571–580 of 979 posts
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The whole situation should make it clear that SV media is beholden to VCs and will print anything they tell them to. Bloomberg, the verge and the information all went to bat for Altman in a big way on this.
You could say the same thing if they were rooting for the board instead..
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?
Sam must have sizable equity in the company. He sells to Microsoft and they dissolve the board, problem solved.
have you read any of the articles at all before firing off that sentence?
This seems like a fairly unconventional idea in a capitalist world where Altman has made all his money on exactly that - equity.
Seems like it has ultimately bit him, the investors, and the board in the ass. Poor incentive structure in the corporate governance is going to really mess with people's heads.
HN! If I had a recorded phone call, emails and chats I thought it would be the better for the public to know about, how would I go ahead and share such in the best and most anonymous way?
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…
That's kinda what happened. The latest gist I read was that the non-profit, idealistic(?) board clashed with the for-profit, hypergrowth CEO over the direction to take the company. When you read the board's bios, they're weren't ready for this job (few are; these rocket ship stories are rare), the rocket ship got ahead of their non-profit goals, and they found themselves in over their heads, then failed to game out how this would go over (poor communication with MS, not expecting Altman to get so much support).
From here, the remaining board either needs to either surface some very damning evidence (the memo ain't it) or step down and let MS and Sequoia find a new board (even if they're not officially entitled to do that). Someone needs to be saying mea culpa.
I just don’t have anything too remarkable to add right now. I like and respect Sam and I think so does the majority of OpenAI. The board had a chance to explain their drastic actions and they did not take it, so there is nothing to go on except exactly what it looks like.
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> Certainly no one is suggesting these systems can become "alive", Lots of people have been publicly suggesting that, and that, if not properly aligned, it poses an existential risk to human civilization; that group includes pretty much the entire founding team of OpenAI, including Altman. The perception of that risk as the downside, as well as the perception that on the other side there is the promise of almost unli…
How does it actually kill a person? When does it stop existing in boxes that require a continuous source of electricity and can’t survive water or fire?
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 t…
Sam has been agreeing with this group and using this as the reason to go commercial to provide funding for that goal. The problem is these new products are coming too fast and taking resources which affects the resources they can use for safety training.
This group never wanted to release chatGPT but were forced to because a rival company made up of ex openAI employees were going to release their own version. To the safety group things have been getting worse since that release.
Sam is smart enough to use the safety group's fear against them. They finally clued in.
OpenAI never wanted to give us chatGPT. Their hands were forced by a rival and Sam and the board made a decision that brought in the next breakthrough. From that point things snowballed. Sam knew he needed to run before bigger players moved in. It became too obvious after devday that the safety team would never be able to catch up and they pulled the breaks.
OpenAI's vision of a safe AI has turned into a vision of human censorship rather than protecting society from a rogue AI with the power to harm.
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Want to bet? Altman has been building himself as the public face of AI and won't let that go so easily. It's not like his world coin is taking off... And non competes can be as airtight as you like.. they are completely unenforceable in California which is where OpenAI's HQ is based and where Sam Altman lives. First the loyal will jump ship. Followed quickly by the mercenaries who see the chance to join a new rocket…
> they are completely unenforceable in California California's non-compete laws don't cover "trade secrets", only your ability to use your expertise to pursue employment in your chosen field. In other words, if you're just a regular programmer, you can go work wherever you like or start a competing company. If you're a principal scientist or architect, you would be in danger of violating your contract. Anyone who wen…
But there is an alternative scenario.. in order for Microsoft to avoid loosing any momentum they might offer Altman an insane amount of money to become the John Giannandrea of Microsoft and bring as many of his recent colleagues with him. And for Altman this might be the easiest way to not loose ground as well with Microsofts patents and license agreements.
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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…
Seems like a bit of a commercial risk there if the CEO can 'make' a third of the company down tools.