831–840 of 979 posts
Kara Swisher has some additional details: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726477828072382480
Oh wow, she’s definitely taken sides. I wonder if Elon will be paying their legal bills. She alludes to shadowy machinations. This reaches an end, then gets wackier, and repeats.
The board claims Altman lied. Is that it? About what? Did he consistently misinform the board about a ton of different things? Or about one really important issue? Or is this just an excuse disguising the actual issues?
I notice a lot of people in the comments talking about Altman being more about profit than about OpenAI's original mission of developing safe, beneficial AGI. Is Altman threatening that mission or disagreeing with it? It would be really interesting if this was the real issue, but if it was, I can't believe it came out of nowhere like that, and I would expect the board to have a new CEO lined up already and not be fumbling for a new CEO and go for one with no particular AI or ethics background.
Sutskever gets mentioned as the primary force behind firing Altman. Is this a blatant power grab? Or is Sutskever known to have strong opinions about that mission of beneficial AGI?
I feel a bit like I'm expected to divine the nature of an elephant by only feeling a trunk and an ear.
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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.
I have watched him speak, and he doesn't seem charismatic at all. I remember hearing the same things about Sam Bankman-Fried and then going and watching his interviews and feeling the same. There is just a giant gap here where I simply do not get it, and I see no evidence that explains me not getting it is missing some key aspect of all this. This just seems like classic cargo cult, cult of personality, and following…
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Nothing can guarantee that. Investors always accept risk. He has a better chance than some other random guy who was not the CEO of OpenAI.
Let's see whether Satya Nadella's bet on that risk will pay or not. Chance is a "biased random" in the real world. Let's see whether his bias is strong enough to make a difference.
OpenAI already had the best technology fully developed and in production when Microsoft invested in them.
I believe "cargo cult" means something quite different to how you're using it.
It's not "cargo cult" to consider someone's CV when you hire them for a new job. Sam Altman ran a successful AI company before and he most likely can do it again if provided enough support and resources.
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 CEO typically builds up a network of his people within the org and if he falls hard they are next on the chopping block. Same deal as with dictators. "Dozens" sounds like about right amount for a large org.
Still, what do they actually want? It seems a bit overly dramatic for such an organisation.
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Being able to hire researchers and, even the top talent doesn't guarantee that they'll be the top company or even succeed at what they're building. This is what I referred as "Cargo Cult AI". You can get the money, but money is not the only ingredient needed to make things happen. edit: Looks like they won't have a brand new company next week, but joining an existing one.
Nothing can guarantee that. Investors always accept risk. He has a better chance than some other random guy who was not the CEO of OpenAI.
Yes, but that doesn't mean it's enough. Not every random guy who wasn't the CEO of OpenAI is about to start an AI company (though some probably are).
It's quite possible an AI company does need a better vision than "hire some engineers and have them make AI".
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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 ok…
For example, one scenario someone in a different thread conjectured is that Sam was secretly green-lighting the intentional (rather than incidental) collection of large amounts of copyrighted training data, exposing the firm to a great risk of a lawsuit from the media industry.
If he hid this from the board, “not being candid” would be the reason for his firing, but if the board admits that they know the details of the malfeasance, they could become entangled in the litigation.
I wonder if the recent departure of Kyle Vogt from Cruise is related. Emmett Shear and Kyle Vogt founded Twitch together.
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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…
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.
You know those stories where someone makes a pact with the devil/djin/other wish granting entity, and the entity does one interpretation of what was wished, but since it is not what the wisher intended it all goes terribly wrong? The idea of alignment is to make the djin which not only can grant wishes, but it does them according to the unstated intention of the wisher.
You might have heard the story of the paper clip maximiser. The leadership of the paperclip factory buys one of those fancy new AI agents and asks it to maximise paperclip production.
What a not-well aligned AI might do: Reach out through the internet to a drug cartel’s communication nodes. Hack the communications and take over the operation. Optimise the drug traficking operations to gain more profit. Divert the funds to manufacture weapons for multiple competing factions on multiple crisis points on Earth. Use the factions against each other. Divert the funds and the weapons to protect a rapidly expanding paperclip factory. Manipulate and blackmail world leaders into inaction. If the original leaders of the paperclip factory try to stop the AI eliminate them, since that is the way to maximise paper clip production. And this is just the begining.
What a well alligned AI would do: Fine tune the paperclip manufacturing machinery to eliminate rejects. Reorganise the factory layout to optimise logistics. Run a succesfull advertising campaign which leads to a 130% increase in sales. (Because clearly this is what the factory owner intended it to do. Altough they did a poor job of expressing their wishes.)