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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

#311
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nuclear codes, assuming they are using modern cryptography would not be spat out by any AI, unless they were leaked publicly. Bigger concern would be the construction of a bomb, which, still, takes a lot of hard to hide resources. I'm more worried about other kinds of weapons, but at the same time I really don't like the idea of censoring the science of nature from people. I think the only long term option is to beef…

>Bigger concern would be the construction of a bomb, which, still, takes a lot of hard to hide resources.

The average postgraduate in physics can design a nuclear bomb. That ship sailed in the 1960s. Anyone who uses that as an argument wants a censorship regime that the medieval catholic church would find excessive.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/24/usa.science

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

#312
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

both Google and Meta have extremely competitive LLMs No they don’t. Both Bard and Llama are far behind GPT-4, and GPT-4 finished training in August 2022.

GPT-4 is a magnitude larger and not a magnitude better. Even before that, GPT-3 was not a particularly high watermark (compared to T5 and BERT) and GPT-2 was famously so expensive to run that it ran up a 6-figure monthly cloud spend just for inferencing. Lord knows what GPT-4 costs at-scale, but I'm not convinced it's cost-competitive with the alternatives.

GPT-4 is an existential threat to Google. Since March 24 of this year, 80% of the time I ask GPT-4 questions I would google before. And Google knows this. They are throwing billions at it but simply cannot catch up.

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

#313
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is with the misinformation. The original Verge article says (with no given sources): > missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. The tweet removes the qualifier: > The staff at OpenAI set a 5PM deadline for the entire board to resign, or else they quit and join Sam in his new company. And you seem to parrot that point even though it is well past that deadline and no news of…

It's all rumours yes, but I'd be inclined to believe that the majority of staff aligns with @sama, and not with Ilya and the board. If this wasn't true, Satya wouldn't be sitting right now in a room with them trying to put out the fire.

This is not healthy approach. (In general. This particular drama is irrelevant for us.)

You are set on believes based on rumors.

Microsoft's power has nothing to do with OpenAI employees.

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The board were literally doing their job. Anyone claiming incompetence is just mistaken about the stated goal of openai: safe available agi for all. Throw in a huge investment, a 90 billion dollar valuation and a rockstar ceo. It’s pretty clear the court of public opinion is wrong about this case.

Competence is generally about effectiveness of execution, and less about intent. This was a foreseeable hot mess executed with staggering naïveté.

For sure. What league did they think they were playing in?

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

#315
post #183

As of this moment the website still says under: https://openai.com/our-structure Our board "OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner." There is also a prominent red notice that seems made for somebody in Sea…

This is amusing because the first two statements are bland legalese you’ll see in many investments. The last point is wildly speculative futurism.

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

#316
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that nothing criminal happened, canning Sam with no chance for discussion was just overkill. It's probably more of an intellectual / philosophical position, given that they just did not think through the real impact on the business (and thus the mission itself) I'm inclined to assume that something stupid was done. It happens. They should resolve it, fix the rules for how the board can behave, and move on. Desp…

While we don’t know the whole story, I don’t think Sam is innocent in this matter. It seems likely that this was a recurring disagreement, and perhaps this was simply a step too far where the board had to act. When you fire somebody, typically you don’t give them a heads up.

You don’t typically do it this quickly either.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The board were literally doing their job. Anyone claiming incompetence is just mistaken about the stated goal of openai: safe available agi for all. Throw in a huge investment, a 90 billion dollar valuation and a rockstar ceo. It’s pretty clear the court of public opinion is wrong about this case.

they likely could have negotiated it better, but I agree, all these Altman fans really suggest the cult of business sapping any nonprofit motive.

It is hard to negotiate when the investors and for-profit part basically has much more power. They tried to bring them in front of a fait accompli situation, as this was their only chance, but they seem to have failed. I do not think they had a better move in the current situation right now, sadly.

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

#318
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't sufficient for Google+ or Farmville either, but both Google and Meta have extremely competitive LLMs. If Microsoft commit themselves (which is a big if ), they could have a competitive AI research lab. They're a cloud company now though, so it makes sense that they'd align themselves with the most service-oriented business of the lot.

both Google and Meta have extremely competitive LLMs No they don’t. Both Bard and Llama are far behind GPT-4, and GPT-4 finished training in August 2022.

Why does ChatGPT-4 say its knowledge cut off date is April 2023?

https://chat.openai.com/share/3dd98da4-13a5-4485-a916-60482a...

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

#320
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're still waiting for the explanations from Altman about the alleged involvement in spending time on conflicting companies while he is CEO at OpenAI. According to FT this could be the cause for the firing: “Sam has a company called Oklo, and [was trying to launch] a device company and a chip company (for AI). The rank and file at OpenAI don’t dispute those are important. The dispute is that OpenAI doesn’t own a pie…

I don’t see how that factors in. What matters is OpenAI’s enterprise customers reading about a boardroom coup in the WSJ. Completely avoidable destruction of value.

This is toatlly irrelevant to the board's initial decision though.
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