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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

#481

Post by Closi »

hef19898 wrote: post #442
hipadev23 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What is it with all this personality cult about founders, CEOs and CTOs nowadays? I thpught the cult around Steve Jobs was, bad it pales in comparison to today. As soon as one person becomes more important than the team, as in the team starts to be structured around said person instead of with the person, that person should be replaced. Because otherwise, the team will not be functioning properly without the "star pl…

While your post sounds like something that would be true, there are loads of examples of where companies have thrived under a clear vision from a specific person.

The example of Steve Jobs used in the above post is probably a prime example - Apple just wouldn’t be the company it is today without that period of his singular vision and drive.

Of course they struggled after losing him, but the current version of Apple that has lived with Jobs and lost him is probably better than the hypothetical version of Apple where he never returned.

Great teams are important, but great teams plus great leadership is better.

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

#482

Post by intellectronica »

mfiguiere wrote: post #416

TheInformation: Dozens of Staffers Quit OpenAI After Sutskever Says Altman Won’t Return >Dozens of OpenAI staffers internally announced they were quitting the company Sunday night, said a person with knowledge of the situation, after board director and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever told employees that fired CEO Sam Altman would not return. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dozens-of-staffers-q...

Tip for builders: you can use the GPT APIs on Microsoft Azure. Managed reliably, nobody's quitting, no drama. Same APIs, just with better controls, global availability, and a very stable, reliable, and trustworthy provider. (disclosure: I work at Azure, but this is just my own observation).

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

#483

Post by systemvoltage »

ansk wrote: post #448

The contrast between the media's depiction of today's events with this outcome demonstrates how much Sam and his aligned interests can influence a narrative. The vast majority of reporting indicated that Sam held all the leverage, the board members were about to be fired, and a new board would be appointed which would be much better aligned with Sam. These accounts took special care to portray the current board as in…

There is one thing that sticks out:

Why didn't the board explain itself clearly?

There are times when saying anything publicly would be considered defamation and openining themselves to lawsuits, but it seems that they owe it to their own staff in plain words. They didn't explain the situation properly as per leaked internal announcements.

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

#484

Post by alsodumb »

mfiguiere wrote: post #416

TheInformation: Dozens of Staffers Quit OpenAI After Sutskever Says Altman Won’t Return >Dozens of OpenAI staffers internally announced they were quitting the company Sunday night, said a person with knowledge of the situation, after board director and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever told employees that fired CEO Sam Altman would not return. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dozens-of-staffers-q...

Does anyone have a non-paywall version of this? Or like excerpts from the article?

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

#485

Post by haldujai »

alsodumb wrote: post #272
15457345234 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every OpenAI researcher he could find on twitter Literally the literal definition of 'selection bias' dude, like, the pure unadulterated definition of it.

Like I said, if the subset of OpenAI researchers who are on twitter is very small, sure. But people in AI/learning community are very active on twitter. I don't know every AI researcher on OpenAIs payroll. But the fact that most active researchers (looking at the list of OpenAI paper authors, and tbh the people I know, as a researcher in this space) are on twitter.

It seems like you're misunderstanding selection bias.

It doesn't matter if it's large, unless the "very active on twitter" group is large enough to be the majority.

The point is that there may be (arguably very likely) a trait AI researchers active on Twitter have in common which differentiates them from the population therefore introducing bias.

It could be that the 30% (made up) of OpenAI researchers who are active on Twitter are startup/business/financially oriented and therefore align with Sam Altman. This doesn't say as much about the other 70% as you think.

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

#487

Post by pedrosorio »

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

The GPT-4 pre-training research lead quit on Friday.

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

#488

Post by icyfox »

This will be an interesting test to see how fast you can bootstrap GPT-4 level performance with unlimited funds and talent that already has deep knowledge of the internals. With the initial adoption of ChatGPT alongside Copilot, OpenAI's data moat of crawled data & RLHF is pretty vast. And that's not leaving the walled garden of OpenAI. You can simulate a lot of this using other off-the-shelf LLMs (see Alpaca) but nothing is a substitute for real world observed usage.

In a related note, has this meaningfully broken through to the mainstream yet? If a ChatGPT competitor comes out tomorrow that is just as good - but under a different brand - how many people will switch because it's Altman backed? I'll be curious to find out.

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

#490

Post by hfjjbf »

alex_young wrote: post #257
alsodumb wrote: post #120

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.

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