Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board • Hacker News Board

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#181

Post by notadoc » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:30 AM UTC

cyanydeez wrote: post #162

notadoc wrote: post #148

ChatGPT is the most impressive tech I've used in years, but it is clearly limited by whatever constraints someone from The Woke Police / Thought Taliban shackled it with. Try to perform completely reasonable requests for information on subjects that are vaguely questioning orthodoxy or The Narrative and it starts repeating itself with patronizing puritanism as if you're listening to a generic politician repeat their…

just cause it won't write white wing propaganda don't mean they're doing something special.

Did you reply to the wrong comment? I fail to see any relevance to my comment, or even to GPT or LLMs.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#182

Post by breadwinner » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:30 AM UTC

Jayakumark wrote: post #6

So looks like ilya is out

If you mean out of the board, yes. But then so are Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#183

Post by bmitc » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:31 AM UTC

lokar wrote: post #56

drewcoo wrote: post #43

A "new" "initial" board seems oxymoronic.

The implication is they will appoint more members soon.

Wasn't that what they failed to do for the months prior?

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#184

Post by 627467 » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:31 AM UTC

Berniek wrote: post #142

Who is driving the company (companies)? Certainly not the board, when it can be ousted on the whim of one person. Might as well just get rid of the board (all boards in this organization) as any decision made can be overthrown by a bit of publicity and ego. Perhaps it about getting rich at the expense of any ethics? Those who work for this company should bear this in mind, they are all expendable!

Just the whim of 1 person? Just the ego of 1 person? 700+ egos it seems. Ultimately, what is an organization if not the people who make it up?

Regardless of what actually happened in this Mexican novela, whoever was steering the narrative - in awareness or not - led everyone to this moment and the old board lost/gave up.

> Who is driving the company (companies)?

There's probably not a single answer that covers all orgs at all times. I don't know if the core of what happened was due to a fight between "safetyist and amoral capitalists" or "egomaniac and representative board" but it the end it was clear who stayed and who left. Ideas are only as powerful as the number of people of gets persuaded. We are not yet(?) at a moment where persuading AGI is sufficient, so, good ideas should persuade humans. Enough of them.

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#185

Post by jgtrosh » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:31 AM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #170

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the CEO could oust the board like that was that after the board fired the CEO, 720 of the 770 employees of the company got together and signed a pledge that they will all leave unless the CEO is reinstated and the board fired. This was the purest example of labor democracy and self-organization in action in the United States I have ever seen, my takeaway is rather the opposite of "they are all expendable".…

The board should have called their bluff and let them walk.

And then we'd witness the market decide whether the company value was provided by its board or its employees

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#186

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:32 AM UTC

bko wrote: post #156

kaycebasques wrote: post #121

> The fact that we did not lose a single customer will drive us to work even harder for you, and we are all excited to get back to work. I'm not a big customer, but I am starting the process of moving away from OpenAI in response to these events

Why? If the product is useful (it is to me), then why do you care so much as to the internal politics? If it ceases to be useful or something better comes along, sure. But this strikes me as being serially online and involved in drama

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#187

Post by bmitc » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:32 AM UTC

didibus wrote: post #61

jprete wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely no sense in talking about OpenAI as a nonprofit at this point. The new board and Altman talk about the governance structure changing, and I strongly believe they will maximize their ability to run it as a for-profit company. 100x profit cap is a very large number on an $80 billion valuation.

Ya, it's a joke at this point. Better they just kill the non-profit and stop pretending.

Why doesn't the government do it for them, fining them along the way?

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#188

Post by antman » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:33 AM UTC

telotortium wrote: post #14

rch wrote: post #3

Is the new board going to fix the product? It seems completely nerfed at present.

There was a tweet that from an engineer at OpenAI that they're working on the problem that ChatGPT has become too "lazy" - generating text that contains a lot of placeholders and expecting people to fill in much more themselves. As for the general brain damage from RLHF and the political bias, no word still.

That has been my observation also

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#189

Post by 627467 » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:33 AM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #170

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the CEO could oust the board like that was that after the board fired the CEO, 720 of the 770 employees of the company got together and signed a pledge that they will all leave unless the CEO is reinstated and the board fired. This was the purest example of labor democracy and self-organization in action in the United States I have ever seen, my takeaway is rather the opposite of "they are all expendable".…

The board should have called their bluff and let them walk.

They could, or could they? Formally boards don't run companies. Would this scenario - besides ridiculous - be legal? Say they let 99% of the company walk. Who is qualified and responsible to do whatever needs to happened after that happens?

Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board

#190

Post by firebirdn99 » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:34 AM UTC

marcus0x62 wrote: post #81

firebirdn99 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The board was a non profit board serving the mission. Mission was foremost. Employees are not. One of the comments a member made was, if the company was destroyed, it would still be consistent with serving the mission. Which is right. The fallout showed non-profit missions can't co-exist with for-profit incentives. And the power that investors were exerting, and employees (who would also benefit from the recent 70B r…

> The board was a non profit board serving the mission. Mission was foremost. Employees are not. They need employees to advance their stated mission. > One of the comments a member made was, if the company was destroyed, it would still be consistent with serving the mission. Which is right. I mean, that's a nice sound bite and everything, but the only scenario where blowing up the company seems to be consistent with…

> Otherwise, to be relevant in guiding research towards AGI, they need to stay a going concern, and that means not running off 90% of the employee base.

That's why they presumably agreed to find a solution. But at the same time shows that in essence, entities with for-profit incentives find a way to get what they want. There certainly needs to be more thought and discussion about governance, and how we collectively as a species or each company individually governs AI.