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Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

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Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#341
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Shipping broken product is a typical strategy to gain first mover advantage and try to build a moat. Even if it's mostly broken, if it's high value, people will do sign up and try to use it.

Alternatively, you can restrict signups and do gradual rollout, smoothing out kinks in the product and increasing provisioning as you go.

In 2016/17 Coinbase was totally broken. Constantly going offline, fucking up orders, taking 10 minutes to load the UI, UI full of bugs, etc. They could have restricted signups but they didn't want to. They wanted as many signups as possible, and decided to live with a busted product and "fix the airplane while it's taking off".

This is all fine, you just need to know your identity. A company that keeps talking about safety, being careful what they build, being careful what they put out in the wild and its potential externalities, acting recklessly Coinbase-style does not fit the rhetoric. It's the exact opposite of it.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#342

As I posted elsewhere, I think this is a conflict between Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Altman. Ilya may have been brought into this without his knowledge (which might explain why he retracted his position). Dustin Moskovitz was an early employee at FB, and the founder of Asana. He also created (along with plenty of MSFT bigwigs) a non-profit called Open Philanthropy, which was a early proponent of a form of Effective Alt…

A "conflict" or false opposition can also be used in a theater like play. Maybe this was setup to get Microsoft to take on the costs/liability and more. Three board members left in 2023 that allowed this to happen.

The idea of boards might even be an anti-pattern going forward, they can be played and used in essentially rug pull scenarios for full control of all the work of entire organizations. Maybe boards are past their time or too much of a potential timebomb/trojan horse now.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#343
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty bad https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/17/white-hou...

It seems to me that this conflates criticism of some Jewish communities with antisemitism. Are people supposed to be above criticism because they are Jewish? Does any disagreement with a Jewish person make you hateful and antisemitic? This is happening with the current conflict in Gaza, where showing any empathy for the plight of Palestinian civilians, is sometimes equated with hatred for Jewish people.

[flagged]

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#344
post #36

It seems the next step, is the board to sign the letter calling for the board resignation. The insanity will be complete, and all can get back to therapy.

Actually, the way this timeline is going, I am not sure it won’t somehow end up with Donald Trump as OpenAI CEO.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#345

As of 10am PT, 700 of 770 employees have signed the call for board resignation. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/joannejang/status/1726667504133808242

So i can't check this at work, but have we seen the document they've all been signing? I'm just curious as to how we're getting this information

Yes: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726599700961521762

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#346
post #3

That s a great twist in the writer's storyline. Board quits, Altman + Brockman returns to openAI, shamed Sutskever defects to microsoft where he leads the AI division in a lifelong quest to take revenge for this humiliation.

They wrote Sutskever as a sort of reverse Bighead. He starts out at the top, actually has tech competence, and through a series of mishaps and random events becomes less influential and less popular.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#347
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like OpenAI employees aren't so enthused about joining MSFT here, no?

Feels like they want to be where Altman is.

Feels like they're not on board with taking the whole "non-profit, for the good of humanity" charter LITERALLY as the board seems to want to do now.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. Potentially: Liability based on their decisions. If it turns out those were not ultimately motivated by actual concern for the good of the company then they have a lot of problems.

It’s not a company - which is why they’re able to do this. We’ve just learned, again, that nonprofits can’t make these kinds of decisions because the checks and balances that investors and a profit motive create don’t exist.

That doesn't matter. Even the members of the board of a non-profit are liable for all of the fall-out from their decisions if those decisions end up not being defensible. That's pretty much written in stone and one of the reasons why you should never accept a board seat out of your competence.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#349

As of 10am PT, 700 of 770 employees have signed the call for board resignation. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/joannejang/status/1726667504133808242

So i can't check this at work, but have we seen the document they've all been signing? I'm just curious as to how we're getting this information

Yes, this is the letter: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726599700961521762
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