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We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

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Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#131

Post by theamk »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #79
ryzvonusef wrote: post #22

> We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. > We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this. 1- So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults? 2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of thi…

> So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults? Altman was trying to remove one of the board members before he was forced out. Looks like he got his way in the end, but I'm going to call Altman the primary instigator because of that. His side was also the "we'll nuke the company unless you resign" side.

His side was also "700 regular employees support this", which is pretty unusual as most people don't care about their CEO at all. I am not related to OpenAI at all, but given the choice of "favorite of all employees" vs "fire people with no warning then refuse to give explanation why even under pressure" I know which side I root for.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#132

Post by doctoboggan »

r721 wrote: post #29

Quote tweets by main participants: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727206691262099616 (+ follow-up https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883 ) https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1727206609477411261 https://twitter.com/miramurati/status/1727206862150672843 UPD https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1727208843137179915 https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1727210329560756598 https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/17272076…

What does Ilya have to say?

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#133

Post by g42gregory »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #68
tomohelix wrote: post #17

So, Ilya is out of the board, but Adam is still on it. I know this will raise some eyebrows but whatever. Still though, this isn't something that will just go away with Sam back. OAI will undergo serious changes now that Sam has shown himself to be irreplaceable. Future will tell but in the long terms, I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust.

The OpenAI of the past, that dabbled in random AI stuff (remember their DotA 2 bot?), is gone. OpenAI is now just a vehicle to commercialize their LLM - and everything is subservient to that goal. Discover a major flaw in GPT4? You shut your mouth. Doesn’t matter if society at large suffers for it. Altman's/Microsoft’s takeover of the former non-profit is now complete. Edit: Let this be a lesson to us all. Just becau…

Why would society at large suffer from a major flaw in GPT-4, if it's even there? If GPT-4 spits out some nonsense to your customers, just put a filter on it, as you should anyway. We can't seriously expect OpenAI to babysit every company out there, can we? Why would we even want to?

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#134

Post by causalmodels »

petesergeant wrote: post #108
ryzvonusef wrote: post #22

> We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. > We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this. 1- So what was the point of this whole drama, and why couldn't you have settled like this adults? 2- Now what happens to Microsoft's role in all of thi…

If there’s been one constant here, it’s been people who actually know Tonrer expressing deep support for her experience, intelligence, and ethics, so it’s interesting to me that she seems to be getting the boot.

Fiascos like this display neither experience nor intelligence. This whole saga was a colossal failure on the part of the previous board.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#135

Post by nickpp »

r721 wrote: post #29

Quote tweets by main participants: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727206691262099616 (+ follow-up https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883 ) https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1727206609477411261 https://twitter.com/miramurati/status/1727206862150672843 UPD https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1727208843137179915 https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1727210329560756598 https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/17272076…

On a side tangent, absolutely amazing how all this drama unfolded on Twitter/X. No Threads, no Mastodon, no Truth Social or Blue whatever.

Say what you want about Elon’s leadership but his instinct to buy Twitter was completely right. To me it seemed like any social network crap but he realized it was important.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#136

Post by brucethemoose2 »

altpaddle wrote: post #42

I guess the main question is who else will be on the board and to what degree will this new board be committed to the Open AI charter vs being Sam/MSFT allies. I think having Sam return as CEO is a good outcome for OpenAI but hopefully he and Greg stay off the board. It's important that the board be relatively independent and able to fire the CEO if he attempts to deviate from the mission. I was a bit alarmed by the…

> It's important that the board be relatively independent and able to fire the CEO if he attempts to deviate from the mission.

They did fire him, and it didn't work. Sam effectively became "too big to fire."

I'm sure it will be framed as a compromise, but how can this be anything but a collapse of the board's power over the commercial OpenAI arm? The threat of firing was the enforcement mechanism, and its been spent.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#137

Post by tunesmith »

Weird... Ilya decides one way then changes his mind. Helen and Tasha vote one way and had the votes to prevent any changes, but then for some reason agreed to leave the board. Adam votes one way then changes his mind. So many mysteries.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#138

Post by arduanika »

vintermann wrote: post #121
arduanika wrote: post #98

Larry Summers is an excellent pick to call out bullshit and moderate any civil war, such as this EA - e/acc feud. Kissinger (R, foreign policy) once said that Summers (D, economic policy) should be given an advisory post in any WH administration, to help shoot down bad ideas.

Those are both terrible people, not in fact brilliant general-purpose bad idea rejectors. A random person would be better qualified to shoot down bad ideas - most people haven't had bad ideas that led to suffering and death for millions of people. No one thinks Larry Summers has any insights on AI. Adding Larry Summers is something you do purely to beg powerful, unaccountable people "please don't stop us, we're on yo…

How is Larry Summers a terrible person?

He did help shoot down the extra spending proposals that would have made inflation today even worse. Not sure how that caused suffering and death for anyone.

And he is an adult, which is a welcome change from the previous clowncar of a board.

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#139

Post by altpaddle »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #55

Did we ever find out why Sam Altman's removal happened in the first place? The reasons I've read so far seem really opaque. From an outsider's perspective, and until there's a clear explanation available, it just seems like a massive bundler.

The most plausible explanation I've found is that the pro-safety faction and pro-accel factions were at odds which was why the board was stalemated at a small size.

Altman and Toner came into conflict over a mildly critical paper Toner wrote involving Open AI and Altman tried to have her removed from the board.

This is probably what precipitated this showdown. The pro safety/nonprofit charter faction was able to persuade someone (probably Ilya) to join with them and oust Sam.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...

Re: We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

#140

Post by lacker »

tomohelix wrote: post #17

So, Ilya is out of the board, but Adam is still on it. I know this will raise some eyebrows but whatever. Still though, this isn't something that will just go away with Sam back. OAI will undergo serious changes now that Sam has shown himself to be irreplaceable. Future will tell but in the long terms, I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust.

Let's see, Sam Altman is an incredibly charismatic founding CEO, who some people consider manipulative, but is also beloved by many employees. He got kicked out by his board, but brought back when they realized their mistake.

It's true that this doesn't really pattern-match with the founding story of huge successful companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. But somehow, I think it's still possible that a huge company could be created by a person like this.

(And of course, more important than creating a huge company, is creating insanely great products.)

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