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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

#361

Post by TapWaterBandit »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #325
dataflow wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some technicality here that we're missing (e.g., is there a difference between you and other customers?) or is he just lying?

It might be that there was no net outflow of customers. I am sure customers quit all the time, and others sign up. It probably means that they either didn't see a statistical relevant increase in churn, or that the amount of excess quits was compensated by excess new customers.

Yea this seems like the most likely read to me. The customers lost are indistinguishable from their churn rate.

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

#362

Post by johndhi »

spoonjim wrote: post #355
Denzel wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a strange statement because I definitely canceled my subscription as a result of the happenings. This very public battle confirmed for me how misaligned OpenAI is with the originating charter and mission of its nonprofit. And I didn’t want to financially contribute towards that future anymore. I guess my subscription didn’t count as a customer.

“Customer” usually means business customer in this context.

Obviously this. They mean the enterprises that have integrated OpenAI into their platforms (like eg Salesforce has). All of this happened so quickly that no one could have dropped them lol but nevertheless yeah they probably didn't officially lose one - plus they're all locked into annual contracts anyway.

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

#363

Post by itchyouch »

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.

There was nothing to bluff. The employees would've been hired by Microsoft and OpenAI the company would've had nothing but sourcecode and some infrastructure. They would've gone down quickly.

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

#364

Post by behnamoh »

sroussey wrote: post #195
toomuchtodo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure offers a mostly at parity offering. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/w... Edit: I misunderstood the ask, my apologies.

That is still OpenAI. Anthropic might be a choice depending on the use case.

anthro? no. they over censor their models.

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

#365

Post by mikeg8 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #358
mikeg8 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building products on top of their platform and then getting mad that they continue to add and improve said platform with additional functionality (without knowing their product roadmap in advance) seems petty. If they’re able to eat their customers lunch so quickly, it’s because the customers are building very thin and weak businesses with no actual innovation.

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

#366

Post by sheepscreek »

I used to correspond with Bret Taylor when he was still at Google. He wrote a windows application called Notable that I used every day for note-taking. Eventually, I started contributing to it.

It’s been fascinating to witness his career progression from Product Manager at Google, to the co-CEO of Salesforce, and now the chair of OpenAI board (he was also the chair of Twitter board pre-Elon)!

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

#367

Post by m463 »

happytiger wrote: post #351
jacquesm wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens to me frequently. When I report an obvious problem in some service it is always the very first time that they've heard of it and no other customers seem to have the issue.

Same. I don’t think it’s the truth. It happens with alarming frequency to our family. We seem to be some kind of stealth customer QA for companies. The other possibility is that they are lying to cover their ass, but they would never do that… right?

I had a friend who did call center stuff.

It was kind of eye-opening - they took phone calls form late-night tv infomercials and there was a script.

They would take down your name, take your order, and then... upsell, cross-sell, special offer sell, etc.

If the person said anything like "I'm not interested in this, blah blah", they had responses for everything. "But other people have quite upset when they didn't receive these very special offers and called back to complain"

It was carefully calculated. It was refined. It was polished and tested.

The only way OUT of the script was to say "I will cancel my order unless you stop"

If the call center operator didn't follow the script, they would be fired.

(You know this happens now with websites at scale. A/B test until the cancellation message is scary enough. A/B test until you give up on the privacy policy.)

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

#368

Post by TapWaterBandit »

swader999 wrote: post #32
telotortium wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does feel like an employee that did really well out of the gate and is starting to coast I their laurels.

I've thought one of the funnier end states for AGI would be if it was created but this ended up making it vastly less productive than when it was just a tool.

So the AI of the future was more like Bender or other robots from Futurama that display all the same flaws as people.

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

#369

Post by corethree »

civilized wrote: post #155
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!

Hacker News represents hackers, not Boards of Directors. The hackers of OpenAI overwhelmingly demanded Sam back. Everyone here should be happy.

That demand on HN was an unfounded gut based reaction that you typically expect from a mob. People were saying stuff like the board was mentally deficient for doing what they did. How likely is it for the board to be actually dumb to the point of actual stupidity?

If you think about it, the board being actually mentally challenged is an extremely low probability but that was the mob reaction. When given so little information they just go with the flow even if the flow is unlikely.

Now with more articles, the mentality has shifted. Most people don't even remember their initial reaction. Yeah It looks like everybody on this thread has flipped, but who admits to flipping? Ask anyone and they'll claim they were skeptical all along.

People say The hacker news crowd is different, better... I'd say the hacker news crowd is the same as any other group. The difference is they think they're better. That includes me... as I'm part of HN so don't get all offended.

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

#370

Post by evantbyrne »

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

Based on the how their post is worded, I'm guessing they never needed OpenAI's products in the first place. For most people, OpenAI's offerings are still luxury products, and all luxury brands are vulnerable to bad press. Some of the things I learned in the press frenzy certainly made me uncomfortable.
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