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OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

bloomberg.com

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

#221

Post by lobochrome »

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…

Ideas are like children. You don't just need to give birth to them; you also need to raise them, teach them, challenge them, and show them the world.

Giving birth to an idea is a necessary condition and sets the boundaries for so much of what it can achieve. But if you're unable to raise it to become a world champion, it isn't worth anything.

I've been on the raising ideas side way more in my 20+ career in tech. I know some people became bitter and scornful of me because I pushed their ideas to become something big and received a lot of credit for that. And I try to give credit where credit is due. But often enough, when I try to share the spotlight (in front of a customer or when presenting at BoD, for example), the brilliant engineer withers under pressure or actively harms his idea by pointing out its flaws excessively. It's a delicate balance.

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

#222

Post by AmericanOP »

rvnx wrote: post #197
jasonhansel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was pretty clearly an attempt by the board to reassert control, which was slowly slipping away as the company became more enmeshed with Microsoft.

Does that mean that the move of the board was actually good for openness of AI ?

Openness in the context of AI is not straightforward. The open source folks read it one way, and the alignment people read it another.

It is entirely possible a program that spits out the complete code for a nuclear targeting system should not be released in the wild.

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

#223

Post by nostrademons »

jasonhansel wrote: post #173

This is why, when you claim to be running a non-profit to "benefit humankind," you shouldn't put all your resources into a for-profit subsidiary. Eventually, the for-profit arm, and its investors, will find its nonprofit parent a hindrance, and an insular board of directors won't stand a chance against corporate titans.

The most logical outcome would be for Microsoft to buy the for-profit OpenAI entity off its non-profit parent for $50B or some other exorbitant sum. They have the money, this would give the non-profit researchers enough play money that they can keep chasing AGI indefinitely, all the employees who joined the for-profit entity chasing a big exit could see their payday, and the new corporate parent could do what they want with the tech, including deeply integrate it within their systems without fear of competing usages.

Extra points if Google were to sweep in and buy OpenAI. I think Sundar is probably too sleepy to manage it, but this would be a coup of epic proportions. They could replace their own lackluster GenAI efforts, lock out Microsoft and Bing from ChatGPT (or if contractually unable to, enshittify the product until nobody cares), and ensure their continued AI dominance. The time to do it is now, when the OpenAI board is down to 4 people, the current leader of whom has prior Google ties, and their interest is to play with AI as an academic curiosity, which a fat warchest would accomplish. Plus if the current board wants to slow down AI progress, one sure way to accomplish that would be to sell it to Google.

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

#224

Post by WanderPanda »

kwant_kiddo wrote: post #148
thepasswordis wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

The robotic hand Rubiks cube manipulation using RL was no joke either!

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

#225

Post by danenania »

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…

I think Sam has been given credit for being a good CEO and leader, which clearly is deserved. I've never heard him take credit for technical accomplishments. Ilya has been doing plenty of talks, podcasts, etc.--if anyone's the technical face of OpenAI, it's him. There's no lack of praise or credit given to him.

"Just speculating on how it might feel to Ilya watching Sam go on a world tour meeting heads of state to talk about what is largely Ilya’s work."

The whole point of a CEO is to do this kind of stuff. If your best engineers are going on world tours, talking to politicians, and preparing for keynotes, that's a pretty terrible use of their time. Not to mention that most of them would hate doing it.

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

#226

Post by TeMPOraL »

jasonhansel wrote: post #180
dnissley wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly it was the other way around this time, at least to start...

This was pretty clearly an attempt by the board to reassert control, which was slowly slipping away as the company became more enmeshed with Microsoft.

So basically, "if you aim for the king, you'd better not miss" kind of situation.

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

#227

Post by jkaplowitz »

skwirl wrote: post #53
d_sem wrote: post #4

It's worth knowing the specific reasons why the board fired Sam before assessing the value of this news. Too much rumor and not enough evidence.

It’s pretty clearly just a power play by four of the board members. Keep in mind Sam was part of the board and Greg Brockman was chairman of the board, so this was 4 board members ousting 2 other board members. OpenAI execs have already said it wasn’t for wrongdoing.

A majority of the board removing a minority of the board doesn’t seem like a power play to me. If the opposite were somehow achieved, e.g. through persuading one member of the majority to vote against their own interests, and using the chairman’s casting vote, that would be a power play.

Also, the executive who said it wasn’t for malfeasance wasn’t himself on the board and appears to be trying to push for Altman’s return. The board themselves has not yet said there was no malfeasance. To the contrary, they said that Altman had not been completely candid with them, which could very well be the last straw of malfeasance in a pattern of malfeasance which in aggregate reaches a sufficient threshold to justify a firing.

I don’t know whether there was or wasn’t malfeasance, but taking that executive’s word for it seems unwise in this polarized PR war.

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

#228

Post by rvnx »

nostrademons wrote: post #223
jasonhansel wrote: post #173

This is why, when you claim to be running a non-profit to "benefit humankind," you shouldn't put all your resources into a for-profit subsidiary. Eventually, the for-profit arm, and its investors, will find its nonprofit parent a hindrance, and an insular board of directors won't stand a chance against corporate titans.

The most logical outcome would be for Microsoft to buy the for-profit OpenAI entity off its non-profit parent for $50B or some other exorbitant sum. They have the money, this would give the non-profit researchers enough play money that they can keep chasing AGI indefinitely, all the employees who joined the for-profit entity chasing a big exit could see their payday, and the new corporate parent could do what they wa…

The new investors entered at a ~90B USD valuation for info.

Microsoft I don't think they need it:

Assuming they have the whole 90B USD to spend: it doesn't really make sense;

they have full access to the source-code of OpenAI and datasets (because the whole training and runtime runs on their servers already).

They could poach employees and make them better offers, and get away with a much more efficient cost-basis, + increase employee retention (whereas OpenAI employees may just become so rich after a buy-out that they could be tempted to leave).

They can replicate the tech internally without any doubt and without OpenAI.

Google is in deep trouble for now, perhaps they will recover with Gemini. In theory they could buy OpenAI but it seems out-of-character for them. They have strong internal political conflicts within Google, and technically it would be a nightmare to merge the infrastructure+code within their /google3 codebase and other Google-only dependencies soup.

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

#229

Post by _heimdall »

pests wrote: post #211
rvnx wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean that the move of the board was actually good for openness of AI ?

Is AI/AGI safety the same as openness?

No, though I think OpenAI at least wants to achieve both.

Whether we can actually safely develop AI or AGI is a much tougher question than whether that's the intent, unfortunately.

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

#230

Post by phpisthebest »

jasonhansel wrote: post #173

This is why, when you claim to be running a non-profit to "benefit humankind," you shouldn't put all your resources into a for-profit subsidiary. Eventually, the for-profit arm, and its investors, will find its nonprofit parent a hindrance, and an insular board of directors won't stand a chance against corporate titans.

See Mozilla for proof of this statement
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