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OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

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Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#141

Post by Davidzheng »

mannerheim wrote: post #132
alecco wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think he’s lucky that apparently many OpenAI employees support him This claim on the press had zero substance. It could well be, but there were no wide resignations or anything. Just 4 execs. OTOH, Altman going for the high score could bump employee TCO 10x. So who knows. Passion vs greed.

> Passion vs greed. What's there to be passionate about in a doomed business? Where is OpenAI going to get compute from? What work are they going to get done if everybody else follows Altman?

You can also have principles which would rather do no work than harmful work

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#142

Post by mannerheim »

jug wrote: post #122
moralestapia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

MS leaving would also be a disaster for subsequent development of Bing, Windows Copilot, Office Copilot, Teams AI, various strategically important Azure service like Semantic Search etc. They’ve gone all in on OpenAI LLM’s, support nothing else and have coupled all their AI to them.

> Microsoft has certain rights to OpenAI’s intellectual property so if their relationship were to break down, Microsoft would still be able to run OpenAI’s current models on its servers.

https://archive.is/jUJEH

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#143

Post by Davidzheng »

medler wrote: post #124
alecco wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think he’s lucky that apparently many OpenAI employees support him This claim on the press had zero substance. It could well be, but there were no wide resignations or anything. Just 4 execs. OTOH, Altman going for the high score could bump employee TCO 10x. So who knows. Passion vs greed.

I’m old enough to remember when all the employees who supported him were going to resign at 5 pm Saturday

I think the hearts on Twitter was supposed to be a show of power on Sam's side. I wouldn't be surprised if that number is >20% of employees

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#144

Post by fidotron »

Davidzheng wrote: post #126
dontupvoteme wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All this talk of talent, they just end up with a company full of people driven only by monetary pursuits. How could it ever have worked with the non profit mission

This is anything involving Effective Altruists. It is a facade of respectability to justify chasing money at all costs.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#145

Post by cwillu »

Davidzheng wrote: post #133
cwillu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that, fundamentally, the only power the board _has_ is to fire the CEO. The CEO, not wanting to be fired, is therefore incentivized to manage the board's expectations, which looks a lot like being willing to take direction from the board if you squint a bit. The problem comes when the situations starts to resemble the line about how, if you owe a bank a billion dollars, you own the bank: if the di…

If you really believe in the ideology and believe that the continuation of openai is dangerous--shutting down the company completely should be an option you consider

Oh, absolutely, although you'd have to consider what happens to the tech and the people who developed it: it may be better to have the out-of-control genie at least nominally under your control than not.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#146

Post by naveen99 »

riffic wrote: post #20
chasd00 wrote: post #6

"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…

oh I recognize Taylor, he was on the former Twitter, Inc. board.

Oh man, Bret knows how’s to use the power of the board. He successfully twisted Elon’s arm into buying twitter. If the board is choosing him, sounds like they are going all oracle on microsoft / google again , Java style.

If Sam beats Ilya + Bret, I will be even more impressed than I already am.

Can’t wait for Matt Levine’s play by play if they hire the same legal team Bret used in the last days of twitter.

Or it’ll be over in 2 hrs and Sam will win now. Let’s see.

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#147

Post by JoeCortopassi »

kranke155 wrote: post #24
moralestapia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenAI will absolutely be able to raise money again, but it will likely never be on the same scale and will also likely have some serious safeguards in the contract language.

Whether you agree with investors agreeing with firing Sam or not, future investors will absolutely be nervous about sinking serious money in a company that split it's board without talking to key partners/investors first

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#148

Post by kwant_kiddo »

thepasswordis wrote: post #123
mrtksn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently, it’s very unclear who operates under what motives. How much is it about ego? How much is it about money and how much is it due to intellectual positions? Maybe there’re are no heroes and maybe there’re no antiheroes? With the recent news about other investments and deals, the facade doesn’t seem to even resemble the OpenAI’s reality. I can’t wait to read the autobiography of involved parties.

>Ego I can absolutely empathize with Ilya here, though. As far as I know the tech making openai function is largely his life’s work. It would be extremely frustrating to have Sam be the face of it, and be given the credit for it. Sam is clearly a very accomplished businessman and networker. Those people are super important, I wish I had a person like him on my team. I’ve had the experience of other people tacitly tak…

What makes you think it is 'his' work and not theirs? I remember when OpenAI was just a joke compared to Deepmind. The turning point (as I remember) was when they used [1] deep reinforcement learning on dota2. clearly iyla (also one of the authors) contributed, but so did many others on the team I assume?

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06680.pdf

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#149

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

hotnfresh wrote: post #46
brookst wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems clear that there weren’t specific reasons, just a kind of final straw in the product announcements that made the board realize how far from the original mission the company had drifted. Turning it into an emergency and surprise coup with innuendo of wrongdoing looks to have been a huge mistake, and may result in total loss of control where a more measured course correction could have succeeded.

Purely outside perspective, but people’ve been complaining for quite a while that OpenAI seems to have bailed on their original mission. Sure looks like Altman was capitalism’ing the whole thing—maybe not on purpose, but because it’s just the only way he knows to operate—and had kinda half-sold it to Microsoft, which sure is corroborated by folks posting on here expecting MS to now be in a position to forcibly overri…

Yeah it's interesting to me how many here on HN seem to be taking Sam's side -- I feel like I've noticed HN users in OpenAI threads mentioning how dishonest Sam is.

Sam seems to have a "move fast and break things" approach which would be appropriate for a less critical industry

Re: OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

#150

Post by throw555chip »

chucke1992 wrote: post #121
alecco wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only seen support for Altman from the press. (guess who spends ads on the press and has more political connections) The board was naive, to say the least.

Well, he is basically the face of OpenAI and ChatGPT and the whole AI push. And at the same time he is not unlikable either.

Which is unusual since it's been around since 1956:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...

"The field of AI research was founded at a workshop held on the campus of Dartmouth College, USA during the summer of 1956."

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