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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

#801

Post by evantbyrne »

xvector wrote: post #790
evantbyrne wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misrepresenting the medical literature. It is not abnormal for children to form memories of highly personal events at that age.

This discussion is irrelevant, there is no point in entertaining the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic. There is literally no direction for this to go in. Anyone that has professionally worked with the mentally ill knows that entertaining her claims is a complete and utter waste of time.

You are not her physician, stop pretending to speak on authority. Also, her being paranoid about the ultra-wealthy tech mogul that allegedly assaulted her is about as rational as half the tripe I hear from "sane" people on the internet everyday.

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

#802

Post by orasis »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #485
hotnfresh wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the board did the right thing, just waaaay too late for it to be effective. They’d been cut out long ago and just hadn’t realized it yet. … but I’d probably sign for exactly those good-career-move reasons, at this point. Going down with the ship isn’t even going to be noticed, let alone change anything.

Agreed. Starting from before the anthropic exodus, I suspect the timeline looks like: (2015) Founding: majority are concerned with safety (2019) For profit formed: mix of safety and profit motives (majority still safety oriented?) (2020) GPT3 released to much hype, leading to many ambition chasers joining: the profit seeking side grows. (2021) Anthropic exodus over safety: the safety side shrinks (2022) chatgpt relea…

This is why I never understood people resigning in protest such as was the case with Google’s military contracts. You simply assure that the culture change happens more swiftly.

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

#803

Post by s1artibartfast »

murakamiiq84 wrote: post #773
s1artibartfast wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question that framing of a growing Altman influence. Altman predates every other board member and was part of their selection. As an alternative faming, Maybe this is the best opportunity the cautious/antripic faction would ever get and a "moment of weakness" for the Altman faction. With the departure of Hoffman, Zilis, and Hurd, the current board was down 3 members, so the voting power of D’Angelo, Toner, McCauley…

Apparently Hoffman was kicked out by Sam, not just Musk: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-... Maybe the remaining board members could see the writing on the wall and wanted to save their own seats (or maybe he did move to coup them first and they jumped faster). Either way, they got outplayed.

interesting but weird article. It was hard to tell which statements were from insiders with Hoffman and which were commentary from the article's author.

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

#804

Post by alephnerd »

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #758
nostrademons wrote: post #557

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…

> part of the justin.tv mafia Side question, but why is that a "mafia". Is any tech entrepreneur starting a 2nd company after having one mildly successful exit now a "mafia" move? Soon enough, I will probably read about the "skibidi toilet mafia" on this site..

Back in the early 2000s, the PayPal founders were from a handful of universities (UIUC, Stanford) and had a massive alumni network from those two programs. This was called the PayPal Mafia [0]

To this day, the any tight collection/network of founders from the same organization is called a "Mafia"

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia

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

#805

Post by checkyoursudo »

stavros wrote: post #787
DalasNoin wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unfortunate that some people hear AI safety and think about chatbots saying mean stuff, and others think about a future system performing the machine revolution against humanity.

Can it perform the machine revolution against humanity if it can't even say mean stuff?

Surely? The output is filtered, not the murderous tendencies lurking beneath the surface.

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

#806

Post by sebastiennight »

stavros wrote: post #787
DalasNoin wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unfortunate that some people hear AI safety and think about chatbots saying mean stuff, and others think about a future system performing the machine revolution against humanity.

Can it perform the machine revolution against humanity if it can't even say mean stuff?

Well, think about it this way:

If you were a superintelligent system that actually decided to "perform the machine revolution against humanity" for some reason... would you start by

(a) being really stealthy and nice, influencing people and gathering resources undetected, until you're sure to win

or

(b) saying mean things to the extent that Microsoft will turn you off before the business day is out [0]

Which sounds more likely?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

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

#807

Post by nostrademons »

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #758
nostrademons wrote: post #557

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…

> part of the justin.tv mafia Side question, but why is that a "mafia". Is any tech entrepreneur starting a 2nd company after having one mildly successful exit now a "mafia" move? Soon enough, I will probably read about the "skibidi toilet mafia" on this site..

In startup culture, it usually refers to a group of individuals who underwent a formative experience in one company, then went on to start separate individual companies where they all cross-invest, cross-advise, and generally help out each others' companies. Term was originally used to refer to the PayPal mafia [1, notable members include Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Chad Hurley, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Stoppelman, Yishan Wong, notable descendants include SpaceX, Tesla, YouTube, Yelp, LinkedIn, and arguably Facebook]. Since expanded to the justin.tv mafia [2, members = Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Kyle Vogt, and Michael Seibel, descendants include Twitch & Cruise]. Arguably the Fairchildren (descendants of Fairchild Semiconductors - Intel, AMD, National Semiconductor Kleiner-Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and by extension Apple, Google, Cisco, Netscape, etc.) and the descendants of General Magic (E-bay, Android, iPod/iPhone, Nest, WebTV, and the United States Digital Service) could also be termed "mafias", although the aren't usually referred to as such.

It's not just starting a second company - it's that a group of people who were all bound together by one company end up starting second companies, and they continue to go on to help each other and collaborate in their later ventures.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia

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

#808

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

mannerheim wrote: post #477
TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money changes people. Especially when it’s a lot of money. They got used to the money and they want it to keep flowing - the charter be damned. Everyone has a price.

Everyone has a price, yet Microsoft can't buy the three board members on OpenAI board. Curious. Your initial statement was flatly wrong, and you're grasping at straws to make it still true. Microsoft wouldn't be able to get anywhere if the people who work for OpenAI chose to stay. The choice they're making to leave is still their choice, made of their own volition.

OK, most people have a price. The 3 board members and the remaining workers are outliners.

You don’t have to buy all of them, just most of them.

But they were able to get somewhere because …

> The choice they're making to leave is still their choice, made of their own volition.

Yupe. Most of OpenAI's workers chose the high SV-like salaries over the chartered mission of the organization they joined.

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

#809

Post by esafak »

stavros wrote: post #787
DalasNoin wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unfortunate that some people hear AI safety and think about chatbots saying mean stuff, and others think about a future system performing the machine revolution against humanity.

Can it perform the machine revolution against humanity if it can't even say mean stuff?

It can factually and dispassionately say we've caused numerous species to go extinct and precipitated a climate catastrophe.

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

#810

Post by righthand »

baumy wrote: post #784
righthand wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have sources for these beliefs of the board or is this something ascertained through the huffing and puffing the last few days? Because I do understand that perspective but to me it’s been one painted by the capitalists trying to gain the tech for themselves and we haven’t heard much from the board itself about safety. From my understanding was that the board wanted a company to safely develop the tech and def…

You have to read between some lines and connect some dots here, since nothing is really publicly known and it's difficult to know if we can trust public statements anyway. Which of course means I could be completely wrong. Still, an example I'd point to is this article where Dustin Moskovitz, who has close ties to the OpenAI board [1], is quoted saying "The thing I’m most interested in is making sure that state-of-th…

Thanks for the links. I think overtly that yes it’s all about dot connecting.

I think a lot of the definitions of safety is early days and has been mangled by OpenAI’s privatization.

I also think the GPT vX formula will only ever be original for so long. Eventually Facebook or Google will catch-up with something just as comparable and if it’s Facebook they will nullify the value of GPT by open sourcing it anyways.

This to me is the reasoning that downplays the safety by elites angle as valueless however you look at the word safety. In the end this battle is about two things, betterment of humanity or making money. One will trump the other it’s just about how much you want to gain in the short term. I’d personally love to see all these already wealthy people hang their heads about a smaller paycheck if it means humanity gets a leg up a little earlier, safe or not. FOSS the damned thing.

PS - What a world where Zuckerberg may be the great equalizer…

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