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OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

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Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#481
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs predict language, and language is a representation of human concepts about the world. Thus, these models are constructing, piece by piece, conceptual chains about the world. As they learn to construct better and more coherent conceptual chains, something interesting must be happening internally.

No they are not.

(You're probably going to have to get better at answering objections than merely asserting your contradiction of them.)

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#482
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this was a unique situation due to timing. OpenAI had 9 board members at the beginning of the year, but 3 (Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis, and Will Hurd) had to leave for various reasons (e.g. conflict of interest, which IMO should have also taken D'Angelo off the board), and this would have never happened if they were still on the board. So you were left with a rare situation where the board was incredibly immat…

> Shivon Zilis Is that the same person who had kids with Elon. Did Elon put her on the Open AI board as his proxy.

> Is that the same person who had kids with Elon.

Yes.

> Did Elon put her on the Open AI board as his proxy.

No, or at least Elon was already off the board when Shivon was elevated to board member: https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#483

Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanaging personnel decisions. Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. This is important, because people were siding with the board under the understanding this firing was led by the head research scien…

That's the only thing that make sense with Ilya & Murati signing that letter.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it make sense that Ilya Sutskever presented the reasons the board had for firing Sam Altman, which were not his reasons. My feeling is Ilya was upset about how Sam Altman was the face of OpenAI, and went along with the rest of the board for his own reasons. That's often how this stuff works out. He wasn't particularly compelled by their reasons, but had his own which justified his decision in his mind.

> Wouldn't it make sense that Ilya Sutskever presented the reasons the board had for firing Sam Altman, which were not his reasons. Ilya was one of the board members that removed Sam, so his reasons would, ipso facto , be a subset of the board's reasons.

It’s also weird that he’s not admitting to any of his own reasons, only describes some trivial reasons he seems to have coaxed out of the other board members?! Perhaps he still has his own reasons but realizing he’s destroying what he loves he’s trying to stay mum? The other board members seem more zealous for some reason, maybe not being employed by the LLC. Or maybe the others are doing it for the sake of Ilya or someone else that prefers to remain anonymous? Okay, clearly I have no idea.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#485
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who were wrong and change their minds should be punished less, not more, than those who persist in being wrong. The rest of the board is holding firm and preventing the problem from being resolved, so they are more culpable than Ilya.

There's nothing admirable about jumping off a sinking ship that you put the holes in. At this stage it's on him to clear his name.

Has Ilya left OpenAI? Not to my knowledge.

This is more like a guy apologizing for the holes and actively trying to fix the ship. Which is absolutely worth something, even if no holes would still be better.

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#486

Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanaging personnel decisions. Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. This is important, because people were siding with the board under the understanding this firing was led by the head research scien…

I’m confused how the board is still keeping their radio silence 100%. Where I’m from, with a shitstorm this big raging, and the board doing nothing, they might very easily be personally held responsible for all kinds of utterly nasty legal action.

Is it just different because they’re a nonprofit? Or how on earth the board is thinking they can get away with this anymore?

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#487
There has to be a bigger story to this.

Altman took a non-profit and vacuumed up a bunch of donor money only to flip Open AI into the hottest TC style startup in the world. Then put a gas pedal to commercialization. It takes a certain type of politicking and deception to make something like that happen.

Then in the past week, he's going and taking money from the Saudis on the order of billions of dollars to make AI accelerators, even though the single greatest threat from strong AI (according to Hinton) is rich and powerful people using the technology to enhance their power over society.

Combine that with a totally inexperienced board, and D'Angelo's maneuvering, and you have the single greatest shitshow in tech history

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#488
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the text completion algorithm is sufficiently advanced enough then we wouldn't be able to tell it's not AGI, especially if it has access to state-of-the-art research and can modify its own code/weights. I don't think we are there yet but it's plausible to an extent.

No. This is modern day mysticism. You're just waving your hands and making fuzzy claims about "but what if it was an even better algorithm".

lol

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now they are trying to unring the bell but cannot. Well, they can unring the bell pretty easy. They were given an easy out. Reinstate Sam (he wants to come back) and resign. However, they CONTINUE to push back and refuse to step down.

I'm going to be the only one in this thread calling it this. But why does no one think it's possible these women are CIA operatives? They come from think tanks. You think the US Intelligence community wants AGI to be discovered at a startup? They want it created at big tech. AGI under MSFT would be perfect. All big tech is heavily compromised: https://twitter.com/NameRedacted247 EDIT: Since this heavy speculation, I'…

Weirdly plausible considering Tasha McCauley also works for the RAND Corporation

Re: OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

#490

> One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project. Have these people never worked at any other company before? Probably every company with more than 10 employees does something like this.

In over 10 years of experience, I have never known this to happen.
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