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The only power MS has is soft power as a backer. Will that win over the board's actual power? If MS pulls investment it will be a catastrophic blow.
That's the choice isn't it. Either reinstall Sam Altman and sack the board, or move the funding to whatever entity he goes and sets up next.
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It indeed did seem like something Ilya would post himself, or at least someone cosplaying as him. Based on what we’ve seen on Twitter from employees it looks like a significant chunk supports Sam.
They're dreaming of being the next version of early googlers, i guess that is inevitable once people start doing math equations that include eleven digit numbers in them
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Ilya is the stereotypical genius mind that is extremely passionate yet disconnected from the real world. He got way too worked up about abstract issues, failed to see the bigger picture and had a meltdown that other board members took seriously because he's a cofounder. He is instrumental in the research but he shouldn't be running the business.
Is there any way he can even stay if Altman returns? Seems like one of them is out and making their own AI venture soon.
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Yeah, MS leaving is the absolute end of OpenAI (and for all practical purposes the end of Ilya's career). It's Satya's call now, he's not happy and wants @sama back. Next week is going to be interesting!
What a wild idea. You actually think of the most esteemed AI researchers will have trouble finding funding after this? Someone somewhere will give him money. We’re in an arms race. Ilya is Otto Hahn.
>You actually think of the most esteemed AI researchers will have trouble finding funding after this?
Plenty of those actually left already ...
Ilya is good but is one of many, and by many I mean there's 100s of equally capable researchers, many of those with more flexible morals. Note: I'm being generous to Ilya and taking him at face value on being the self-proclaimed AI messiah that is keeping us from the destruction of the world.
Thanks Ilya, but money is money and investors would definitely prefer to put their money in a for-profit than a non-profit. This is even more true after this whole fiasco.
"Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce Inc., will be on the new board, several people said. Another possible addition is an executive from Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest shareholder — but Microsoft hasn’t decided whether it wants board representation, some people said." hah, Microsoft will be in control from here on out whether they have someone technically on the board or not. They did…
AI doomers will say this is the beginning of the end.
But maybe the beginning of the end of OpenAI.
A week ago I was saying that it's likely the leading AI company in 5 years time hasn't been founded yet.
After the news Friday and looking more at how Ilya sees the future of neural networks, I actually thought there's a decent chance OpenAI might correct course to continue to lead.
If it becomes too productized under a strengthened Altman, it's back on the list of companies building into their own obsolescence.
The right way to the future is adapting alignment to the increasing complexity of the model. It's not just about 'safety' but about performance and avoiding Goodhart's Law.
The way all major players, OpenAI included, are handling that step is by carrying forward the techniques that were appropriate for less complex models. Which is a huge step back from the approach reflected very early on pre-release for GPT-4's chat model. An approach that seemed to reflect Ilya's vision.
As long as OpenAI keeps fine tuning to try to meet the low hanging fruit product demand they've created and screwing up their pretrained model on measures that haven't become the industry target, they aren't going to be competitive against yet to exist companies that don't take such naive approaches with the fine tuning step. Right now they have an advantage in Ilya being ahead of the trend, but if Altman returning is at the cost of Ilya's influence, they are going to continue to dig their long term grave in the pursuit of short term success.
Altman is more powerful than I thought.
Big money on the line. Insane, life-changing payouts in the cards. Altman and MS on the side of those, the board on the side of the mission. Money’s likely to win.
"Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce Inc., will be on the new board, several people said. Another possible addition is an executive from Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest shareholder — but Microsoft hasn’t decided whether it wants board representation, some people said." hah, Microsoft will be in control from here on out whether they have someone technically on the board or not. They did…
What? EEE is meant for competitors, OpenAI is very much not a competitor - they're effectively Microsoft's outsourced R&D.
The key question in my mind is not who is going to be on the new board, but whether Ilya Sutskever will stay if Altman comes back. I worry that OpenAI without Ilya is not going to produce groundbreaking innovations at the same pace. Hopefully Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever can patch things up. That's more important than who they add or remove to the board.
The key question in my mind is not who is going to be on the new board, but whether Ilya Sutskever will stay if Altman comes back. I worry that OpenAI without Ilya is not going to produce groundbreaking innovations at the same pace. Hopefully Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever can patch things up. That's more important than who they add or remove to the board.
A rough guess is that Elon will pick up Ilya, with a promise to really aim for safe AGI.