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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

#331

Post by russellbeattie »

Reality check for those who need it:

Altman won't be starting a competing company. First, he may have contractual restrictions and second, OpenAI owns their IP. And even if Altman is somehow free to do what he wants because he was fired (doubtful), anyone who quits to go with him surely do have airtight non-competes. Besides, it's not like Sam and his few loyalists are just going to spin up a few servers and duplicate what OpenAI has done. He'll do something AI-adjacent like the chip startup he was rumored to be pursuing.

As for Microsoft, they have a contract with OpenAI and are deeply reliant on them at the moment. OpenAI isn't disappearing just because Sam and Greg aren't there. Nadella may not be happy with the change, but he'll just have to live with it. Nothing will change for the foreseeable future there either.

When it comes to lawsuits? Who knows, but I highly doubt Altman will fight, or if he does, it will be discreetly settled as it's in no one's interest to wage some protracted battle. Microsoft may want to renegotiate their deal, but that again most likely isn't going to be anything nasty, as Microsoft needs OpenAI right now.

As for developers and consumers of OpenAI's service? They won't care or notice for many months until whatever changes the new CEO and board have in mind are enacted.

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

#332

Post by rf15 »

Palmik wrote: post #319

Emmett is a self-proclaimed AI doomer. Given some of his Tweets from the past, it's likely the board indeed wants someone who will takes things slower: https://archive.is/tuf3s https://archive.is/sNvvs This is probably not something you want to hear as a researcher who is motivated by pushing the frontiers of our capabilities, nor as a researcher who is motivated by pushing their compensation.

But what are you going to do if your ambitions cannot be met with the money and resources they require, especially in the long term? They look like they're tripping over hard limits.

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

#334

Post by sgift »

PepperdineG wrote: post #300
himaraya wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emmett's just a placeholder after Murati turned. I suspect he won't stay in his position for long.

Recursive Interim CEOs. Will there be a Mandelbrot set of Interim CEOs?

The new research focus demanded by the board in the name of safety will be an CEO AI, which will be aligned to humanities interests - the benchmark to show this will be if it does whatever the board wants. It's the only way to make sure they cannot be stabbed in the back again by a pesky human.

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

#335

Post by loveparade »

threeseed wrote: post #308
loveparade wrote: post #290

For a change, maybe it'd be a good idea to get a CEO who at least has faint idea about how ML works on a technical level? Would you like a company that builds rockets to be led by some salesman who doesn't understand basic Physics? Probably not. You don't need to be Hinton or Schmidhuber, but come on, who thinks it's a good idea to have these typical "Silicon Valley VC CEOs" lead an AI company?

[flagged]

You can hate Elon Musk as much as you want, but he absolutely knows a decent amount of Physics and Material Science. That's what he studied and has always wanted to do before PayPal. He even get into a Material Science PhD at Stanford. He drove a lot of the engineering at both Tesla and SpaceX. And without that, probably none of these companies would've worked out.

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

#337

Post by frabcus »

shippintoboston wrote: post #4

Crazy how a 4 person board staved off pressure from a behemoth like Microsoft

This could all be good for Microsoft.

Microsoft want OpenAI to do research, and give them the model to run on Azure.

They certainly don't need OpenAI competing in consumer products. ChatGPT could have been a Micrsoft product in an only slightly different timeline.

And they'd rather they didn't compete in API serving, they'd rather everyone currently using OpenAI had to shift to Azure.

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

#338

Post by ryanSrich »

hsrada wrote: post #217
ryanSrich wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Death. The default consequence of AGI's arrival is doom. Aligning a super intelligence with our desires is a problem that no one has solved yet. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." ---- Listen to Dwarkesh Podcast with Eliezer or Carl Shulman to know more about this.

I like science fiction too, but all of these potential scenarios seem so far removed from the low level realities of how these systems work.

I'm not suggesting we don't see ASI in some distant future, maybe 100+ years away. But to suggest we're even within a decade of having ASI seems silly to me. Maybe there's research I haven't read, but as a daily user of AI, it's hilarious to think people are existentially concerned with it.

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

#339

Post by jazzyjackson »

hsrada wrote: post #217
ryanSrich wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Death. The default consequence of AGI's arrival is doom. Aligning a super intelligence with our desires is a problem that no one has solved yet. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." ---- Listen to Dwarkesh Podcast with Eliezer or Carl Shulman to know more about this.

I'm not sure that it's a matter of "knowing" as much as it is "believing"

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

#340

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

dougmwne wrote: post #40
Racing0461 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like the board were "true believers" in the nonprofit/human first/guardrails and sam just wanted to zuckerberg openai by growing as fast as possible and in the end the true believers won.

What did they win exactly? This is far from the only effort to develop AI models. They were a leader for a time, but seem unlikely to continue in that position.

Even so it buys some time to do safety work
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