881–890 of 979 posts
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> How did that even happen on Sam’s watch? What do you imagine he could have done about the board of a non-profit as CEO and fellow board-member?
As CEO and a board member, he was better positioned than literally anyone else to move changes to the governance structure of the nonprofit.
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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 the…
'.. before it's our time' is definitely in the eye of the beholder.
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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…
There are at least three competing perspectives. One is Sutskever, who believes AI is very dangerous and must be slowed down and closed source (edit: clarified so that it doesn't sound like closed down). He believes this is in line with OpenAI's original charter. Another is the HN open source crowd who believes AI should be developed quickly and be open to everyone. They believe this is in line with OpenAI's original…
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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.”
That is, if you do not subscribe to one of the various theories that him sinking Twitter was intentional. The most popular ones I've come across are "Musk wants revenge for Twitter turning his daughter trans", "Saudi-Arabia wants to get rid of Twitter as a trusted-ish network/platform to prevent another Arab Spring" and "Musk wants to cozy up to a potential next Republican presidency".
Personally, I think all three have merits - because otherwise, why didn't the Saudis and other financiers go and pull an Altman on Musk? It's not Musk's personal money he's burning on Twitter, it's to a large degrees other people's money.
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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…
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?
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It's always been my observation that the actual heavyweights of any hardcore engineering project are the ones that avoid snarky lightweight platforms like twitter like the plague. I would imagine that if you based hiring and firing decisions on the metric of 'how often this employee tweets' you could quite effectively cut deadwood. With that in mind...
Discredit people using twitter is a weird take, and didn't resemble critical thinking to me.
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They were apparently unhappy with him because he's too good at business, so I think his reputation is intact.
Or he is not doing what the board wants, which is damaging. If I am good at hacking computers, it does not mean that I should hack all of them and get to the jail.
This is fair that it's a distraction from the mission, but randomly firing him and now having all their staff leave and probably losing all the compute funding is a strange way of dealing with it.
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Imagine how bad a reputation EA would have if the general public knew about HPMOR
Even HP fanfiction lovers HATED HPMOR. It had a clowny reputation It is wild to see how closely connected the web is though. Yudkowsky, Shear, and Sutskever. The EA movement today controls a staggering amount of power.
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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.
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.
> startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
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…
- The elite ML/AI researchers and engineers.
- The elite SV/tech venture capitalists.
These types come with their own followings - and I'm not saying that these two never intersect, but on one side you get a lot of brilliant researchers that truly are in it for the mission. They want to work there, because that's where ground zero is - both from the theoretical and applied point of view.
It's the ML/AI equivalent of working at CERN - you could pay the researchers nothing, or everything, and many wouldn't care - as long as they get to work on the things they are passionate about, AND they get to work with some of the most talented and innovative colleagues in the world. For these, it is likely more important to have top ML/AI heads in the organization, than a commercially-oriented CEO like Sam.
On the other side, you have the folks that are mostly chasing prestige and money. They see OpenAI as some sort of springboard into the elite world of top ML, where they'll spend a couple of years building cred, before launching startups, becoming VP/MD/etc. at big companies, etc. - all while making good money.
For the latter group, losing commercial momentum could indeed affect their will to work there. Do you sit tight in the boat, or do you go all-in on the next big player - if OpenAI crumbles the next year?
With that said, leadership conflicts and uncertainty is never good - whatever camp you're in.