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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

#811

Post by exizt88 »

vintermann wrote: post #707
tempusalaria wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Anyone who works with text generation will tell you that GPT-4 is far, far beyond anything anyone else has put out for general purpose text gen. The benchmarks don’t really tell you the whole picture. It’s impossible to prompt other models for anything as complex as what GPT-4 can do, both semantically and stylistically.

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

#812

Post by g42gregory »

sanxiyn wrote: post #618
dehrmann wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still cannot process what’s happened to one of the most prominent and hyped companies of the past year in just one weekend. 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…

I am not sure why. As far as I can tell, the board doesn't need to answer to anyone.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?), you always have to answer to somebody. In this board's case, they have to answer to investors, Microsoft in particular. Why? Because Microsoft can pull the money (apparently they only sent a fraction of $10Bn so far) and can sabotage the partnership deal. The OpenAI won't meet the payroll and won't be able to run the GPU farm. Microsoft already threatened to do exactly that.

My suspicion is that Microsoft will do exactly that: they will pull the money, sabotage the partnership deal and focus on rebuilding GPT in-house (with some of the key OpenAI people hired away). They will do this gradually, on their own timetable, so that it does not disrupt the GPT Azure access to their own customers.

I doubt that there could be a replacement for the Microsoft deal, because who would want to go through this again? OpenAI might be able to raise a billion or two from the hard core AI Safety enthusiasts, but they won't be able to raise $10s of Billions needed to run the next cycle of scaling.

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

#813

Post by upwardbound »

justcool393 wrote: post #737
upwardbound wrote: post #577

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

so the plot of WarGames?

Exactly. WarGames is very similar to a true incident that occurred in 1979, four years before the release of the film.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/david-wright/nuclear-false-alarm-950...

    In this case, it turns out that a technician mistakenly inserted into a NORAD computer a training tape that simulated a large Soviet attack on the United States. Because of the design of the warning system, that information was sent out widely through the U.S. nuclear command network.

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

#814

Post by jstummbillig »

bmitc wrote: post #785
jstummbillig wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Do you understand why he was fired?

Do you? Because that part is way more irritating, and, honestly, starting to read your original comment I thought that was where you were going with this: Why was he fired, exactly?

The way the statement was framed basically painted him a liar, in a way, so vague, that people put forth the most insane theories about why. I can sense some animosity, but do you really think it's okay to fire anyone in a way, where to the outside the possible explanation ranges from a big data slip to molesting their sister?

Nothing has changed. That is the part that needs transparency and its lack is bewildering.

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

#815

Post by bmitc »

mdekkers wrote: post #735
bmitc wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Altman, the ousted CEO, appears to have been adding to the instability. His firing seems like a step in getting back to a desired stability.

Can you, you know, bring facts and data to this discussion, as opposed to vague handwaving of weird accusations? Altman has been doing an amazing job at running the business he co-founded, and “instability” isn’t something _anyone_ at any side of the discussion is accusing him of. What is this instability, in your view? And how is this “desired stability” going to come back?

What discussion, specifically, as you're just joining in here?

If a CEO of a non-profit is raising billions of dollars from foreign companies and states to create a product that he will then sell to the non-profit he is CEO of, I view that as adding instability to the non-profit given its original mission. Because that mission wasn't to create a market for the CEO to take advantage of for personal gain.

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

#816

Post by 4734573 »

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…

Professionals tend to value their work in the real way of assigning value to it. So I doubt it was desperation so much as having a sense of self worth and a belief that the structure of Open-AI was largely a matter of word games the lawyers came up with.

As for Altman... I don't understand what's insignificant about raising money and resources from outside groups? Even if he wasn't working directly on the product itself, that role is still valuable in that it means he knows the amounts of resources that kind of project will require while also commanding some amount of familiarity with how to allocate them effectively. And on top of that he seems understand how to monetize the existent product a lot better than the Ilya who mostly came out of this looking like a giant hazard for anyone who isn't wearing rose tinted sci-fi goggles.

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

#817

Post by Solvency »

belugacat wrote: post #715
bmitc wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's a big deal because he has a cult of personality?

It’s a big deal because he’s extremely charismatic and well connected and that matters much, much more for a tech company’s success than some programmers like to think.

What am I missing here: Sam Altman has zero charisma or cool factor. Every talk I've seen him in, he comes off as lethargic and sluggish. I get zero sense of passion or rallying drive around the hype of AI from him. He's not an AI visionary. He's not a hype man. He simply "is", and just because he happens to have been the CEO he's been thrust into the spotlight, but there's literally nothing interesting about him.

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

#818

Post by hurryer »

upwardbound wrote: post #808
hurryer wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I know about the doctrine.

Yet everytime there was a "real" attack, somehow the doctrine was not followed (in US or USSR).

It seems to me that the doctrine is not actually followed because leaders understand the consequences and wait for very solid confirmation?

Soviets also had the perimeter system, which was also supposed to relieve pressure for an immediate response.

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

#819

Post by OccamsMirror »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #588
wokwokwok wrote: post #458

Honest question: Other than 1) Microsoft and 2) anyone building a product with the OpenAI api 3) OpenAI employees… …is OpenAI crashing a burning a big deal? This seems rather over hyped… everyone has an opinion, everyone cares because OpenAI has a high profile. …but really , alternatives to chatGPT exist now, and most people will be, really… not affected by this in any meaningful degree. Isn’t breaking the strangle h…

Totally agree. It seems like OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but even some free open source projects have become really good. I am no expert, so take this with a grain of salt. It seems OpenAI has a lead, but only of a few months or so and others are racing behind. I guess it really sucks if you built something that relies on the OpenAI api, but even then one could replace the api layer.

I mean, OpenAI aren't just going to close up shop. I would very much doubt they're just going to turn off their APIs. I would just keep building and if you have to swap LLMs at some point then do so.

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

#820

Post by upwardbound »

mlindner wrote: post #614
dragonwriter wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What does "properly aligned" even mean? Democracies even with countries don't have alignment, let alone democracies across the world. They're a complete mess of many conflicting and contradictory stances and opinions. This sounds, to me, like the company leadership want the ability to do some sort of picking of winners and losers, bypassing the electorate.

Any AGI must at a minimum be aligned with these two values:

(1) humanity should not be subjugated

(2) humanity should not go extinct before it’s our time

Even Kim Jong Un would agree with these principles.

Currently, any AGI or ASI built based on any of the known architectures contemplated in the literature which have been invented thus far would not meet a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard of being aligned with these two values.

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