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

Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 979 posts

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#231

Post by alsodumb »

cj wrote: post #195
alsodumb wrote: post #51

I think Adam D'Angelo has a very strong conflict of interest and shouldn't have been on the board of OpenAI. I'm sure Quora views took a hit after ChatGPT. Not like Quora was any good before ChatGPT, they just managed to get to the top of Google results for a lot of common questions. Now, Poe by Quora was trying to go big on custom agents. The GPT Agents announcement on DevDay was a fundamental threat to Poe in many…

I could be wrong, but I thought I saw something about Quora's use of LLMs improving their SEO (the LLM answer to most questions is embedded on the Quora page) and potentially driving more traffic. If you look at Poe as a value add for existing Quora users, instead of a feature that is going to grow their userbase, it's still a net win for Quora even if GPT agents exist simultaneously.

Quora SEO'd their way to the top of most Google searches before the LLMs era.

Poe is not really meant as a value addition for Quora users. Poe was a general AI chat company, like ChatGPT.

Poe's unique selling point was their 'chat agents with customizable instructions/personality' and they were charging people money for this while pretty much building on OpenAI GPT API. They also had an agents store.

During DevDay when Sam announced GPTAgents and store, that was a fundamental threat to Poes existance.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#233

Post by slkdjfalzkdfj »

alsodumb wrote: post #51

I think Adam D'Angelo has a very strong conflict of interest and shouldn't have been on the board of OpenAI. I'm sure Quora views took a hit after ChatGPT. Not like Quora was any good before ChatGPT, they just managed to get to the top of Google results for a lot of common questions. Now, Poe by Quora was trying to go big on custom agents. The GPT Agents announcement on DevDay was a fundamental threat to Poe in many…

Adam was appointed to the OpenAI board in April 2018, long before ChatGPT and Poe. He's always been somewhat interested/involved in AI/ML so the appointment broadly makes sense to me.

Also keep in mind that a year earlier in Spring 2017 Sam Altman led Quora's Series D, after YC previously joined in on Quora's Series C in 2014. So the two of them clearly had some pre-existing relationship.

I don't think OpenAI and Quora (the product) are a serious conflict of interest. You claim "I'm sure Quora views took a hit after ChatGPT" but I really doubt that's true in any meaningful way. Quora's struggles are a separate issue and predate the GPT craze of the last year.

Nor were Poe and OpenAI competitors until recently; Poe was simply building on top of OpenAI models, the same as hundreds of other ventures in the space right now.

However...I do agree that the GPTs announcement two weeks ago now creates a very clear conflict of interest--OpenAI is now competing directly against Poe. And because of that, I agree that Adam probably should leave the board.

The timing also raises the question of whether booting Sam is in any way related to the GPTs launch and to Poe. Perhaps Sam wasn't candid about the fact that they were about to be competing with Adam's company. The whole thing is messy and not a good look and exactly why you try to avoid these conflicts of interest to begin with.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#234

Post by jxi »

mschuetz wrote: post #180
mupuff1234 wrote: post #168

Which character is Gordon Joseph Levitt gonna play when the movie comes out?

A board member's husband?

It's certainly telling when you're more known to be an actor's wife than anything to do with AI or the company you're on the board for.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#235

Post by reducesuffering »

ryanSrich wrote: post #190
chubot wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I think is funny is how the whole "we're just doing this to make sure AI is safe" meme breaks down, if you have OpenAI, Anthropic, and Altman AI all competing, which seems likely now. Do you really need all 3? Is each one going to claim that they're the only ones who can develop AGI safely? Since Sam left, now OpenAI is unsafe? But I thought they were the safe ones, and he was being reckless. Or is Sam just goin…

Can someone explain to me what they mean by "safe" AGI? I've looked in many places and everyone is extremely vague. Certainly no one is suggesting these systems can become "alive", so what exactly are we trying to remain safe from? Job loss?

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

Signed by Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Yoshua Bengio, Geoff Hinton, Demis Hassabis (DeepMind CEO), Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO), and Bill Gates.

https://twitter.com/robbensinger/status/1726039794197872939

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#236

Post by TillE »

zombiwoof wrote: post #135

Can’t wait to see how many staffers who said they would quit sheep their way into the office tomorrow to collect their million dollar salaries Thanks Sam we bluffed but no way we quiting

It'd be pretty silly to quit in this situation, unless you just absolutely loved and worshiped Sam. You wouldn't be acting on some moral principle.

The only thing the board has really done wrong is not communicating their reasons clearly.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#237

Post by ah765 »

valine wrote: post #97

Not a word from Ilya. I can’t wrap my mind around his motivation. Did he really fire Sam over “AI safety” concerns? How is that remotely rational.

It might be because of AI safety, but I think it's more likely because Sam was executing plans without informing the board, such as making deals with outside companies, allocating funds to profit-oriented products and making announcements about them, and so on. Perhaps he also wanted to reduce investment in the alignment research that Ilya considered important. Hopefully we'll learn the truth soon, though I suspect that it involves confidential deals with other companies and that's why we haven't heard anything.

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#238

Post by enigmurl »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #204
azurezyq wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, we are dealing with people and people think differently so they won't move altogether. Moving to a new company under Alt is not an easy choice, at least the new company: - Does not yet have a big model (need $$$ and months to train, if code is ready) - Does not have proprietary code OpenAI has right now - Does not have labeled data ($$$ and time) and chatgpt logs - Does not have ChatGpt brand...

I thought GPT-4 was not trained on labeled data, but simply on a large volume of text / code. Most of it is publicly accessible: wikipedia, archives of scientific articles, books, github, plus probably purchased data from text-heavy sites like Reddit.

Assuming it's a reference to RLHF? Not sure

Re: Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

#240

Post by spaceman_2020 »

altdataseller wrote: post #88
TechnicolorByte wrote: post #57

I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend. If it’s true that Altman won’t return to OpenAI (or alternatively: that the current board won’t step down) then where does that leave OpenAI? Microsoft can’t be happy, as evidenced by reporting that Nadella was acting as mediator to bring him back. Does OpenAI survive this? Will be super inter…

OpenAI has hundreds more employees, all of whom are incredibly smart. While they will definitely lose the leadership and talent of those two, it’s not as if a nuclear bomb dropped on their HQ and wiped out all their engineers! So questioning whether they will survive seems very silly and incredibly premature to me

If the funding dries up for OpenAI, those engineers have no incentive to keep working there. No point wasting your career on an organization that's destined to die.
Post reply on HN