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Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

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Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#81
As you're watching this whole episode where no one can figure out what an organization worth tens of billions of dollars is going to be on Monday morning, remember: Silicon Valley businesspeople are the smartest, most competent, and most innovative people in America - if not the world - and deserve their personal net worth because none of us could have handled this better.

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#82
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A not insignificant portion of HN commenters believe AGI is close. This community is so split on this that it’s virtually random as to whether or not you’ll be downvoted for saying that a specialized search engine is not likely to achieve AGI.

5 years ago large parts of this same community would sneer at you and call you a luddite for suggesting that fully-self-driving claims were overly optimistic. People were saying things like trucking was a dead profession within a handful of years, etc. They were wrong as hell, clearly. Point being: Moore's law is for transistors, not just any tech, and not everything in tech gets on an exponential growth/improvement…

"Wrong as hell" seems like a severe overstatement. Even after the Cruise fiasco, self-driving cars with no human in the driver's seat are commercially available in three major US cities. There were quite a lot of overly optimistic claims about the speed of market penetration, but the technology is real.

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#84

Do people still trust this organization to build super 'AGI'? Just focus on the enterprise chat bot business

At the moment AGI is a skizoid dream, so we are safe.

You say that, but one day one of them is going realise that they can give ChatGPT a fresh cup of really hot tea and ask it for an implementation of AGI.

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#85

As you're watching this whole episode where no one can figure out what an organization worth tens of billions of dollars is going to be on Monday morning, remember: Silicon Valley businesspeople are the smartest, most competent, and most innovative people in America - if not the world - and deserve their personal net worth because none of us could have handled this better.

[flagged]

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#86
post #44

This whole thing is gross. The sycophantic worship of Sam is gross and the paranoid AI safety people are insane. The singularity cultists are also insane. What happened? I remember when most of the people in this industry were at least okay. A little weird but okay. Of course judging by social media it’s a microcosm of the rest of society. People are utterly losing their minds everywhere. It’s both scary and amusing.

This is what happens when you have people trying to change the world. Opinions make people weird. If you want to avoid weirdness, just have a boring business that tries to make money by any means necessary.

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#87
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The deadline has passed and mass resignations expected if a deal isn’t reached ASAP"

Instead of the board firing the employees, the employees fire the board.

Ah, parliamentary democracy.

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#88

This seems like BS that the Altman camp is feeding to the media. I very much doubt a single engineer or scientist would side with him and leave with him - most likely it's his cronies he put up in other executive positions. However, if you check their backgrounds, none of them have any meaningful experience pre-openAI - I am skeptical any would actually leave their opportunity of a lifetime.

Three people resigned yesterday: Jakub Pachocki, the company’s director of research; Aleksander Madry, head of a team evaluating potential risks from AI, and Szymon Sidor, a seven-year researcher. I know a good number of OpenAI people, and every single person I know is supportive of Sam. (This may be selection bias, of course, but there are a large number of people who are on Sam's side in all of this) Even if this w…

You are saying these two facts like they are separate.

That's a bit flippant but its no surprise to me that that there are people who know Sam personally and are supportive of him, that's pretty much how people work. Especially when working and living in SV bubble and Sam is a person who had seemingly mastered that world, as someone who can raise billions of dollars etc. Even if they don't consciously associate him with monetary success, they certainly would associate him with success generally.

From my very outside and mostly uninformed perspective, Sam just seems like a very good salesman (some would say grifter) and is far from infallible.

Re: Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce

#89
post #44

This whole thing is gross. The sycophantic worship of Sam is gross and the paranoid AI safety people are insane. The singularity cultists are also insane. What happened? I remember when most of the people in this industry were at least okay. A little weird but okay. Of course judging by social media it’s a microcosm of the rest of society. People are utterly losing their minds everywhere. It’s both scary and amusing.

Silicon Valley has a way of diminishing humans. So of course deep learning is about to eclipse human intelligence - the vast majority of humans are just stochastic parrots and NPCs, after all.

I visit often but I am so glad I never moved there.
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