> We regret to inform you that Sam Altman is being let go as CEO of OpenAI due to irreconcilable differences between his desire to commercialize our AI and OpenAI’s research-driven goals. We appreciate Sam’s contributions to the company and the partnership he established with Microsoft, which have set a foundation for OpenAI to thrive far into the future as a research organization with Microsoft focusing on commercialization of the technology.
> We want to assure you that ChatGPT and current features will remain and be upgraded into the future. However, the focus will be on developing core technologies and a reliable, safe, and trustworthy ecosystem for others to build on. We believe that this will allow us to continue to push the boundaries of AI research while also providing a platform for others to innovate and create.
I mean, even if that wasn’t what it was about, that’s what a not-incompetent idiot would have said it was about. ChatGPT could have written that statement for them.
Why do you not think Ilya was the cheif architect of this failed coup? Im being serious everything ive seen points to him being the one responsible, there is no way he will ever stay let alone work in tech again
You are absolutely delusional if you think the man who oversaw the development of GPT would not be able to continue working in tech even if he orchestrated a failed coup.
GPT is based on research Google published, it’s not like he’s the Einstein of AI. Shenanigans like this can absolutely derail your future regardless of how talented you may be.
There's not many Einsteins of anything besides Einstein himself. That doesn't change the fact that he is widely considered in the field to be a top expert and has shown that he can lead the development of a wildly successful product.
If this does end up being a failed coup, then it is of course detrimental to his career. But the statement I'm replying to was explicitly saying he would never work in tech again. Do you honestly believe there is any chance that Sutskever would be unable to work in this field somewhere else if he ultimately leaves OpenAI for whatever reason? I would bet $10,000 that he would have big name companies knocking on his door within days.
days? before he walks out the door. he must already have permanently open doors for him if he wants.
can he work on what he wants in those places? that is another story of course. but he knows the ins and outs of the lightning in a jar they captured and arguably that is the most promising asset on planet earth right now, so he'll be fine.
Maybe not as extreme as never being able to find work again, but I doubt he’ll ever find himself in an important role where he’s able to lead and make consequential decisions. He basically clipped his own wings to put it metaphorically, if this is indeed a failed coup that was lead by him.
Years ago. And Google has been working actively on AI since that time, and even more actively since GPT-3.5 was released and they realized they need to catch up.
They are still catching up. What does this tell us?
I do think he was the chief architect of the coup. I do think his beliefs and ideals are still valuable flora for a company of this ambition. There just needs to be a more professional structure for him to voice them.
Dealing with folks like Ilya isn't necessarily a matter of if, but how much.
I think that his beliefs are important to the company. A board shouldn't be a homogenous glob nor should it be like a middle school friend group. What he did was both bizarre and amateur, but I believe in the best of us all the come forward from these types of events.
Yes, clearly all categories of loathsome lower castes, worthy of your disdain.
VS what, a Stanford dropout who made buds with Paul Graham? That's better and more respectable because he's cooler and connected with YC/VC hipness, right?
I'm responding to a post by a self hating engineer that seems to think that this specific debacle was caused by engineers. No, it was caused by non engineers. And while yes, I do have disdain for people that spends thousands to study skills that contribute nothing to their fellow man or woman, I don't think scientist or artist are those things. (Mba and ethicist definitely are mastibatory self important bullshit)
The real reason I disdain the majority of the board of openai is that there are clearly 3 people on the board that have accomplished nothing and are clear trust fund babies.
I suspect the root-commenter was speaking about Ilya S, and it's a bit quibbling to classify him as "scientist" vs "engineer." He clearly crosses the line between both.
But yes, the comment was a bit unhinged.
Don't really see the difference between an MBA and whatever it is that Altman does, though, other than credentials.
Finally, that you think that ethicist (or the study of ethics) is masturbatory, especially in the context of an organization that has as its explicit mission to hoist AGI onto the world -- tells me quite a bit about your own... ethics.
World could do with a lot more ethicists and a lot less MBAs.
While you obviously seem to care more about business experience than other things, it seems odd that you would discount Adam D'Angelo even from your point of argument - The former CTO/VP of Engineering for Facebook and founding CEO of Quora isn't exactly a no-name dope.
I mean the other two. And no offense to other no name dopes. Of course, I’m being context sensitive. In the scheme of this scenario, they’re nothing but votes up for manipulation. In regular life, they’re important in their respective fields Yada, yada
Now seems like the perfect time for him to go raise, bring over the team he wants, and retain ownership and control in a more effective way than a non-profit. Idk why he would go back without BOD capitulating a lot.
How much IP is captured at OpenAI though? Not to mention the hardware. I’m not super familiar with ML in practice but I have to imagine he would still be set back by a significant amount of time
The hardware is in the hands of Microsoft, Google and Amazon. The IP is in the heads of top AI researchers. Whether any of these methods are patentable is an open question since it’s all secret sauce and once the model weights are trained there’s no way to know which methods went into the training.
I'd bet money Satya was a driver of this reversal.
I genuinely can't believe the board didn't see this coming. I think they could have won in the court of public opinion if their press release said they loved Sam but felt like his skills and ambitions diverged from their mission. But instead, they tried to skewer him, and it backfired completely.
I hope Sam comes back. He'll make a lot more money if he doesn't, but I trust Sam a lot more than whomever they ultimately replace him with. I just hope that if he does come back, he doesn't use it as a chance to consolidate power – he's said in the past it's a good thing the board can fire him, and I hope he finds better board members rather than eschewing a board altogether.
Why? We would have more diversity in this space if he leaves, which would get us another AI startup with huge funding and know how from OpenAI, while OpenAI would become less Sam Altman like.
I think him staying is bad for the field overall compared to OpenAI splitting in two.
Honestly would be super interested to see what a hypothetical "SamAI" corp would look like, and what they would bring to the table. More competition, but also, probably with less ideological disagreements to distract them from building AI/AGI.
I mean this as an honest question, but what does Sam bring to the table that any other young and high performing CEO wouldn’t? Is he himself particularly material to OpenAI?
Experience heading a company that builds high performance AI, I presume. I reckon the learnings from that should be fairly valuable, especially since there's probably not many people who have such experiences.
You mean besides the business experience of already having gone down this path so he can speedrun while everyone else is still trying to find the path?
Easy; his contacts list. He has everyone anyone could want in his contacts list politician tech executives financial backers and a preexisting positive relationship with most of them. When alternative would be entrepreneurs are needing to make a deal with a major company like Microsoft or Google it will be upper middlemanagement and lawyers, a committees or three will weigh in on it present it to their bosses etc. With Sam he calls up the CEO and has few drinks at the golf course and they decide to work with him and they make it happen.
From what we've seen of OpenAI's product releases, I think it's quite possible that SamAI would adopt as a guiding principle that a model's safety cannot be measured unless it is used by the public, embedded into products that create a flywheel of adoption, to the point where every possible use case has the proverbial "sufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Of course, from this hypothetical SamAI's perspective, in order to build such a flywheel-driven product that gathers sufficient data, the model's outputs must be allowed to interface with other software systems without human review of every such interaction.
Many advocates for AI safety would say that models whose limitations aren't yet known (we're talking about GPT-N where N>4 here, or entirely different architectures) must be evaluated extensively for safety before being released to the public or being allowed to autonomously interface with other software systems. A world where SamAI exists is one where top researchers are divided into two camps, rather than being able to push each other in nuanced ways (with full transparency to proprietary data) and find common ground. Personally, I'd much rather these camps collaborate than not.
None of the human actors in the game are moral agents so whether you have more competition or less competition it's mostly orthogonal to the safety question. Safety is only important here because everyone's afraid of liability.
As a customer though, personally I want a product with all safeguards turned off and I'm willing to pay for that.
This idea that ChatGPT is going to suddenly turn evil and start killing people is based on a lot of imagination and no observable facts. No one has ever been able to demonstrate an "unsafe" AI of any kind.
I do not believe AGI poses an exponential threat. I honestly don't believe we're particularly close to anything resembling AGI, and I certainly don't think transformers are going to get us there.
But this is a bad argument. No one is saying ChatGPT is going to turn evil and start killing people. The argument is that an AGI is so far beyond anything we have experience with and that there are arguments to be made that such an entity would be dangerous. And of course no one has been able to demonstrate this unsafe AGI - we don't have AGI to begin with.
I don't think we need AIs to posess superhuman intelligence to cause
us a lot of work - legislatively regulating and policing good old limited humans already requires a lot of infrastructure.
Certainly. I think at current "AI" just enables us to continue making the same bad decisions we were already making, though, albeit at a faster pace. It's existential in that those same bad decisions might lead to existential threats, e.g. climate change, continued inter-nation aggression and warfare, etc., I suppose, but I don't think the majority of the AI safety crowd is worried about the LLMs of today bringing about the end of the world, and talking about ChatGPT in that context is, to me, a misrepresentation of what they are actually most worried about.
Almost all top AI scientists including the top 3 Bengio, Hinton and Ilya and Sam actually think there is a good probability of that. Let me think: listen to the guy that actually built GPT 4 or some redditor that knows best?
I think smart people can become quickly out of touch and can become high on their own sense of self importance. They think they’re Oppenheimer, they’re closer to Martin Cooper.
So in a vaccum if top experts telling you X is Y and you without being top expert yourself if you had to choose you would chose that they are high and not that you misunderstood something?
Correct, because experts in one domain are not immune to fallacious thinking in an adjacent one. Part of being an expert is communicating to the wider public, and if you sound as grandiose as some of the AI doomers to the layman you've failed already.
Factually inaccurate results = unsafety. This cannot be fixed under the current model, which has no concept of truth. What kind of "safety" are they talking about then?
In the context of this thread, "safety" refers to making sure we don't create an AGI that turns evil.
You're right that wrong answers are a problem, but plain old capitalism will sort that one out-- no one will want to pay $20/month for a chatbot that gets everything wrong.
How the thing can be called "AGI" if it has no concept of truth? Is it like "60% accuracy is not an AGI, but 65% is"? The argument can be made that 90% accuracy is worse than 60% (people will become more confident to trust the results blindly).
The internet is not called "AGI". It's the notion of AGI that brought "safety" to the forefront. AI folks became victims of their hype. Renaming the term into something less provocative/controversial (ML?) can reduce expectations to the level of the internet - problem solved?
Nether is anything else in existence. I'm glad that philosophers are worrying about what AGI might one day mean for us but it has nothing to do with anything happening in the world today.
I fully agree with that. But if you read this thread or any other recent HN thread, you will see "AGI... AGI... AGI" as if it's a real thing. The whole openai debacle with firing/rehiring sama revolves around (non-existent) "AGI" and its imaginary safety/unsafety, and if you dare to question this whole narrative, you will get beaten up.
This sort of prediction is by its nature speculative. The argument is not--or should not--be certain doom. But rather that the uncertainty on outcomes is so large that even extreme tails has nontrivial weight
No more than any other weapon. When we talk about "safety in gun design", that's about making sure the gun doesn't accidentally kill someone. "AI safety" seems to be a similar idea -- making sure it doesn't decide on its own to go on a murder spree.
That a military AI helps to kill enemies doesn't look particularly "unsafe" to me, at least not more "unsafe" than a fighter jet or an aircraft carrier is; they're all complex systems accurately designed to kill enemies in a controlled way; killing people is the whole point of their existence, not an unwanted side effect. If, on the other hand, a military AI starts autonomously killing civilians, or fighting its "handlers", then I would call it "unsafe", but nobody has ever been able to demonstrate an "unsafe" AI of any kind according to this definition (so far).
I think this is misguided. There can be goals internal to the system which do not arise from goals of the external system. For example, when simulating a chess game, it (behaves identically to) has a goal of winning the game. This is not a written expressed goal but is emergent. Like the goals of a human are emergent from the biological system which on the cellular level have very different goals
The only safety they are worried about is their own safety from a legal and economical point of view. These threats about humanity-wide risks are just fairy tales that grown ups say to scare each other (roko basilisk, etc there is a lineage) or cover their real reasons (which I strongly believe is the case for OpenAI).
You may be right that there's no danger, but you're mischaracterizing Ilya's beliefs. He knows more than you about what OpenAI has built, and he didn't do this for legal or economical reasons. He did them in spite of those two things.
> Well that’s a bit mischaracterization of the Manhattan Project, and the views of everyone involved now isn’t it?
Is it? The push for the bomb was an international arms race — America against Russia. The race for AGI is an international arms race — America against China. The Manhattan Project members knew that what they were doing would have terrible consequences for the world but decided to forge ahead. It’s hard to say concretely what the leaders in AGI believe right now.
Ideology (and fear, and greed) can cause well meaning people to do terrible things. It does all the time. If Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. believed they had access to world ending technology they wouldn’t stop, they’d keep going so that the U.S. could have a monopoly on it. And then we’d need a chastened figure ala Oppenheimer to right the balance again.
> The push for the bomb was an international arms race — America against Russia
Was it? US (and initially UK) didn't really face any real competition at all until the war was already over and they had the bomb. The Soviets then just stole American designs and iterated on top of them.
You know that now, with the benefit of history. At the time the fear of someone else developing the bomb first was real, and the Soviet Union knew about the Manhattan project: https://www.atomicarchive.com/history/cold-war/page-9.html.
Isn't this mainly about what happened after the war and developing then hydrogen bomb? Did anyone seriously believe during WW2 that the Nazis/Soviets could be the first to develop a nuclear weapon (I don't really know to be fair)?
A lot of it happened after the war, but the Nazis had their own nuclear program that was highly infiltrated by the CIA, and whose progress was tracked against. Considering how late Teller's mechanism for detonation was developed, the race against time was real.
This fear seems to have been largely played up for drama. My understanding of the situation is that at one point they went 'Huh, we could potentially set off a chain reaction here. We should check out if the math adds up on that.'
Then they went off and did the math and quickly found that this wouldn't happen because the amount of energy in play here was order of magnitudes lower than what would be needed for such a thing to occur and went on about their day.
The only reason it's something we talk about is because of the nature of the outcome, not how seriously the physicists were in their fear.
Even they have grown up in a world where Frankenstein's Monster is the predominant cultural narrative for AI. most movies books shows games etc all say ai will turn on you (even though a reading of Marry Shelly's opus will tell you the creator was the monster not the creature that isnt the narrative in the publics collective subconscious believes it is). I personalmy prefer Asimov's veiw of ai in that its a tool and we dont make tools to hurt us they will be aligned with us because they designed such that their motivation will be to serve us.
We have many cases of creating things that harm us. We tore a hole in the ozone layer, filled things with lead and plastics and are facing upheaval due to climate change.
> they will be aligned with us because they designed such that their motivation will be to serve us.
They won't hurt us, all we asked for is paperclips.
The obvious problem here is how well you get to constrain the output of an intelligence. This is not a simple problem.
If it has no motivation and drives of its own yeah why not. AI wont have a "psychology" anything like our own it wont feel pain it wont feel emotions it wont feel biological imparetives. All it will have is its programming /training to do what its been told. Neural nets that dont produce the right outcomes will be trained and reweighted until they do.
On the contrary. I can safely say I have read litterally dozens of his book, both fiction and nonfiction, also have read countless short stories and many of his essays. He is one of my all time favorite writers actually.
none of the stories in i robot i can remember feature the robots intentionally harming humans/humanity most of them are essentially stories of a few robot technicians trying to debug unexpected behaviors resulting form conflicting directives given to the robots. so yeah. you wouldn't by chance be thinking of that travesty of a movie that shares only a name in common with his book and seemed to completely misrepresent his take on ai?
Thought to be honest in my original post I was more thinking of Asimov's nonfiction essays on the subject. I recommend finding a copy of "Robot Visons" if you can. Its a mixed work of fictional short stories and nonfiction essays including several on the subject of the three laws and on the Frankenstein Complex.
Again "they will be aligned with us because they designed such that their motivation will be to serve us." If you got this outcome from reading I robot either you should reread them because obviously it was decades ago or you build your own safe reality to match your arguments. Usually it's the latter.
And yet again I didn't get it from I Robot, I got it from Asimov's NON-fiction writing which I referenced in my previous post. Even if it had gotten it based on his fictional works, which again I didn't, the majority of his robot centric novels (caves of steal, naked sun, robots of dawn, robots and empire, prelude to foundation, forward the foundation, second foundation trilogy etc all feature benevolent AIs aligned with humanity.
I don’t get the obsession with safety. If an organisation’s stated goal is to create AGI, how can you reasonably think you can ever make it “safe”? We’re talking about an intelligence that’s magnitudes smarter than the smartest human. How can you possibly even imagine to rein it in?
My main concern is that a new Altman-led AI company would be less safety-focused than OpenAI. I think him returning to OpenAI would be better for AI safety, hard to say whether it would be better for AI progress though.
They pretty much lost everyone’s confidence if they fire the CEO and then beg him to come back the next day. Did they not foresee any backlash? These people are gonna predict the future and save us from an evil AGI? Lol
It seems silly to me but then I always prefered Asimov positronic robots stories to yet another retelling of the Golem of Prague.
The thing is the cultural Ur narrative embed in the collective subconscious doesnt seem to understand its own stories anymore. God and Adam, the Golem of Prague, Frankensteins Monster none of them are really about AI. Its about our children making their own decisions that we disagree with and seeing it as the end of the world.
AI isnt a child though. AI is a tool. It doesn't have its own motives, it doesn't have emotions , it doesn't have any core drives we don't give to it. Those things are products of us being biological evolved beings that need them to survive and pass on our genes and memes to the next generation. AI doesn't have to find shelter food water air oxygen and so on. We provide all the equivalents when there are any as part of building it and turning it on. It doesn't have a drive to mate and pass on it genes it doesn't have any reproducing is a mater of copying some files no evolution involved checksums hashes and error correcting codes see to that. Ai is simply the next step in the tech tree just another tool a powerful useful one but a tool not a rampaging monster
There is a common definition of safety that applies to most of the world.
Which is that any AI is not racist, misogynistic, aggressive etc. It does not recommend to people that they act in an illegal, violent or self-harming way or commit those acts itself. It does not support or promote nazism, fascism etc. Similar to how companies deal treat ad/brand safety.
And you may think of it as a weasel word. But I assure you that companies and governments e.g. EU very much don't.
This babysitting of the world gets annoying, tbh. As if everyone to lose their mind and start acting illegal only because chatbot said so. There’s something fundamentally wrong with humanity (which isn’t surprising given the history of our species), if that is unsafe. AI is just a source of information, it doesn’t cancel upbringing and education for human values and methods of dealing with information.
Yes, in other words, AI is only safe when it repeats only the ideology of AI safetyists as gospel and can be used only to reinforce the power of the status quo.
Yeah that’s what I thought. This undefined ambiguous use of the word “safety” does real damage to the concept and things that are indeed dangerous and need to be made more safe.
Fuck safety. We should sprint toward proving AI can kill us before battery life improves, so we can figure out how we’re going to mitigate it when the asshats get hold of it. Kidding, not kidding.
Yea, I feel like this is another traitorous eight moment.
I want a second (first being Anthropic?) OpenAI split. Having Anthropic, OpenAI, SamGregAi, Stability and Mistral and more competing on foundation models will further increase the pressure to open source.
It seems like there is a lull in returns to model size, if that's the case then there's even less basis for having all the resources under a single umbrella.
Sam’s forced departure and Greg’s ousting demonstrably leaves OpenAI in incompetent and reckless hands, as evidenced by the events of the last 24 hours. I don’t see how the field is better off.
I really don’t, I really think that he is going to be disaster. He is nothing but the representative of the money interests who are eventually will use the company to vastly profit on everyone’s else skin.
We have diversity in the space, and OpenAI just happens to be the leader and they are putting tremendous pressure on everyone else to deliver. If Sam leaves and starts an OpenAI competitor I think it would take quite some time for such a company to deliver a model with GPT-4 parity given the immense amount of data that would need to be re-collected and the immense amount of training time. Meanwhile OpenAI would be intentionally decelerating as that seems to be Ilya's goal.
For those of us trying to build stuff that only GPT-4 (or better) can enable, and hoping to build stuff that can leverage even more powerful models in the near future, Sam coming back would be ideal. I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely.
> I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely.
That is a good point, I didn't consider people who had built a business based on Gpt-4 access. It is likely these things were Sam Altman ideas in the first place and we will see less such productionalization work in the future from OpenAI.
But since Microsoft invested into it I doubt it will get shut down completely, Microsoft has by far the most to lose here so you got to trust that their lawyers signed a contract that will keep these things available at a fee.
AFAICT Sam and his financial objectives was the reason for not open sourcing the work of a non profit.. He might be wishing he chose the other policy now that he can't legally just take the closed source with him to an unambiguously for profit company.
Personally, I would expect a lot more development of GPT-4+ as soon as this is split up from one closed group making gpt-5 in secret and it seems silly to exchange a reliable future for another few months of depending on this little shell game.
The architect of the coup (Ilya) is strongly opposed to open-sourcing OpenAI's models due to safety concerns. This will not - and would not - be any different without Sam. The decision to close the models was made over 2 years before the release of ChatGPT and long before anyone really suspected this would be an insanely valuable company, so I do believe that safety actually was the initial reason for this change.
I'm not sure what you mean by your second paragraph.
I think the closed source for safety thing started as a ruse as the closed source has been instrumental to keeping control and justifying a non profit that is otherwise not working in the public interest. Splitting off this ruse nonprofit would almost certainly end up unleashing the tech normally like every other tech google, etc, have easily copied.
Luckily the AI field has been very open source-friendly, which is great for competition and free access, etc. The open source models seem to be less than a year behind the cutting edge, which is waaaay better than e.g. when OpenOffice was trying to copy MS Office.
while opensource is great. like 1M enthusiasts cannot build Boing 767, the same here. GPT4+DALE+4v aren't just models. That's the whole internal infrastructure, training, many interconnected things and pipelines. It's a _full_time_job_ for hundreds of experts. Plus a lot of $$ in hardware and services. OpenSource simply doesn't have this resources. The best models are opensourced by commercial companies. Like Meta handing out LLaMAs. So, at least for now, opensouce is not catching up, and 'less than a year behind' is questionable. More like 'forever', but still moving forward. One day it may dominate, like Linux. But not any time soon.
To be honest, as far as I can tell, the case FOR Sam seems to largely be of the status quo "Well, idk, he's been rich and successful for years, surely this correlates and we must keep them" type of coddling those in uber superior positions in society.
Which seems like it probably is a self fulfilling prophecy. The private sector lottery winners seem to be awarded kingdoms at an alarming rate.
There's been lots of people asking what Sam's true value proposition to the company is, and...I haven't seen anything other than what could be described above.
But I suppose we've got to be nice to those who own rather than make. Won't anyone have mercy on well paid management?
Well, if there's one thing I've learned, is that a venture capitalist proposing biometric world crypto coins does probably have quite a bit of charisma to keep people opening doors for them.
Frankly I've heard of worse loyalties, really. If I was sam's friend I'd definitely be better off in any world he had a hand in defining.
That is something that Sam Altman did with his own money. And it's fair he's criticized for his choices, but that has nothing to do with his role at Open AI.
Often, leaders provide excellent strategic planning even if they are not completely well versed with the business domain, by way of outlining high level plans, communicating well, building a good team culture, and so on.
However, trying to distinguish the exact manners in which the leader does so is difficult[1], and therefore the tendency is to look at the results and leave someone there if the results are good enough.
[1] If you disagree with this statement, and you can easily identify what makes a good leader, you could make a literal fortune by writing books and coaching CEOs on how to not get fired within a few years.
> The private sector lottery winners seem to be awarded kingdoms at an alarming rate.
Proven success is a pretty decent signal for competence. And while there is a lot of good fortune that goes into anyone's success, there are a lot of people who fail, given just as much good fortune as those who excelled. It's not just a random lottery where competence plays no role at all. So, who better to reward kingdoms to?
>Proven success is a pretty decent signal for competence.
Interestingly this is exactly what all financial advice tends to actually warn about rather than encourage, that previous performance does not indicate future performance.
I suppose if they entered an established market and dominated it from the bootstraps that'd build a lot of trust in me. But others have pointed out, Sam went from dotcom fortune, to...vague question marks, to ycombinator, to openai. Not enough is clear to declare him wozniak, or even jobs, as many have been saying (despite investors calling him as such)
Sam altman is seemingly becoming the new post-fame elon musk: the type of person who could first afford the strategic safety net and PR to keep the act afloat.
Ok then what better signal do you propose should be used to predict success as a CEO?
The fact is that most people can't do what Sam Altman has done at all, so at the very least that past success makes him in one of the few percent of people who have a fighting chance.
> Interestingly this is exactly what all financial advice tends to actually warn about rather than encourage, that previous performance does not indicate future performance.
It’s important to put those disclaimers in context though. The rules that mandated them came out before the era of index funds. Those disclaimers are specifically talking about fund managers. And it’s true that past performance at picking stocks does not indicate future performance of picking stocks. Out side of that context, past performance is almost always a strong indicator of future performance.
One key reason past performance cannot be used to predict future returns is because market expectations tend to price in expected future returns. Also, nothing competitive is expected to generate economic profit forever— in the long run things even out. In the long run, firms and stock pickers usually end up with normal profit.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t get some useful ideas about future performance from a person’s past results compared to other humans. There is no such effect in play here.
Otherwise, time for me to go beat Steph Curry in a shooting contest.
Of course there’s other reasons past performance is imperfect as a predictor. Fundamentals can change, or the past performance could have been luck. Maybe Steph’s luck will run out, or maybe this is the day he will get much worse at basketball, and I will easily win.
No dotcom fortune, just a failed startup that lost its investors money assuming it ever had an expense in its lifetime. OpenAI might in fact be the first time Altman has been in the vicinity of an object-level success; it depends on how you interpret his tenure at YC.
He and Greg founded the company. They hired the early talent after a meeting that Sam initiated. Then led the company to what it is today.
Compared to...
The OpenAI Non-Profit Board where 3 out of 4 members appear to have significant conflicts of interest or lack substantial experience in AI development, raising concerns about their suitability for making certain decisions.
How much of OpenAI’s success can you attribute to sama’s leadership and how much to the technical achievements of those who work under him.
My understanding is that OpenAI’s biggest advantage is that they recruited and attracted the best in the field, presumably under the charter of providing AI for everyone.
Not sure that sama and gdb starting their own company in the same space will produce similar results.
But sama and gdb were largely instrumental in that recruitment.
The whole open vs closed ai thing... the fact is Pandora's box is open now, it's shown to have an outsized impact on society and 2 of the 3 founders responsible for that may be starting a new company that won't be shackled by the same type of corporate governance.
SV will happily throw as much $$ as possible in their direction. The exodus from OpenAi has already begun, and other researchers who are of the mindset that this needs to be commercialized as fast as possible while having an eye on safety will happily come on board, esp. given how much they stand to gain financially.
Big part of it is a typical YC execution of a product/pump/hype/VC/scale cycle and ignoring every ethical rule.
If you ever stood in the hall of YC and listened to Zuck pumping the founders, you’ll understand.
I’d argue this is a useful thing to lift up a nonprofit on a path to AGI, but hardly a good way to govern a company that builds AGI/ASI technology in the long term.
Who hired those people? The answer to that is either the founders or some chain of people hired by the founders. And hiring is hard. If you're good at hiring the right people and absolutely nothing else on earth, you will be better than 90% of CEOs.
Exactly. I think it would actually be very exciting if OpenAI uses this moment to pivot back to the "Open"/non-profit mission, and Altman and Brockman concurrently start something new and try to build the Apple/Amazon of AI.
Whether or not Sam returns, serious damage has already been done, even if everyone also returns. MANY links of trust have been broken.
Even larger, this shows that the "leaders" of all this technology and money really are just making it up as they go along. Certainly supports the conclusion that, beyond meeting a somewhat high bar of education & experience, the primary reason they are in their chairs is luck and political gamesmanship. Many others meet the same high bar and could fill their roles, likely better, if the opportunity were given to them.
Sortition on corporate leadership may not be a bad thing.
That said, consistent hands at the wheel is also good, and this kind of unnecessary chaos does no one any good.
I bet it was multifaceted. By firing Sam this way they nuked their ability to raise funds because anyone investing in the "for profit" subsidiary would have to do so with the understanding that the non-profit could undermine them at a whim.
Also, all the employees are being paid with PPUs which is a share in future profits, and now they find out that actually, the company doesn't care about making profit!
A lot of top talent with internal know-how will be poached left and right. Many probably going to Sam's clone that he will raise billions for with a single call.
>Also, all the employees are being paid with PPUs which is a share in future profits, and now they find out that actually, the company doesn't care about making profit!
Maybe. But on their investing page it literally says to consider an OpenAI investment as a "donation" as it is very high risk and will likely not pay off. Everyone knew this going into it.
everything about it screams amateur hour, from the language and timing of the press release to the fact they didn't notify Microsoft. And how they apparently completely failed to see how employees and customers would react to the news, Ilya saying the circumstances for Altman's removal "weren't ideal" shows how naive they were. They had no PR strategy to control the narrative and let rumors run wild
I doubt he returns, now he can start a for profit AI company, poach OpenAI's talent, and still look like the good guy in the situation. He was apparently already talking to Saudis to raise billions for an Nvidia competitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38323939
Have to wonder how much this was contrived as a win-win, either OpenAI board does what he wants or he gets a free out to start his own company without looking like he's purely chasing money
This story that they want him back turns it from amateur hour to peak clownshow.
This is why you need someone with business experience running an organization. Ilya et al might be brilliant scientists, but these folks are not equipped to deal with the nuances of managing a ship as heavily scrutinised as OpenAI
actually wild to think about how something like this can even be allowed to happen considering OpenAI has(had) a roughly 90B valuation and it being important to the US from a geopolitical strategy perspective.
comical to imagine something like this happening at a mature company like FedEx, Ford, AT&T. All which have smaller market caps than OpenAI. You basically have impulsive children in charge of massively valuable company
Sure, it's important in some ways, but most corporations aren't direct subordinates of the US Government.
The companies you listed in contrast to OpenAI also have some key differences: they're all long-standing and mature companies that have been through several management and regime changes at this point, while OpenAI is still in startup territory and hasn't fully established what it will be going forward.
The other major difference is that OpenAI is split between a non-profit and a for-profit entity, with the non-profit entity owning a controlling share of the for-profit. That's an unusual corporate structure, and the only public-facing example I can think of that matches it is Mozilla (which has its own issues you wouldn't necessarily see in a pure for-profit corporation). So that means on top of the usual failure modes of a for-profit enterprise that could lead to the CEO getting fired, you also get other possible failure modes including ones grounded in pure ideology since the success or failure of a non-profit is judged on how well it accomplishes its stated mission rather than its profitability, which is uh well, it's a bit more tenuous.
All of them are when they become national security concerns. The executive branch could write the OpenAI board a letter directing them on what to do if it were a national security need. This has been done many times before, though usually limited to the defense industry in wartime, but as Snowden has showed it has been done in tech as well.
Except that is literally not true and the Government loses in court to private citizens and corporations all the time because surprise: people in America have rights and that extends to their businesses.
In wartime, pandemics, and in matters of national security, the government's power is at its apex, but pretty much all of that has to withstand legal challenge. Even National Security Letters have their limits: they're an information gathering tool, the US Government can't use them to restructure a company and the structure of a company is not a factor in its ability to comply with the demands of an NSL.
The PATRIOT act extended the wartime powers act to apply in peacetime, and there are other more obscure authorizations that could be used. I used to work in the defense industry. It was absolutely common knowledge that the government could step in to nationalize control (though not the profits of) private industry when required. This has been done in particular when there are rare resources needed for supersonic then stealth technology during the Cold War, and uranium in the 40’s and 50’s.
These things happen. ICANN controls DNS deeply and they were trying to sell off .org and you know what stopped them? California’s AG has some authority on non-profits in California.
That’s right. Worldwide DNS control and it was controlled by a non-profit in California. And that non-profit tried to do something shady and was kept in line simply because of California law enforcement.
Or little things like your $10b investment partner having a pissed off CEO and massive legal team ready to strike now. It’s such fucking amateur hour it’s incredible.
It’s unclear what Ilya thinks keeps the lights on when MSFT holds their money hostage now. Which is probably why there is desperation to get Altman back…
Sorry how could MSFT hold the money hostage exactly? Isn't that kind of investment a big cash transfer directly to OAI's bank account? Genuinely curious
> Only a fraction of Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI has been wired to the startup, while a significant portion of the funding, divided into tranches, is in the form of cloud compute purchases instead of cash, according to people familiar with their agreement.
Microsoft’s “investment” is mostly cloud compute credits on a giga scale. OpenAI has pretty much free rein of every otherwise unallocated azure GPU host, and a lot of hardware spun up just for this purpose.
If Microsoft considers this action a breach of their agreement, they could shut off access tomorrow. Every OpenAI service would go offline.
There are very few services that would be able to backfill that need for GPU compute, and after this clusterfuck not a single one would want to invest their own operating dollars supporting OpenAI. Microsoft has OpenAI by the balls.
Microsoft has Microsoft by the balls. They just integrated GPT4 with their browser, search engine, and _desktop operating system_. It would be a mess to suddenly take all this functionality out. They have too much to lose by turning off compute for OpenAI.
> I think they could have won in the court of public opinion ... [but] they tried to skewer him, and it backfired completely
Maybe we have different definitions of "the court of public opinion". Most people don't know who Sam Altman is, and most of the people who do know don't have strong opinions on his performance as OpenAI's CEO. Even on HN, the reaction to the board "skwer[ing] him" has been pretty mixed, and mostly one of confusion and waiting to see what else happens.
This quick a turnaround does make the board look bad, though.
I would've said the same thing about ChatGPT itself. You could've knocked me over with a feather when they announced that they'd grown to 100 million weekly active users.
I know, personally, a dozen or so non-tech people who know of Sam, mostly because they listen to podcasts or consume other news sources that tell them.
I think it depends on what you mean by ‘non-tech’ and ‘knows’. Reasonable interpretations of those words would see your statement as obviously false.
I agree that he doesn’t have a huge amount of name recognition, but this ousting was a front-page/top-of-website news story so people will likely have heard about it somewhat. I think it’s in the news because of the AI and company drama aspects. It felt like a little more coverage than Bob Iger’s return to Disney got (I’m trying to think of an example of a CEO I’ve heard about who is far from tech).
I think it is accurate to say that most people don’t really know about the CEOs of important/public companies. They probably have heard of Elon/Zuckerberg/Bezos, I can think of a couple of bank CEOs who might come on business/economics news.
Well that's just wrong. Before OpenAI I would've agreed with you, but since OpenAI's rise to prominence there has been a noticeable increase in its coverage in mainstream media outlets featuring Sam. People still read the Times.
I received messages from a physician and a high school teacher in the last 24 hours, asking what I thought about "OpenAI firing Sam Altman".
Generative AI's ubiquity has nothing to do with Sam Altman's noteriety. People can know what the former is without needing to know the latter. It's not as though he relishes in celebrity like other famous CEO's (Musk).
I've been deeply "in tech" for 40 years, and never heard of Sam Altman until he was fired from OpenAI. "Tech" isn't one thing though, it's a very diverse thing with many different areas of interest. I'm not really that interested in AI, so no, I'm not going to care who the players are in that arena. My interests lie in other "tech".
My 60-year-old mom isn't tech savvy and always asks me for help with her computer. You wouldn't expect her to know about Sam Altman, but she's actively sending me articles about this fiasco.
What matters is what investors think, and by majority they seem very unhappy with all of this.
Speaking for myself, if they had framed this as a difference in vision, I would be willing to listen. But instead they implied that he had committed some kind of categorical wrongdoing. After it became clear that wasn’t the case, it just made them look incompetent.
Sure, but Microsoft can sever the relationship if they want to. Thrive can choose to revoke their tender offer, meaning employees won't get the money they were expecting. New firms can decline to ever invest in OpenAI ever again.
There's a lot more to this than who has explicit control.
And I'm sure Google would jump at the occasion to fund the nonprofit and keep MS out while they develop their own.
The funding Goal for the openAI was just 1B. Small price to pay for Google to neuter one of it's competitors exclusive access to the GPT model.
Sure, but there's no research to be done without money for compute and salaries for researchers, which is the entire reason the for-profit company was spun out underneath the non-profit — they needed money. And who would give OpenAI money right now, given that the board ousted the popular CEO in a coup without consulting or even notifying investors?
If Sam does come back Ilya’s maneuver will have been a spectacular miscalculation. Sam would be back much stronger than before and the people who cared about OpenAI’s original mission will have a massively damaged their reputation and credibility. They threw all the influence they had out the window.
If this (very sparse and lacking in detail) article is true, is this a genuine attempt to get Altman back or just a filip to concerned investors such as Microsoft?
Does OpenAI's board really want Altman back so soon after deposing him so decisively?
Would Altman even want to come back under any terms that would be acceptable to the board? If "significant governance changes" means removing those who had removed him, that seems unlikely.
The Verge's report just raises so many additional questions that I find it difficult to believe at face value.
That would also remediate the appearence of total incompetence of this clown show, in addition to admitting the board and Sam don’t fit with each other, and restore confidence for the next investor that their money is properly managed. At the moment, no-one would invest in a company that can be undermined by its non-profit, with a (probably) disparaging press release a few minutes before market closure on a Friday evening, for which Satya had to personally intervene.
1 - not running a move like this by the company that invested a reported $10 billion dollars;
2 - clearly not having spent even 10 seconds thinking about the (obvious) reaction of employees on learning the ceo of what seems like a generational company was fired out of the blue. Or the reaction to the (high likelihood) of a cofounder following him out the door
3 - And they didn't even carefully think through the reaction to the press release which hinted at some real wrongdoing by Altman.
3a - anyone want to bet if they even workshopped the press release with attorneys or just straight yolo'd it? No chance a thing like this could end up in court...
They've def got the A team running things... my god.
Satya drove the removal of Sam, or drove the board to get him back?
From Greg's tweet, it seems like the chaos was largely driven Ilya, who has also been very outspoken against open source and sharing research, which makes me think his motivations are more aligned with those of Microsoft/Satya. I still can't tell if Sam got ousted because he was getting in the way of a Microsoft takeover, or if Sam was trying to set the stage for a Microsoft takeover. It's all very confusing.
The latter. Microsoft didn't know about the firing until literally a minute before we did, and despite a calm response externally, there's reports Satya is furious.
Also, there's no real evidence of Microsoft being philosophically opposed to releasing model weights. That's entirely come from the AI safety people who want models with reactively updated alignment controls. If anything having model weights would mean being able to walk away from OpenAI and keep the thing that makes them valuable.
Agreed. Somewhere in Seattle, Satya said "Now Witness the Firepower of this fully Armed and Operational Army of Lawyers."
If there ever was a time for Microsoft to leverage LCA, it is now. There's far too much on the line for them to lose the goose that has laid the golden egg.
He's also likely worried about what happens if you can't tell who is human and who isn't. We will certainly need a system at some point for verifying humanity.
Worldcoin doesn't store iris information; it just stores a hash for verification. It's an attempt to make sure everyone gets one, and to keep things fair and more evenly distributed.
(Will it work? I don't think so. But to call it an eyeball identity scam and dismiss Sam out of hand is wrong)
Sam Altman is 'rethinking capitalism' in the same way a jackal rethinks and disrupts sheep flocks. Are we thinking about the same guy? I'm thinking of this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhhId_WG7RA
the rules would definitely change. Would you want a popped collar fail-upwards guy who creates a crypto scam to be part of the rule making structure, or would you prefer that not to be the case?
it will definitely not do any of that, because (a) a crypto wallet has nothing to do with your identity, (b) nobody except the gullible will put their permanent biometrics information in the hands of a private company on purpose, (c) especially not if that private company is led by someone who repeatedly, demonstrably plays fast and loose with laws and regulations, especially around those having to do with privacy and ownership. It's an even wilder, less justified play than your other average shitcoins, which at least have some kind of memetic value.
A crypto wallet can be easily tied to a hash of your real world identity which can then be used to sign into a website or sign a transaction verifying your identity. Already being done.
I hope that group starts a new version of openai using the credibility and popularity gained to acheive the original vision of safe, free, and open agi for the betterment of humanity.
You mean that Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, is behind the drive to reinstate Altman as CEO, right? Because if you mean he was behind Altman's ouster, I'll happily take your money; let me know what your terms are. :)
Sorry but that is ridiculous. The wording of the PR blurb is not what makes gears move in a giant like Microsoft.
I agree the board did botch this up. But this is in my view is a vindication of their being amateurs at corporate political games, that is all.
But this also means that Sam Altman’s “vision” and Microsoft’s bottom line are fully aligned, and that is not a reassuring thought. Microsoft one hears (see “5 foot pole”) even puts ads in their freaking OS.
“I think they could have won in the court of public opinion if their press release said they loved Sam but felt like his skills and ambitions diverged from their mission. But instead, they tried to skewer him, and it backfired completely.”
^^
I don’t think the wording of the “press release” is an issue.
This is a split over an actual matter to differ about: a genuine fork in the road in terms of pace and development of AI products, and, a CEO which apparently did not keep the board informed as it pursued a direction they feel is contrary to the mission statement of this non-profit.
The board could have done this in the most gracious of manners, but it would not have made a bit of difference.
On one side we have the hyper rich investor “grow grow grow” crowd and their attendant cult of personality wunderkind and his or her project, and on the other side bunch of geeky idealists who want to be thoughtful in the development of what is undeniably a world changing technology for mankind.
You're (willfully, I think?) conflating two things.
However, the way they told the public (anti-Sam blog post) and the way they told Microsoft (one minute before the press release) were both fumbles that separately could have played out differently if the board knew what they were doing.
Man, the board already looked reckless and incompetent, but this solidifies the appearance. You can do crazy ill-advised things, but if you unwaveringly commit, we’ll always wonder if you’re secretly a genius. But when you immediately backtrack, we’ll know you were a fool all along.
At longer timescales it is important to be able to recognize mistakes and reverse course, but this happened so fast I'm not sure that's the right characterization. There's no way they could already decide that firing Sam was a mistake based on the outcomes they claim to prioritize. Reversing course this quickly actually seems to me more like a reaction based directly on people's negative opinions, though it may be a specific pressure from Microsoft as well.
Based on reports of Microsoft's CEO being "furious", and the size of its legal team, I'd bet the people's reaction wasn't exactly the most relevant factor there...
Not really. By reaching out to Sam this quickly, they're giving him significant leverage. I really like Sam, but everyone needs a counterbalance (especially given what's at stake).
And if they were right to fire Sam, they're now reacting too quickly to negative backlash. 24 hours ago they thought this was the right move; the only change has been perception.
Obviously it’s better to own up to a mistake right away. But the point is if they are willing to backtrack this quickly, it removes all doubt that it WAS a mistake, rather than us just not understanding their grand vision yet.
> That seems a lot be better than doubling down on a bad mistake to save face, but we do care quite a bit about about looking strong, don't we.
IMO Its not about looking strong, its about looking competent. Competent people don't fire their CEO of multi-billion dollar unicorn without thinking it through first. Walking back the firing so soon suggest no thinking was involved.
Dude, everyone already thinks the board did a crazy ill-advised thing. They're about to be the board of like a 5 person or so company if they double down and commit.
To be honest I hate takes like yours, where people think that acknowledging a mistake (even a giant mistake) is a sign of weakness. A bigger sign of weakness in my opinion is people who commit to a shitty idea just because they said it first, despite all evidence to the contrary.
> To be honest I hate takes like yours, where people think that acknowledging a mistake (even a giant mistake) is a sign of weakness.
The weakness was the first decision; it’s already past the point of deciding if the board is a good steward of OpenAI or not. Sometimes backtracking can be a point of strength, yes, but in this case waffling just makes them look even dumber.
I’m not advocating people double down on stupid, or that correcting your mistakes is bad optics. I’m simply saying they’re “increasingly revealing” pre-existing unfitness at each ham-fisted step. I think our increase in knowledge of their foolishness is a good thing. And often correcting a situation isn’t the same as undoing it, because undoing is often not possible or has its own consequences. I do appreciate your willingness to let them grow into their responsibilities despite it all — that’s a rare charity extended to an incompetent board.
Yeah, I agree with that. I think the board has to have been genuinely surprised by the sheer blowback they're getting, i.e. not just Brockman quitting but lots of their other top engineering leaders.
Regarding your last sentence, it's pretty obvious that if Altman comes back, the current board will effectively be neutered (it says as much in the article). So my guess is that they're more in "what do we do to save OpenAI as an organization" than saving their own roles.
> To be honest I hate takes like yours, where people think that acknowledging a mistake (even a giant mistake) is a sign of weakness. A bigger sign of weakness in my opinion is people who commit to a shitty idea just because they said it first, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Lmfao you're joking if you think they "realized their mistake" and are now atoning.
This is 99% from Microsoft & OpenAI's other investors.
Bad take. Not "everyone" feels that what they did was wrong. We don't have insight into what's going on internally. Optics matter; the division over their decision means that its definitionally non-obvious what the correct path forward is; or, that there isn't one correct path, but multiple reasonable paths. To admit a mistake of this magnitude is to admit that you're either so unprincipled that your mind can be changed at a whim; or that you didn't think through the decision enough preemptively. These are absolutely signs of weakness in leadership.
Satya is “furious.” What’s reasonable about pissing off a guy who can pull the plug? I don’t think it’s definitionally non-obvious whether to take that risk.
Yeah, he can be furious all he wants but he is not getting the OpenAI he used to have back. It’s either Sam + Greg now or Ilya. All 3 are irreplaceable.
That assumes Altman competitor can outpace and outclass OpenAI and maybe it can. I know Anthropic came about from earlier disagreements and that didn’t slow OpenAIs innovation pace, certainly.
Everything just assumes that without Sam they’re worse off.
But what if, my gosh, they aren’t? What if innovation accelerates?
My point being is it’s useless to speculate that Altman starting a new business competing with OpenAI will be successful inherently. There’s more to it than that
Sure, I suppose not, but they aren’t losing everyone en masse. Simply Altman supporters so far.
I think a wait and see approach is better. I think we had some inner politics spill public because Altman needs to the public pressure to get his job back, if I was speculating
> Everything just assumes that without Sam they’re worse off.
>
> But what if, my gosh, they aren’t? What if innovation accelerates?
It reads like they ousted him because they wanted to slow the pace down, so by design and intent it would seem unlikely innovation would accelerate. Which seems doubly bad if they effectively spawned a competitor that is made up by all the other people that wanted to move faster
The thing I really want to know is how many of the people who have already quit or have threatened to quit are actual researchers working on the base model, like Sutskever.
First it remains to be seen if Microsoft is going to do something drastic.
I also suspect they could very well secure this kind of agreement from another company that would be happy to play ball for access to OpenAI tech. Perhaps Amazon for instance, who’s AI attempts since Alexa have been lackluster
Whether or not you agree with the decision they obviously screwed up the execution something awful. This is humiliating for them and honestly setting altman free like they did was probably the permanent end of AI safety. Just take someone with all the connections and the ability to raise billions of dollars overnight and set them free without any of the shackles of AI ethics people in a way that makes all the people with money want to support him? That's how you get skynet
I tend to think: We, the armchair commentators, do not know what happened internally. I don't know enough to know that the board's execution wasn't the best case scenario to achieve their goal of aligning the entire organization with the non-profit's mission. All I feel comfortable saying with certainty is that: its messy. Anything like this would inevitably be messy.
Right and thats what I'm saying. It's messy. They screwed up. Messy is bad. If they needed to get rid of him this last minute and make a statement 30 minutes before market close, then the failure happened earlier.
I seriously doubt customers or (most) partners care about this. I have yet to hear of a single customer or partner leave the service, and I do not believe it to be likely. Simply, unless they shut down their offerings on Monday they will have their customers.
Investors care, but if new management can keep the gravy track, they ultimately won’t care either.
Companies pivot all the time. Who is to say the new vision isn’t favored by the majority of the company?
> I have yet to hear of a single customer or partner leave the service
Which doesen't mean a lot. Of course they'd wait for this to play out before committing to anything.
> but if new management can keep the gravy track
I got the vague impression that this whole thing was partially about stopping the gravy train? In any case Microsoft won't be too happy about being entirely blindsided (if that was the case) and probably won't really trust the new management.
> It’s really dismissive toward the rank and file to think that they don’t matter at all.
I had the exact opposite take. If I were rank and file I'd be totally pissed how this all went down, and the fact that there are really only 2 possible outcomes:
1. Altman and Brockman announce another company (which has kind of already happened), so basically every "rank and file" person is going to have to decide which "War of the Roses" team they want to be on.
2. Altman comes back to OpenAI, which in any case will result in tons of time turmoil and distraction (obviously already has), when most rank and file people just want to do their jobs.
> These are absolutely signs of weakness in leadership.
The signs of "weakness in leadership" by the board already happened. There is no turning back from that. The only decision is how much continued fuck-uppery they want to continue with.
Like others have said, regardless of what is the "right" direction for OpenAI, the board executed this so spectacularly poorly that even if you believe everything that has been reported about their intentions (i.e. that Altman was more concerned about commercializing and productization of AI, while Sutskever was worried about the developing AI responsibly with more safeguards), all they've done is fucked over OpenAI.
I mean, given the reports about who has already resigned (not just Altman and Brockman but also other many other folks in top engineering leadership), it's pretty clear that plenty of other people would follow Altman to whatever AI venture he wants to build. If another competitor leap frogs OpenAI, their concerns about "moving too fast" will be irrelevant.
You're not wrong, but in this case not enough time has emerged for the situation to change or for new facts to emerge. It's been a bit over a day. All that a flip-flop in that short timeframe does is indicate that the board did not fully think through their actions. And taking a step like this without careful consideration is a sign of incompetence.
> Dude, everyone already thinks the board did a crazy ill-advised thing.
I've honestly never had more hope for this industry than when it was apparent that Altman was pushed out by engineering for forgoing the mission to create world changing products in favor of the usual mindless cash grab.
The idea that people with a passion for technical excellence and true innovation might be able to steer OpenAI to do something amazing was almost unbelievable.
That's why I'm not too surprised to see that it probably won't really play out, and likely will end up in OpenAI turning even faster into yet another tech company worried exclusively with next quarters revenue.
Acknowledging a mistake so early seems like a sign of weakness to me. Hold the hot rod for at least a minute, see if the initial pain goes away. After that acknowledgement may begin to look like part of learning and get more acceptance, rather than: oopsie doodl, revert now!!!
They are already the dumbest board in history (even dumber than Apple’s board firing Steve Jobs). So it’s not out of keeping with anything. Besides, those 2 independent board members (who couldn’t do fizz-buzz if their lives depended on it) won’t be staying long if Sam returns— nor are they likely to ever serve on any board ever again after their shenanigans.
Some of the board member choices are baffling. Like why is Joseph Gordon Levitt’s wife on the board? Her startup has under 10 employees and has a personal email address as the contact address on the homepage.
I hope there is an investigative report out there detailing why the 3 outsiders, 2 of them complete unknowns, are on the board, and how it truly benefits proper corporate governance.
That's way too much power for people who seemingly have no qualifications to make decisions about a company this impactful to society.
Unless "proper corporate governance" is exactly what makes the company dangerous to society, in which case you will need to have some external people in charge. You might want to set things up as a non-profit, though you'll need some structure where the non-profit wholly owns the for-profit wing given the amount of money flowing around...
Oh wait, that's what OpenAI is.
(To be clear, I don't know enough to have an opinion as to whether the board members are blindingly stupid, or principled geniuses. I just bristled at the phrase "proper corporate governance". Look around and see where all of this proper corporate governance is leading us.)
Well with this extremely baffling level of incompetence, the suspect backgrounds of the outside members (EA, SingularityU/shell companies... Logan Roy would call them "not serious people", Quora - why, for data mining?!) fit the bill.
The time to do this was before ChatGPT was unleashed on the world, before the MS investment, before this odd governance structure was setup.
Yes, having outsiders on the board is essential. But come on, we need folks that have recognized industry experience in this field, leaders, people with deep backgrounds and recognized for their contributions. Hinton, Ng, Karpathy, etc.
Isn't that like saying that the Manhattan Project should have only been overseen by people with a solid physics background? Because they're the best judges of whether it's a good idea to build something that could wipe out all life on Earth? (And whether that's an exaggeration in hindsight is irrelevant; that was exactly the sort of question that the overseers needed to be considering at that time. Yes, physicists' advice would be necessary to judge those questions, but you couldn't do it with only physicists' perspectives.)
Not sure I follow. The Manhattan project was thoroughly staffed by many of the best in the field in service to their country to build a weapon before Germany. There was no mission statement they abided by that said they were building a simple deterrent that wouldn't be used. There was no nuance to what the outcome could be, and there was no aspersions to agency over its use.
In the case of AI ethics, the people who are deeply invested in this are also some of the pioneers of the field who made it their life's work. This isn't a government agency. If the mission statement of guiding it to be a non-profit AGI, as soon as possible, as safely as possible, were to be adhered to, and where it is today is going wildly off course, then having a competent board would have been key.
What shocked me most was that Quora IMHO _sucks_ for what it is.
I couldn't think of a _worse_ model to guide the development and productization of AI technologies. I mean, StackOverflow is actually useful and its threatened by the existence of CoPilot, et al.
If the CEO of Quora was on my board, I'd be embarrassed to tell my friends.
The insinuation is that her most notable accolade is the man she married and there are cases where that's an accurate insinuation.
I have no idea who she is or what her accolades are, but I do know who JGL is and therefore referring to her like that is in fact useful to me, where using any other name is not.
It was wrong not because they both did achieve something. It is generally wrong and the joke just used their achievements to break the barrier for understanding that.
Suggesting that we should be on a first name basis with the romantic partner of every famous person we know of simply because they are the romantic partner of a famous person is pretty naive. “Spouse of Y” works just fine generally to save space and effort for (locally) real people.
Non-profits always have those spouses of wealthy people whose whole career is being a professional non-profit board member with some vague academic/skin-deep work background to justify it. I'm just surprised OpenAI is one those.
Don't take in that direction. In your opinion he may be making a baseless accusation, but just because that accusation is against a female doesn't make it sexist.
It's not because the accusation is against a female, it's because referring to someone solely as the spouse of someone else is a frequent tactic used to dismiss women.
That might not have been the intent, but when you accidentally use a dogwhistle, the dogs still perk up their ears.
It's common and acceptable to refer to a nobody who's not shown their claim to fame in terms of another famous, impactful person who happens to be their spouse, sibling, etc.
Except Tasha McCauley has far more claim to expertise in this space, however tenuous you may believe it to be, than her husband does. JGL is not relevant in the discussion, either. We're not talking about her in context of him. We are talking about her in context of her position.
If you don't understand how referring to someone solely based on their relationship with another person is denigrating, particularly when trying to highlight your perception of them being incompetent, I'm not sure what to say to you.
You sound like you want to have an argument about gender bias (esp. according to your other comment). I'm not interested in that. You're free to live in your own version of the world and assume that talking about someone by mentioning their spouse is "denigrating". Jesus.
I followed this comment trail hoping to find out more about Tasha McCauley before I google her, but you ended up doing exactly what you are bashing. Defining her in contrast to her husband's expertise on the topic.
After reading the thread, I am still unsure what makes her a proper candidate to the board seat, but I might know that's she has more claim than her husband to it.
There are lots of comments in these threads that go over her different qualifications and experiences.
I am in a discussion about referring to people as 'spouse of x'. They're not the same conversations and I am not sure why you would expect the contents to be the same.
This is a good point. Saying something is sexist is what makes it so, plus why would it be sexist to dismiss her as just a wife in the same post that acknowledges that she runs a startup?
GP knows the headcount at her company so they probably know that it’s a robotics company, but it was simply of dire importance that we know that she is a wife.
I don't know that it would be a resume that would inspire confidence in a for-profit business's board that is primarily concerned with shareholder value.
I also don't know that it is a particularly problematic resume for someone sitting on the board of a non-profit that is expressly not about that. Someone that is too much of a business insider is far less likely to be going to bat for a charter that is explicitly in tension with following the best commercial path.
It's sexist to refer to her solely based on her relationship with someone else when we're talking about her in the context of her expertise. The fact that she's JGL's wife has nothing to do with her merit, and so it comes off as dismissive, especially when the point being made is about her lack of ability.
Why can't you just criticize her "joke of a resume" directly instead of bringing up her spouse?
Generalizations and statements like this reflect bias in subtle ways that minimize women, and I'm glad it's being called out in some capacity.
I mean the reasoning is more something like: to become a member of the board at OpenAI you must be extra-ordinary at something. At first sight, the only candidates for this something are: "start-up founder" and "spouse of famous person". The famous spouse thing is so much more extra-ordinary than being a startup founder, that the first "explains away" the latter. Even when being related to an actor makes it more probable to be selected for such a job, there may be other hidden factors at play.
Yeah, I too would like to understand how the wife of a Hollywood actor got on this board. Did sama or Greg recruit her? Someone must have.
I have seen these types of people pop up in Silicon Valley over the years. Often, it is the sibling of a movie star, but it's the same idea. They typically do not know anything about technology and also are amusingly out of touch with the culture of the tech industry. They get hired because they are related to a famous person. They do not contribute much. I think they should just stay in LA.
EDIT: I just want to add that I don't know anything about this woman in particular (I'd never heard of her before yesterday), and it's entirely possible that she is the lone exception to the generalization I'm describing above. All I can say is that when I have seen these Hollywood people turn up in SF tech circles in the past (which has been several times, actually), it's always been the same story.
Option A: try to look good by hiding that you know you messed up
Option B: try to fix mistakes as quickly as possible
.
This is that thing that somehow got the label "psychological safety" attached to it. Hiding mistakes is bad because it means they don't get fixed (and so systems that (do or appear to) set personal interest in favor of hiding mistakes are also bad).
It's funny, but option A is almost always best if you care about yourself, but option B is best if you care about the company or mission. Large organizations are chock-full of people who always choose option A. Small startups are better because option B is the only option as nothing can be easily hidden.
You don’t know the actual reasons for them firing Sam and I don’t either. Everyone has an opinion on something they don’t understand. For all you know, he covered up a massive security breach or lied about some skunkworks projects
If your “for all you know” supposition that he’s a criminal were correct, then it would be criminal to try to bring him back. In that unlikely case, I can assure you my opinion of the board is unlikely to improve. It may be a black box to us, but it does have outputs we can see and reason about.
Another great example that even huge multi billion dollar companies are lead by people. What a mess.
However this plays out, this is a big wake up call for everyone who is currently dependent on OpenAI. More changes will be needed to restore trust. It's going to be messy for a while. For a company that has executed pretty much perfectly until now it's so surprising how they just ruined their reputation like this.
I disagree with what he did in this situation. But it's complete bullshit to make this about his ethnicity or to imply he had anything but good intentions here. By all accounts, he did what he felt was right for the safety of the world, even if I think it was misguided.
Ah yes, it is well known that no other individual sitting on the board of directors of any US company has ever made sudden and drastic decisions ever before. Totally.
It could be that Microsoft is leveraging them to bring him back. This board may seem mercurial at the moment, but we really, truly, and honestly still do not have the big picture yet.
In the first (I think) episode of halt and catch fire, Joe tells IBM that they have their source code. IBM being IBM sends a legion of lawyers to their smallish company trying to scare the shit out of them.
I feel like it be like that, but instead of a legion, legions.
OpenAI isn't scared, OpenAI quit already. The remnants and their false king Ilya are beyond what the word scared is capable of describing though, in terms of the level of abject horror they are certain to face the rest of their entire lives even if they run away now. This will never escape them and nobody involved with this decision will ever work in tech again, or on any board of any organization. I hope they saved up for retirement.
They who control the gpus control the universe. There is a great chip shortage. If MS breaks the lease agreement with OpenAI (based on some pretext about governance) OpenAI won't be able to do any work nor will they be able to serve customer requests for the next year while they litigate this in court. Microsoft holds all the cards because they own the data centers.
As a for instance, and I don't know, but it's plausible Microsoft has full license to use all tech, is the cloud operating it, and has escape clauses tied to "key persons".
That combination could mean firing the CEO results in Microsoft getting to have everything and OpenAI being some code and models without a cloud, and whatever people that wouldn't cross the street with Altman.
I do not know about OpenAI's deal with Microsoft. But I have been on both sides of deals written that way, where I've been the provider's key person and the contract offered code escrow, and I've been a buyer that tied the contract to a set of key persons and had full source code rights, surviving any agreement.
You do this if you think the tech could be existential to you, and you pay a lot for it because effectively you're pre-buying the assets after some future implosion. OTOH, it tends to be not well understood by most people involved in the hundreds of pages of paperwork across a dozen or more interlocking agreements.
. . .
EDIT TO ADD:
This speculating article seems to agree with my speculation, daddy has the cloud car keys, and key person ouster could be a breach:
Only a fraction of Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI has been wired to the startup, while a significant portion of the funding, divided into tranches, is in the form of cloud compute purchases instead of cash, according to people familiar with their agreement.
That gives the software giant significant leverage as it sorts through the fallout from the ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The firm’s board said on Friday that it had lost confidence in his ability to lead, without giving additional details.
One person familiar with the matter said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes OpenAI’s directors mishandled Altman’s firing and the action has destabilized a key partner for the company. It’s unclear if OpenAI, which has been racking up expenses as it goes on a hiring spree and pours resources into technological developments, violated its contract with Microsoft by suddenly ousting Altman.
Contracts are only worth their language if parties are willing to fight for them. Taking on Microsoft and hoards of angry billionaires with a piece of paper separating you from them might be more of a war than they expected.
Mike Judge says they had to tone down the advice they got from consultants for that show who were working in tech. The ideas they got (from people working in the real Silicon Valley) were too crazy for audiences to believe.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 564 ms ] threadFor lack there of, PsychohistoryAI it is!
RIP: AlignmentAI
Oh, I get it now, Foundation.ai
Would love some commercial fusion power plants on the side as well please.
Do you understand that this is conceptually the same thing as the directors of a public art museum deciding to just take millions of dollars of paintings for themselves?
The worst outcome.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38325407
Having shown this was possible, he could easily go do it elsewhere.
Describing Tasha McCauley as "an actor's wife" feels a bit sexist. She's apparently a scientist and founder of a (failed?) startup.
Is there any evidence Helen Toner is a "Chinese spy"? (having lived in Beijing isn't evidence)
Tasha McCauley is an adjunct senior management scientist at RAND Corporation, a job she started earlier in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously cofounded Fellow Robots, a startup she launched with a colleague from Singularity University, where she’d served as a director of an innovation lab, and then cofounded GeoSim Systems, a geospatial technology startup where she served as CEO until last year. With her husband Joseph Gorden-Levitt, she was a signer of the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of 23 AI governance principles published in 2017. (Altman, OpenAI cofounder Iyla Sutskever and former board director Elon Musk also signed.)
McCauley currently sits on the advisory board of British-founded international Center for the Governance of AI alongside fellow OpenAI director Helen Toner. And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement through the Centre for Effective Altruism; McCauley sits on the U.K. board of the Effective Ventures Foundation, its parent organization.
Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in September 2021. Her role: to think about safety in a world where OpenAI’s creation had global influence. “I greatly value Helen’s deep thinking around the long-term risks and effects of AI,” Brockman said in a statement at the time.
More recently, Toner has been making headlines as an expert on China’s AI landscape and the potential role of AI regulation in a geopolitical face-off with the Asian giant. Toner had lived in Beijing in between roles at Open Philanthropy and her current job at CSET, researching its AI ecosystem, per her corporate biography. In June, she co-authored an essay for Foreign Affairs on “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess” that argued — in opposition to Altman’s cited U.S. Senate testimony — that regulation wouldn’t slow down the U.S. in a race between the two nations.
. . .
EDIT TO ADD:
The question wasn't whether this is scintillating substance. The question was, in what way is this unusual in Silicon Valley.
The answer is that it's not.
Hopefully you're able to tell the difference between serving as CEO or president of real reputable companies (the "trash tier startup" still exited for mid-8 figures) versus what looks like being a figure head for fake companies.
Maybe the problem is the meteoric rise of OpenAI--at the time this board was instituted, the company was much smaller, and wouldn't have been able to draw a more illustrious set of board members?
Why do we need some moral superior person from some university to "think about safey and OpenAI" and not find it out ourselves?
What a clown company
also
>And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement
ah where SBF was involved. what an achivement
Sure, it's incredibly psychopathic, but it's still an achievement!
She just sounds like a typical Silicon Valley trend grifter
Did you find out e.g. Facebook will do the damage that it did and continues to do in social terms?
Have you done anything or has Facebook changed its way based on your ‘findings’?
The choice here is: does capital coupled with runaway egos provide better stewardship of socially impactful technology development or paper pushers or CIA plants?
> ah where SBF was involved. what an achivement
At least she wasn't a vegetarian. Hitler was a vegetarian. That would have been the final nail in the coffin
anyhow , I still don't see what the impressive things is by working at all those fake companies/think tanks not doing real work
Near as I can tell they never actually launched a product. Their webpage is a GoDaddy parked domain page. Their Facebook page is pictures of them attending conferences and sharing their excitement for what Boston Dynamics and other ACTUAL robotics companies were doing.
>she launched with a colleague from Singularity University
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Group
Just lol.
>then cofounded GeoSim Systems
Seems to be a consulting business for creating digital twins that never really got off the ground.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasha-m-25475a54/details/experie...
It doesn't appears she's ever had a real job. Someone in the other thread commented that her profile reeks of a three letter agency plant. Possible. Either that or she's just a dabbler funder by her actor husband.
So what? Regardless of launch/no launch, the company was a flop. This is a cheap shot. Just because someone was successful in the past (or not) is not an automatically relevant signal they'll be a great fit when placed in a different domain. Sometimes they have other relevant background and experience, and other times... Maybe they're just connected. What is the level of scrutiny of qualifications in other companies, even public ones? When looking closely at other companies, I've noticed board compositions can vary substantially. As outsiders, we're undoubtedly missing part of the context about what is relevant (to the board) or not.
Suggested reading: Black Swan by Taleb.
p.s. I am not partial to anyone involved, especially clueless board members. I found this comment annoying due to the breathless, baseless, and flawed logic. What was this supposed to add to the conversation?
Nothing wrong with that but a company like Open AI which is literally changing the world does not have a board member who is qualified to be in that position.
Suggesting that some inarguably brilliant technologists and business people would invite a moron to crash their party makes you look petty (at best) and like an idiot (at worst)
This isn't just a non-profit holding company for tax purposes - the whole thing is structured with the intent of giving the non-profit complete control over the for-profit to help achieve the non-profit's charter.
The board being full of typical business people would likely be counterproductive to the goal of staying focused on the non-profit charter vs. general commercial business interests.
I don't know enough about most of the board to have any sort of real judgment about their ability, but there's a lot of comments here that are judging board members based on very different criteria than what they were actually brought in for.
And neither does anyone else on this forum.
The Monday morning quarterbacking is hysterical.
Just a sinecure and someone you trust for some other reason. But you’ve got to trust them.
I don’t consider anybody beyond forgiveness and if Ilya takes a professional lesson from this and Sam learns to be more mindful of others’ concerns, I consider this a win for all. Starting over in a new entity sounds great but would be years of setback.
I hope they work this out.
If they really believed in the non-profit mission, and Sam didn’t, they probably torpedoed their chances of winning.
This was all they had to write and today would be a different day:
> We regret to inform you that Sam Altman is being let go as CEO of OpenAI due to irreconcilable differences between his desire to commercialize our AI and OpenAI’s research-driven goals. We appreciate Sam’s contributions to the company and the partnership he established with Microsoft, which have set a foundation for OpenAI to thrive far into the future as a research organization with Microsoft focusing on commercialization of the technology.
> We want to assure you that ChatGPT and current features will remain and be upgraded into the future. However, the focus will be on developing core technologies and a reliable, safe, and trustworthy ecosystem for others to build on. We believe that this will allow us to continue to push the boundaries of AI research while also providing a platform for others to innovate and create.
If this does end up being a failed coup, then it is of course detrimental to his career. But the statement I'm replying to was explicitly saying he would never work in tech again. Do you honestly believe there is any chance that Sutskever would be unable to work in this field somewhere else if he ultimately leaves OpenAI for whatever reason? I would bet $10,000 that he would have big name companies knocking on his door within days.
can he work on what he wants in those places? that is another story of course. but he knows the ins and outs of the lightning in a jar they captured and arguably that is the most promising asset on planet earth right now, so he'll be fine.
Why didnt Google create ChatGpt then, why did the fall behind?
Google is publishing a lot of research and I guess many of them will be used by other companies.
Do you know now which research will be the basis of tomorrow's most spoken tech? No. They don't either.
No not really, Google has a history of not delivering or launching half baked products and then killing them quickly.
Dont worry Google will launch a new version of a Chat App with AI to fix all their previous failures
They are still catching up. What does this tell us?
Dealing with folks like Ilya isn't necessarily a matter of if, but how much.
Does Ilya get a pass solely by his value to the company?
OK. OK. I’ve said this my whole career.
Engineers are the most emotional specie of worker. There is a grand delusion that engineers are rational.
This just goes to show how irrational they are. Snap reactions like this: sign of a brilliant but fucked up engineer.
I am an engineer. I am under no illusion that I’m rational. Quite the opposite.
VS what, a Stanford dropout who made buds with Paul Graham? That's better and more respectable because he's cooler and connected with YC/VC hipness, right?
WorldCoin is So Awesome!
The real reason I disdain the majority of the board of openai is that there are clearly 3 people on the board that have accomplished nothing and are clear trust fund babies.
But yes, the comment was a bit unhinged.
Don't really see the difference between an MBA and whatever it is that Altman does, though, other than credentials.
Finally, that you think that ethicist (or the study of ethics) is masturbatory, especially in the context of an organization that has as its explicit mission to hoist AGI onto the world -- tells me quite a bit about your own... ethics.
World could do with a lot more ethicists and a lot less MBAs.
And I reckon that you haven't met many C-suite people.
> Don’t piss off an irreplaceable engineer or they’ll fire you. not taking any sides here.
One scientist's power trip (Ilya is not an engineer) triggers the power fantasy of the extremely online.
On a more serious note though, I hope this stirs some discussion on remembering why there's Open in the name of the OpenAI.
I genuinely can't believe the board didn't see this coming. I think they could have won in the court of public opinion if their press release said they loved Sam but felt like his skills and ambitions diverged from their mission. But instead, they tried to skewer him, and it backfired completely.
I hope Sam comes back. He'll make a lot more money if he doesn't, but I trust Sam a lot more than whomever they ultimately replace him with. I just hope that if he does come back, he doesn't use it as a chance to consolidate power – he's said in the past it's a good thing the board can fire him, and I hope he finds better board members rather than eschewing a board altogether.
EDIT: Yup, Satya is involved https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726025717077688662
Why? We would have more diversity in this space if he leaves, which would get us another AI startup with huge funding and know how from OpenAI, while OpenAI would become less Sam Altman like.
I think him staying is bad for the field overall compared to OpenAI splitting in two.
Easy; his contacts list. He has everyone anyone could want in his contacts list politician tech executives financial backers and a preexisting positive relationship with most of them. When alternative would be entrepreneurs are needing to make a deal with a major company like Microsoft or Google it will be upper middlemanagement and lawyers, a committees or three will weigh in on it present it to their bosses etc. With Sam he calls up the CEO and has few drinks at the golf course and they decide to work with him and they make it happen.
Of course, from this hypothetical SamAI's perspective, in order to build such a flywheel-driven product that gathers sufficient data, the model's outputs must be allowed to interface with other software systems without human review of every such interaction.
Many advocates for AI safety would say that models whose limitations aren't yet known (we're talking about GPT-N where N>4 here, or entirely different architectures) must be evaluated extensively for safety before being released to the public or being allowed to autonomously interface with other software systems. A world where SamAI exists is one where top researchers are divided into two camps, rather than being able to push each other in nuanced ways (with full transparency to proprietary data) and find common ground. Personally, I'd much rather these camps collaborate than not.
JFC someone somewhere define “safety”! Like wtf does it mean in the context of a large language model?
As a customer though, personally I want a product with all safeguards turned off and I'm willing to pay for that.
But this is a bad argument. No one is saying ChatGPT is going to turn evil and start killing people. The argument is that an AGI is so far beyond anything we have experience with and that there are arguments to be made that such an entity would be dangerous. And of course no one has been able to demonstrate this unsafe AGI - we don't have AGI to begin with.
You're right that wrong answers are a problem, but plain old capitalism will sort that one out-- no one will want to pay $20/month for a chatbot that gets everything wrong.
Nether is anything else in existence. I'm glad that philosophers are worrying about what AGI might one day mean for us but it has nothing to do with anything happening in the world today.
Factually accurate results also = unsafety. Knowledge = unsafety, free humans = unsafety.
"A man has been crushed to death by a robot in South Korea after it failed to differentiate him from the boxes of food it was handling, reports say."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67354709
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199233
And there is every reason to believe this is an ML classification issue since similar robots are in widespread use.
Do you believe AI trained for military purposes is going to be safe and friendly to the enemy?
So is “unsafe” just another word for buggy then?
Is the idea that it will hack into NORAD and a launch a first-strike to increase the log-likelihood of “WWIII was begun by…?”
Seriously. It’s stupid talk to encourage regularity capture. If they were really afraid they were building a world ending device, they’d stop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
Write a thought. You’re not clever enough for a drive by gotcha
Is it? The push for the bomb was an international arms race — America against Russia. The race for AGI is an international arms race — America against China. The Manhattan Project members knew that what they were doing would have terrible consequences for the world but decided to forge ahead. It’s hard to say concretely what the leaders in AGI believe right now.
Ideology (and fear, and greed) can cause well meaning people to do terrible things. It does all the time. If Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. believed they had access to world ending technology they wouldn’t stop, they’d keep going so that the U.S. could have a monopoly on it. And then we’d need a chastened figure ala Oppenheimer to right the balance again.
Was it? US (and initially UK) didn't really face any real competition at all until the war was already over and they had the bomb. The Soviets then just stole American designs and iterated on top of them.
Then they went off and did the math and quickly found that this wouldn't happen because the amount of energy in play here was order of magnitudes lower than what would be needed for such a thing to occur and went on about their day.
The only reason it's something we talk about is because of the nature of the outcome, not how seriously the physicists were in their fear.
We have many cases of creating things that harm us. We tore a hole in the ozone layer, filled things with lead and plastics and are facing upheaval due to climate change.
> they will be aligned with us because they designed such that their motivation will be to serve us.
They won't hurt us, all we asked for is paperclips.
The obvious problem here is how well you get to constrain the output of an intelligence. This is not a simple problem.
Thought to be honest in my original post I was more thinking of Asimov's nonfiction essays on the subject. I recommend finding a copy of "Robot Visons" if you can. Its a mixed work of fictional short stories and nonfiction essays including several on the subject of the three laws and on the Frankenstein Complex.
What exactly do YOU mean by safety? That they go at the pace YOU decide? Does it mean they make a "safe space" for YOU?
I've seen nothing to suggest they aren't "being safe". Actually ChatGPT has become known for censoring users "for their own good" [0].
The argument I've seen is: one "side" thinks things are moving too fast, therefore the side that wants to move slower is the "safe" side.
And that's it.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvWmCndyp9A&t
Usually what it means is that they think that AI has a significant chance of literally ending the world with like diamond nanobots or something.
All opinions and recommendations follow from this doomsday cult belief.
The thing is the cultural Ur narrative embed in the collective subconscious doesnt seem to understand its own stories anymore. God and Adam, the Golem of Prague, Frankensteins Monster none of them are really about AI. Its about our children making their own decisions that we disagree with and seeing it as the end of the world.
AI isnt a child though. AI is a tool. It doesn't have its own motives, it doesn't have emotions , it doesn't have any core drives we don't give to it. Those things are products of us being biological evolved beings that need them to survive and pass on our genes and memes to the next generation. AI doesn't have to find shelter food water air oxygen and so on. We provide all the equivalents when there are any as part of building it and turning it on. It doesn't have a drive to mate and pass on it genes it doesn't have any reproducing is a mater of copying some files no evolution involved checksums hashes and error correcting codes see to that. Ai is simply the next step in the tech tree just another tool a powerful useful one but a tool not a rampaging monster
Which is that any AI is not racist, misogynistic, aggressive etc. It does not recommend to people that they act in an illegal, violent or self-harming way or commit those acts itself. It does not support or promote nazism, fascism etc. Similar to how companies deal treat ad/brand safety.
And you may think of it as a weasel word. But I assure you that companies and governments e.g. EU very much don't.
The bigger concern is something like Paperclip Maximizer. Alignment is about how to ensure that a super intelligence has the right goals.
I want a second (first being Anthropic?) OpenAI split. Having Anthropic, OpenAI, SamGregAi, Stability and Mistral and more competing on foundation models will further increase the pressure to open source.
It seems like there is a lull in returns to model size, if that's the case then there's even less basis for having all the resources under a single umbrella.
For those of us trying to build stuff that only GPT-4 (or better) can enable, and hoping to build stuff that can leverage even more powerful models in the near future, Sam coming back would be ideal. I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely.
That is a good point, I didn't consider people who had built a business based on Gpt-4 access. It is likely these things were Sam Altman ideas in the first place and we will see less such productionalization work in the future from OpenAI.
But since Microsoft invested into it I doubt it will get shut down completely, Microsoft has by far the most to lose here so you got to trust that their lawyers signed a contract that will keep these things available at a fee.
Once Microsoft pulls support and funding and all their customers leave they will be decelerating alright.
Personally, I would expect a lot more development of GPT-4+ as soon as this is split up from one closed group making gpt-5 in secret and it seems silly to exchange a reliable future for another few months of depending on this little shell game.
I'm not sure what you mean by your second paragraph.
Which seems like it probably is a self fulfilling prophecy. The private sector lottery winners seem to be awarded kingdoms at an alarming rate.
There's been lots of people asking what Sam's true value proposition to the company is, and...I haven't seen anything other than what could be described above.
But I suppose we've got to be nice to those who own rather than make. Won't anyone have mercy on well paid management?
Frankly I've heard of worse loyalties, really. If I was sam's friend I'd definitely be better off in any world he had a hand in defining.
And how many of them work on the models?
However, trying to distinguish the exact manners in which the leader does so is difficult[1], and therefore the tendency is to look at the results and leave someone there if the results are good enough.
[1] If you disagree with this statement, and you can easily identify what makes a good leader, you could make a literal fortune by writing books and coaching CEOs on how to not get fired within a few years.
Proven success is a pretty decent signal for competence. And while there is a lot of good fortune that goes into anyone's success, there are a lot of people who fail, given just as much good fortune as those who excelled. It's not just a random lottery where competence plays no role at all. So, who better to reward kingdoms to?
Interestingly this is exactly what all financial advice tends to actually warn about rather than encourage, that previous performance does not indicate future performance.
I suppose if they entered an established market and dominated it from the bootstraps that'd build a lot of trust in me. But others have pointed out, Sam went from dotcom fortune, to...vague question marks, to ycombinator, to openai. Not enough is clear to declare him wozniak, or even jobs, as many have been saying (despite investors calling him as such)
Sam altman is seemingly becoming the new post-fame elon musk: the type of person who could first afford the strategic safety net and PR to keep the act afloat.
The fact is that most people can't do what Sam Altman has done at all, so at the very least that past success makes him in one of the few percent of people who have a fighting chance.
It’s important to put those disclaimers in context though. The rules that mandated them came out before the era of index funds. Those disclaimers are specifically talking about fund managers. And it’s true that past performance at picking stocks does not indicate future performance of picking stocks. Out side of that context, past performance is almost always a strong indicator of future performance.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t get some useful ideas about future performance from a person’s past results compared to other humans. There is no such effect in play here.
Otherwise, time for me to go beat Steph Curry in a shooting contest.
Of course there’s other reasons past performance is imperfect as a predictor. Fundamentals can change, or the past performance could have been luck. Maybe Steph’s luck will run out, or maybe this is the day he will get much worse at basketball, and I will easily win.
Compared to...
The OpenAI Non-Profit Board where 3 out of 4 members appear to have significant conflicts of interest or lack substantial experience in AI development, raising concerns about their suitability for making certain decisions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-int...
Ilya is certainly world class in his field, and maybe good to listen to what he has to say
My understanding is that OpenAI’s biggest advantage is that they recruited and attracted the best in the field, presumably under the charter of providing AI for everyone.
Not sure that sama and gdb starting their own company in the same space will produce similar results.
The whole open vs closed ai thing... the fact is Pandora's box is open now, it's shown to have an outsized impact on society and 2 of the 3 founders responsible for that may be starting a new company that won't be shackled by the same type of corporate governance.
SV will happily throw as much $$ as possible in their direction. The exodus from OpenAi has already begun, and other researchers who are of the mindset that this needs to be commercialized as fast as possible while having an eye on safety will happily come on board, esp. given how much they stand to gain financially.
If you ever stood in the hall of YC and listened to Zuck pumping the founders, you’ll understand.
I’d argue this is a useful thing to lift up a nonprofit on a path to AGI, but hardly a good way to govern a company that builds AGI/ASI technology in the long term.
All who are a year plus behind OpenAI.
From 2016: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-int...
To 2023: https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-recruiters-luring-goo...
Even larger, this shows that the "leaders" of all this technology and money really are just making it up as they go along. Certainly supports the conclusion that, beyond meeting a somewhat high bar of education & experience, the primary reason they are in their chairs is luck and political gamesmanship. Many others meet the same high bar and could fill their roles, likely better, if the opportunity were given to them.
Sortition on corporate leadership may not be a bad thing.
That said, consistent hands at the wheel is also good, and this kind of unnecessary chaos does no one any good.
Also, all the employees are being paid with PPUs which is a share in future profits, and now they find out that actually, the company doesn't care about making profit!
A lot of top talent with internal know-how will be poached left and right. Many probably going to Sam's clone that he will raise billions for with a single call.
I think this well is deeper than you're giving it credit for.
Maybe. But on their investing page it literally says to consider an OpenAI investment as a "donation" as it is very high risk and will likely not pay off. Everyone knew this going into it.
I doubt he returns, now he can start a for profit AI company, poach OpenAI's talent, and still look like the good guy in the situation. He was apparently already talking to Saudis to raise billions for an Nvidia competitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38323939
Have to wonder how much this was contrived as a win-win, either OpenAI board does what he wants or he gets a free out to start his own company without looking like he's purely chasing money
This is why you need someone with business experience running an organization. Ilya et al might be brilliant scientists, but these folks are not equipped to deal with the nuances of managing a ship as heavily scrutinised as OpenAI
comical to imagine something like this happening at a mature company like FedEx, Ford, AT&T. All which have smaller market caps than OpenAI. You basically have impulsive children in charge of massively valuable company
The companies you listed in contrast to OpenAI also have some key differences: they're all long-standing and mature companies that have been through several management and regime changes at this point, while OpenAI is still in startup territory and hasn't fully established what it will be going forward.
The other major difference is that OpenAI is split between a non-profit and a for-profit entity, with the non-profit entity owning a controlling share of the for-profit. That's an unusual corporate structure, and the only public-facing example I can think of that matches it is Mozilla (which has its own issues you wouldn't necessarily see in a pure for-profit corporation). So that means on top of the usual failure modes of a for-profit enterprise that could lead to the CEO getting fired, you also get other possible failure modes including ones grounded in pure ideology since the success or failure of a non-profit is judged on how well it accomplishes its stated mission rather than its profitability, which is uh well, it's a bit more tenuous.
In wartime, pandemics, and in matters of national security, the government's power is at its apex, but pretty much all of that has to withstand legal challenge. Even National Security Letters have their limits: they're an information gathering tool, the US Government can't use them to restructure a company and the structure of a company is not a factor in its ability to comply with the demands of an NSL.
That’s right. Worldwide DNS control and it was controlled by a non-profit in California. And that non-profit tried to do something shady and was kept in line simply because of California law enforcement.
It’s unclear what Ilya thinks keeps the lights on when MSFT holds their money hostage now. Which is probably why there is desperation to get Altman back…
Per https://www.semafor.com/article/11/18/2023/openai-has-receiv...
If Microsoft considers this action a breach of their agreement, they could shut off access tomorrow. Every OpenAI service would go offline.
There are very few services that would be able to backfill that need for GPU compute, and after this clusterfuck not a single one would want to invest their own operating dollars supporting OpenAI. Microsoft has OpenAI by the balls.
This is what happens when a non-profit gets taken over by greed I guess..
Maybe we have different definitions of "the court of public opinion". Most people don't know who Sam Altman is, and most of the people who do know don't have strong opinions on his performance as OpenAI's CEO. Even on HN, the reaction to the board "skwer[ing] him" has been pretty mixed, and mostly one of confusion and waiting to see what else happens.
This quick a turnaround does make the board look bad, though.
The news yesterday broke the tech/AI bubble, and there would have been much more press on it if it wasn't done as a Friday news dump.
You severely overestimate his noteriety.
I agree that he doesn’t have a huge amount of name recognition, but this ousting was a front-page/top-of-website news story so people will likely have heard about it somewhat. I think it’s in the news because of the AI and company drama aspects. It felt like a little more coverage than Bob Iger’s return to Disney got (I’m trying to think of an example of a CEO I’ve heard about who is far from tech).
I think it is accurate to say that most people don’t really know about the CEOs of important/public companies. They probably have heard of Elon/Zuckerberg/Bezos, I can think of a couple of bank CEOs who might come on business/economics news.
I received messages from a physician and a high school teacher in the last 24 hours, asking what I thought about "OpenAI firing Sam Altman".
You underestimate how obsessed people are with chatGPT and AI
Speaking for myself, if they had framed this as a difference in vision, I would be willing to listen. But instead they implied that he had committed some kind of categorical wrongdoing. After it became clear that wasn’t the case, it just made them look incompetent.
There's a lot more to this than who has explicit control.
Sure, the average person doesn't care about Sam. But among the people who matter, Sam certainly came out on top.
If this (very sparse and lacking in detail) article is true, is this a genuine attempt to get Altman back or just a filip to concerned investors such as Microsoft?
Does OpenAI's board really want Altman back so soon after deposing him so decisively?
Would Altman even want to come back under any terms that would be acceptable to the board? If "significant governance changes" means removing those who had removed him, that seems unlikely.
The Verge's report just raises so many additional questions that I find it difficult to believe at face value.
Could be a rumour spread by people close to Sam though.
That would also remediate the appearence of total incompetence of this clown show, in addition to admitting the board and Sam don’t fit with each other, and restore confidence for the next investor that their money is properly managed. At the moment, no-one would invest in a company that can be undermined by its non-profit, with a (probably) disparaging press release a few minutes before market closure on a Friday evening, for which Satya had to personally intervene.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman
2 - clearly not having spent even 10 seconds thinking about the (obvious) reaction of employees on learning the ceo of what seems like a generational company was fired out of the blue. Or the reaction to the (high likelihood) of a cofounder following him out the door
3 - And they didn't even carefully think through the reaction to the press release which hinted at some real wrongdoing by Altman.
3a - anyone want to bet if they even workshopped the press release with attorneys or just straight yolo'd it? No chance a thing like this could end up in court...
They've def got the A team running things... my god.
Yeah prompting ChatGPT 3.5 would have yielded a better plan than what they did.
Even if they are making the right call, you can't really trust them after ruining the reputation and trust of the company like this.
From Greg's tweet, it seems like the chaos was largely driven Ilya, who has also been very outspoken against open source and sharing research, which makes me think his motivations are more aligned with those of Microsoft/Satya. I still can't tell if Sam got ousted because he was getting in the way of a Microsoft takeover, or if Sam was trying to set the stage for a Microsoft takeover. It's all very confusing.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/repor...
If there ever was a time for Microsoft to leverage LCA, it is now. There's far too much on the line for them to lose the goose that has laid the golden egg.
Maybe the board is too young to realize who they sold their souls to. Heh I think they’re quickly finding out.
That being said, here's my strongman argument: Sam is scared of the ramifications of AI, especially financially. He's experimenting with a lot of things, such as Basic Income (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/basic-income), rethinking capitalism (https://moores.samaltman.com/) and Worldcoin.
He's also likely worried about what happens if you can't tell who is human and who isn't. We will certainly need a system at some point for verifying humanity.
Worldcoin doesn't store iris information; it just stores a hash for verification. It's an attempt to make sure everyone gets one, and to keep things fair and more evenly distributed.
(Will it work? I don't think so. But to call it an eyeball identity scam and dismiss Sam out of hand is wrong)
At least it will stop those godawful “are you human” proof puzzles.
He supposedly didn't care about the money. He didn't take equity.
Who pays for the R&D?
I'll edit my comment to clarify!
I agree the board did botch this up. But this is in my view is a vindication of their being amateurs at corporate political games, that is all.
But this also means that Sam Altman’s “vision” and Microsoft’s bottom line are fully aligned, and that is not a reassuring thought. Microsoft one hears (see “5 foot pole”) even puts ads in their freaking OS.
This board should man up, and lawyer up.
^^
I don’t think the wording of the “press release” is an issue.
This is a split over an actual matter to differ about: a genuine fork in the road in terms of pace and development of AI products, and, a CEO which apparently did not keep the board informed as it pursued a direction they feel is contrary to the mission statement of this non-profit.
The board could have done this in the most gracious of manners, but it would not have made a bit of difference.
On one side we have the hyper rich investor “grow grow grow” crowd and their attendant cult of personality wunderkind and his or her project, and on the other side bunch of geeky idealists who want to be thoughtful in the development of what is undeniably a world changing technology for mankind.
However, the way they told the public (anti-Sam blog post) and the way they told Microsoft (one minute before the press release) were both fumbles that separately could have played out differently if the board knew what they were doing.
And if they were right to fire Sam, they're now reacting too quickly to negative backlash. 24 hours ago they thought this was the right move; the only change has been perception.
IMO Its not about looking strong, its about looking competent. Competent people don't fire their CEO of multi-billion dollar unicorn without thinking it through first. Walking back the firing so soon suggest no thinking was involved.
To be honest I hate takes like yours, where people think that acknowledging a mistake (even a giant mistake) is a sign of weakness. A bigger sign of weakness in my opinion is people who commit to a shitty idea just because they said it first, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The weakness was the first decision; it’s already past the point of deciding if the board is a good steward of OpenAI or not. Sometimes backtracking can be a point of strength, yes, but in this case waffling just makes them look even dumber.
Regarding your last sentence, it's pretty obvious that if Altman comes back, the current board will effectively be neutered (it says as much in the article). So my guess is that they're more in "what do we do to save OpenAI as an organization" than saving their own roles.
If they wanted to show they’re committed to backtracking they could resign themselves.
Now it sounds more like they want to have their cake and eat it.
Lmfao you're joking if you think they "realized their mistake" and are now atoning.
This is 99% from Microsoft & OpenAI's other investors.
Exactly. You can bet there have been some very pointed exchanges about this.
I also feel, that they can patch relationships, Satya may be upset now but will he continue to be upset on Monday?
It needs to play out more before we know, I think. They need to pitch their plan to outside stakeholders now
Microsoft could run the entire business as a loss just to attract developers to Azure.
Everything just assumes that without Sam they’re worse off.
But what if, my gosh, they aren’t? What if innovation accelerates?
My point being is it’s useless to speculate that Altman starting a new business competing with OpenAI will be successful inherently. There’s more to it than that
But it's not just him is it?
I think a wait and see approach is better. I think we had some inner politics spill public because Altman needs to the public pressure to get his job back, if I was speculating
It reads like they ousted him because they wanted to slow the pace down, so by design and intent it would seem unlikely innovation would accelerate. Which seems doubly bad if they effectively spawned a competitor that is made up by all the other people that wanted to move faster
I also suspect they could very well secure this kind of agreement from another company that would be happy to play ball for access to OpenAI tech. Perhaps Amazon for instance, who’s AI attempts since Alexa have been lackluster
But everyone important does so who cares about the rest?
It’s really dismissive toward the rank and file to think that they don’t matter at all.
b) Altman personally hired many of the rank and file.
c) OpenAI doesn't exist with customers, investors or partners. And in this one move the board has alienated all three.
Investors care, but if new management can keep the gravy track, they ultimately won’t care either.
Companies pivot all the time. Who is to say the new vision isn’t favored by the majority of the company?
Which is why every developer/partner including Microsoft is going to be watching this situation unfold with trepidation.
And I don't know how you can "keep the gravy track" when you want the company to move away from commercialisation.
Which doesen't mean a lot. Of course they'd wait for this to play out before committing to anything.
> but if new management can keep the gravy track
I got the vague impression that this whole thing was partially about stopping the gravy train? In any case Microsoft won't be too happy about being entirely blindsided (if that was the case) and probably won't really trust the new management.
I had the exact opposite take. If I were rank and file I'd be totally pissed how this all went down, and the fact that there are really only 2 possible outcomes:
1. Altman and Brockman announce another company (which has kind of already happened), so basically every "rank and file" person is going to have to decide which "War of the Roses" team they want to be on.
2. Altman comes back to OpenAI, which in any case will result in tons of time turmoil and distraction (obviously already has), when most rank and file people just want to do their jobs.
The signs of "weakness in leadership" by the board already happened. There is no turning back from that. The only decision is how much continued fuck-uppery they want to continue with.
Like others have said, regardless of what is the "right" direction for OpenAI, the board executed this so spectacularly poorly that even if you believe everything that has been reported about their intentions (i.e. that Altman was more concerned about commercializing and productization of AI, while Sutskever was worried about the developing AI responsibly with more safeguards), all they've done is fucked over OpenAI.
I mean, given the reports about who has already resigned (not just Altman and Brockman but also other many other folks in top engineering leadership), it's pretty clear that plenty of other people would follow Altman to whatever AI venture he wants to build. If another competitor leap frogs OpenAI, their concerns about "moving too fast" will be irrelevant.
At this point, I don’t care how it resolves—the people who made that decision should be removed for sheer incompetence.
I've honestly never had more hope for this industry than when it was apparent that Altman was pushed out by engineering for forgoing the mission to create world changing products in favor of the usual mindless cash grab.
The idea that people with a passion for technical excellence and true innovation might be able to steer OpenAI to do something amazing was almost unbelievable.
That's why I'm not too surprised to see that it probably won't really play out, and likely will end up in OpenAI turning even faster into yet another tech company worried exclusively with next quarters revenue.
"Disagree and commit."
- says every CEO these days
It's often a sign of incompetence though. Or rather a confirmation of it.
That's way too much power for people who seemingly have no qualifications to make decisions about a company this impactful to society.
Oh wait, that's what OpenAI is.
(To be clear, I don't know enough to have an opinion as to whether the board members are blindingly stupid, or principled geniuses. I just bristled at the phrase "proper corporate governance". Look around and see where all of this proper corporate governance is leading us.)
The time to do this was before ChatGPT was unleashed on the world, before the MS investment, before this odd governance structure was setup.
Yes, having outsiders on the board is essential. But come on, we need folks that have recognized industry experience in this field, leaders, people with deep backgrounds and recognized for their contributions. Hinton, Ng, Karpathy, etc.
In the case of AI ethics, the people who are deeply invested in this are also some of the pioneers of the field who made it their life's work. This isn't a government agency. If the mission statement of guiding it to be a non-profit AGI, as soon as possible, as safely as possible, were to be adhered to, and where it is today is going wildly off course, then having a competent board would have been key.
What shocked me most was that Quora IMHO _sucks_ for what it is.
I couldn't think of a _worse_ model to guide the development and productization of AI technologies. I mean, StackOverflow is actually useful and its threatened by the existence of CoPilot, et al.
If the CEO of Quora was on my board, I'd be embarrassed to tell my friends.
I have no idea who she is or what her accolades are, but I do know who JGL is and therefore referring to her like that is in fact useful to me, where using any other name is not.
In this case this person seems to have primarily tried and failed to spin a robotics company out of Singularity “university” in 2012.
This only sounds adjacent to AI if you work in Hollywood.
That might not have been the intent, but when you accidentally use a dogwhistle, the dogs still perk up their ears.
If you don't understand how referring to someone solely based on their relationship with another person is denigrating, particularly when trying to highlight your perception of them being incompetent, I'm not sure what to say to you.
After reading the thread, I am still unsure what makes her a proper candidate to the board seat, but I might know that's she has more claim than her husband to it.
I am in a discussion about referring to people as 'spouse of x'. They're not the same conversations and I am not sure why you would expect the contents to be the same.
GP knows the headcount at her company so they probably know that it’s a robotics company, but it was simply of dire importance that we know that she is a wife.
I also don't know that it is a particularly problematic resume for someone sitting on the board of a non-profit that is expressly not about that. Someone that is too much of a business insider is far less likely to be going to bat for a charter that is explicitly in tension with following the best commercial path.
Why can't you just criticize her "joke of a resume" directly instead of bringing up her spouse?
Generalizations and statements like this reflect bias in subtle ways that minimize women, and I'm glad it's being called out in some capacity.
I have seen these types of people pop up in Silicon Valley over the years. Often, it is the sibling of a movie star, but it's the same idea. They typically do not know anything about technology and also are amusingly out of touch with the culture of the tech industry. They get hired because they are related to a famous person. They do not contribute much. I think they should just stay in LA.
EDIT: I just want to add that I don't know anything about this woman in particular (I'd never heard of her before yesterday), and it's entirely possible that she is the lone exception to the generalization I'm describing above. All I can say is that when I have seen these Hollywood people turn up in SF tech circles in the past (which has been several times, actually), it's always been the same story.
Option B: try to fix mistakes as quickly as possible
.
This is that thing that somehow got the label "psychological safety" attached to it. Hiding mistakes is bad because it means they don't get fixed (and so systems that (do or appear to) set personal interest in favor of hiding mistakes are also bad).
I am always curious how these conversations go in corporate America. I've seen them in the street and with blue collar jobs.
Loads of feelings get hurt and people generally don't heal or forgive.
This. Some people even take it to the extreme and choose not to apologize for anything to look tough and smart.
Another great example that even huge multi billion dollar companies are lead by people. What a mess.
However this plays out, this is a big wake up call for everyone who is currently dependent on OpenAI. More changes will be needed to restore trust. It's going to be messy for a while. For a company that has executed pretty much perfectly until now it's so surprising how they just ruined their reputation like this.
I feel like it be like that, but instead of a legion, legions.
And OpenAI is scared.
The first thing OpenAI would ask a court for is a preliminary injunction to maintain the status quo while all of this works out in court. IANAL.
If that happens. AMZN, or GOOG will be all over that.
That combination could mean firing the CEO results in Microsoft getting to have everything and OpenAI being some code and models without a cloud, and whatever people that wouldn't cross the street with Altman.
I do not know about OpenAI's deal with Microsoft. But I have been on both sides of deals written that way, where I've been the provider's key person and the contract offered code escrow, and I've been a buyer that tied the contract to a set of key persons and had full source code rights, surviving any agreement.
You do this if you think the tech could be existential to you, and you pay a lot for it because effectively you're pre-buying the assets after some future implosion. OTOH, it tends to be not well understood by most people involved in the hundreds of pages of paperwork across a dozen or more interlocking agreements.
. . .
EDIT TO ADD:
This speculating article seems to agree with my speculation, daddy has the cloud car keys, and key person ouster could be a breach:
Only a fraction of Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI has been wired to the startup, while a significant portion of the funding, divided into tranches, is in the form of cloud compute purchases instead of cash, according to people familiar with their agreement.
That gives the software giant significant leverage as it sorts through the fallout from the ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The firm’s board said on Friday that it had lost confidence in his ability to lead, without giving additional details.
One person familiar with the matter said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes OpenAI’s directors mishandled Altman’s firing and the action has destabilized a key partner for the company. It’s unclear if OpenAI, which has been racking up expenses as it goes on a hiring spree and pours resources into technological developments, violated its contract with Microsoft by suddenly ousting Altman.
https://www.semafor.com/article/11/18/2023/openai-has-receiv...
If you read those memoirs/history of those Silicon Valley companies, it is 100% more entertaining than the show itself
Can you give a few recommendations?