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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

#231

Post by jazzyjackson »

capableweb wrote: post #116
spookthesunset wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worldcoin thing really bugs me too. Any time there is crypto, somebody is scamming somebody else. Worldcoin is no different in this regard.

Did you figure out the motives behind Bitcoin too while doing your research?

despite being invented for non-scam purposes, it turns out to be a productivity multipler for scammers more than anyone else.

and also Bitcoin might be the exception that proves the rule - every other chain or token is managed by a few insiders taking get-rich-quick marks for a ride.

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

#232

Post by mi_lk »

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

It for sure doesn't have sama's name on it. The point stands

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

#233

Post by gizmo »

BryantD wrote: post #154
gizmo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. As long as Sam has total control over the board it's fine if Iiya doesn't approve of everything Sam does. Not worth losing a top AI researcher over this.

That defeats the purpose of having a board. Which is sometimes the desired outcome, of course, but if I were Microsoft I am not sure I’d want Sam in there with zero checks and balances. I also wouldn’t want Ilya in there without checks and balances, to be clear. So the challenge is identifying the right adults. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that negotiation to complete successfully in the eyes of all parties…

If Sam returns he doesn't want to risk getting ousted again? So presumably he'll appoint people 100% loyal to him.

Plenty of precedent for tech founders to have total board control. It will take a little while for Sam to consolidate power, but he won't forget what happened this weekend and he'll play the long game accordingly.

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

#234

Post by TeMPOraL »

frabcus wrote: post #209
jart wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the kind of alignment we can expect from superintelligence? Gossiping, surprise trials, and purges?

Worse. Which is exactly why superintelligence is scary - it'll make the humans around it go wild for power, and then it will be impossible (by definition) to predict.

Huh. I imagined many scenarios, including the more obvious and dangerous one, "AI manipulating people unaware of its existence" - but I never considered a scenario in which the AI makes its existence widely known, and perhaps presents itself as more dangerous than it is, and then it just starts slightly nudging all the people racing to take control over it.

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

#235

Post by jkaplowitz »

tempnow987 wrote: post #118
dontupvoteme wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. and MS takes a massive hit financially as they're hardpdroven as an unreliable cloud service.

Uh, you have a nonprofit board firing a CEO at a board meeting that doesn't even sound like was properly noticed. Was the board president even given time to attend? And Microsoft has total rights to the models and weights, so they can CONTINUE their services and then spin up with Sam's new company.

If they had written consents from a majority of the board to remove Altman and Brockman from the board, then depending on the applicable nonprofit law and corporate governance documents, the board removals may very well have been legally conducted without need for a properly noticed board meeting. (For the actual firing of Altman, that might have been legal either through written consents or through a board meeting after the removals of Altman and Brockman.)

Having no information on what laws and governance documents apply to OpenAI or on what steps the board took, I express no opinion on whether the legal requirements were actually met, but it’s possible they were.

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

#236

Post by timeon »

rvnx wrote: post #228
nostrademons wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, +…

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

Would they be also able to keep up with development?

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

#237

Post by timeon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #226
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.

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

More like last desperate attempt.

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

#239

Post by next_xibalba »

itchy_spider44 wrote: post #16
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.

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.

He seems to have gone the way of Eliezer Yudkowsky (but with actual technical chops).

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

#240

Post by shoggouth »

pyaamb wrote: post #186

Does the story of Sam raising funds from Saudi investors to start a AI Chip company have any relevance to what happened or is that just a nothing-burger? I don't any people on HN discussing it today

Is that related to GlobalFoundries?
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