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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

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. They still would have needed to have a majority of board seats on their side - I mean, Brockman was chairman of the board and he didn't find out about all this until the machinations were complete. Read a good a article about the history of the OpenAI board that argued this all went down due to the recent loss of 3 board members, bringing total board membership from 9 to 6 (including losses like Reid…

What’s the article? Sounds interesting

https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

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

#543
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google's advantage here is so blatantly obvious

Exactly. Google has so much more resources, tries so hard to compete (it's literally life or death for them), and yet it's still so far behind. It's strange that you don't see that - if you haven't tried comparing Bard's output to GPT-4 for the same questions - try it, it will become obvious.

It's quite possible their rumored Gemini model might finally catch up with GPT-4 at some point in the future - probably around the time GPT-5 is released.

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

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Ilya’s problem with Sam was that he was acting out on his own and deviating from founding principles, he’s not going to have a good time under Elon.

Ilya has worked for Elon in the past without incident. I doubt it would be a problem.

[deleted]

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

#545
post #316
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you do it properly, from the outside it seems sudden.

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

#546
I only got to know Altman from the Lex Fridman podcast, but he never striked me as particularly ethical or insightful.

For a while I felt more hopeful about OpenAI being truly open and benefiting everyone (perhaps I was naive).

I hope he doesn't end up being the CEO again.

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

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The loyalty was significant. The PR was meh

It was, but still: perception matters and Sam has - contrary to the board - not made many wrong moves since this whole thing started. Note that this is all extremely rapidly developing and it's very hard to do all of this on the fly when you don't expect to even be in this situation and not miss a beat. The board however has only made things ever more murky with their vague and fig-leaf like defenses. They appear utt…

If they had said "Sam has helped OpenAI tremendously over the years, and we thank him for his invaluable contributions. Going forward, he will be using his skill set to pursue other opportunities, while OpenAI continues its mission to advance AI for the betterment of humanity."

That would at least made it seem like they knew what they were doing.

But investors would have still beaten them over the head.

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

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Come on now, does it sound like Musk to you to leave due to the prospect of profit? Surely there was some kind of power struggle there that he couldn't win, and the mission thing was a good story to tell others.

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

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was, but still: perception matters and Sam has - contrary to the board - not made many wrong moves since this whole thing started. Note that this is all extremely rapidly developing and it's very hard to do all of this on the fly when you don't expect to even be in this situation and not miss a beat. The board however has only made things ever more murky with their vague and fig-leaf like defenses. They appear utt…

If they had said "Sam has helped OpenAI tremendously over the years, and we thank him for his invaluable contributions. Going forward, he will be using his skill set to pursue other opportunities, while OpenAI continues its mission to advance AI for the betterment of humanity." That would at least made it seem like they knew what they were doing. But investors would have still beaten them over the head.

Yes, that's true. But that's exactly the kind of thing that would have at least given it a semblance of being an orderly decision and it would have stopped a ton of negative press in its tracks.

It's like a dance, you can't just go do the Polka if everybody expects a Waltz, that's going to attract a ton of attention. They should have gotten out in front of any potential blowback to ensure that even if their decision was by the book (which for their sake I hope it was) that it also didn't ruffle the scales of very large dragons.

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

#550
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is a complete departure from past stated means without clear justification.

Some would say it is the opposite way around. Mission of openAI was not supposed to be maximising profit/value. Especially if it can be argued that this exactly goes against its original purpose.
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