Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 596 posts

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

#341

Post by HPsquared »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #335
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, though, is without the huge commercial and societal success of ChatGPT, the AI Safety camp had no real leverage over the direction of AI advancement worldwide. I mean, there are tons of think tanks, advocacy organizations, etc. that write lots of AI safety papers that nobody reads. I'm kind of piqued at the OpenAI board not because I think they had the wrong intentions, but because they failed to see tha…

Better to have a small but independent voice that can grow in influence then being shackled by commercial interest and lose your integrity - e.g. How many people actually gives a shit what Google has to say about internet governance?

A LOT of people care about what Google does in that area. What they say is kinda redundant.

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

#342

Post by VectorLock »

vanshg wrote: post #274
pdntspa wrote: post #246

I really hope Altman doesn't return to his role. It is nice to see some people showing some spine and standing up to business interestes. "Open"AI is and was a lie for the longest time.

He confirmed he's returning: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1726345564059832609

What's up with these guys not using capital letters?

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

#343

Post by paulddraper »

sensanaty wrote: post #336

Why are people suddenly jacking Altman off so hard? What has this non-technical dude done other than trying to corner the AI market for himself and implementing insane bullshit like worldcoin for him to deserve such weird devotion?

Um...what

He's secured the resources and partnerships to grow a $100B company virtually overnight, but he hasn't done anything noteworthy or laudible?

HN takes are the best. Humor really is the best medicine.

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

#344

Post by cthalupa »

aitrw wrote: post #311
aeonik wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Significantly more info out and available now than when they worked on that project, too. It's only gotten easier.

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

#345

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

sethherr wrote: post #327
junofan wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would any employee put up with that? Why not go work somewhere else that better aligns with what you want?

What is it that you want that this doesn’t offer?

I think the idea of separate groups within the company checking and balancing each other is not a great idea. This is essentially what Google set up with their "Ethical AI" group, but this just led to an adversarial relationship with that group seeing their primary role as putting up as many roadblocks and vetoes as possible over the teams actually building AI (see the whole Timnit Gebru debacle). This led to a lot of the top AI talent at Google jumping ship to other places where they could move faster.

I think a better approach is to have a system of guiding principles that should guide everyone, and then putting in place a structure where there needs to be periodic alignment that those principles aren't being violated (e.g. a vote requiring something like a supermajority across company leadership of all orgs in the company, but no single org has the "my job is to slow everyone else down" role).

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

#346

Post by smoldesu »

p1esk wrote: post #312
smoldesu wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Beating OpenAI in a money-pissing competition is not their priority. I don't use Google or harbor much love for them, but the existence of AI does not detract from the value of advertising. If anything, it funnels more people into it as they're looking to monetize that which is unprofitable. ChatGPT is not YouTube; it doesn't print money.

Feel however you will about it, but people have been rattling this pan for decades now. Google's bottom line will exist until someone finds a better way to extract marginal revenue than advertising.

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

#347

Post by sangnoir »

Aeolun wrote: post #304

At the risk of being off topic (well, definitely): > in a post on X, formerly Twitter It keep surprising me that someone can so completely torpedo their brand that news organisations feel compelled to keep referring to the old name so people have some idea of what they’re talking about.

The last time I recall the press using similar language was when the subject was intentionally damaging their own brand due to a contract grievance: "[glyph] (the artist formerly known as Prince)"

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

#348

Post by zug_zug »

silenced_trope wrote: post #330
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.

> 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. To be frank, they need to really spell out what "benefitting mankind" is. How is it measured? Or is it measured? Or is it just "the board says this isn't doing that so it's not doing that"? It's honestly a silly slogan.

They should define it, sure. Here's what I'd expect this means:

- Not limiting access to a universally profitable technology by making it only accessible to highest bidder (e.g. hire our virtual assistants for 30k a year).

- Making models with a mind to all threats (existential, job replacement, scam uses)

- Potentially open-sourcing models that are deemed safe

So far I genuinely believe they are doing the first two and leaving billions on the table they could get by jacking their price 10x or more.

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

#349

Post by [deleted] »

aitrw wrote: post #306
aunty_helen wrote: post #212

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.

>safe available agi for all. And they can pick two. Gpus don't grow on trees so without billions in funding they can't provide it to everyone. Available means that I should have access to the weights. Safe means they want to control what people can use it for. The board prioritised safe over everything else. I fundamentally disagree with that and welcome the counter coup.

[deleted]

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

#350

Post by lmm »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #249
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 problem, though, is without the huge commercial and societal success of ChatGPT, the AI Safety camp had no real leverage over the direction of AI advancement worldwide. I mean, there are tons of think tanks, advocacy organizations, etc. that write lots of AI safety papers that nobody reads. I'm kind of piqued at the OpenAI board not because I think they had the wrong intentions, but because they failed to see tha…

> That is, the board should have realistically known that there will be a huge arms race for AI dominance. Some would say that's capitalism - I say that's just human nature. So the board of OpenAI was in a unique position to help guide AI advancement in as safe a manner as possible because they had the most advanced AI system. They may have thought Altman was pushing too hard on the commercial side, but there are a million better ways they could have fought for AI safety without causing the ruckus they did.

If the board were to have any influence they had to be able to do this. Whether this was the right time and the right issue to play their trump card I don't know - we still don't know what exactly happened - but I have a lot more respect for a group willing to take their shot than one that is so worried about losing their influence that they can never use it.

Post reply on HN