Live data from Hacker News

Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

twitter.com

201–210 of 518 posts

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> probably the most well-known tech reporter I imagine Walt Mossberg saying "hold my beer"

I included the phrase "working right now" -- which you left off when quoting me -- very intentionally. :)

Because it’s a joke. (And upvoted you btw)

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#202

This is genuinely frustrating. IF the stories are to be believed so far, the board of OpenAI, perhaps one of the most important tech companies in the world right now, was full of people who are openly hostile to the existence of the company. I don't want AI safety. The people talking about this stuff like it's a terminator movie are nuts. Strongly believe that this will be a lot like facebook/oculus ousting Palmer Lu…

> Palmer, of course, went on to start a company (anduril), which has a much more powerful and direct ability to enact his political will.

If that were true, Palmer Lucky wouldn't spend all his time ranting on twitter about how he was so easily hoodwinked by the community of a particular linux distribution / functional programming language.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#203

I have a hard time believing this simply since it seems so ill-conceived. Sure, maybe Sam Altman was being irresponsible and taking risks, but they had an insanely good thing going for them. I'm not saying Sam Altman was responsible for the good times they were having, but you're probably going to bring them to an end by abruptly firing one of the most prominent members of the group, seeing where individual loyalties…

> and pissing off Microsoft by tanking their stock price

When did Microsoft’s stock price tank?

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#204
post #168

These Kara Swisher's tweets aligns extremely closely with the following pseudonymous Reddit user Anxious_Bandicoot126 from 4 hours ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/17xoact/comment/k9p... > I feel compelled as someone close to the situation to share additional context about Sam and company. > Engineers raised concerns about rushing tech to market without adequate safety reviews in the race to capitalize o…

That account actually sounds like it is generating text via chatgpt. zero spelling mistakes and keeps things super vague

I refuse to accept that the lack of spelling mistakes and the careful use of language is evidence of AI. I can be sloppy, but I've known Real Humans to take great care with their written language.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in a power struggle, you have to act quickly

I don't think it's that dramatic. In a board meeting, you have to act while the board is meeting. They don't meet every day, and it's a small rigamarole to pull a meeting together, so if you're meeting... vote.

One imagines in this case the current board discussed this in a non-board context, scheduled a meeting without inviting the chair, made quorum, and voted, then wrote the PR and let Sam, Greg, and HR know, then released the PR. Which is pretty interesting in and of itself, maybe they were trying to sidestep roko or something

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn says President, Chairman, & Co-Founder. Murati was the CTO. But from his interviews, he sounded more like the CTO. And often like an individual contributor: "the feeling when you finally localize a bug to a small section of code, and know it's only a matter of time till you've squashed it" https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725373059740082475 "Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, works 60 to 100 h…

Greg was the CTO before Murati. Then he was "promoted" to President and Murati replaced him as the CTO.

You're right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Brockman

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#207
post #136

What has me scratching my head is the fact that Altman has been on a world tour preaching the need for safety in AI. Many people here believed that this proselytizing was in part an attempt to generate regulatory capture. But given what's happening now, I wonder how much Altman's rhetoric served the purpose of maintaining a good relationship with Sutskever. Given that Altman was pushing the AI safety narrative public…

They did compromise. The creation of the for-profit and Sam being brought in WAS the compromise. Sam eventually decided that was inconvenient for him, so he stopped abiding by it, because at the end of the day he is just another greedy VC guy and when push came to shove he chose the money, not OpenAI. And this is the result.

Hasn’t Sam been there since the company was founded?

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#208
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When two people have different ideologies and neither is willing to backdown or compromise, one person must "go".

There’s no indication that any sort of discussion took place. Major stakeholders like Microsoft appear uninformed.

Basically half the point of this is that Microsoft isn’t a stakeholder. The board clearly doesn’t care or is actively hostile to the idea of growing “the business”. If they didn’t know then that they weren’t a stakeholder, they know now.

MS owns a non controlling share of a business controlled by a nonprofit. MS should have prepared for the possibility that their interests aren’t adequately represented. I’m guessing Altman is very persuasive and they were in a rush to make a deal.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#209

I wonder how much of this was the influence of Hinton on his former student, Sutskever. I'm sure Sutskever respects Hinton above basically anyone out there and took Hinton's strong objections seriously. I think personally think it's a shame because this is all totally inevitable at this point, and if the US loses its leading position here because of this kind intentional hitting of the brakes, then I certainly don't…

You’re taking Hinton at his word. Maybe he was forced out of Google for doing nothing with LLM tech for half a decade.

Re: Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?

#210
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you think one company will determine whether the us beats china in ai or not ? Like 75% of the authors i read on AI papers are Chinese, that should be far more alarming if you really are afraid of china getting ahead.

Research from PRC (across all of science, not specific to AI) has a terrible reputation. They are rewarded for sheer quantity. You can easily find many articles discussing this phenomenon. So the volume of Chinese AI papers says little to nothing about their advancements in the field.

Hmmm, that's the same reputation er... western science has as well.
Post reply on HN