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Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
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Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#302i'm still not clear what the accusation against Altman was... something about being cavalier about safety? if that was the claim and it has merit, i don't understand why it wasn't right to oust him, and why the employees are clamoring for him back
I’m with you. The (apparently, very highly coordinated) employees should sign a public letter explaining why they wanted Altman back so badly.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#303> 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
The public drama is a red flag that the organization's leaders lack the integrity and maturity to solve their problems effectively and responsibly.
They are clearly not responsible enough to deal with their own internal problems maturely. They have proven themselves irresponsible. They are not trustworthy. I think it's reasonable to conclude that they cannot be trusted to deal with anybody or any issue responsibly.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the "money people", but the extremely bad way they removed Altman, I think. It made it easy to sway employees to Altman's favor and pressure the board. If the employees were not cohesive on Altman's side, he probably wouldn't be back...
Yeah, I think this was "700 out of 730 employees signed a letter saying they'd quit, over a holiday weekend". OpenAI with no employees is not worth a whole lot.
This episode taught us the very obvious lesson that if you hire people incentivized by equity growth, it is not possible to take steps that detrimentally impact equity growth, without losing all those people. The board had already lost the moment it allowed hundreds of fat compensation packages to be signed.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
These internal drama can play out in the service. Frame the question as: do you want to build on an unstable/unsteady platform?
As long as you can outrun the technical debt, sure. Nothing lasts forever. Architect against lock in. This is just good vendor/third party risk management. Avoid paralysis, otherwise nothing gets built.
I'm convinced embeddings are the ultimate vendor lock in of our time.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#306Is 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.
What is "RLHF" here?
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#307i'm still not clear what the accusation against Altman was... something about being cavalier about safety? if that was the claim and it has merit, i don't understand why it wasn't right to oust him, and why the employees are clamoring for him back
It also isn't clear why Altman couldn't have been replaced by someone else with literally no change in operations and progress. It is just really confusing why people acted as if they fired Michael Jordan from the Bulls.
He is obviously a great leader and those that work there wanted to work with him. It’s very clear in this thread how undervalued exceptional leadership actually is, as evidence by comments thinking the top role in the most innovative company could be just plug-and-play.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#308Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#309> 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
I despise the engineering instinct to derisively dismiss anything that involves humans as "politics".
The motivations of individuals, the trade-offs of organizations, the culture of development teams - none of those are "politics".
And neither is the fundamental hierarchical and governance structure of big companies. They influence the stability of architectures, the design of APIs, the operational priorities. It is absolutely reasonable to have one's confidence in depending on the technology of a company based on the shenanigans OpenAI went through.
Re: Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
#310> 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
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