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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

#801
post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Why would workers immediately quit their job when he has no other company > It is Sam Altman. He will have one in a week. His previous companies were Loopt and Worldcoin. Won't his next venture require finding someone else to piggyback off of? > If you are interested in the money side, that isn't something to take lightly. I am interested in how taking billions from foreign companies and states could lead to natio…

His previous ventures don't matter. If he seeks funding, whether millions or billions, he will get it. Period. I don't know how people can reasonably argue that he will have a hard time raising money for a new AI startup along with Greg. It's not a new board, but it's the time when the board decided to assert their power and make their statement/vision clear.

So Sam and Greg are going to invent some new thing out of thin air in a matter of days? Or will they attach themselves to something else, like I implied? Or take on millions of dollars of funding to "figure it out"?

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

#802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux isn't the workhorse in any business that isn't tech based. The dev bubble here is pretty strong. I've done IT for a couple MSPs now so I've seen 100s of different tech stacks. No one uses Linux for anything. ESXi for the hypervisors, various version of Windows server, and M365 for everything else. Graphics/marketing uses Macs sometimes but other than that, it's all Windows/MS. Seeing a Linux VM is exceeding rar…

I think GP is referring to servers. Linux may still be tiny on the desktop, but it dominates servers (and mobile)

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

#803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mira isn't on the OpenAI Board.

I genuinely don't remember who's on it, so thanks for the data point. Regardless, my argument is they needn't act in total unanimity. I presume this Mira person wasn't totally freelancing -- how would this even end up being presented to the board without some direction from someone on the board. So maybe more like 3.5 against 0.5. It could have been a total flip flop, but that's a bigger assumption. I have no problem…

> I presume this Mira person wasn't totally freelancing

She was the interim CEO; it seems that it was her and some of the rest of the executive team, not the board, that wanted Sam to come back. The board apparently was working on finding a new interim CEO to replace Mira that wasn't in Sam's camp more than it was trying to bring Sam back.

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

#804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also pretty suspicious of people in forums like these who say nothing can compare to GPT4 and they're miles ahead of everyone else etc. How much of that is venture capital speaking? It's not quite where it is (or was) with Tesla, where it was hopeless to know what was sincere and what was just people talking up their investment/talking down their short, but it's getting there.

The crypto bros switched to AI hype and are now hyping OpenAI/GPT4 hoping to pump MSFT/NVDA. In every HN conversation where someone mentions competing products, there are people talking it down and saying GPT4 is miles ahead, and in a tone to undermine the competition. I see a pattern and it is definitely not sincere.

You clearly haven't tried GPT-4 if you think people are lying about how much better it is.

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

#805
post #785

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I am so confused by how this question is asked, and the reactions. It's "such a big deal" because he has been leading the company, and apparently some people really like how and they really don't like how it ended. Why would it require any other explanation? Are you asking what leaders do and why an employee would care about what they do...?

Do you understand why he was fired? The company had a charter, one the board is to help uphold. Altman and his crew were leading the company, and seemingly its employees, away from that charter. He was not open about how he was doing that. The board fired him. This is like a bunch of people joining a basketball team where the coach starts turning it into a soccer team, and then the GM fires the coach for doing this a…

But if the board seems to be doing everything they can to make sure that longterm OpenAI wouldn’t be able to execute anything in their charter in a meaningful way (assuming they end up being left behind technologically and not that relevant) does it really make that much sense?

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

#806
post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In time of Windows, around let's say mid 1990s, people thought Windows is irreplaceable. Now turns out Linux is the workhorse everywhere for running workloads or consuming content. Almost every programming language (other than Microsoft's own SDKs) gets developed on Linux, has first class support for Linux and Windows is always an afterthought. It has gone to that extent that to lure developers, Microsoft has to embe…

Linux isn't the workhorse in any business that isn't tech based. The dev bubble here is pretty strong. I've done IT for a couple MSPs now so I've seen 100s of different tech stacks. No one uses Linux for anything. ESXi for the hypervisors, various version of Windows server, and M365 for everything else. Graphics/marketing uses Macs sometimes but other than that, it's all Windows/MS. Seeing a Linux VM is exceeding rar…

So I’m guessing you have never heard of AWS then…

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

#807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And people say there aren't real-world applications to n-ary tree rebalancing.

I laughed, but actually I think the utility of tree rebalancing is widely appreciated!

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

#808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One route is if AI (not through malice but simply through incompetence) plays a part in a terrorist plan to trick the US and China or US and Russia into fighting an unwanted nuclear war. A working group I’m a part of, DISARM:SIMC4, has a lot of papers about this here: https://simc4.org

Since you work on this, do you think leaders will wait until confirmation of actual nuclear detonations, maybe on TV, before believing that a massive attack was launched?

According to current nuclear doctrine, no, they won’t wait. The current doctrine is called Launch On Warning which means you retaliate immediately after receiving the first indications of incoming missiles.

This is incredibly dumb, which is why those of us who study the intersection of AI and global strategic stability are advocating a change to a different doctrine called Decide Under Attack.

Decide Under Attack has been shown by game theory to have equally strong deterrence as Launch On Warning, while also having a much much lower chance of accidental or terrorist-triggered war.

Here is the paper that introduced Decide Under Attack:

A Commonsense Policy for Avoiding a Disastrous Nuclear Decision, Admiral James A Winnefeld, Jr.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/09/10/commonsense-policy-...

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

#809
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…

A poorly planned poorly executing of a CEO with such a high profile and so important to investors that the CEO of Microsoft is surprised, angry, and negotiating his return… is the kind of absolute chaos that I would like to avoid. I would definitely consider quitting in that circumstance.

I would think to myself, what if management ever had a small disagreement with me?

I quit a line cook job once in a very similar circumstance scaled down to a small restaurant. The inexperienced owners were making chaotic decisions and fired the chef and I quit the same day, not out of any kind of particular loyalty or anger, I just declined the chaos of the situation. Quitting before the chaos hurt me or my reputation by getting mixed up in it… to move on to other things.

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

#810
post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No idea what the future holds for any of the players here. Reality truly is stranger than fiction. Is it though? "No outcome where [OpenAI] is one of the big five technology companies. My hope is that we can do a lot more good for the world than just become another corporation that gets that big." -Adam D'Angelo

I guess he would prefer is the existing incumbents got even larger, or if his competitor to ChatGPT (Poe) could capture significant fraction of the market.

Can’t beat em so join em? You’re framing this as a capitalist competition. Non-profits don’t care if their “competitors” win market share.
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