Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down • Hacker News Board

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

#741

Post by vintermann » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:52 AM UTC

lajawfe wrote: post #667

gzer0 wrote: post #576

@karpathy on Twitter: 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. https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1726289070345855126

I for one thought Karpathy would side with the core researchers and not the corpos. To me, this whole ordeal is a clash between profit motives of Sam vs Non Profit and Safety motives of OpenAI's original charter. I mean didn't HN hate when OpenAI changed their open nature and become completely closed and profit oriented? This could be the healing of the cancer that OpenAI brought to this field to make it closed as a…

Karpathy is a very agreeable guy and a fantastic educator, and he's very respected by everyone including leader-owners like Altman and Musk, but he doesn't seem like he has very strong opinions one way or another about the hot button issues.

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

#742

Post by cheeselip420 » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:52 AM UTC

frabcus wrote: post #317

Tohhou wrote: post #179

Embarrassing for OpenAI.

On the contrary, it shows it is a non-profit. People keep denying it is and pretending it is a normal Silicon Valley startup. This demonstrates clearly it is a non-profit.

Non profit != No profit

OpenAI will be even less open now. Ilya must protect all of us from his powerful creations.

Only he and his alignment team can be trusted.

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

#743

Post by AbrahamParangi » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:52 AM UTC

fevangelou wrote: post #674

bmitc wrote: post #592

Through all of this, no one has cogently explained why Altman leaving is such a big deal. Why would workers immediately quit their job when he has no other company, and does he even know who these workers are? Are these people that desperate to make a buck (or the prospect of big bucks)? It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting ou…

100% spot on. The world is filled with Sam Altmans, but surely not enough Ilya Sutskevers.

This is deeply wrong. Just because you don’t see what’s special about him doesn’t mean he isn’t a rare talent.

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

#744

Post by jonbell » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:52 AM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #687

reissbaker wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The board fired Altman for shipping too fast compared to their safety-ist doom preferences. The new interim CEO has said that he wants to slow AI development down 80-90%. Why on earth would you stay, if you joined to build + ship technology? Of course, some employees may agree with the doom/safety board ideology, and will no doubt stay. But I highly doubt everyone will, especially the researchers who were working on…

Not enough people understand what OpenAI was actually built on. OpenAI would not exist if FAANG had been capable of getting out of it's own way and shipping things. The moment OpenAI starts acting like the companies these people left, it's a no brainer that they'll start looking for the door. I'm sure Ilya has 10 lifetimes more knowledge than me locked away in his mind on topics I don't even know exist... but the las…

It’s possible be extremely smart in one narrow way and a complete idiot when it comes to understanding leadership, people, politics, etc.

For example, Elon Musk was smart enough to do some things … then he crashed and burned with Twitter because it’s about people and politics. He could not have done a worse job, despite being “smart.”

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

#745

Post by Upvoter33 » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:53 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #410

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?

The trick is that execs do have unusually good insight into how their tech works, because they can ask their reports to explain it. Btw, I think it's funny how much credit Hinton gets for AI. His contribution is pretty much just keeping some grad students on the problem.

Wow that really undersells Hinton.

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

#746

Post by ssnistfajen » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:53 AM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #592

Through all of this, no one has cogently explained why Altman leaving is such a big deal. Why would workers immediately quit their job when he has no other company, and does he even know who these workers are? Are these people that desperate to make a buck (or the prospect of big bucks)? It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting ou…

Based on Andrej Karpathy's comment on Twitter today, the board never explained any of this to the staff. So siding with Altman seems like a far better option since his return would mean a much higher likelihood of continuing business as usual.

If Ilya & co. want the staff to side with them, they have to give a reason first. It doesn't necessarily have to be convincing, but not giving a reason at all will never be convincing.

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

#747

Post by ascorbic » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:53 AM UTC

zer00eyz wrote: post #632

intellectronica wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You want me to trust M$ in all this? Embrace, extend, extinguish. Fellow nerds, you really need to go into work on Monday and have a hard chat with your C levels and legal (Because IANAL). The question is: Who owns the output of LLM/AI/ML tooling? I will give you a hint, it's not you. Do you need to copyright what a CS agent says, no, you want them on script as much as possible. An LLM parroting your training data is…

Have I just been transported to Slashdot in 2003?

I'm not sure you appreciate how enterprise licence agreements work. Every detail of who owns what will have been spelled out, along with the copyright indemnities for the output.

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

#748

Post by ShamelessC » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:53 AM UTC

lajawfe wrote: post #667

gzer0 wrote: post #576

@karpathy on Twitter: 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. https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1726289070345855126

I for one thought Karpathy would side with the core researchers and not the corpos. To me, this whole ordeal is a clash between profit motives of Sam vs Non Profit and Safety motives of OpenAI's original charter. I mean didn't HN hate when OpenAI changed their open nature and become completely closed and profit oriented? This could be the healing of the cancer that OpenAI brought to this field to make it closed as a…

Karpathy is a hybrid. He’s smart, but he clearly enjoys both the money and the attention. This is the guy who defended Elon’s heavily exaggerated self driving claims when the impact was actual human lives.

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

#749

Post by astrange » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:53 AM UTC

FeepingCreature wrote: post #698

astrange wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The message is that if you do math in your head in a specific way involving Bayes' theorem, it will make you always right about everything. So it's not even quasi-religious, the good deity is probability theory and the bad one is evil computer gods. This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical", and then decide they need to spend their life fighting evil compute…

> This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical" Yes, which is 100% because of "LessWrong" and 0% because groups of young nerds do that every time, so much so that there's actually an XKCD about it ( https://xkcd.com/592/ ). The actual message regarding Bayes' Theorem is that there is a correct way to respond to evidence in the first place. LessWrong does not man…

> The actual message regarding Bayes' Theorem is that there is a correct way to respond to evidence in the first place.

No, there isn't a correct way to do anything in the real world, only in logic problems.

This would be well known if anyone had read philosophy; it's the failed program of logical positivism. (Also the failed 70s-ish AI programs of GOFAI.)

The main reason it doesn't work is that you don't know what all the counterfactuals are, so you'll miss one. Aka what Rumsfeld once called "unknown unknowns".

https://metarationality.com/probabilism

> Given that this didn't happen with anyone else

They're instead buying castles, deciding scientific racism is real (though still buying mosquito nets for the people they're racist about), and getting tripped up reinventing Jainism when they realize drinking water causes infinite harm to microscopic shrimp.

And of course, they think evil computer gods are going to kill them.

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

#750

Post by jiggawatts » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 7:53 AM UTC

nicce wrote: post #561

intellectronica wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the model weights were developed by OpenAI. They are licensed exclusively and irrevocably to Microsoft, and operated by Microsoft, not OpenAI. If you are building with these APIs and concerned that consuming them from OpenAI (which also runs them on Azure, but managed by OpenAI staff) because of the drama there, you can de-risk by consuming from Azure directly.

> They are licensed exclusively and irrevocably to Microsoft, and operated by Microsoft, not OpenAI. No wonder why CEO got fired.

Let me guess: Ilya and his team had developed GPT5, decided it very-nearly had consciousness, and then Sam immediately turned around and asked Microsoft what they're willing to pay for a copy to use and abuse.