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Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

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

#321

Post by awb »

CSMastermind wrote: post #196
jxi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her move makes even less sense than what the board did. The board told her the day before that they're firing Sam, so she obviously accepted it. But, one day later she caves and sides with Sam (that's what the heart tweet means)? That's weak leadership and resolve.

Seems pretty reasonable she would accept it at first while she was still figuring out what's going on. Like the board presumably called her and said, "hey Sam is out, you're the CEO for now, more details to come" And then in the next 48 hours she had a chance to talk to Sam and others and realize that she was on his side.

> the board presumably called her and said, "hey Sam is out, you're the CEO for now, more details to come"

I wouldn’t take over as CEO or interim-CEO unless I knew why the previous CEO was fired and was OK with the process and reasoning.

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

#322

Post by comp_throw7 »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #140
reducesuffering wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad news for you, their last CEO was too. Sam Altman signed a statement saying "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." Looks like you're not on any of their team, but you do have crypto king Marc Andreessen. https://twitter.com/robbensinger/status/1726039794197872939

> Bad news for you, their last CEO was too. Did anyone believe that he seriously believed in that? I thought the consensus was he was angling for a government backed monopoly with OpenAI as the “steward” of large AI models.

This view was totally divorced from reality. Sam literally laid out his own case for AI posing an extinction risk on his blog in 2015, before OpenAI was even founded: https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

"Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) [1] is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."

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

#323

Post by yeck »

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…

Well, despite what Musk did, X (Twitter?) has still been limping along for quite a while now. While more abrupt and surprising, this doesn't seem nearly as bad as that.

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

#325

Post by ignoramous »

mcpackieh wrote: post #254
ignoramous wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did he really fire Sam over "AI safety" concerns? How is that remotely rational. Not rational iff (and unlike Sustkever, Hinton, Bengio) you are not a "doomer" / "decel". Ilya's very vocal and on record that he suspects there may be "something else" going on with these models. He and DeepMind claim AlphaGo is already AGI (correction: ASI) in a very narrow domain ( https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/2311.02462/ ).…

> "[Artificial General Intelligence] in a very narrow domain ." Which is it?

Read the paper linked above, and if you don't agree that's okay. There are many who don't.

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

#327

Post by 15457345234 »

nickkao wrote: post #282
15457345234 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always been my observation that the actual heavyweights of any hardcore engineering project are the ones that avoid snarky lightweight platforms like twitter like the plague. I would imagine that if you based hiring and firing decisions on the metric of 'how often this employee tweets' you could quite effectively cut deadwood. With that in mind...

[flagged]

lolno

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

#329

Post by esjeon »

ignoramous wrote: post #203
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.

> Did he really fire Sam over "AI safety" concerns? How is that remotely rational. Not rational iff (and unlike Sustkever, Hinton, Bengio) you are not a "doomer" / "decel". Ilya's very vocal and on record that he suspects there may be "something else" going on with these models. He and DeepMind claim AlphaGo is already AGI (correction: ASI) in a very narrow domain ( https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/2311.02462/ ).…

> AGI in a very narrow domain

The definition of AGI always puzzles me, because "G" in AGI is general, and the word certainly don't play well w/ "narrow". AGI is a new buzzword I guess.

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

#330

Post by maxbond »

surrealize wrote: post #211
yreg wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The board firing a CEO is hardly a hostile takeover.

If you fire one board member (Altman) and remove another from the board (Brockman) it's not exactly friendly either

Firing generally isn't friendly, but no one "took over." The people who had the power exercised it. Maybe they shouldn't have, I feel no compulsion to argue on their behalf, but calling it a "takeover" isn't correct.

I think when people say "takeover" or "coup" it's because they want to convey their view of the moral character of events, that they believe it was an improper decision. But it muddies the waters and I wish they'd be more direct. "It's a coup" is a criticism of how things happened, but the substantive disagreements are actually about that it happened and why it happened.

I see lots of polarized debate any time something AI safety related comes up, so I just don't really believe that most people would feel differently if the same thing happened but the corporate structure was more conventional, or if Brockman's board seat happened to be occupied by someone who was sympathetic to ousting Altman.

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