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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

#101

Post by injeolmi_love »

andrewfromx wrote: post #56
api wrote: 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.

i feel the same way api but I did watch this entire thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTRHFaaPG8 and now I can't stop thinking about Eliezer is so smart, smarter than me, should I listen?

No, you shouldn’t. When someone sounds smart, that means they are an effective communicator and have good media presence. Those are valuable skills but don’t indicate whether the underlying ideas are accurate.

Eliezer is filling the traditional doomsday prophet archetype, of which there have been thousands in history. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but should immediately raise questions.

A deeper analysis of his ideas shows there are fundamental problems in his reasoning.

First, He’s been consistently wrong about the future development and results in AI research so his understanding of AI is proven to be superficial.

Second, His doomsday scenarios are based on a fundamental fallacy; that a GAI smarter than humans would be insanely stupid, unable to self reflect or solve moral quandaries. That’s not to say AI cannot be dangerous, but the types of doomsday scenarios he presents are unlikely. For instance because of acausal trade, Rokos Basilisk is a serious risk that should be treated properly, but Elizer denies it.

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

#102

Post by pvg »

user_named wrote: post #96
pvg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the topcomment of the discussion of the same article which is itself updated with that same information. That submission is on the FP.

That discussion is based on the earlier version of the article which has a different headline. This is a new piece of information that is significant and should be surfaced.

Yes but HN doesn't really work by 'every hourly development in a story gets its own frontpage thread' because then it wouldn't work at all. In fact, the story linked is in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38325552 is more up to date than the submitted tweet.

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

#103

Post by empath75 »

api wrote: 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.

> The sycophantic worship of Sam

I don't think the support for Altman has much to do with that. There are a lot of people building companies and investing a lot of time of money into OpenAI products. They want to work with a company that they can do business with over the long term and isn't going to rug pull them.

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

#105

Post by RetpolineDrama »

gkoberger wrote: post #42
globamel wrote: post #29

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…

>I know a good number of OpenAI people, and every single person I know is supportive of Sam.

FWIW: I spend an insane amount of money with OpenAI each month, more than the average income in the US. I'm not a Fortune 500 or anything, but I emailed my OpenAI enterprise account rep and let them know if this ends with Altman _not_ the CEO I'm terminating our account.

I had always had "alternatives" on my list of to-dos, and now I'm losing my whole weekend to this garbage thanks to the morons on the OpenAI board.

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

#107

Post by dragonwriter »

ekianjo wrote: post #50
fooey wrote: post #10

> Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.

There is no no compete agreement with Altman? How is that possible?

Non-competes (with three narrow exceptions, none of which apply here), are void in California (and the practice of making employees sign them even though they are unenforceable, a historically common way of making workers think they have less rights than they do, will become an actionable tort itself, on top of the agreements not being enforceable, due to a law going into effect January 1.)

Obviously, anything that Altman does that would compete with OpenAI will have OpenAI lawyers circling around looking for indicia of use of trade secrets or other IP, but non-competes aren't an issue.

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

#108

Post by frognumber »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #57
majikaja wrote: post #14

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

No I believe anyone can do AGI vapourware as well as they.

The problem is we don't know. It might be current-grade LLMs plateauing for 50 years, and it might be AGI in 5 weeks, with exponential growth to the singularity.

Heck, we're split on whether current GPT is a glorified autocomplete, a friend, or an alien intelligence, or a half-dozen other theories. It's a black box.

Most people can't handle uncertainty, so they're in some camp, and all the camps are crazy and stupid.

Ditto for covid, for that matter. In early 2020, it could have been anything from a glorified flu to a civilization-ending plague. Ditto for global warming, for that matter. All the models are speculation and extrapolation from limited data. Ditto for a half-dozen other things.

Personally, I think we should play it safe for all of those, but reasonable people can differ. What reasonable people can't do is argue for certainty before we have data coming in or a reasonable understanding of the underlying threat.

Edit: If people could handle uncertainty (and understand value differences are okay), we'd also have a lot less political polarization. A lot of this is simply about believing the other side _might_ be right. If I believe something with 10% odds, and you with 90%, it's often possible to compromise, where with a categorical split, it's not.

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

#110

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

ekianjo wrote: post #50
fooey wrote: post #10

> Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.

There is no no compete agreement with Altman? How is that possible?

As everyone else has mentioned, there is no such thing in CA, but you can sue if employees reveal company secrets to their new employer. OpenAI would probably have a strong case if they suddenly released a copycat product soon after leaving.
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