Does anyone think the abuse allegations leveled against Sam might be related to his firing? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...
Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
231–240 of 985 posts
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#232Guess OpenAI that was actually open was dead the moment Altman took MS money and completely change the organization. People there got a taste of the money and the mission went out the window. A lesson to learn I guess, just because something claims to be a nonprofit with a mission doesn’t mean it is/always will be so. All it takes is a corporation with deep pockets to compromise a few important people*, indirectly gi…
I don't think this is a fair conclusion. Close to 90% of the employees have signed a letter asking for the board to resign. Seems like that puts the burden of proof on the board.
A board that basically accused Altman, publicly, of wrongdoing of some kind which appears to be false. To bring Altman back, or issue an explanation, would require retracting that; which brings in serious questions about legal liability for the directors.
Think about it. If you are the director of the company, fire the CEO, admit you were wrong even though nothing materially changed 3 days later, and severely damaged the company and your investors - are you getting away without a lawsuit? Whether it be from investors, or from Altman seeking to formally clear his name, or both? That's a level of incompetence that potentially runs the risk of piercing into personal liability (aka "you're losing your house").
So, you can't admit that you were wrong (at least, that's getting risky). You also can't elaborate on what he did wrong, because then you're in deep trouble if he actually didn't do anything wrong [1]. Your hands are tied for saying anything regarding what just happened, and it's your own fault. All you can do is let the company implode.
[1] A board that was smarter would've just said that "Altman was a fantastic CEO, but we believe the company needs to go a different direction." The vague accusations of wrongdoing were/are a catastrophic move; both from a legal perspective in tightening what they can say, and also for uniting the company around Altman.
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do we know the mission got thrown out a window? The board still, after days of intense controversy, have yet to clearly explain how Altman was betraying the mission. Did he ignore safety? Did he defund important research? Did he push forward on projects against direct objections from the board? If there’s a good reason, then let everybody know what that is. If there isn’t, then what was the point of all this?
He went full-bore on commercialization, scale, and growth. He started to ignore the 'non-profit mission'. He forced out shoddy, underprovisioned product to be first to market. While talking about safety out one side of his mouth, he was pushing "move fast and break things", "build a moat and become a monopoly asap" typical profit-driven hypergrowth mindset on the other. Not to mention that he was aggressively fundrai…
chatgpt was under provisioned relative to demand, but demand was unprecedented, so it's not really fair to criticize much on that.
(It would have been a much bigger blunder to, say, build out 10x the capacity before launch, without knowing there was a level of demand is known to support it.)
Also, chatgpt's capabilities are what drove the huge demand, so I'm not sure how you can argue it is "shoddy".
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#234Anyone else hear this rumor about Sam OK'd in private the training of a dataset from a Chinese cyberwarfare unit? Or is that more insane theoretical stuff going on? Honestly I don't want Microsoft to own AGI, it'll mess up AI for a decade much the same it did to Nokia and mobile phones. Let's be real here too they don't have the capacity at Azure to do their main business of training new models. I think OpenAI got ar…
the other half of that rumor/conspiracy theory was that the Chinese government found out about it, told the Biden administration, who told Satya Nadella, who then instigated the firing of Altman.
seeing as Nadella is willing to hire Altman to work at MS, I think the very, very little credibility this rumor had is officially gone.
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incredible. Is this unprecedented or have been other cases in history where the vast majority of employees standup against the board in favor of their CEO?
I highly doubt this is directly in support of Altman and more about not imploding the company they work for. But you never know.
Could also be an indictment of the new CEO, who is no Sam Altman.
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do we know the mission got thrown out a window? The board still, after days of intense controversy, have yet to clearly explain how Altman was betraying the mission. Did he ignore safety? Did he defund important research? Did he push forward on projects against direct objections from the board? If there’s a good reason, then let everybody know what that is. If there isn’t, then what was the point of all this?
> How do we know the mission got thrown out a window? When was the last time OpenAI openly released any AI?
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#237The only way this story gets more suspenseful: 1) Large military convoys are seen moving towards data centers used by OpenAI. 2) Rumors start going around that GPT-5 demonstrated very unusual behavior towards end of testing last week. 3) "Unknown entity" has somehow gained control of key US infrastructure. 4) Emergency server shut down procedures at key Microsoft Azure data centers rumored to run GPT-5 inference have…
I could hear a newscasters voice in my head reading that and it actually gave me a little shiver
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do we know the mission got thrown out a window? The board still, after days of intense controversy, have yet to clearly explain how Altman was betraying the mission. Did he ignore safety? Did he defund important research? Did he push forward on projects against direct objections from the board? If there’s a good reason, then let everybody know what that is. If there isn’t, then what was the point of all this?
> How do we know the mission got thrown out a window? When was the last time OpenAI openly released any AI?
Whisper v3, just a couple weeks ago https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-large-v3
Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#239Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do we know the mission got thrown out a window? The board still, after days of intense controversy, have yet to clearly explain how Altman was betraying the mission. Did he ignore safety? Did he defund important research? Did he push forward on projects against direct objections from the board? If there’s a good reason, then let everybody know what that is. If there isn’t, then what was the point of all this?
> How do we know the mission got thrown out a window? When was the last time OpenAI openly released any AI?
Whisper maybe?