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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

#501

Post by skygazer »

aunty_helen wrote: post #486
skygazer wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing their most viable path was to fire him, wreak havoc and immediately seek to rehire and further empower him whilst diminishing themselves in the process? It's so convoluted, it just might work! Whether fulfilling their mission or succumbing to palace intrigue, it was a gamble they took. If they didn't realize it was a gamble, then they didn't think hard enough first. If they did realize the risks, but t…

No, I’m not???

Oh, then my apologies, it's unclear to me what you're arguing; That the disaster they find themselves in wasn't foreseeable?

That would imply they couldn’t have considered that Altman was beloved by vital and devoted employees? That big investors would be livid and take action? That the world would be shocked by a successful CEO being unceremoniously sacked during unprecedented success, with (unsubstantiated) allegations of wrongdoing, and leap on the story. Generally those are the kinds of things that would have come up on a "Fire Sam Pro and Cons" list. Or any kind "what's the best way to get what we want and avoid disaster" planning session. They made the way it was done the story, and if they had a good reason, it's been obscured and undermined by attempting to reinstate him.

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

#502

Post by jacquesm »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #394

Many are speculating that Sam Altman could just move on and create another OpenAI 2.0 because he could easily attract talent and investors. What this misses is all the regulatory capture that he’s been campaigning for. All the platforms have now closed their gardens. Authors and artists are much more vigilant about copyright etc. So it’s now a totally different game compared to 3 years ago because the data is not jus…

What has been crawled stays crawled and there are plenty of copies of sets of tokens that can be used to retrain a model. For a bit of money you can probably get any set that you really want (bit: billions, but pocket change for anything that is going to go head to head with OpenAI).

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

#503

Post by smoldesu »

p1esk wrote: post #437
smoldesu wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deca…

Beating OpenAI in a money-pissing competition is not their priority I bet Google has already spent an order of magnitude more money on GPT-4 rival development than OpenAI spent on GPT-4.

For the sake of your wallet, I hope you don't put money on that. Google certainly spends an order of magnitude more than OpenAI because they have been around longer than them, ship their own hardware and maintain their own inferencing library. The amount they spend on training their LLMs is the minority, full-stop.

I despise both of these companies, but Google's advantage here is so blatantly obvious that I struggle to see how you can even defend OpenAI like this.

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

#505

Post by jacquesm »

facu17y wrote: post #434
agnosticmantis wrote: post #394

Many are speculating that Sam Altman could just move on and create another OpenAI 2.0 because he could easily attract talent and investors. What this misses is all the regulatory capture that he’s been campaigning for. All the platforms have now closed their gardens. Authors and artists are much more vigilant about copyright etc. So it’s now a totally different game compared to 3 years ago because the data is not jus…

You are assuming he wouldn't steal t from OpenAI. He could have a low level employee steal it, and manage to keep it a secret until AGI is born then he takes over the world.

This is a pretty wild comment. That's a very safe assumption and no low level employee will do Sams bidding in an illegal enterprise. And keeping it a secret isn't going to work either and whether or not AGI is 'born' (who will bear it) is an open question to which I hope the answer is 'not for a while'. Because we haven't even figured out how to get humans to cooperate which I think should be a prerequisite.

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

#506

Post by somenameforme »

RivieraKid wrote: post #170
someperson wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk has been very critical of OpenAI's switch from a non-profit focused on AI safety to a for-profit competing with Tesla. It's why he fell out and left OpenAI despite investing $100 million to start it. I'd say he's well aligned with Ilya's position. Early on I wondered if he was an instigator of the entire board coup.

He left because they didn't allow him to be in charge.

Musk left in 2018 after disagreements over the future of the company. In 2019 OpenAI started their 'OpenAI LP' for-profit entity. It seems entirely reasonable that the profit vs mission motive that seems to be driving this issue, is also what drove Musk to leave.

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

#507

Post by Davidzheng »

belter wrote: post #208
Davidzheng wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worst part is their own employees don't care about the non profits value

Because they were promised shares for a future IPO?

I thought they are given shares to the private owned for profit branch--not that it will ever IPO?

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

#508

Post by jatins »

jjeaff wrote: post #262
danenania wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ta…

I'm a developer and have used Open AI as a beta user from before their public launch and been interested in the structure and business side of AI and had never heard of Ilya until this recent blowup. I'm just one data point, but my guess is that the vast, vast majority of the public that knows anything about AI has also never heard of Ilya.

Obviously Ilya will not be as famous as Sam since Sam is doing world tours and talking to who's who of world politics. But Ilya, Karpathy, gdb all are well respected and know in dev circles.

Even the recent OpenAI profile in one of prominent publications covered Mira, Ilya and gdb in addition to Sam.

But the fundamental question is why would a researcher expect (if they do) that they will be as well known as the CEO who is the face of organisation?

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

#509

Post by jacquesm »

kernal wrote: post #431
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…

Ilya doesn’t want to be known as the Steve Wozniak in this relationship while Sam is perceived as the Steve Jobs. Unless you’re technically inclined no one remembers or praises the contributions of the Woz.

I think there is a lot to be said for being remembered as the Steve Wozniak. I'd much rather be remembered as Wozniak than as Jobs.

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

#510

Post by icelancer »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #261
g42gregory wrote: post #182

From the article: "...but Microsoft hasn’t decided whether it wants board representation..." This is not a good sign. Microsoft the largest $10Bn investor, who is in the middle of pushing through the restructuring of the company, hasn't decided if they want board representation? The only reason you would do that if they want to keep their options open, in the future, to hit OpenAI hard (legally and/or to raid the per…

Everyone keeps saying that Microsoft made a huge mistake by not having board representation, and I couldn't disagree more. Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI was really ideal from a speed-of-advancement perspective. That is, reams and reams have been written about how Google has to move at such a slow pace with AI productization because, essentially, they have so much to lose. Microsoft saw this first hand with the…

Exactly. The board thought a piece of paper somehow superceded Microsoft's (Satya's, really) soft power.

It doesn't. It never does. Especially when you're not profitable.

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