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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

#511

Post by chmod600 »

rowls66 wrote: post #191

This seems to me like an example of how difficult it is to organize a company around a goal other then making money. As a non-profit, OpanAI was not supposed to be a profit maximizing enterprise. But how is a board supposed to opperate, and set objectives without a clear goal like profit maximization? Usually a boards represents the owners of the business and their interested. The OpenAI board does not represent the…

How is board membership controlled?

For a profit company, you buy shares and elect the board, right? If they turn the company into something nobody wants, the shares lose value, and maybe someone picks up the shares cheap and turns it around. So there's a feedback cycle. The profit motive is almost incidental.

But here do the current board members just appoint the next board members and grow/shrink the total number?

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

#512

Post by jacquesm »

hotnfresh wrote: post #441
TeMPOraL wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both are too complicated. All a true AI has to do to get control of everything is promise 10% annual returns and guaranteed victory in battle. Limited-time offer, sign up today. Done. Any actual AI takeover will be boring and largely voluntary. For certain definitions of voluntary.

That's the playbook of any dictator. Hitch your horse to my wagon and we'll go places. But stray from the wagon and I'll have you shot by someone who is loyal to me. And it works. Without their henchmen little creeps wouldn't get out of the gate because they are invariably complete cowards.

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

#513

Post by crotchfire »

mr_toad wrote: post #466
4death4 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the data is easily accessible. If you wanted to get your hands on the data while simultaneously keeping them clean, contract with a Russian contracting company to give you a data dump. You don't need to know how they got it.

Subcontracting out your crimes isn’t going to fly in court.

[flagged]

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

#514

Post by jacquesm »

siva7 wrote: post #104
breadwinner wrote: post #57

The key question in my mind is not who is going to be on the new board, but whether Ilya Sutskever will stay if Altman comes back. I worry that OpenAI without Ilya is not going to produce groundbreaking innovations at the same pace. Hopefully Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever can patch things up. That's more important than who they add or remove to the board.

Ilya will do just fine after openai but there is zero chance that he will stay there as too many bridges are burned.

Finding co-founders might be a bit harder than it was before.

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

#515

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

monocasa wrote: post #454
Shekelphile wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think getting training data is that hard still, the biggest platforms that locked down their APIs still use them for their mobile apps and can easily be reverse engineered to find keys or undocumented endpoints (or in the case of reddit, an entirely different internal API with less limits and a lot more info leaks...)

Easier than that would just be downloading the torrent of all of Reddit through Sept 2023. https://academictorrents.com/details/89d24ff9d5fbc1efcdaf9d7...

The question is: if you then added all of Usenet before, say, 1992, would the effective intelligence of the trained LLM go up or down?

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

#516

Post by rblatz »

coderenegade wrote: post #460
shoelessone wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the logic here that training a base model isn’t as easy or even possible in the same way that OpenAI did in the past, and that what they have in a trained model is valuable in that even with all the code and experience it couldn’t be reproduced today with new restrictions?

Yes, potentially. The data has to come from somewhere, and all of the outlets that were used to train ChatGPT, stable diffusion, etc. have since been locked down. Any new company that Sam Altman makes in the AI space won't be competing just on merits of talent and product, they will also need to pay for and negotiate access to data. I'd actually expect this to get far worse going forward, now that other organizations…

Couldn’t he just partner with Microsoft and start with the Bing corpus?

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

#517

Post by jacquesm »

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…

They may not want it for reasons all their own such as to avoid being seen as conflicted or privy to information that they aren't supposed to have just in case they end up competing with OpenAI. Microsoft legal is in the driving seat for things like this not tech or finance.

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

#518

Post by somenameforme »

timeon wrote: post #259
rowls66 wrote: post #191

This seems to me like an example of how difficult it is to organize a company around a goal other then making money. As a non-profit, OpanAI was not supposed to be a profit maximizing enterprise. But how is a board supposed to opperate, and set objectives without a clear goal like profit maximization? Usually a boards represents the owners of the business and their interested. The OpenAI board does not represent the…

> This seems to me like an example of how difficult it is to organize a company around a goal other then making money. Hard in sense that for-profit part has actual power here?

Corruption. 7 guys in a room may think they genuinely think one way. But change that picture to 7 guys in a room, alongside $10 billion dollars, and some, if not most, are suddenly going to start thinking in an entirely different way - even without needing to be 'persuaded.' Sums up politics and many other issues in society as well. People themselves don't even know who they are, until they have the freedom and resources to be whatever they want to be.

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

#519

Post by 4death4 »

mr_toad wrote: post #466
4death4 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the data is easily accessible. If you wanted to get your hands on the data while simultaneously keeping them clean, contract with a Russian contracting company to give you a data dump. You don't need to know how they got it.

Subcontracting out your crimes isn’t going to fly in court.

Really? It's done pretty regularly to limit liability.

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

#520

Post by jacquesm »

stingraycharles wrote: post #295
shivawu wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. This incident has proven MSFT’s strong hands without a board seat and they don’t really need it if things do/did go off the rails.

Isn’t the point that if MSFT had a board seat, this whole problem likely wouldn’t have happened in the first place?

Possibly but not certainly. It would have deadlocked the vote if a board member would have been replaced and it would have still passed if Microsoft had had an extra seat (4:2 -> 3:3) vs (4:2 -> 4:3) assuming the Microsoft representative to the board would vote against having Altman removed.

What I'm fairly sure of though is that if the board had been stocked with heavyweights rather than lightweights that this would have been handled in a procedural correct way with a lot more chance that it would stick.

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