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Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down

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341–350 of 979 posts

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

#341

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?

I think the guy read the paper he linked the wrong way. The paper explicitly separates "narrow" and "AGI" types where AlphaGo is in the virtuoso bracket for narrow AI, and ChatGPT is in the "emerging" bracket for "general" AI. Only thing it puts to be AGI is few levels up from virtuoso, but in the "general" type.

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

#342
"We fired the CEO for being too profit-driven" is a terrible message to send to your employees when you've lured them in with $1m comp packages that mostly consist of "Profit Participation Units" that are only worth anything when you actually make money.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they don't get Altman back, Altman starts a new company AkshuallyOpenAI and most talent moves there. They quickly get the funding and the contracts with MS. OpenAI is left in the dust.

Yes, but data for the training, model development and other things requires a lot of time and investment, with OpenAI having a huge head start. It is to be seen if investors will likely pour another set of billions of dollars, just to catch up to speed with OpenAI, which, by that time, would have even further evolved. There is a ray of hope that, as it so happens in this field, that old things are quickly obsolete an…

You are definitely over estimating how much time and effort it needs to build large models.

Sam will get billions of dollars if he starts a new company. So there's no issue of money. In terms of data and training models, look at Anthropic - they did train a reasonable model. Heck look at Mistral, a bunch of ex Meta folks and their LLaMA team lead who spinned up a good models in months.

The only bottle neck i could think of would probably be RLHF data - but given enough money, that's not an issue either.

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money = building boring enterprise products, not building AI gods I would suspect

OpenAI was building boring enterprise and developer products. Which likely most of the company was working on.

OpenAI was building boring enterprise and developer products under Sam Altman's leadership

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter re-tweeted Sam Atlman's heart tweet with their own heart or some other supportive message. I'm sure that's a sign that they are all team Sam - this includes a ton of researchers you see on most papers that came out of OpenAI. That's a good chunk of their research team and that'd be a very big loss. Also there are tons of engineers (and I know a few of t…

Team Sam = Team Money. If you're an employee at OpenAI there is a huge opportunity to leave and get in early with decent equity at potentially the next giant tech company. Pretty sure everyone at OpenAI's HQ in San Francisco remembers how many overnight millionaires Facebook's IPO created.

Salaries at openai already make them millionaires.

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

#346
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.

I'd say it sounds like they want to go faster with research and slower with commercializing the outputs of the research.

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

#347
post #86

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…

Yeah Emmett Shear seems like an odd choice if they’re worried about retention because 1) Twitch was never known to be a particularly great place to work and 2) he stepped down for some reason and not because Twitch was in an amazing place or anything at the time

Emmett Shear is probably the person most friendly to OpenAI board's AI safety agenda among possible candidates. Source: have a look at his Twitter.

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

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter re-tweeted Sam Atlman's heart tweet with their own heart or some other supportive message. I'm sure that's a sign that they are all team Sam - this includes a ton of researchers you see on most papers that came out of OpenAI. That's a good chunk of their research team and that'd be a very big loss. Also there are tons of engineers (and I know a few of t…

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...

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every researcher I know at OpenAI who are on twitter re-tweeted Sam Atlman's heart tweet with their own heart or some other supportive message. I'm sure that's a sign that they are all team Sam - this includes a ton of researchers you see on most papers that came out of OpenAI. That's a good chunk of their research team and that'd be a very big loss. Also there are tons of engineers (and I know a few of t…

The heart tweet rebellion is about as meaningful as adding a hashtag supporting one side of your favorite conflict. Come on. “By 5 pm everyone will quit if you don’t do x”. Response: tens of heart emojis.

Anyone worth a shit will leave and go work with Sam. OpenAI will be left with a bunch of below average grifters.

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

#350

The best talent will leave OpenAI the moment Sam announces his new venture. Deep down builders want to build, and they want to do it as quickly as possible. OpenAI will represent caution. NewCo will represent opportunity. Opportunity wins. This is human nature.

That's not obvious to me. Why did so many join OpenAI in the first place, given that its charter prioritizes humanitarian benefit over building as quickly as possible?

https://openai.com/charter

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