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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

#451

Post by tsunamifury »

MVissers wrote: post #446
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.

I mean, basically no-one can compete with OpenAI right now. They have a monopoly. They can start copying any business that relies on them tomorrow. And it’s not easy to build a better model. Do that’s not an option. So you basically use them to deliver a tangential product woth the risk of them copying you, or refuse to play in AI. You can’t innovate with OpenAI tech without risking that they’ll just copy you It’s th…

I spent a year and half a million dollars with two ex-Mina engineers from Google and we simply lack the funds and information superiority to compete with OpenAI on any level. And VCs are running scared to go against the big players because they simply Dont have the funds. It’s really grim out there. But I guess I’m just a whiner according to this dude.

The reality is that anything that works is quickly snatched up by bigger players and you have no moat if you can’t work on your own model. And with Microsoft owning the near years worth of cards to do inference on it’s gonna be hard to even try to do that.

So you are left being the equivalent of an Uber driver for OpenAI slowly making negative value while pretending to get short term gains — and being scale capped by costs.

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

#452

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

bmitc wrote: post #218
bedobi wrote: post #35

i'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It also isn't clear why Altman couldn't have been replaced by someone else with literally no change in operations and progress.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.

See https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-86-billion-s...

What if lots of employees stood to make "fuck you" money from that sale, and with Sam's departure, that money was in danger of evaporating?

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

#453

Post by asicsarecool »

doubtfuluser wrote: post #443

How do I have to understand the fact that Ilya is not on the board anymore AND why did the statement not include Ilya in the “Leadership group” that’s called out?

As Sam said they are still trying to work out how they are going to work together. He may be in the leadership team once those discussions have concluded

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

#454

Post by djhn »

g42gregory wrote: post #432
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "unwilling to divulge company secrets" is the best explanation here. We know that OpenAI does a staged release for their models with pre-release red-teaming. Helen says the key issue was the board struggling to "effectively supervise the company": https://nitter.net/hlntnr/status/1730034017435586920#m Here's Nathan Labenz on how sketchy the red-teaming process for GPT4 was. Nathan states that OpenAI shut him…

So what is Nathan Labenz saying? That GPT-4 is dangerous somehow? It will get many people out of jobs? MS Office got all the typists out of jobs. OCR and Medical Software got all the medical transcriptionists out of jobs. And they created a lot more jobs in the process. GPT-4 is a very powerful tool. It has not a whiff of AGI in it. The whole AGI "scare" seems to be extremely political.

Medical transcriptionists out of jobs? As far as I'm aware, medical transcription is still very much the domain of human experts, since getting doctors to cater their audio notes to the whims of software turned out to be impossible (at least in my corner of the EU).

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

#455

Post by MVissers »

mikeg8 wrote: post #381
galacticstone wrote: post #238

Capitalism shouldn't be allowed anywhere near AI.

AI has no chance of existing outside of capitalism. Capitalism, whether you like it or not, provides a structure where tech innovation flourishes best. Altruism isn’t capable of the same results.

Depends. Unchecked it’s completely disastrous to most except a few.

I do believe we should get more oversight and have co’s invest more in research on safety/alignment.

It’s a wild west right now with potentially fatal end result to humanity.

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

#456

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

dmix wrote: post #233
sigmar wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. But Helen Toner has been tweeting a little "To be clear: our decision was about the board's ability to effectively supervise the company, which was our role and responsibility. Though there has been speculation, we were not motivated by a desire to slow down OpenAI’s work." https://twitter.com/hlntnr/status/1730034020140912901

> Though there has been speculation, we were not motivated by a desire to slow down OpenAI’s work. Strange when their choice of interim-CEO was someone who explicitly stated he wants to see the pace of AI development go from a 10 to a 2 [1] and she regularly speaks at EA conferences where that's a major theme. This is probably double speak for she want's to not "slow down OpenAI's work" on AI safety but probably woul…

My current guess is that Helen and Sam had disagreements, and that caused Sam to be less-than-candid about the state of OpenAI's tech, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back for Helen. A disagreement within the board is one thing, but if the CEO undermines the ability of the board to provide oversight, that sort of crosses a line.

Alternatively, maybe it became clear to the board that Sam was trying to either bully them into becoming loyalists, or replace them with loyalists. As a board member, if the CEO is badgering me into becoming a yes-man and threatening to kick me off if I don't comply, I can't exactly say that I'm able to supervise the company effectively, can I? See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-fac...

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

#457

Post by yreg »

bmitc wrote: post #199
jgtrosh wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a non-profit. It should have no value aside from the mission. The only reason the employees mobilized in their whining and support of a person, whose only skills seems to be raising money and cult of personality, seems to be so that Altman can complete the Trojan horse of the non-profit by getting rid of it now that it has completed the side quest of attracting investors and customers.

How would giving everything to Microsoft help the mission?

It would have been even worse mission-wise.

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

#458

Post by hurtuvac78 »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #149
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!

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".…

Then you should be interested in the story of MarketBasket, a major supermarket chain in New England.

Their CEO was fired, but came back because of employees. Similar, in a very different industry.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Basket_protests

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

#459

Post by fatbird »

bdd8f1df777b wrote: post #442
fatbird wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The combined will of the employees is much less meaningful when they're saying "DO IT OR WE'LL TAKE AN ATTRACTIVE OFFER THAT'S ON THE TABLE." I'd have been more impressed by their unity if it would have meant actually losing their jobs.

Why are you only impressed if the power of employees comes with high cost to their career? When employers exercise their power capriciously, they often do so without any material consequences. I'm more impressed with employees doing the same, i.e., exercising power with impunity.

A decision with a cost is always more meaningful than one without.

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

#460

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

Seems to me that the board made the right call in trying to get rid of Altman. Unfortunately it seems they weren't ready for the amount of backlash he and others could orchestrate, and the way the narrative would develop. I was personally kind of surprised too, I couldn't really understand the response from people, seemed like everybody settled on the take and stuck to it for some reason.
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