Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

theverge.com

651–660 of 985 posts

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

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while he was very fast to welcome Ilya back Was he? I must have missed that in all this chaos.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1726594398098780570

Can anyone explain why when I go to https://twitter.com/sama I don't see the linked tweet, but if I navigate to https://twitter.com/sama/status/1726594398098780570 I can? Is this a nuance of like tweets being privatable? Or deleted tweets remaining directly navigable? Sorry probably something basic about how twitter functions.

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

#652
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone mentioned the plight of people with conditional work visas. I'm not sure how they could handle that.

Depending on the “conditionals,” I’d imagine Microsoft is particularly well-equipped to handle working through that.

Microsoft in particular is very good at handling immigration and visa issues.

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

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More confusion - Emmett Shear is a close friend of Sam Altman. He was part of the original 2005 YCombinator class alongside Altman, part of the justin.tv mafia, and later a part-time partner at YCombinator. I don't think he has any such close ties to Dustin Moskovitz. Why would the Dustin-leaning OpenAI board install him as interim CEO? This whole thing still seems to have the air of a pageant to me, where they're ma…

He's part of the EA community which Moskovitz funded. He was even named in Yudkowsky's warcrime of a Harry Potter fanfic [0][1] [0] - https://www.404media.co/new-openai-ceo-emmett-shear-was-mino... [1] - https://hpmor.com/chapter/104?ref=404media.co

Why is Yudkowsky's HPMOR a "warcrime"?

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

#654
post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's part of the EA community which Moskovitz funded. He was even named in Yudkowsky's warcrime of a Harry Potter fanfic [0][1] [0] - https://www.404media.co/new-openai-ceo-emmett-shear-was-mino... [1] - https://hpmor.com/chapter/104?ref=404media.co

Silicon Valley lore is way too complex at this point; needs a reboot. I'd rather start One Piece from scratch.

We need a wiki indeed.

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

#655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carelessness from the perspective of those downstream of the board's decisions. Boards are supposed to be careful, not careless. Good primer here: https://www.onboardmeetings.com/blog/what-are-nonprofit-boar... At least that will create some common reference.

Using that framework, I still think it is possible that this is the result of legitimate and irreconcilable differences in opinion about the organization’s mission and vision and execution. Edit: it is also common for changing circumstance to bring pre-existing but tolerable differences to the relevant Forefront

Yes, and if that is so I'm sure there are meeting minutes that document this carefully, and that the fall-out from firing the CEO on the spot was duly considered and deemed acceptable. But without that kind of cover they have a real problem.

These things are all about balance: can we do it? do we have to do it? is there another solution? and if we have to do it do we have to do it now or is there a more orderly way in which it can be done? And so on. And that's the sort of deliberation that shows that you took your job as board member serious. Absent that you are open to liability.

And with Ilya defecting the chances of that liability materializing increases.

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

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see how people reacted to Ilya apologizing? Read through the early comments here, it isn't very positive they mostly blame him for being weak etc, before he wrote that people were more positive against Ilya but Ilya admitting fault made people home in on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347501&p=2

People tend to speak and act very differently in pseudonymous online forums, with no skin in the game, than they ever would in "the real world", where we are constantly reminded of real relationships which our behavior puts at risk. The only venues where I've witnessed someone being attacked for apologizing or admitting an error have been online.

People are more honest about how they feel online. They might not attack openly like that offline, but they do think those things.

So you see people who refuse to acknowledge their mistakes fail upwards while those who do admit are often pushed down. How often do you see high level politicians admitting their mistakes? They almost never do since those who did never got that far.

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

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that Adam himself has a strong conflict of interest too. The GPT store announcement on DevDay pretty much killed his company Poe. And all this started brewing after DevDay announcement. Maybe Sam kept it under the wraps from Adam and the board.

I've heard others take this stance, but a common response so far has been "Poe is so small as to be irrelevant", "I forgot it exists", etc in the grand scheme of things here.

What matters is how much personal work and money Adam put into Poe. It seems like he's been working on it full-time all year and has more or less pivoted to it away from Quora, which also faces an existential threat from OpenAI (and AI in general).

Either way, Adam's conflict of interest is significant, and it's staggering he wasn't asked to resign from the board after launching a chatbot-based AI company.

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

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People tend to speak and act very differently in pseudonymous online forums, with no skin in the game, than they ever would in "the real world", where we are constantly reminded of real relationships which our behavior puts at risk. The only venues where I've witnessed someone being attacked for apologizing or admitting an error have been online.

People are more honest about how they feel online. They might not attack openly like that offline, but they do think those things. So you see people who refuse to acknowledge their mistakes fail upwards while those who do admit are often pushed down. How often do you see high level politicians admitting their mistakes? They almost never do since those who did never got that far.

I don't think people are more honest about how they feel online. I think that the venue makes one feel differently.

Probably Honestly, I think the "never apologize or admit an error" thing is memetic bullshit that is repeated mindlessly, and that few people really believe, if challenged, that it's harmful to admit an error; they're saying it because it's a popular thing to say online. I've posted the same thing too, in the past, but having given it some thought I don't really believe it myself.

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

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, the Anthropic folks quit because they wanted more safety?

This article from back then seems to describe it as, they wanted to integrate safety from the ground up as opposed to bolting in on at the end: https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/anthropic-is-the-new-ai-re... I'm curious how much progress they ever made on that, to be honest. I'm not aware of how Claude is "safer", by any real-world metric, compared to ChatGPT.

Claude 2 is IMO, safer and in a bad way. They did "Constitutional AI". And made Claude 2 Safer but dumber than Claude 1 sadly. Which is why on the Arena leaderboard, Claude 1 is still score more than Claude 2...
Post reply on HN